Ron Howard likes to describe it as his “wow” moment. At 2.30 one morning, standing with Tom Hanks in front of the
Mona Lisa, in a darkened, otherwise deserted Louvre, the director found himself contemplating not only Leonardo da Vinci’s Renaissance masterpiece, but the “pretty amazing” adventures of life.
The latest of these is the long path Howard has followed to bring Dan Brown’s blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code to the big screen. In a less enlightened age, you might say the production has been cursed. In today’s world, where there’s no such thing as bad publicity, it’s starting to look positively blessed.
There have been protests, pronouncements from the Vatican, arguments over the use of churches as locations and advertising hoardings, and a court case that threatened to delay the release of the film.
But, along the way, Howard and Hanks have enjoyed a magical history tour of Europe, with unprecedented access to châteaux, art galleries and cathedrals across France, England and Scotland. “We were in many of the places mentioned in the book with all the amazing historical significance that entailed,” says Hanks. “We got to crawl through some little doors and kneel on some very hard floors. It was a very different experience from driving to a Hollywood studio every day and going to Stage Six to shoot your scenes.”
But the Louvre in the dead of night, surrounded by some of mankind’s finest artistic achievements, just about topped the lot. “Tom and I were standing right here on one of our test nights,” recalls the director when we meet on the same spot, just three yards from Leonardo’s most famous work. “We were here for prep and rehearsal and there was no one else in the room. Just me, Tom, some equipment and the paintings, including the Mona Lisa. We were just staring at it and Tom said, ‘Man, we’ve come a long way since Splash . . .’ ”
They certainly have. The soggy mermaid love story was released more than 20 years ago, and marked the crossover from television to movies for both men. It was a hit, and launched their Hollywood careers. By the time their paths crossed again on Apollo 13, in 1995, Hanks was a double Oscar winner (for Forrest Gump and Philadelphia) and Howard had directed some solid hits, though he would have to wait until A Beautiful Mind to collect an Academy Award. Now, they are back together on what is bound to be a monster $125 million film of a 50-million-selling publishing phenomenon.
The Da Vinci Code will open the Cannes Film Festival on May 17 before going on global release two days later. The potential audience is huge, though Howard claims that at this stage he is too close to the subject to predict what viewers will think of it.
“I recognise that there will be a great deal of scrutiny, a lot of criticism — who knows how it will go? Whether it will be more positive than negative I don’t know and I do worry about it. But ultimately I’m happy that I’ve worked on this story because the themes and subjects are interesting and as a life experience it was fascinating. So there is a little Yin and Yang in this one.”
The one worry he doesn’t have is generating publicity. Whether you take the view that Brown’s novel is historical hokum or dangerous, blasphemous propaganda, it is hard to find anyone who doesn’t at least know about it thanks to a high-profile court case — two historians accused the author of plagiarism and lost — and the furore over the central premise (skip to the next paragraph if you don’t want to know): that Jesus fathered a child with Mary Magdalene and that the blood line survives in modern France.
As the cameras have turned, the film has started to generate a web of myth and intrigue to rival its storyline. There was the report that the President of France was lobbying Howard for a relative to be given the coveted role of Sophie Neveu and, at the same time, expressing his hope that Jean Reno, who plays the French detective Bezu Fache, was being paid enough. Howard, so the story went, ignored Jacques Chirac’s advice and cast Audrey Tautou (Amé lie) instead. When I mention this story to Tautou, she snorts in disbelief: “As if the President of France would have the time to get involved with the casting and in renegotiating Jean Reno’s contract! It was a joke! The person who translated the article made it come across as something serious. How can people possibly believe that?” Quite. Yet the controversies just won’t die down. The Archbishop of Canterbury referred to the film in his Easter sermon, and Opus Dei, the mysterious Catholic sect at the centre of the plot, has called for the film to carry a disclaimer. The Archbishop of Genoa has called the book “a sackful of lies against the Church”, setting the tone for outrage that recntly hit Italy when scaffolding around the 16th-century façade of San Pantaleo church in Rome was used to advertise the film’s release. But are they bothered? “When you have excerpts being played on The Nine O’Clock News, you are not going to find a film company getting too worried,” says Ian McKellen, who plays the historian Sir Leigh Teabing. “Everybody knows about The Da Vinci Code, whether they have read it or not, and they will be intrigued to see the film.”
Even The Albino Association of America has joined the outraged pressure groups, asking for the key character of Silas to be toned down. Paul Bettany, who plays the selfflagellating killer determined to protect the secrets of Christ’s true past, admits that this rather bizarre request got short shrift.
“Number one, it’s a book that sold 50 million copies and I don’t think it would have flown if I’d gone up to Dan Brown and said, ‘Do you know what? I just don’t see him as an albino. Or a monk,’” says Bettany. “Clearly it’s no more a comment on albinos or monks than on people who wear sandals.”
