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French action film shot in several locations

by Fiona Galea Debono

The Times of Malta - September 19th, 2007

The French adventure/ thriller Largo Winch has recently completed an intensive three-and-a-half weeks of filming in Malta.

Based on the popular story of a character by the same name, about a young man who inherits one the world's greatest fortunes after being purposely adopted by a billionaire, it is considered to be France's most challenging production, in terms of budget and size, of the year, said Malcolm Scerri-Ferrante, the unit production manager for the film.

When the billionaire is murdered, Largo finds himself in a race against time to save his life and his father's empire.

The film is directed by young, up-and-coming Jerome Salle, who is considered to be "hot" in France, following his last film Anthony Zimmer, nominated for a Cesar for Best First Film, Mr Scerri Ferrante said.

Filming in Malta was carried out in various localities, showing its versatility. They included the water tanks at the Mediterranean Film Studios, which were what initially attracted the producers to the island - the opening scene involves an underwater struggle between two men.

It was also shot in a government school, which acted as an orphanage and a police station in Eastern Europe, St Edwards College, which stood in for a Swiss boarding school, Mtahleb and the airport grounds, which doubled as the Balkans.

The main restaurant of the Corinthia Palace Hotel in Attard portrayed an upmarket New York eatery. A Boeing 727 was also utilised for the filming. Complicated scenes were shot on the runway and nearby after several weeks of intensive planning with Malta International Airport management.

When Mr Salle was shown around by Film Commissioner Luisa Bonello, he immediately realised the island had much more potential for his film and decided to scout for more locations, Mr Scerri-Ferrante said.

The financial incentives and assistance of the Malta Film Commission helped keep the producers interested in Malta until they decided to extend their filming to over three weeks, he continued. The movie is also being filmed in other countries including France, Sicily and Hong Kong.

Despite the fact that Largo Winch has a budget of €25 million - unusually high for an independent European film - it has huge aspirations, with a lot of action sequences, Mr Scerri-Ferrante said.

"In Hollywood, a film of the sort would have double the budget. However, it was the conscious decision of the producers to use unknown talent and to produce it in a cost-effective manner, meaning harder work because you are trying to achieve a lot with less money," he said.

Casting for actors with speaking parts and some 350 extras began locally in May. Coordinated by Edward Said, five local actors were chosen for secondary parts. Of the 100-strong crew, about 50 were Maltese, said the Producer's Creative Partnership, the local production company, engaged with recruiting crew and managing the movie.

Filming of Largo Winch is currently continuing in Sicily and a number of Maltese technicians and assistants have joined the French crew there.

HOOKED ON THE HUMAN FACTOR

The Sunday Times - September 2nd, 2007

Eric German interviews Jerome Salle, co-writer and director of Largo Winch, currently being shot in Malta

Jerome Salle - "Action is easy to direct; the difficult part is

to direct actors"  Photo: Darrin Zammit Lupi

After all these years I still get tense when I do an interview.  It doesn’t show but that’s because I suppress it to get on with my job which I love. But in the case of Jerome Salle, I didn’t have to suppress anything and interviewing him was a unique pleasure. 

Intelligent and completely charming in a perfectly natural way, Salle had the gift of making me feel relaxed and comfortable the minute we met. 

I didn’t say anything at the time as I thought it more relevant to ask him about his career and Largo Winch, the big budget French film which he co-wrote, with Julien Rappeneau, and which he’s been directing in Malta. 

But the subject emerged on its own later, when Salle told me, “There’s only one way to do this job.  I feel that the way to deal with a film, even a big one like this, is to create a happy set and a relaxed working environment.” 

It certainly makes sense when you hear of the miserable time some directors had while working with ego-centred actors or, vice versa, of the tense atmosphere on the set of a film directed by a dictator. 

Such negative experiences affect everyone working on the film and they’re very counter productive since it’s bound to show in the film.  He told me that directing in Malta was “easy and our unit producer (Unit Production Manager Malcolm Scerri-Ferrante) was very helpful.”

The more I talked with Salle, the stronger my impression that it must be wonderful to work with such a filmmaker. 

