FILM CLIPS: ‘NELL’ BOUND : A Different Sort of Wilderness Tale

It’s time to play name that movie: A husband and wife move to a remote cabin in the north woods with no electricity or running water. The extreme isolation leads to a marital crisis. If you guessed “The Shining,” you’re wrong.

The film that emerged from the real-life lesson is the upcoming Jodie Foster vehicle “Nell,” about a wild child who grows up with nothing more to survive on than her wits.

How did the one lead to the other? It all began as a play, “Idioglossia,” from the Greek for private language, by Mark Handley. “You can understand why they didn’t use that title for the movie,” he says. (The screenplay was co-written by William Nicholson, based on Handley’s play.)

The character of Nell grew out of his fascination with a true incident of twins in San Diego who were thought to be mentally retarded and were largely ignored and left to communicate only with one another.

Handley, 38, then fused it with his own experience of isolation. In a Thoreau-inspired moment in the late ‘70s, Handley and his wife, Dottie, dropped out and moved from Chicago to a remote area of Washington’s Cascade Mountains just north of Leavenworth. The rusticity, he found, was “horrifying.”

It wasn’t the lack of amenities so much as the realization that “I didn’t know how to communicate with the woman I married,” he says. “I hadn’t realized how much of a hold distractions have on our lives, that we all spend so much time ignoring one another in the world.”

The character of Nell became a metaphor for isolation, according to Handley, and how “it can actually be positively used to build an inner reserve of strength.”

The Handleys’ marriage survived the six years in the cabin. They recently celebrated 19 years as a couple and now live in Seattle. Having already generated one play and movie, there’s plenty of drama left over from this pioneer experiment for another project, Handley says.

His next art-imitates-life installment of tales from the backwoods is the script “The Education of a New Pioneer,” which will explicitly tackle the eternal question of how to keep the flames of love alive over the long haul. “I’m using our life together to show how people build a loving relationship over time,” he says.

The new script is a rebuke against the romantic notion of love at first sight. “I’ve watched people literally die while waiting for the perfect love to come along,” he says. “But like a log cabin, love is something you build, log by log.”

Renee Missel, the producer of “Nell,” who optioned the project when it was performed at L.A.’s Oydssey Theater, and built it log by log into a movie, is also going pioneer. Or maybe guerrilla is the more appropriate word.

After a career of studio-funded productions, Missel’s next project will be shot on High-8 video for less than $1 million. “Guy,” written by newcomer Kirby Dick, “is a dark, obsessive look at the problems of intimacy between the sexes,” says Missel. “Actors are very attracted to the piece.”