Tomb Raider is getting the big screen treatment but, as well as adventure, the film reveals Lara Croft’s bedroom secrets

At the end of a gruelling day fighting off wolves and monsters, Lara Croft still has enough energy to unwind romantically in the arms of someone special.
In fact, and apparently it is now official, she seems rarely to sleep alone.

Simon West is the director charged with making Lara flesh for her big screen debut in the film Tomb Raider.

Angelina Jolie plays Lara and the globe-trotting adventure includes some revealing details about Lara’s private life. “She’s definitely a voluptuous, sexual woman, but she is many other things as well,” says West.

“One of the great things about having Angelina playing Lara is that she brings a dark undercurrent to the part. Her Lara doesn’t suffer fools gladly.

“And Angelina has no problem with being sexual. When I told Angelina we were going to do a bedroom scene, she replied, ‘Don’t forget to put a dent next to me in the other side of the bed, as if someone’s just left.’ ”

West, who also directed Con Air and The General’s Daughter, has been working on the project all year, starting with a complete re-write of the screenplay. “I purposely didn’t want to copy any of the games,” he says.

“I figured that the gamers have spent years playing all the generations and the last thing they want to see is the game made 3D. They want the next thing on, or to find out what Lara does between the things that they have seen.”

What Lara does is travel to exotic locations in a film expected to rival the Indiana Jones adventures for excitement. The story takes in the ice-capped extremes of Syria - actually filmed in Iceland - and the rainforests of Cambodia.

Closer to home, Hatfield House in Hertfordshire, doubles for the exterior shots of Croft Manor, Lara’s ancestral home. But the interior of the house has been built at Pinewood Studios in Buckinghamshire, where its magnificent stone hallway is divided by a plate-glass wall. On one side are some bullet-ridden sofas and and on the other is the computer room. Lara’s father, Lord Croft, is played by Jon Voight, Angelina’s real father.

Their scenes at the manor are in the can and filming has switched to a Cambodian underground world created 25 yards away in the studio used for James Bond films. This will be the setting for the climactic fantasy scene, where Lara will perform death-defying stunts.

West explains: “The rule I came up with is that everything above ground has to be plausible and able to happen, but once you go underground, anything goes. The Cambodia set is where we are doing the very technical and intricate sequences, mixing computer-generated images with real stunts.

“There’s a lot of New Age mysticism to the story and then there’s the pure fantasy stuff, like the creatures. Of course, now these can have such fantastic detail that they become characters in their own right.”

The monsters may look ultra-realistic but West admits that some of Lara’s furry in-game foes would be too much for sensitive cinema audiences.

“We couldn’t kill as many animals as Lara does in the game,” he says. “Actually, we can’t harm one animal.

“Cinema audiences are a lot more critical of things like that than the gaming audience. It is all so far removed in a game that you can blow away animals and people realise it is not for real.

“But a film is so much more realistic that their morals won’t go as far as shooting wolves, dogs and endangered species.”

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