He is very handsome and he has a very appealing personality.  These, coupled with his charm and, presumably, his acting ability, were bound to make him a big star besides a director.

As I expected, Salle told me that many have made the same observation that I did.  “But I would make a terrible actor,” he told me as he laughed, “because I’m not an extrovert.”

He started out as a screenwriter and in 2000 he wrote and directed Le Jour de Grace, a short film about a World War 1 incident concerning orders to execute a soldier. 

Salle broke into the gig time with Anthony Zimmer (2005), a romantic thriller starring Sophie Marceau and Yvan Attal who can be seen locally as the Parisian taxi driver in Rush Hour 3.

In France, Anthony Zimmer was a big success with critics and public alike and Salle was nominated for a Cesar for Best First Film. It was also released in the USA. 

Salle described it as a film which “looks like a thriller but which is a love story about two people who manipulate each other but who will do anything to earn one another’s love.”

It sounded like the kind of film in which the director had the difficult task of striking a balance between the thriller and love story elements.

“Yes,” Salle agreed, “but that is also what stimulated me.  Any movie, even if it’s a youth action movie must have different levels if it’s to work. I always need to work on different levels. 

“If it’s just on one level, say the action level, I get bored writing it and I get bored shooting it.  That’s what I was looking for in Anthony Zimmer and that’s what I was looking for in this one.”

Currently, Largo Winch is considered to be France’s largest film production of the year.  It has a budget of 25 million Euros which, by Hollywood standards, is a medium range budget.

But with big Hollywood budgets, a lot of the money spent never ends on the screen as it goes to pay for gifts and the personal perks of its celebrity stars and, sometimes, even the director.  

With European budgets there’s no waste at all so the audience gets much more value for its money.  As Salle told me, “It’s my responsibility to ensure that every Euro ends up on the screen.” 

Largo Winch is a huge challenge for him because it has huge aspirations that Hollywood would normally make for twice the amount.  The unit built a set at Malta Film Studios where a lot of the film was shot. 

Other locations include a Hamrun government school which stood in for an orphanage and a police station in the Balkans; the Corinthia Palace Hotel restaurant, which doubles as a New York restaurant; Mtahleb which will appear on screen as the Balkans countryside; a Siggiewi farm house and the airport, which also portray the Balkans. 

Fundamentally, Malta doubles for the Balkans.  Five speaking roles were given to Maltese actors and the unit employed some 350 extras. 

The story’s launching pad is the death of billionaire Nerio Winch, whose body is found floating just a few yards from his yacht. This drowning appears suspect because the victim is the founder and majority shareholder of the W Group, an empire employing 400,000 people around the globe.

The renowned businessman had no family. Who will inherit the group? This question panics the W Group’s board. Without their boss and figurehead, they are incapable of ensuring the company’s survival as it is already under attack from all sides on the world’s financial markets.

However, they are unaware of Nerio’s great secret, Largo, a son adopted almost 30 years earlier in a Bosnian orphanage and raised in total secrecy by a family of fishermen on the shores of the Adriatic.  Presently, Largo is rotting in a prison in the depths of the Amazon.

Although he claims to be innocent, he’s accused of drug trafficking.  Could Nerio’s suspected murder and Largo’s imprisonment form part of a single plot designed to seize control of the Winch empire?

His breakthrough film was a small scale project, so I asked Salle what led to his directing such a big production.

“Anthony Zimmer was smaller and shorter, though I had a big star in Sophie Marceau.  It was quite a successful film so in France it gave me a lot of power- no, I don’t like that word ..”  I volunteered that in Hollywood he would be called a hot director at the moment.

“Yeah, exactly,” he agreed.  “It’s always difficult to do a huge adventure movie in France because they’re very expensive, but the first film gave me the opportunity to get the budget to do such a film. 

“I’ve always wanted to do the kind of movie that I would have liked to see when I was 12 years old, a movie that my children would love to see.  That was my first goal and I told myself that now is the time to do it. 

“Perhaps in two years’ time I wouldn’t have such an opportunity.  You never know what life will bring, so when the occasion arises you’ve got to take it and make the most of it.

