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“I’m always interested in the small detail set against the larger historical background,” he says. “When Maugham wrote the story, he had no notion of the imminent war. But we were able to develop that context for the story and highlight the sinister and powerful events going on in Italy in 1938. We made those events serve our story, so that Mary’s drama is reflected in the greater drama of history.”
Sean Penn, with Kristin Scott Thomas
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Up at the Villa was shot entirely on location in and around Florence and Siena, with Lord Lambton’s gorgeous Villa Cetinale serving as the one in which Mary is spending the summer. But working with his regular designer Paul Brown, Oscar-nominated for Angels and Insects, and director of photography Maurizio Calvesi (making his first English-language film), Haas was determined not to be seduced by the beauty of Tuscany. It was to be a part of the film, but not something which took over completely.
“We didn’t want anything to look conventional or comfortable,” he says. “We wanted it blunt and real and visceral, without sentimentality or nostalgia. I wanted to portray Tuscany’s beauty, but also its underside. There was a great deal of poverty in Florence in the thirties, coupled with the rise of Fascism, so that underneath the veneer of great beauty is something ugly, violent and twisted.”
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UP AT THE VILLA |
Mirage Enterprises, Intermedia Film Equities.
Prod: Sydney Pollack, Stanley Buchthal, Geoff Stier; Exec prod: Guy East, Nigel Sinclair; Co-prod: David Brown; Dir: Philip Haas; Scr: Belinda Haas, based on the novella by Somerset Maugham; Ph: Maurizio Calvesi; Prod/Cost des: Paul Brown; Ed: Sandy Morse; Mus: Pino Donaggio.
With Kristin Scott Thomas (Mary Panton), Sean Penn (Rowley Flint), Anne Bancroft (Princess San Ferdinando), James Fox (Sir Edgar Swift), Jeremy Davies (Karl), Derek Jacobi (Lucky Leadbetter), Massimo Ghini (Beppino Leopardi).
International
distribution: UIP/Intermedia.
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Austrian refugee Karl (Jeremy Davies)
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Also starring in Up at the Villa are Anne Bancroft as an American-born princess whose free spirit is an inspiration to Mary (as well as almost bringing about her downfall); Massimo Ghini as the local Fascist politician; and Derek Jacobi as colourful English expat Lucky Leadbetter, who is not quite respectable enough to be part of English society but amusing enough to be tolerated.
“Up at the Villa is a terrific story about a woman who makes a decision that has quite the opposite result of what she intended,” concludes Haas. “In a period and a place in which conventional attitudes prevailed, a shocking and very unconventional act takes place that has incredible reverberations for a number of people in the story. When you mix that up with the other elements - Italy, Fascism and Englishness - you get something very interesting and unsettling and beautiful.”
louche ex-pat Lucky Leadbetter
(Derek Jacobi) |
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