There are plenty of fabulous opportunities and perks that come with being the daughter of Oscar-winning filmmaker Jane Campion.
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There's one in particular Alice Englert wishes she could remember.
"Apparently I had lunch with Johnny Depp when I was three months old," the Sydney-born 18-year-old, speaking in a hybrid New Zealand-Australian-English accent thanks to her jet-set upbringing, said recently.
"God damn, it's somewhere in my subconscious."
If the hype is to be believed, Englert is Hollywood's next big thing and she will have plenty of opportunities to have lunch with Depp or any other A-list hunk.
With the Twilight film series coming to an end after earning $3.5 billion at the box office, every film studio in Hollywood has been scrambling to find a franchise that can tap into the teen, young adult film audience.
Lions Gate, which cashed in with Twilight, snapped up the rights to Beautiful Creatures, a best-selling series of books written by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl. It is set in Gatlin, South Carolina, and follows a love story between a coming-of-age witch, Lena Duchannes, and a local human lad, Ethan Wate.
The casting net for the two leads was wide and initially Englert did not have the slightest interest in the role of Lena.
"I got a brief which was three sentences long that did just sort of say it was a Twilight re-make," Englert said. "I just thought, 'It's a bit early isn't it? They just finished it. We can't remake it already'."
Beautiful Creatures director Richard LaGravenese and producer Erwin Stoff came back to Englert, who was living in London, two more times, but each offer was spurned.
"Then I got an email from Erwin which said, 'Please come in. I have done this and this and this', which the subliminal message was, 'Stop being silly. Come and meet us you silly girl'," she recalled.
"I went, 'Mmmm. Alright.'
"I went in and was precocious and out of my place and told Richard how I thought he should make his film and he said 'Yes, that's what I want to do'.
"So I read the script and loved it and thought, 'Oh my God, I'm such an idiot. I'm not going to get it now'."
Englert auditioned, signed on and LaGravenese built a cast of Oscar winners and nominees around her, including Jeremy Irons as Lena's flamboyant uncle, Emma Thompson as a conservative mother who wants Lena banished from Gatlin and Viola Davis, a librarian who knows more than what she lets on.
The cast also includes Emmy Rossum and Alden Ehrenreich, a 23-year-old Los Angeles native who plays Lena's love interest.
On paper, it doesn't make sense that LaGravenese, an Oscar nominee himself for writing the script for 1991's The Fisher King, and producer Stoff (The Matrix, The Blind Side and Water for Elephants) would chase Englert to be the star of a potential multibillion-dollar franchise.
As the daughter of New Zealand-born Campion and filmmaker Colin Englert, she has the pedigree, but her only acting achievement of any note was Ginger & Rosa, the 2012 film by English director Sally Potter and co-starring Elle Fanning and Annette Bening.
AAP
