Production
Director Dario Argento tried at first to get Bridget Fonda and then Jennifer Jason Leigh to play the role of Anna. He eventually cast his own daughter, Asia Argento, in the role. Thomas Kretschmann was cast as Alfredo Grossi because Argento had seen him working with Asia on the set of La Reine Margot (1994). Argento was impressed enough by Kretschmann that he would later think of him for the role.
Ennio Morricone's eerie music score for the film follows the same tune played either forward or backward.
The opening scene was shot in Florence at Italy's famed Uffizi Gallery. Argento is the only director ever granted permission to shoot there.
The painting that Anna literally steps into is a Rembrandt painting of 17th Century policemen entitled The Night Watch. The painting that causes Anna to faint in the museum is by Bruegel, called Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
The footage of Anna underwater after fainting in the gallery was actually shot in the sea – not a swimming pool. The huge grouper fish that Anna kisses was a remote model that was being pulled through the waters by cables attached to a small float on the ocean's surface. Mere moments after wrapping the underwater shoot, the fish stopped working.
This would be the last fiction feature film for acclaimed director of photography Giuseppe Rotunno. The following year he shot a documentary on Marcello Mastroianni before retiring.
Graffiti artists were brought in to cover the underground lair of Alfredo with graffiti. In one night the group created over a hundred square feet of graffiti-covered walls on the location.
This is the second of four films in which Argento has directed his daughter Asia: the three others are Trauma, The Phantom of the Opera and The Mother of Tears. She also had roles in Demons 2 and The Church, both of which Dario Argento produced.
Argento planned on making a sequel to the film which would follow Detective Anna Manni on another case. However, Asia was unavailable so the character's name was changed (to Anna Mari) and Stefania Rocca was cast. The resulting film is 2004's The Card Player.
Read more about this topic: The Stendhal Syndrome
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“Constant revolutionizing of production ... distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“The problem of culture is seldom grasped correctly. The goal of a culture is not the greatest possible happiness of a people, nor is it the unhindered development of all their talents; instead, culture shows itself in the correct proportion of these developments. Its aim points beyond earthly happiness: the production of great works is the aim of culture.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)