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New Dan Brown film gets round Vatican ruling
When the Roman Catholic Church banned Ron Howard’s film crew, they simply posed as tourists
Despite a critical drubbing for the Tom Hanks film of Dan Brown's book The Da Vinci Code, and in the face of a furious Roman Catholic church, the trailer for the next Brown film, Angels and Demons, has already received 1.2m hits on the internet and the film looks likely to be just as successful at the box office when it opens on May 14.
Angels and Demons, again directed by Ron Howard, is a prequel to The Da Vince Code, which grossed $758m worldwide.
The critics aren’t the only ones would rather Angels and Demons never got made. Still incensed by The Da Vinci Code's basic premise that Christ married and fathered children with Mary Magdalene, the Roman Catholic church sought to make the filming of the new movie as difficult as possible.
Crews were denied permission last year to shoot in two of Rome's historic churches, Santa Maria del Popolo and Santa Maria della Vittoria. Father Marco Fibbi, a spokesman for the diocese, told the Guardian newspaper at the time: "Given the story of The Da Vinci Code, banning the filming for Angels and Demons was automatic - the name Dan Brown was enough." As for the Vatican itself, it was totally out of bounds.
Now Howard's team have admitted to using underhand tactics to get round the ban. Cameramen posing as tourists infiltrated the Vatican in order to take thousands of photographs and hours of video footage before heading back to Hollywood where the set was digitally created. What appears as the Vatican in the movie is actually the royal palace at Caserta near Naples doubling for the Vatican.
Ryan Cook, the special effects supervisor on Angels and Demons, explained the decision behind the covert techniques in a recent interview with Italian film magazine Ciak. "The ban on filming put us in serious difficulty because we were not able to carry out the photographic surveys necessary to reconstruct the setting”, he said. "So for weeks we sent a team of people who mixed with tourists and took thousands of photos and video footage."
The new film sees Tom Hanks back as symbologist Robert Langdon, this time teaming up with a beautiful physicist – played by Israeli actress Ayelet Zurer - to prevent the secret society, Illuminati, from destroying Vatican City using technology that harnesses antimatter.
The Vatican will not be thrilled to hear that there's a third film on the horizon: Dan Brown's next book in the Da Vinci saga, The Lost Symbol, is due to be published in September and filmmakers are first in line for draft copies. ·
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There are people who plod along like sheep all their lives. Then there are a few who lift up their heads and look around them in wonder. Then there is Peter Simmons, whose consciousness flings itself hither and yon throughout the cosmos. Who knows which bizarre universe it will inhabit next? And luckily his mortal body is able to channel the craziness back to earth so we can share it. Awesome post, Peter. You truly are madder than a badger. Back on topic, the film was kind of OK, the book was better, but 10/10 to the producers for refusing to be done over by the Vatican.
He died in Kashmir and his descendants still look after his tomb.
http://www.tombofjesus.com/2007/home.html