London: Anne Hathaway spent three days fighting with the director of her latest movie, 'The Hustle', over her character being British, as she finds the accent so difficult.
"If I could have gotten away without doing it, I would've been very happy not to do it," Hathaway told The Associated Press recently. "I find it really hard doing a British accent because they're so nuanced."
Hathaway has received a critical mauling for an English accent before: her take on the Yorkshire dialect was panned in romantic comedy 'One Day'.
But director Chris Addison insisted, and so her character in 'The Hustle', Josephine Chesterfield, became a Brit. Addison, an English former stand-up comic and actor, had been honing his craft directing episodes of the award-winning satirical TV series, 'Veep'.
'The Hustle' is a modern take on 1988 comedy 'Dirty Rotten Scoundrels', itself a remake of 1964 Marlon Brando/David Niven film 'Bedtime Story'. The screenplay is written by Jac Schaeffer ('Captain Marvel').
Hathaway and Rebel Wilson play a pair of con artists plying their trade in a stunning seaside town in the south of France. Both have penchant for defrauding gullible, wealthy men from all corners of the world, but are thrown together and bring their own distinctive skills to the art of the con.
'The Hustle' was partly shot on the Spanish island of Mallorca, a Mediterranean seaside paradise. "Oh wow, right?" laughs Hathaway. "Mallorca is not a bad place to end a film."
The costumes were important to the look of the film, and Hathaway worked closely with costume designer Emma Fryer, who had to make the Oscar-winner look a million dollars with a budget of considerably less.
"If I couldn't sleep, I would be on different sites sending her this South Korean designer and this emerging designer, and somehow she just kind of got them all," said the 36-year-old New York native. "I really enjoyed the story about the way women dress for men and the way we dress for ourselves, you know... and it was really lovely."
'The Hustle' hits Indian screens on May 17.
With inputs from APTN
