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The first days of shooting on any film are always unnerving times for the people involved, but somehow for Istvan Szabo's latest film, "The Taste of Sunshine," the emotional stakes are particularly high.
Producer Robert Lantos left his native Hungary in the '50's and now lives and works in Canada. Lantos flew over for the first few days of shooting to see director/writer Istvan Szabo begin the magical process of bringing the film to life. Lantos admits that this is an unusual occurrence for him. An ebullient, energetic man, Lantos built a globally successful film and television company in Canada. He says, "visiting the set on the first day of shooting is a ritual I rarely indulge in any more. But I traveled from a long way because this is important to me."
Producer Andras Hamori, who oversees all of the company's films from the early development stages right through until distribution, also made the trip for the start of principal photography.
Lantos said, "I had hoped to work with Istvan Szabo since the beginning of my producing career, and with Ralph Fiennes since I first saw him on screen. I am particularly delighted that we have all embarked together on a project which is close to my heart."
"The Taste of Sunshine" is an Alliance and Serendipity Point presentation of a Robert Lantos Production of and Istvan Szabo film. "The Taste of Sunshine" stars Ralph Fiennes, Rosemary Harris, Rachel Weisz, Jennifer Ehle, Deborah Kara Unger, Molly Parker, John Neville, Miriam Margolyes, David De Keyser, James Frain, Mark Strong and William Hurt. Executive Producer's are Rainer Kolmel and Jonathan Debin. "The Taste of Sunshine" is based on an original story by Istvan Szabo, written by Istvan Szabo and Israel Horovitz. It is produced by Robert Lantos and Andras Hamori and directed by Istvan Szabo. Alliance Pictures International is handling the world-wide sales and marketing and Alliance Releasing will self-distribute in the UK and Canada.
"The Taste of Sunshine" tells the gripping story of a family that rises from humble origins to positions of wealth and power, only to fall victim to the events which defined Europe over the past century. Spanning three generations, Fiennes stars in the three leading roles: Ignatz, the pragmatic jurist, his Olympic-athlete son Adam and his political grandson Ivan. The powerful Hungarian writer/director Szabo intertwines personal drama and love affairs against a backdrop of larger social forces to create a powerful metaphor for European history of the last century.
With a hint of irony, when asked the nationality of the film, director/writer Szabo says, "Well, both myself, Robert Lantos and Andras Hamori are Hungarian as is my long time collaborator the Director of Photograph Lajos Kolta, so I leave it to people to make up their own *mind* as to which country this film belongs."
Lantos and Hamori explain that although Alliance has shot a number of films for television in Hungary, including "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" and "Shot Through the Heart," this project is unique. Lantos says, "other films we have made here have been for logistical reasons, but this one is shot here because the talent is from here and it is about this country. For that reason, it has different resonance for me as I am from Hungary. This film is about how you never escape your roots; in the story it takes three generations of the Sonnenschein/Sors family to understand that.
Szabo explains his connection with the producer saying, "Robert and I knew each other a long time before beginning the project. We met several times; it was a kind of friendship where we had nice lunches together in very good restaurants and had some very good talks about life. But I never imagined that Robert would produce a film with me and at that stage it was more important for us to find the best soup in Budapest."
During one of their splendid meals together they swapped life stories, shared family histories. "Istvan told me his story, which in some respects overlaps my own," says Lantos, "and I immediately said that he should make that into a screenplay. He said he already had and that it was to be a serial for German television."
Szabo puts it slightly differently, saying simply, "one day I told Robert about a script I was working on and he asked if he could read it when it was finished. He did not forget, so once it was complete I handed him a copy in Hungarian."
Robert Lantos picks up the thread adding, "at that stage the script was headed for a mini-series, so it was 600 pages long. I flew back from Budapest to Canada and began reading it on the plane and I couldn't put it down. I was captivated. I hadn't read so much Hungarian since I was a child. It was a fascinating story and I knew I had to talk to Istvan and say forget mini-series, forget television, we have to make this as a movie. It is a great magnus opus; if anything has the sweeping size to be a movie, it is this. So many movies get made which should be TV and this was the other way around."
And so began the task of turning this huge piece of work into a script of feature film length in the English language. It sounds like it would be a heart-wrenching process for any writer -- to delete hundreds of pages from their carefully crafted text -- but Szabo's response is surprisingly sanguine.
"The process of compressing the story for film was a beautiful task," he says, "it was a marvelous experience to discover how a few words could tell the audience the same story as we had previously told in hundreds of pages. To compress something helps you be more poetic."