“The only difficulty was that after we sold Anthony Zimmer to the Americans, I received a lot of scripts from Hollywood and some of them were very good.  So I had to decide whether to go to Hollywood or to continue working in France. 

“I decided to remain in France because in France I would have the final cut and I would never have that in Hollywood.  In France a director is guaranteed the final cut by law, so we’re very lucky.”

In Hollywood very few directors have the final cut i.e. the right to decide what stays in the final print as it will be released and what goes out.  As Salle said, usually “it’s a struggle for control between the producer, the director and the studio.”

The unkindest cut of all comes when a film is cut drastically after a test screening.

The audiences at such screenings consist of ordinary people picked at random and after seeing the film they fill in a questionnaire.  If the major part of this audience wants changes they usually get them. 

Often, such audiences want a happy ending so if a film ended realistically, the studio may junk that ending and shoot additional footage to change the ending to a happy one.

Salle told me, “My premise of test screenings is just to know what the audience understands of my film.  Does the audience understand what I want them to understand?  Sometimes there may be a problem because I didn’t do my job well. 

“I want to be very precise so if there’s something that I can change to make them understand what I meant to say, then I’ll make changes.  I’m very interested in that but I’m not interested to know what they like or not. 

“If you use the test screening to give the audience what they’re looking for, it can be very bad for the film.  But if the premise of a test screening is to be sure that the audience understands the film as you want it to understand it, then it’s very useful.” 

Largo Winch originated as a series of graphic novels by Philippe Francq and Jean Van Hamme.  They became so popular that they spawned a TV series and a video game that’s also available in the USA.    

The TV series premiered on September 7, 2001 and ended on March 4, 2003.  Salle described it as “very bad because of the terrible acting.  I could never watch more than a few minutes at a time.”

When I asked him why he was so interested in making this film, his reply told me that we had another thing in common, namely that our main interest lies in the film’s human factor.  Earlier in our interview, he told me, “For my first film I did the casting and I chose actors who were very human.”

In reply to my question, Salle explained that, “Something interested me very strongly about the orphanage and the relationship between father and son.”

Coincidentally or not, two years ago he wrote the screenplay for the film Trouble (international title: Duplicity) and this too was about a boy who grew up in an orphanage.

“Another thing that I found very interesting,” Salle added, “is that when Largo Winch the orphan becomes a young man, he doesn’t want this destiny that he has inherited from his rich adoptive father. 

“In that respect it’s similar to The Godfather when Michael Coreleone doesn’t want to become capo mafia but that’s his destiny.  Thirdly, I was interested in this film because it involved many cultures and various parts of the world.”

The film has five different locations- Malta (for a shoot of just over three weeks), Sicily (two weeks), Hong Kong (eight weeks) and Macao.  The leading actors weren’t required for the Malta shoot which is unfortunate for they include one of the actresses I admire most, Kristin Scott Thomas.

She was nominated for an Oscar for her performance in The English Patient, but she always gives superb performances, even in small scale films like Up at the Villa.  Largo is portrayed by Tomer Sisley who does his own stunts in the film.

Contrary to my expectations, Salle didn’t feel that there was an appreciable difference between directing a small scale film like his first one and a large scale one like Largo Winch which also has quite a lot of action in it.

“I would say that it’s always the same job,” he replied.  “The job of a director is to tell a story.  If you don’t know how to direct action there are technicians who will help you.  For me, my job is how to tell the story and how to get the audience hooked on it.

“Action is easy to direct, the difficult part is to direct actors, to get them to convey to the audience the emotions that you’re looking for.  The action is a sweet for the audience but for the film to work, you must have a good story, interesting characters and the right actors.

“The latest good action movie from Hollywood is The Bourne Ultimatum.  But why is it very good?  It’s because there’s Jason Bourne’s search for his identity.  The action is the means to that end.”

I wondered how he had chosen Malta as one of the key locations.

“I didn’t know about Malta.  I was looking for a location in the Mediterranean.  We have an underwater scene at the beginning of the movie so we came here to see the tank.  We realised it was a great place to work in because you have really good crews and you’re used to working on movies.

