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:
“The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“By bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage labor. By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.”
—Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)