Howard’s favourite furore so far was when the media reported that an angry nun had led 200 people in protest at Lincoln Cathedral. “There was a nun, either protesting or praying for us, I’m not sure which. She was there all day and one other person joined her at some point.
"The papers said that there were 200 people protesting. There were about 200 people, but 198 of them had Dan Brown’s book and were trying to get Tom Hanks to sign it!"
Howard, working with his favourite screenwriter, Akiva Goldsman (A Beautiful Mind and Cinderella Man), has remained largely faithful to Brown’s page-turner, but expect some surprises and a different ending.
"People know the story so well that I want to hold a few things back for them to discover," says the director. "So, on the one hand, it’s as faithful an interpretation of the novel as I could offer. But of course there are going to be some changes, and I think that will be part of the fun of seeing it."
For those who don’t know the story, Hanks plays a Harvard professor, Robert Langdon, a "symbologist" called in to help the French police when a curator is murdered at the Louvre. The victim has left a coded farewell note, in his own blood, full of symbols and signs which Langdon, and his French colleague, Sophie Neveu, try to decipher.
They then discover clues in Leonardo’s paintings The Last Supper, Mona Lisa and Virgin of the Rocks to a far bigger conspiracy, involving everything from the Holy Grail, Opus Dei and the Knights Templar, as Silas and his puppet master, Bishop Aringarosa (Alfred Molina), try to stop them at all costs.
Real locations are used as far as possible, but filming also took place at Shepperton and Pinewood, where a replica of the Louvre’s Grande Galérie was built, complete with more than 140 fake works of art. "It was fantastic shooting in the Louvre," says the director, "but we had to build a set to complement it because what we could do in there was restricted."
Westminster Abbey turned them down, so the production substituted Lincoln Cathedral (after making a significant "donation"). "I don’t know that Westminster Abbey ever gave a formal reason," Howard says. "I think the fact that the subject of the book is controversial and that it’s the Royal Family’s church made them think that, along with the logistical hassles,there wasn’t any good reason to invite more controversy."
Winchester Cathedral took a more pragmatic view and accepted £20,000 to allow filming. It then promptly made it clear that, in its view, the theories on which the book is based are a load of bunkum by putting the money towards the cost of a special Christianity exhibition.
At one point, the Vatican urged people not to read the book or see the film and the Christian Council of South Korea has launched a legal attempt to stop the film being distributed there, claiming it "belittles and tries to destroy Christianity". "I don’t think this book undermines Christianity," McKellen says. "It might undermine certain elements of the establishment who call themselves Christians, but the Catholic Church has been making statements for so long that they really can’t object if somebody pokes a finger and says, ‘hey, hang about. . .’"
Tautou agrees: "It’s based on theories which have been developed by many other authors and nobody ever talked about that. It’s a fiction. It’s just a movie."
Howard himself emphasises that he sees the story as a clever piece of entertainment, nothing more. "What Dan has done is really smart and he’s not the first author to do it with historical fiction.
He has taken a lot of things that historians and theologians would agree are pretty accurate and built in other ideas — conspiracy theories that maybe only fringe groups would think are valid — and he has woven them together. On top of everything else, he has created a clock-ticking murder mystery."
Howard is trying his best not to fuel any debate on whether the film might be offensive to some Christians. There is an irony, of course, that it is being released at a time when Hollywood has been trying to court the potentially huge Christian audience in the States with films such as The Chronicles of Narnia.
"I was raised in a moderately rigorous Presbyterian upbringing," says the former star of Happy Days. "I’m not going to talk about my belief system but I am spiritual, I am religious, and I didn’t feel threatened by the book. That said, I do respect people of faith and devotion. In fact, there are a couple of lines of dialogue, a couple of moments, that are built into the film that reflect that in a way that might not exist in the book.
"I just felt that the themes, the ideas, the story, albeit a work of fiction, are really saying that faith is a personal thing and that it’s important to think about what you believe and not necessarily just accept ideas because they are presented, but to use God’s greatest gift, the mind, to think through and understand." 0
The Da Vinci Code opens on May 19. Follow the Cryptic Quest in The Sunday Times and in The Times all next week for a chance to win a Smart car. supplement on the Da Vinci effect.
THE PRIORY OF SION
The book says: Godefroi de Bouillon headed to the crusades in search of the Holy Grail. He founded the Priory of Sion, which established the Knights Templar. Leonardo, Isaac Newton, Sandro Boticelli and Victor Hugo were grand masters of the priory.
The history books say: The Priory of Sion was made up by a mad Frenchman called Plantard in the 1950s. Unless he also invented time travel, all the Priory of Sion stuff is claptrap.
THE VIRGIN OF THE ROCKS
The book says: Da Vinci paints Jesus on the left, John the Baptist on the right, and the Virgin Mary in the centre, making threatening gestures. The nuns of the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception rejected the painting because it used pagan symbols.
The history books say: Jesus is on the right, John the Baptist on the left; Mary is blessing Jesus; the Confraternity had no nuns, and there are no pagan symbols in the picture.