“We decided to find different locations in Malta but there was one location that we couldn’t find here and for that we went to Sicily.  What was impossible for me to find in Malta were large landscapes because you have a very built island.”

Before the interview I did some research on Salle and his films.  I found tons of information on Anthony Zimmer and mentions of his work as a screenwriter.  But I found absolutely nothing on him.  One site even pleaded for information on him.

Salle laughed heartily when I told him about this.  “I’m very discreet,” he told me.  I have a very normal life.  I hate nightclubbing.  I have four children from two wives and actually, I’m here with my children.

“So far I’ve managed to keep my professional and private life separate.  It will be more difficult when Largo Winch is released because it’s going to get a huge promotion.

“Last month I was in Vietnam and it was a pleasure to talk to the press.  There’s never any problem about talking to the press about my movies.  But I’m very careful about my private life.”

The Lost Treasures of the Knights Templar III

September 20th, 2007

The second sequel (third instalment) of a popular Danish children’s adventure feature shot almost entirely in Malta in June and July. The story follows Danish teenage friends on holiday in Malta in search of a lost treasure of the Templar knights said to be buried on the island, therefore Malta featured as Malta. Though mainly in Danish, the script also featured English and Maltese dialogue. Shooting took place in various locations around the island, including Rabat, Valletta and Mdina, and featured uniquely Maltese locations as themselves, such as the Malta International Airport, Hagar Qim, Fort St Angelo and the Rabat catacombs. The Danish Village in Mellieha also featured. The PCP consulted for the crewing of the film. Some financial aide was given by the Malta Tourism Authority.

Top Korean director chooses Malta for commercial

February 24th, 2007

Malta will feature in a Korean TV commercial for a wheat-based beverage, scenes having been filmed in Mdina and Valletta earlier this week.

Myung-Chun Park, considered to be among the most established Korean commercial directors, was in charge of the project. He had already filmed a Coca-Cola commercial at the Rinella water tanks a few years back.

Photos by Alexander Chorny

"In the only free time he had on his way to the airport, he managed to slip in a quick visit to Mdina... It was the unique characteristics of its streets that remained impressed in his memory and that allowed him to 'sell' his concept for the drink commercial in Korea," a spokesman for the Producer's Creative Partnership said, adding that "an exotic and fantasy kind of backdrop" was required.

The filming of the commercial required a number of challenges on the part of the PCP, the production company engaged to organise the shoot.

Barely a week's notice was given to scout locations, get permits, bring over specialised technicians and equipment from Germany and coordinate everything from A to Z in time for a hectic two-day shoot, which involved a 40-strong crew of Koreans, Maltese and Germans. The 30-second commercial features a heartbroken guy running fast through various streets. To achieve the director's vision, and a cinematic feel, a special quad bike was brought over from Munich and a steadicam mounted so that the camera could move smoothly alongside the actor at high speed.

In Valletta, filming took place by the bastions near the sea, under Fort St Elmo.

A famous Korean model, Tae-Pyoung Kim, stars in the commercial, which is typically Asian because it features a celebrity to sell a product.

The PCP expressed its gratitude towards the local councils of Mdina, Valletta and Senglea for their cooperation in connection with the urgent preparations that had to be made.

"In London, you would usually need two weeks to organise permits. Here, we just had a few days. The residents were all extremely helpful and made us feel very welcome." executive producer Jae Kim was quoted as saying.

The commercial is being edited in London and "everyone there is excited about the shots we managed to capture in Malta".

Valletta plays Jerusalem

Fiona Galea Debono

January 13th, 2007

It's no wonder film-makers like coming to Malta - the co-producers of the movie Eichmann, currently shooting here, are sipping coffees in a warm and welcoming sun in the height of winter.

But to be fair, Peter Bevan and Michael Frenchkowski are merely enjoying a short, hard-earned break. And while they appreciate and are taking advantage of the good weather during their six-day shoot in Malta, they chose to film here primarily because of the locations, which could double for Israel.

