'The Hours': What? No sex, no car chases?

The author of 'The Hours' said it wouldn't make a movie. Sheila Johnston hopes he's wrong

When Michael Cunningham, a respected but little-known American novelist, began work on a post-modern fantasia on a modernist classic, he had no expectation that his fourth book would bring him fabulous royalties. "I was already planning the bestseller I was going to write next: it would be full of sex and car chases," he recalls. "Then The Hours started to sell, and it won this big prize [the 1999 Pulitzer]. But even after it began to succeed, I remember saying to my agent, 'At least we know one thing. No one's going to want to make this critter into a movie'."

Further proof, if proof were needed, that William Goldman's evergreen axiom about the film business – "Nobody knows anything" – still holds true. For shortly afterwards, a phone call came in from a producer, Scott Rudin, enquiring after the movie rights. And now, a couple of years after that, a $22m film has indeed been made by Stephen Daldry with a script by one of Britain's leading playwrights, David Hare, and an exceedingly starry cast. Following a shower of gongs at the American end-of-year critics' awards, it is a front-runner for the Oscars.

Yet The Hours is scarcely a commercial prospect in the obvious sense. Inspired by Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway, it weaves together apparently unconnected stories about three different women, whose links emerge only towards the end. It includes two suicides and two severe cases of depression. And it attempts to dramatise the profoundly interior process of Woolf writing her novel while struggling with madness.

In the debate about the Bloomsbury group (aired on these pages last week), Daldry stands with those who believe that Woolf, at least, has been grossly maligned. "A version of her has been handed down to us, I don't know why or where – certainly not through her own writing or indeed her own diaries – as rather staid. It's an English projection on to our literary figures: they're somehow part of the Establishment. Although she came from a certain family, the real Virginia seemed to me a dangerous animal: somebody who was subversive, had great courage, imagination and tenacity and still speaks loudly and vividly, to anybody who engages with her work. We wanted an actress to match that rather than a lookalike."

His choice, Nicole Kidman, had her own reasons for taking the role. After the messy end of a 10-year marriage to Tom Cruise, she was, she says, drawn to sombre material and the brilliant, troubled author. "One of the things that was most surprising for me was that a lot of times you don't sense her mischief. She was accused of being almost asexual, but she was actually very sexual, and I wanted that to feed into the role.

"At the same time she was terrified of the servants. She has this incredible intellectual strength and an extraordinary emotional fragility. The combination is what makes her this rare bird – I always thought of her as a bird, like a rare crane. I became pretty obsessed with her. There are so many facets to Virginia's personality; it's a very rich and diverse life. I could do a thesis on her now. "

Meryl Streep, who plays a modern version of Mrs Dalloway, was given Cunningham's novel by her fellow actress and friend, Natasha Richardson. After a mild shock, when she stumbled across her own name in print in the opening chapter (Clarissa, the character she would eventually play, glimpses Meryl Streep on the streets of New York), she was impressed. "But I never imagined they would make it into a film. Then, when the script came a year later, I thought it was remarkable. Very spare and elegantly laid out.

"Virginia Woolf is not someone of whom you could say, 'She was a great woman writer.' And this film is the illumination of a great mind, of a brilliant intelligence and a sensitive human being. It's not gender-specific."

The third female lead, a California housewife in the Fifties who is affected and disturbed when she reads Mrs Dalloway, is taken by Julianne Moore. She offers a somewhat different view. "I don't like to go see a movie unless there's a woman in it, so to have this many female characters is exciting," Moore says. "There's been this notion in Hollywood that the largest body of movie-goers are young males between 18 and 24. But there are audiences for many different kinds of movies, and I think women want to see movies with women in them. When they sent me the trailer for The Hours, I said to Stephen, 'Man, I would run to this movie.' I mean, three girls crying!"

The Hours has, after all, no car chases or any sex to speak or, although there are ardent, women's kisses. Even with a few Oscars in tow, audiences will need to be convinced that it is not purely a chick flick or a massive downer if it is to break out of the arthouses.

Hare and Daldry argue vigorously that it is neither of those things. "I absolutely loathe films that do what's called 'celebrating women's lives'," Hare says. "The very words make me cringe. As soon as I see women wearing cloche hats or sitting in a circle round the fireside being told that they are daffy but wonderful, it curdles my blood. Those pictures are ludicrously condescending towards women and I don't think The Hours is at all like that."

"I don't find it depressing," adds Daldry. "The women manage to overcome their sadness and move towards the light, towards transfiguration. It's not an easy option; sometimes it can be the hardest option of all and can include the fact that you have to leave your children. So I hope at the end it's not sentimental, but that you come out with a feeling of catharsis."

'The Hours' (12A) is released on Friday