Cry Me A River
by Mark Salisbury, The Guardian
April 19, 2002
When Franco Zeffirelli was first asked to make a movie about his friend Maria Callas, he said it would be too painful. So why has he agreed now? Mark Salisbury visits the set of Callas Forever.
[Webmaster's note: Herewith the Jeremy excerts from a longer article about the making of Callas Forever.]
'It's a sort of Faustian experiment," says Franco Zeffirelli. "Sell your soul and you get your youth back." The septuagenarian film-maker and veteran opera buff is talking about Callas Forever, a fictionalised account of the final four months in the life of iconic opera star Maria Callas. With a script by playwright Martin Sherman, Callas Forever stars Fanny Ardant as the singer and Jeremy Irons as an English music promoter who coaxes her out of retirement in Paris to film a series of operas in which she will mime to her old recordings. "She feels from the beginning there's something wrong but she's tempted."
To play Callas, Zeffirelli had intended to cast a real opera singer he had worked with, but when she passed on the project, he met Ardant, the French star of Ridicule, who had played the singer on stage in Terrence McNally's Master Class, and instantly knew he'd found his Maria: "I couldn't imagine finding an actress so close to the image of Maria Callas, but Fanny resembles Maria in many ways. She projects something with the muscles of her face, the eyes." The effect is unnerving for him. "I have to make an effort to think, 'That's Maria.' "
"He cast well with Fanny," says Irons who previously worked with Ardant on Swann in Love and Australia. "As soon as she was made up, she became her. Which is what you hope when you're playing somebody who is known."
Irons's character seems partly based on Zeffirelli himself. "There are two sides of Franco," says Irons, sporting a ponytail for the part. "The sort of mischievous, gay, a-bit-cheap side, and the side of the artist which runs very deep in him. He's an incredible artist, incredible designer. Not a bad film director. Wonderful opera director. I think Larry [Irons's character] has both those sides."
Zeffirelli retires for lunch at one, emerging a good couple of hours later. "He's no good in the morning," says Irons, who lunches with Zeffirelli most days, "so we take a long time to get started, which I used to find very frustrating. I'm getting the measure of it now. He'd go on until three in the morning. Fortunately the Italian crew is used to working eight to eight and can't be persuaded to work midday to midnight, which would suit him quite well, I think."