Heathrow, London, 11am, Thursday, Feb 12, 2009
Board plane to Geneva, clutching pristine copy of bestselling conspiracy
thriller Angels and Demons by Dan Brown. The novel, which apparently
describes the apocalyptic plans of a secret organisation of scientists
called the Illuminati, has been transformed into a $100 million summer
blockbuster by the director Ron Howard and his star Tom Hanks. The pair’s
previous Brown adaptation, The Da Vinci Code, became one of the
biggest hits of 2006, scooping $757 million at the global box office. This
time, however, the movie lacks the instant brand recognition of The Da
Vinci Code — that novel had sold 60 million copies before the film and
had whipped up a world of Christian-baiting controversy. The producers of Angels
& Demons have thus orchestrated an aggressive marketing putsch. They
have invited 150 journalists to a four-day Angels & Demons
love-in. Private aircraft will be hired and luxury hotel suites will be
booked, as the hacks, with and without the movie’s stars (including Hanks
and Ewan McGregor), will be pinged about from science labs in Geneva to
churches in Rome to experience the Angels & Demons phenomenon in
immersive detail.
Geneva airport, 3pm, same day
Have read half the book. So far, it’s rubbish. Shame. Was a fan, semi-closet,
of the Da Vinci Code novel. Loved that thriller’s elegant sense of
purpose, and its singularity, where even a throwaway anagram of Leonardo’s Madonna
of the Rocks — So Dark the Con of Man — could artfully imply a world of
Christian cover-ups. Angels and Demons, on the other hand, is
malformed dreck. Written three years before The Da Vinci Code (but
adapted by the movie-makers as a sequel) it reads like a choppy first draft
of that novel. The hero, naturally, is the Harvard symbologist Robert
Langdon (played by Hanks in both films) who again finds himself caught
between a group of well-meaning intellectuals and some sinister Roman
Catholic extremists, with only a pretty brunette for company. The plot is
unwieldy and involves a futuristic anti-matter explosive device stolen from
the CERN laboratories in Geneva, and hidden in the Vatican, timer-switch on,
leaving hero Langdon a mere five hours to rescue some cardinals; to find and
defuse the device; and to uncover the truth about the ancient order of
Illuminati. Angels and Demons has sold 39 million copies, which, next
to the 81 million Da Vinci Codes now sold, makes Brown the most
widely read author since, well, the big bearded guy who dictated the Bible.
Hotel Royal, Geneva, 4pm
The lobby is abuzz with journalists from Japan wearing blue Angels &
Demons press badges. Have barely enough time to pick up a complimentary
Swiss army water bottle before it’s on to the complimentary Swiss coach for
the 50-minute trip to CERN itself, where Tom Hanks and some nuclear
physicists will show footage from the film and talk about anti-matter.
Guiltily dig out copy of Angels and Demons on the coach and continue
reading. Am mildly stunned by the book’s reactionary depiction of a Middle
Eastern über-villain — an Arab assassin who hates Christians and loves
raping and torturing white women. Like everything else in the book, it’s not
very subtle.
Talk on the bus turns to the upcoming footage. How much will they show? Best
bits? Talky bits? The Da Vinci Code is mentioned and a fight breaks
out between an older German man and a young Australian woman, when the
latter reminds the former that the movie of The Da Vinci Code
was an execrable mess. She’s right. “Spirit lowering tripe,” said The
New Yorker at the time; “A stodgy, grim thing,” said Variety.
Visitor Centre, CERN, 6pm
The centre is a giant wooden globe that looks impressive from the outside,
but inside has something of an Ikea feel. Security is tight and, after the
removal of all technological devices and Swiss army water bottles, we are
ushered upstairs to a roof-level conference room, where a brief and,
frankly, disappointing 8½ minutes of Angels & Demons footage
is screened. Here, we see Tom Hanks as Langdon doing laps in his Harvard
pool in tiny black Speedos. We see him discuss the nature of religious faith
with Ewan McGregor’s papal honcho “the Camerlengo”. And we see snippets of
street chases, of cardinals being tortured and crowd scenes in St Peter’s
Square.
The footage gets a big round of applause. Hanks, Howard, and the Israeli
co-star Ayelet Zurer (she plays the brunette love interest, Vittoria)
shuffle on to the stage. The conference is jovial and jokey. “I have no fear
of the Speedo,” says Hanks, referring to the swimming footage. “It takes a
real man to slap on a pair of Speedos and say, ‘OK, let’s go to work!’ ”
Much laughing ensues.
The team explain that the exteriors were shot in Rome and most of the
interiors on soundstages in LA, and that the Vatican, understandably, didn’t
co-operate with the filming (given the kicking it got in The Da Vinci Code).
Hanks then jokes about his lack of research (“I started to read The
God Particle but I couldn’t finish it”), Howard explains that only 400
of the movie’s 800 special effects shots are completed, while a CERN
physicist, Sergio Bertolucci, tries hard to explain the wider significance
of our presence here. “In this place even reality can be as thrilling as
fiction,” he says. “What we do here in the future will be part of a
different type of movie.” Puzzled faces all round.
And then, during an inevitable discussion on the movie’s depiction of religion
versus scientific fact, Hanks gets a bit metaphysical. “I have a friend who
is a priest,” he says. “We were talking about miracles, and he said,
‘Miracles are a dime a dozen, but it’s the mystery that makes me a priest.’
” Hanks pauses, adding dramatically: “When I go to church, and I do go to
church, I ponder the mystery. The mystery is the great unifying theory of
all mankind. It is the mystery that propels us along.”
