|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Monks, Presence, and the Rose
| Article
# : |
11579 |
|
|
Section : |
THE ARTS
|
| Issue
Date : |
9 / 1986 |
2,645 Words |
| Author
: |
Jan Van Raay
Jan van Raay is a free-lance writer and photographer now
living in Amsterdam. |
It's cold. The air is damp. Stones hewn centuries past breathe chill deep into your bones. People move and walk, when permitted, to excite their circulation. We are on the movie set of The Name of the Rose, and conditions during filming are not much different from those suffered by the monks and peasants of the fourteenth century, the time of the novel and film. It is not Northern Italy, where Umberto Eco set his tale of death and intrigue, in an abbey protected by a fortress of mountains. The abbey of the film is Kloster Ebberbach, a few kilometers from the Rhine, near Wiesbaden, West Germany. The mountains are hills of vineyards shrouded in mist (no one will know the difference).
Directed by Jean Jacques Annoud (Quest of Fire), the Novel's adaptation stars Sean Connery as Brother William and F. Murray Abraham, Oscar winner as Best Actor in 1985 for his role as Salieri in Milos Forman's Amadeus. Abraham portrays the evil Bernardo Gui. It will be released in the United States on September 24.
The Name of the Rose is one of the most costly films ever to be made in Europe. With a starting budget of $15.5 million and an international cast of English, American, Scottish, German, Italian, Russian French, and South American, it was directed by Annoud simultaneously in three languages. The work schedule was arduous and the cold affected everyone. Rehearsals and shooting were on a Monday through Saturday schedule, Sunday being the one free day per week. Up at 6 or 7 A.M., a quick breakfast and twenty-minute ride to the set from the hotel; makeup and costume and on the set by 9:30 A.M. Rehearsals and shooting never wrapped up until 6 or 7 P.M. by conversations with F. Murray Abraham took place over several days, both on and off the set and squeezed into his very tight schedule that even included flying back to New York to do a play and preparations for his role as Lincoln in a TV mini-series based on the Gore Vidal novel. F. Murray Abraham is a very hard-working actor. He's also a full professor at Brooklyn College. When Murray was about to read The Name of the Rose for the first time, he said to a colleague of his at the college, who speaks all of the languages brought up in the book, "Oh, my God, I have to have a reference book." His colleague replied, "Wait, we'll read it together."
"So, he invited me to his place," Murray continued," and I spent the whole afternoon getting through the first fifty or sixty pages, which was heavy. His [the colleague's] first discipline was as a priest, a Dominican monk. He was bringing such richness to all this that so many people had said was difficult to get through. I found it absolutely
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