And so, after approximately three years, including what Lantos describes as, "a lot of soul-searching," they had a movie screenplay on their hands. Obviously shorter, but still an epic piece of work, spanning over a hundred years, covering the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to the aftermath of the 1956 revolution and through the Communist period. But this is not about a nation, it is the story of a *family*, as Szabo explains:
"It started in my mind with how in the whole of Middle Europe, not just Hungary, people's private lives have been influenced by history and politics. I wanted to tell the story of one family and how their whole life is deeply affected by the various movements in Europe. All human being seek out a sense of comfort in their lives and in the last 150 years we have faced enormous challenges and difficulties which threaten our safety and that can lead to losing ourselves. So I wrote this story, showing how these supposedly different regimes -- be they an Empire, a republic or a foreign dictatorship -- have put individuals under pressure. All regimes promise happiness, but dreadful things have happened in that name. Authority uses people. When it no longer needs them, it throws them away or destroys them. This enormous experience is only the experience of the 20th century. It is extraordinary that in one life, say that of my grandfather, a man could experience the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Nazi and the Communist regimes. Instead of showing one life through different ages, I thought it might be more profound to tell the story through three generations. I therefore created three characters -- a grandfather, a father and a son -- all at similar ages. I always knew I wanted one actor to play the three parts or Ignatz, Adam and Ivan and so I asked Ralph Fiennes to create these for me."
He makes it sound very simple and unusually for the casting process in movies, it actually was. "Probably for the first time in my entire professional life," says Lantos, " we have landed our absolute first choice for leading actor. So often it doesn't happen for so many reasons, either they are not available or there are other problems. But in this case Ralph was our very first choice."
Szabo sums up perfectly what it is about this extraordinarily talented actor that made him so right for the roles. "The first thing was to find a human being, not an actor; to find a man who can express how fragile people are. Ralph has a human face, not the face of a star. That is his talent."
For the actor who has undertaken this huge challenge, his motivation was clear from the outset. It was simply one of the best scripts he had ever read and it gave him the opportunity to work with Istvan Szabo whose work he had long admired.
"I was a fan of his work for some time, even before I met him," Fiennes says, "I adored "Mephisto" and also particularly loved "Colonel Redl." Now I've started working with him I let myself be totally guided by him. He is so meticulous and detailed about the characters and how they behave."
Fiennes continues, "The script works on so many levels. Not only is it a story of personal relationships across three generations, but it is set against a very specific historical and social background of Hungary from the turn of the century until the 1960's. It is deeply humane without being sentimental. It is as rich as any great novel and it is all from Istvan Szabo who is an extraordinary human being."
Fiennes is immersing himself in the process of creating these closely linked but very different characters. He describes each one distinctly and clearly. To say this is an actor who puts a great deal of thought into the parts he plays is a huge understatement. He seems to understand them totally. The first, Ignatz, a lawyer Fiennes describes as, "a man who wants to be a member of the establishment in Hungary. He is a middle class Jew who wants to be assimilated successfully; he wants to feel the safety of the Establishment and the legal system. The infrastructure of the Empire is what gives him his raison d'etre, to the point of neglecting the woman he loves.
Fiennes continues, "By contract his son Adam is a sportsman. He lives through his body, he's a championship top athletic fencer and his motivation is to succeed as an athlete. He too wants to be assimilated, but he's a physical man and has the linear vision of any sportsman. He is blind to social change, to the rise of Fascism, so in one sense he is quite limited. But in another he is the most romantic because he is a bit of a swashbuckler."
The final of the three is Ivan, Adam's son and Ignatz's grandson. He is perhaps the most complex, as Fiennes explains, "Ivan is the most crippled and wounded psychologically by seeing his father murdered in a concentration camp. He's the most conflicted; he has literally no roots. He comes out of the war with a kind of Messianic determination to fight for Communism and take on the Fascists. It's only when he sees the corruption of the Communist regime and recognizes it as the same mindless corruption as Totalitarianism that he is able to make a change. He does it in the most fundamental way, by changing back to his family name."
Once Ralph Fiennes was in place, Alliance set about casting the other principal roles and have succeeded in assembling a huge international cast with over 150 principal roles and actors from England, Germany, Canada, the USA and of course, Hungary. A number of the parts are assigned to two actors, covering them at their different ages, including mother and daughter actors Rosemary Harris (Tom and Viv, Crossing Delancey) and Jennifer Ehle (Paradise Road, Wilde, Backbeat) who play's Ignatz's wife, Valerie; James Frain (An Awfully Big Adventure, Shadowlands) and John Neville (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Little Women) as Ignatz's brother Gustave; and Katja Studt (Deadly Maria, Wild West Included) and Torocski Mari (Szerelem, Macskajatek) as the family maid Kato.
Once the process of preparing for this mammoth work was complete, it was time for the really hard work to begin. Shooting began in Budapest on Tuesday, July 13th and continues for 20 weeks, using both the studio and numerous locations around the capital city, including the Opera House, the Technical Museum, the National Sports Hall, the Synagogue and the Wester Railway Station.
Lantos concludes, "when I was very young I saw some of Szabo's
early films and they had a great effect on me. My choices for
movies are driven by the maker and it has long been my ambition
to work with this man who I regard as one of the world's greatest
film-makers. But it is not just the man, it is also the story. "The
Taste of Sunshine" is about many things -- love, betrayal, loyalty,
family, ambition, cowardice, courage, human hatred, war, injustice --
but ultimately it's about on thing, it is about roots."
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on January 8, 1999
EL STEPHO