'Just a good story' is how The Da Vinci Code star Tom Hanks describes his latest project. He admits that, at one stage, he thought he was playing Leonardo Da Vinci until he sat down to read the book. Steve Pratt reports on the secrecy and strife that has finally led to one of the year's must-see films.
THE degree of security surrounding the film of Dan Brown's international bestseller The Da Vinci Code may be judged from the experience of a reporter from US magazine Entertainment Weekly. He found that the whereabouts of the editing suite on the Sony lot was as secret as details of the film version, eventually locating it in a room behind a door labelled 'Dental Records'.
The makers were just as secretive during the making, eager to keep a few surprises up their sleeves until the world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival yesterday. Besides, they didn't need the publicity as the subject matter has done a good job at getting the book and now the film talked about.
What is known is the basic plot about a Harvard professor investigating the murder of a curator at the Louvre in Paris and stumbling across a church conspiracy to cover up evidence that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had children.
Tom Hanks stars as the prof, Robert Langdon, with Amelie star Audrey Tautou as the French cryptologist who helps him. Ian McKellen, Alfred Molina, Paul Bettany and Jean Reno also feature in the film directed by Ron Howard, who's teamed with Hanks for the third time after Splash and Apollo 13.
Howard is more anxious about the worries of fans that he'll muck up the book than about those who've protested about the contents. Some in the Catholic Church have called for a boycott of the movie, claiming it's blasphemous and an attack on their faith. The film-makers encountered a protest while filming at Lincoln Cathedral, which stands in for Westminster Abbey on screen. Reports of 200 protestors baying for the film-makers' blood seem misleading. According to Howard there was a single nun staging a prayer vigil and a pastor clutching a Bible, but the other 198 people were there for Hanks's autograph. Hanks has said that the movie may end up helping churches do their job. "You know, if they put up a sign saying, 'This Wednesday we're discussing the gospel', 12 people show up. But if the sign says, 'This Wednesday we're discussing The Da Vinci Code', 800 people show up," he says. The controversial aspects of the book haven't been played down on the screen, although there has been some restructuring and compressing for dramatic purposes.
"The intention was to adapt the novel, and that was the goal, not to reinvent it," says Howard. "We have naturally condensed ideas. The editing is my creative decision. The actors have interpreted their characters. But I like the book. It would be ludicrous to take the edges off."
Hanks himself says the film of the book is just "a good story" and shouldn't be taken too seriously. He told the London Evening Standard: "If you're going to take any sort of movie at face value, particularly a big budget motion picture like this, you'd be making a very big mistake".
He said they'd always known there would be a segment of society that wouldn't want the movie to be shown. "But the story we tell is loaded with all sorts of hooey and fun kind of scavenger hunt type nonsense. It's a damn good story and a lot of fun... all it is, is dialogue. That never hurts," he says. Howard first heard about Brown's novel through his producing partner Brian Glazer. Then his wife Sheryl's book group read it and loved it. The day Howard finishing reading it, he got word that Hanks was interested in playing Langdon, although he's described on the page as "Harrison Ford in Harris tweed".
For his part, Hanks knew nothing about the book until his agent suggested he read it. "I wasn't even sure the book took place in the modern era. I was like, 'I'm going to play Da Vinci?'. But about 40 pages into it I said, 'okay, I get it. I would be very interested in doing this'."
Much has been made of Hanks's long, pushed back hair in the movie. This was part of his character development before filming began. He consulted stylist Manny Millar who, as he puts it, "tells stories through hair". He suggested a "loose and free professorial look", which Hanks went for right away.
"Fuller in the back and falling down across my forehead," he explains. "But the truth is my hair cannot be long and flowing - genetically, it doesn't do that. It's a bush. It's either long or short. We talked about a wig, but that ends up taking a huge amount of time. So I went to these guys who know about hair chemistry and found a way."
One of the perks of the job was gaining permission to shoot in the Louvre. "We were continuously enthralled by all the masterpieces that we were around," says Hanks. "I had to go around the corner and change my clothes in front of a statue of Apollo that is probably 5,000 years old. It was a constant bonus to the day, to the night, to the experience."
* The Da Vinci Code (12A) goes on release tomorrow after midnight screenings in some cinemas tonight.
Published: 18/05/2006
