BBC pays £500,000 for Emin film

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Britian's most controversial contemporary artist, Tracey Emin, is to receive £500,000 from from the BBC to make a film about herself.

The figure is more than three times the sum art collector Charles Saatchi paid Emin for her most notorious work, the soiled My Bed.

Neither Damien Hirst, the Chapman brothers nor any other fellow Young British Artists will appear in the film.

Instead, like her art, Emin's directorial debut will be about her favourite subject: herself.

Although the 39- year- old admits the £500,000 will be the most money she has ever received, the BBC's investment in the feature film about Emin's traumatic teenage years could prove very canny indeed.

Co-directed by Emin and acclaimed British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom, the biopic will centre around the traumatic, formative event of her life. Shooting will begin next year in Emin's hometown Margate, where she was raped at the age of 13 in an alleyway as she returned home from a disco.

The art that has made Emin famous has always taken the artist as its subject, including a tent embroidered with 102 names entitled Everybody I Have Ever Slept With and, of course, My Bed - in which Emin lay for days while locked in a deep depression.

"I've got a very strong idea for the film," Emin said. "Basically it's a rite of passage for a 13-yearold girl - six months in her life. It's loosely autobiographical and it's hopefully going to be very poetic and spiritual."

She added: "It's the simple story of a girl going from innocence to losing her virginity - and when I say losing her virginity I mean being broken into against her will."

Speaking in the November issue of Art Review magazine, published next week, Emin says: "It's low-budget but far more money than I've ever been given before."

She will not be searching for a young star to play herself in the established stage schools. "The extras will all come from Margate and I'll hire a church hall there to hold auditions. I'll ask each of the girls: 'What is it you really hate about your mum?'."

After Emin's rape she avoided boys for six months, then embarked on a two-year mission to be as promiscuous as possible - a time she describes as her "shagging years".

As well as the film, this period of Emin's life will feature in her memoirs, which she intends to begin next year. She said: "It'll be very frank, starting with my earliest memories."

All these plans have not distracted Emin from her art. A New York gallery is exhibiting her latest works, including an update of My Bed, which is a far more reserved affair than the original. Emin feared it might be a bit too conservative, saying: "I've been spending far too much time looking at curtain samples for my house, so I've had terrible traumas with this bed. It looked like I'd just done a course in home furnishings - as if I wanted to display it in some village craft show."

Another new show, her first in Britain since 1997, opens in Oxford on 10 November and will centre around her Cypriot father, Enver Emin.

"My dad is 82," she said, "and I'm really scared about him dying. I made these films in Cyprus of him waving to me. So when my dad dies, I'll have all these pictures of him waving."

Surprisingly, despite her imminent biopic and memoirs and her confessional art, Emin does not like being branded a self-publicist. She said: "I don't mind serious art criticism but you can't attack me and my work by accusing me of being a publicity seeker. That really winds me up."

 

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