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Falling for Florence
Neil Midgley goes on location in Italy to discover how Andrew Davies's new version of A Room with a View brings fresh insights to EM Forster's classic story
Even at 7.00am, Florence is buzzing. The narrow street that runs along the north bank of the River Arno is already clogged with tiny Italian cars, their drivers gesticulating as if on cue when a parked delivery van blocks their way.
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The English abroad: Sinéad Cusack, Elaine Cassidy and Mark Williams |
There's a chic young Italiana on a moped at the front of a traffic queue at the junction with the Ponte Vecchio. She's giving the policeman there lip for keeping her waiting so long. But he has no choice: the young lovers on the bridge must not be disturbed by the roar of a two-stroke engine.
Those lovers are Lucy Honeychurch and George Emerson - on the bridge, the clock has been turned back from summer 2007 to the year 1912. Twenty-two years after the Merchant Ivory adaptation, a new film crew - this time from TV production company IWC, commissioned by ITV - is back to film EM Forster's tale of a young girl's romantic awakening, A Room with a View.
On the bridge, the scene dissolves from Florentine chaos into organised chaos. Actors Rafe Spall (as George) and Elaine Cassidy (as Lucy) wait patiently in their period costumes as the crews set up the next shot, looking out over the timeless view of the Arno.
"I've never been here before, and Florence is just spellbinding," says Spall. "It's like a big, living museum. There are certainly worse places to shoot." There are worse co-stars, too: in a bit of a coup for ITV, Spall has been cast as son George, with his real-life father Timothy Spall cast as George"s dad, old Mr Emerson.
"It's the first time we've worked with each other - it's like having your mate there, someone that you know," says Spall Jr. "And also, it's amazing that I'm working with someone of his calibre - he's Timothy Spall. Even though he changed my nappy, that doesn't take away from the fact that he's one of the best actors of his generation."
As well as Spall senior, the cast includes Sinéad Cusack as the adventurous Miss Lavish, Sophie Thompson as Lucy's chaperone Miss Bartlett, Mark Williams as the Reverend Beebe and Laurence Fox as Lucy's ill-fated suitor Cecil Vyse. The score has been written by Gabriel Yared, who won an Oscar for the music for The English Patient in 1996. Perhaps most crucially, the script has been written by Andrew Davies.
Davies - the undisputed king of costume drama, whose lengthy CV includes recent adaptations of Northanger Abbey for ITV1 and Bleak House for BBC1 - is lurking on the other side of the bridge. "I picked this project because of the location," he confesses. "I thought, we'll be able to come out to Florence. The second reason was having another look at the first film and having another look at the book. I thought we could make this less stilted and more modern. And I wanted to be much more straightforward about the theme of gayness that runs through the story. Beebe for one is gay, so let's make him clearly that." Sure enough, when George and Lucy's clinch on the bridge is filmed, the crew packs up and moves rapidly to a back alley where Beebe is to be seen making shady arrangements with some toothsome young Italian men.
More pivotally to the plot, Davies has also taken a new look at what might happen to George and Lucy after their romance finally blossoms. "George was of that generation who, fairly soon after he met this girl that he fell madly in love with, had to go off to the war. Just about half the people who went to war got killed, so I thought it was more likely that it would be Lucy who would eventually come back to Florence," he says. "We could make it seem fresh by starting off in 1920 with Lucy coming back to relive her memories."
This device - to tell the lovers' story in flashback as Lucy revisits Florence alone after the First World War - serves only to highlight her innocence when she first meets George. In one famous early scene, Lucy faints when she sees an Italian stabbed to death in a fight - only for George gallantly to scoop her up.
But, with the day drawing to a close and the filming schedule growing ever tighter, the Florentine weather seems to be conspiring against that scene ever being shot. It's drizzling and grey, and difficult to set up the lighting. Executives from the production company pace anxiously as they watch crew members standing idly around. But Elaine Cassidy, ready to faint as soon as she's called, sits placidly on a director's chair.
"Lucy's just a simple girl," she explains. "She has her own complexities, though - she's just on the brink of becoming a woman, and experiencing a lot of things for the first time. She isn't a thinker, she just reacts. She's drawn to George, but she never feels 100 per cent comfortable around him."
Eventually, director Nicholas Renton is ready and his assistant shouts "Movimento!" - "action!" in Italian. With Cassidy duly rescued and lots of fake blood on the cobbles, the filming wraps for the day. Renton at least has the relief of knowing that the next shoot will be less at the mercy of the weather. Tomorrow, the cameras will be moving indoors to a beautiful Florentine apartment and a beautiful Florentine room. A room, in fact, with a view.
A Room with a View is on ITV1 on Sunday, 4 November at 9.00pm
© Copyright of Telegraph Media Group Limited 2007
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