Visitor Centre, CERN, 8:30am, Friday, Feb 13, 2009
We hacks are divided into bite-size bundles for separate “mini press
conferences” with Howard, Zurer, and yet more CERN physicists. Here Howard,
perhaps stung by the criticisms of his Da Vinci adaptation, conveys
the paradoxical idea that his Angels & Demons will be very Dan
Brown, but not, well, too Dan Brown. His producing partner, Brian Grazer,
has admitted that they were “too reverential” when adapting The
Da Vinci Code. “We got all the facts of the book right,” he said, “But
the movie was a little long and stagey.” Today Howard agrees that they were
“too respectful” of Brown’s work in the past but notes, forcefully, that
they had the author’s permission to deviate from the novel this time. “In
this one he [Brown] was much more encouraging of taking the novel and really
pulling the movie out of it, making a film that stood on its own.” The movie
will thus spend less time in CERN, and more in Rome. It will feature
protagonists who are composites of different characters in the novel. And,
as for the beastly arab assassin? He is no longer an Arab, admits Howard,
quietly.
Geneva airport, 4pm
Bundled on to a private plane for Rome leg of love-in. Finish book on board.
Chuckle at this passage, “The Illuminati were no longer about hiding. They
were about flaunting their power, confirming the conspiratorial myths as
fact. Tonight was a global publicity stunt.” You said it, Dan.
The Church of Santa Marta, Rome, 11am, Saturday, Feb 14, 2009
More mini press conferences, this time in the heart of Rome, in a
fresco-filled deconsecrated church, with the movie’s co-stars Ewan McGregor
and Stellan Skarsgard. The latter, a 58-year-old Swedish character actor,
plays Commander Richter, an aforementioned “composite character” and an
officer in the Swiss Guard, the Pope’s elite personal army. Skarsgard, who
made his name in Lars von Trier movies such as Breaking the Waves and Dancer
in the Dark, but hit box-office paydirt with Mamma Mia!
last year is refreshingly dyspeptic. He dispatches flimsy questions with
ruthless efficiency. Do you like Dan Brown? “Never met him.” Do you like his
books? “Not particularly.” What is the difference between Ewan and Tom on
set? “Tom is taller, while Ewan has a Scottish accent.” And so on.
McGregor is keener to please, and uses the occasion to discuss his resurgence
— after a patchy hiatus in theatre and on motorbikes — into the world of
movies. Four forthcoming film projects include the Jim Carrey comedy I
Love You Phillip Morris. Nevertheless, he is, it seems, banned from
speaking about his role in Angels & Demons as the Pope’s aide,
the Camerlengo — a priest with apparently progressive views who aids Langdon
in his search for the anti-matter bomb and the killer who planted it. “It’s
difficult to talk about him without spoiling your readers’ pleasure of the
film,” McGregor says, grinning archly.
He finishes by saying that he is much more adept at dealing with the press
these days, and no longer shoots his mouth off in interviews (he derided the Star
Wars prequels while he was making them). “I think that when we’re 23,
and we’re probably a bit drunk at a press conference there’s a certain
looseness of the tongue that you learn to tame over the years,” he says.
Piazza del Popolo, Rome, 4pm
The Angels & Demons extravaganza climaxes here. Without a movie to
show us, this is the next best thing. We take, in groups of ten, the “Path
of Illumination” tour, as described in the book and the film. Like Hanks’s
Langdon, we move methodically across the city, following spoofy clues from
the even spoofier secret society of Illuminati (a fictional group of secular
conspirators, allegedly begun in 18th-century Bavaria or 17th-century Rome,
but only tenuously linked to reality). We start in the Chigi Chapel of the
Santa Maria del Popolo church and are guided by a sassy Roman history
student called Francesca, who holds a dog-eared copy of Angels and Demons
and speaks in loud MTV English. “In meanwhile, ees anodder phonecall,” she
says, describing the plot along the way. “And ees anodder bed gay! Ees de
villain of de story!”
We soon bump into other Path of Illumination tours, and realise that this is
just the beginning. The Dan Brown effect is conspicuous, and tends to send
tourists scampering around Renaissance chapels like rats around a corpse.
Visitor numbers at Rossyln Castle in Edinburgh, for instance — site of the Da
Vinci Code climax — have tripled in recent years to 100,000 annually,
while tour operators on both sides of the English Channel continue to offer Da
Vinci Code tours of Paris and London.
Our Francesca takes us from Piazza del Popolo to St Peter’s Square, and then
to the breathtaking Santa Maria della Vittoria, a church designed by Gian
Lorenzo Bernini, the Baroque sculptor and architect. Bernini is a key player
in Angels and Demons, and is to that story what Leonardo was to The
Da Vinci Code — his ancient artistry points the way to a modern
conspiracy. Francesca gathers us inside, around Bernini’s famous statue The
Ecstasy of St Theresa. In the novel and the movie, a Catholic cardinal
will be burnt alive just feet away from us. Francesca begins reading the
action aloud, from the book, the good book of Dan Brown. And in some way,
right here and now, the journey is complete. For Brown may have sold just
fewer copies than the Bible, but here, in a place made sacred by the highest
of artistic aspirations but now colonised by lazy modern paranoias and
corporate fictions, he is the new reality. He is the opiate of the people.
Of course, it’s all good news for the Angels and Demons business.
And no doubt the movie will be a huge success. Certainly the
counter-recessionary mood among escape-seeking cinemagoers would suggest
that the movie will hit paydirt. And yet it’s hard here, staring at
Francesca as she reads Brown’s doggerel in this once holy place, not to
think of Tom Hanks, sitting calmly in his church, and to wonder, “Where is
the mystery gone? Where is the mystery, Tom?”
Angels & Demons is released on May 14
