Minke whales still come inshore every year and filming had to stop in the middle of one of Judi Dench's scenes when someone yelled 'Whale!' and everyone rushed to see. Treacherous as they melt and destabilise, they crack in the night, booming across the bays.

Towering icebergs 'with cores of beryl, blue gems within white gems', as Proulx has it, break off Greenland's glaciers and drift southwards, studding the horizon until early summer. They can weigh nearly a ton and it's not an encounter everyone survives. There are about 125,000 moose in Newfoundland, and about 600 moose collisions a year.

Equally familiar is Spacey's terror of hitting a moose. Spacey's experience when he first landed, of a crawling three-and-a-half-hour drive in blinding snow, was not that different to his character Quoyle's arrival in the novel. On seaside cliffs, the wind has blown so hard for so long that the trees are no more than chest-high, gnarled into natural bonsai called tuckamore.īlizzards can howl out of clear blue days, chased by gale-force winds rainbows apologise bashfully for June sleet. It's not the most welcoming vista to fly in, you skim over the choppy grey Atlantic, then dip towards snow and ice punctuated by black rock. I liked this harsh, bony, bare, empty, cruel and beautiful place so much I could not bear it.' 'I don't think I'd been on the island for seven or eight minutes when I was just struck viscerally. Her statement belies the fervour with which she always describes her first encounter with the place, in wind and sleet, in mid-July. As Proulx says, drily, 'Newfoundland is different from any other place. Newfoundland (pronounced Newf'n-LAND) is a vital character in Proulx's book about Quoyle, a lumpen, failed and just-widowed American newspaperman who returns with his children to the Newfoundland of his ancestors and begins, traumatically, to heal. In Trinity Bight, Newfoundland.Īnd thank goodness. In the end, after detours involving Billy Bob Thornton and various versions of the script, The Shipping News was made with Kevin Spacey in the lead, Judi Dench, Julianne Moore and Cate Blanchett co-starring. Annie Proulx, author of the Pulitzer prize-winning book, was equally determined that it should not, and balked at signing the contract. John Travolta - objecting to Canadian tax-collectors and believing in comfortable weekends - was determined that it should be filmed near his 20-bedroom house in Maine. T he Shipping News nearly didn't get filmed in Newfoundland, the island off eastern Canada where much of the novel is set.

The shipping news author