"We needed something that was convincing," said Mr Bevan. And they found that in Malta.

The "untouched" architecture, still in a pristine state and unmarred by modern interventions - as many producers somehow seem to view it - was the main attraction: Eichmann is set in Jerusalem, and Malta did not need much of a make-over to play that role.

"There isn't the modern stuff that often gets in the way, especially when doing a period movie," comments Mr Bevans, squinting in the sun.

Valletta's East Street was yesterday draped in Israeli flags, playing the part of a Jerusalem road on a public holiday, while shooting was also going on in a house in St Paul's Street. Other locations include San Anton gardens and a police station in Hamrun, which is acting as German Nazi Adolf Eichmann's prison cell.

"People know what Jerusalem looks like and you cannot cheat. We looked at Spain and all around the world really... Of course, the political situation excluded Israel from the options, with the whole Israeli-Hizbollah war going on when they were putting everything together. Agents and insurances would not have it!"

And Steven Spielberg's Munich, shot here in the summer of 2005, has certainly served its purpose. It was through this movie that the producers knew Malta would work as a Middle Eastern country. They came over to scout for locations and see with their own eyes a couple of months ago, but it did not take them too long to decide...

The whole movie is being shot in 30 days - the other location being Budapest, Hungary. But the producers cannot compare the two, both having their own advantages and assets, they maintain.

"There is no competition really between the two because you are completely different from Hungary," says Mr Frenchkowski, who is also the line producer. "Budapest is either specifically Budapest, or some other old European city, plus it has the sound stages, which you do not have here. Hungary also offers tax discounts, and as regards crew costs, it is similar and maybe a little bit cheaper. That may be an issue when making a decision, but really, the most important factor is the locations. In Hungary, there are no water tanks and no architecture like this," he says.

Mr Frenchkowski makes a quick, mental calculation: An $8 million-budget movie - quite "reasonable and healthy" for an independent film - around 10 per cent being spent in Malta.

A fledgling production company, the UK outfit E-Motion has already come a long way in its first year of life - Eichmann is its second movie since its inception. Plans for the immediate future include a movie about the Vatican, starring Peter O'Toole and Albert Finney, and the possibility of other projects heading for Malta, depending on the story.

After all, their experience here has been positive. They were pleasantly surprised by the infrastructure and the facilities on offer. Once upon a time, Malta lacked experienced crew, but today, they seem to have become another source of attraction.

"Even local crew is available and they know what we require as film-makers; they are of professional quality," says Mr Bevan, adding that around 70 members of the crew on the movie are Maltese.

"The Malta Film Commission was also especially helpful, particularly in the early stages. They are very straightforward and made our work easy. It is very clear how you can get a tax rebate on what you spend in Malta."

The movie

Considering German Nazi Adolf Eichmann, played by Thomas Kretschmann (The Pianist), was responsible for the transportation of Jews to the death camps, not too many movies have been made about him.

"As you'll find out through the course of the movie, Eichmann had a much greater hand in what happened to the Jews, despite the fact that he always denied it. He was actually one of the Nazis who came up with what he called a more efficient solution for killing them, using gas, rather than shooting them," recount the enthusiastic co-producers.

Another central and real-life character, Avner Less, played by Troy Garity, had the job of interrogating Eichmann before he went to trial. "A very unassuming character, he is, essentially, the first Israeli hero," says Mr Bevan, revealing that Less discovers Eichmann had signed the papers for his own father to be transported to the gas chamber. "Essentially, there are two threads to the story: The battle of wills between Eichmann and Less during the interrogation in the cell; and Less's personal life and his internal conflicts regarding whether he should really be interrogating this guy and why he was being given a chance when most just wanted him dead."

Eichmann is also starring Stephen Fry (Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) in the role of Israeli Minister Tormer and Franka Potente (The Bourne Identity) as Less's wife Vera. The actors have all been in Malta briefly at some stage of the shoot.

Among the young (Mr Bevan is only 23), but experienced, crew is lead producer Karl Richards, while the movie is being directed by Robert Young and the director of photography is Mike Connor, who had the original idea for the topic for the movie.