The film's director, Danny Boyle, and the screen writer, Simon Beaufoy, are both English, and they've both done fine work in the past.

WSJ: Telluride Thrills

There is plenty of plot and dialogue in Splinter Cell, which was left to screen writer JT Petty, who had to follow Clancy's strict rules.

BBC: Splinter Cell

Canaris' father was a camera man, mine a screen writer.

NPR: Excerpt: 'Gone Tomorrow'

Her husband, screen-writer Jack Rosenthal, died of cancer in a north London hospice in 2004.

BBC: Maureen Lipman is new ambassador for Dove House Hospice

In this new screen adaptation, writer-director Michael Hoffman has set the show in the Tuscan region of Italy, in the early part of the 20th century.

CNN: Flockhart in her element: slap-happy with the Bard

An Education was brought to the big screen by celebrated British writer Nick Hornby, who has been named in the adapted screenplay category.

BBC: Helen Mirren and Colin Firth lead Britain's Oscars dash

Many of the qualities that attracted Sagnier to Chabrol are similar to those that draw her on-screen alter-ego Gabrielle to writer Charles Saint-Denis (Francois Berleand) -- Charles' knowledge of life, literature and his ability to treat her like a little girl, not as an equal.

CNN: Veteran new wave filmmaker seduces French starlet Sagnier

"Suddenly, things you wouldn't say out loud in conversation are OK to say because you're sitting behind a computer screen, " says Kimberly Kaye, 26, an arts writer in New York.

WSJ: How Facebook Can Ruin Your Friendships

When adapting fiction like this for the screen, the challenge is always to find cinematic ways to express the writer's larger purpose, and one of the first things a period film has to do is to transcend its set.

ECONOMIST: All that glitters