The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
The secret locations behind Cyrano... in Sicily
Italy’s biggest island is not an obvious setting for the very French tale of Cyrano de Bergerac – but it works beautifully as the backdrop for a new film, says Chris Leadbeater
It started, Joe Wright explains, with a serendipitous stop-off for dessert. Back in the pre-pandemic mists of 2018, Sarah Greenwood – the production designer who has worked with the British director on a host of applauded films over the past two decades, including Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, Anna
Karenina and Darkest Hour – was visiting Sicily for an unrelated project. As the sunset hour approached, she found herself in Noto, a small town at the south-east corner of the island, having been told that its cannoli – the creamstuffed fried pastry so beloved of Italians – are wonderful. The advice was entirely accurate, the view was remarkable and the end result was significant.
“I can confirm that the cannoli there are the best in the world,” Wright grins – 18 months after trying them for himself, and two years on from Greenwood’s recommendation that he create his latest movie in the town. “I guess I’m often led by my stomach,” he laughs. Cyrano, the ultimate reverberation of that dash to the bakery, finally reaches UK cinemas this weekend, after a series of (inevitably Covid-related) delays. It is an achievement that, in parts, is as sweet as the sugary treat that helped to launch its journey; an adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac, French dramatist Edmond Rostand’s 1897 play about a 17th-century Parisian poet and soldier who, encumbered with a giant nose, doubts that he can ever be loved by the woman of his dreams, despite the affection his literary talent inspires in her.
In a sense, this is nothing new. The story has been transferred to the silver screen on several occasions: a 1950 re-working which saw the Puerto Rican actor José Ferrer win the Oscar for Best Actor; Roxanne, a so-so 1987 comedic spin on the tale, with Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah in the leading roles; a more traditional French version, released in 1990 to award-garnering acclaim, with Gerard Depardieu in a prosthetic conk.
But Wright’s take on a familiar narrative is different. It sets up its celebrated love triangle with Haley Bennett as the venerated Roxanne, Kelvin Harrison Jr as Christian de Neuvillette (the handsome but unimaginative army cadet with whom she becomes entranced) and Game of Thrones star Peter Dinklage as the titular character. Rather than the facial protrusion of Rostand’s original text, it is this Cyrano’s stature – Dinklage, famously, is 4ft 5in – which the surrounding community uses as the reason to disparage him.
However, the key change is one of location. Filming took place over 11 weeks, from October to December 2020, a time when shooting in a major city was all but impossible.
“Replicating the Paris of the 1640s – which is where and when the play is set – didn’t really feel feasible, given the Covid circumstances,” Wright says. “We thought about moving everything to a modern location,” he adds, though this plan, too, was dismissed. Greenwood’s early-evening recollections of Noto and Sicily would soon find their mark.
The island has long had an appeal for holidaymakers who travel with food, culture and history in mind, wearing its culinary sophistication in the restaurants and markets of the capital Palermo, and its ancient heritage in (most notably) the Greco-Roman amphitheatre that clings to its hillside in the east-coast idyll of Taormina. It has long called to movie visionaries as well, from Francis Ford Coppola’s depiction of it in the Godfather trilogy to Anthony Minghella’s 1999 thriller The Talented Mr Ripley (which flirts with Palermo).
Wright’s latest opus is much closer to the beauty and colour (if not the treachery) of the latter than the violence of the former. However, in many ways, Cyrano is not set in Sicily at all. “The idea was to create a fantasy of a period and place, rather than make a period movie set in a specific place,” he continues. “The original Noto was destroyed by an earthquake in 1693. The community, which was wealthy at the time, rebuilt everything in a blast of baroque fantasy. It has a unity of aesthetic that meant we could use it as a set.”
Noto is never identified in the film, but it is almost everything as a backdrop. It shimmers through the carriage window in the opening moments, as Roxanne rides to an evening at the theatre that will introduce the three pivotal characters in full. The pale facade of its twin-towered cathedral is a mute witness to her later conversation with Cyrano, where he agrees to bring her love letters from Christian that will secretly be written using his own hand and wit. The Palazzo Castelluccio, meanwhile, plays host to literature’s second most iconic balcony scene – Roxanne in her bedroom, listening to Christian in the courtyard, serenading her with honied words that Cyrano, hidden in the shadows, is feeding to him. This gorgeous building – an 18th-century masterpiece of ornate chambers and gleaming chandeliers – is no studio sleight of camera. It is open to visitors (palazzocastelluccio.it).
When the movie does look beyond its baroque citadel, it does so to equally splendid effect. Its gaze wanders 20 miles north-east, to the coast at Syracuse, where the Castello Maniace, a 13th-century seafront fortress, is the barracks where Cyrano’s men prepare for battle. And from here, the lens goes north, to the heights of Mount Etna, dragging Cyrano and Christian with it.
‘The volcano erupted, so we had to run, with lava and ash being spat at us from on high’
In keeping with the film’s deliberately unspecific use of location, Wright was seeking to create a classic war hellscape, albeit one which nodded to the Alpine front of the First World War, where Italian and Austrian troops fought each other in snowy trenches and desperate conditions. In Sicily’s notoriously bad-tempered volcanic beast, he found a landscape well suited to the purpose. A little too suited, in fact. “We were supposed to be shooting at 16,000ft, near the summit of the volcano,” he recalls. “We had been assured that snow does not fall there until February; that we could set up. Four days before we were due to start filming, a metre and a half fell. It buried our set and camera platform, and our crane was completely inaccessible. So we had to move down to about 8,000ft and improvise the whole thing.” He laughs again.
“And on the last day, the volcano erupted. We had to run, with lava and ash being spat at us from on high.”
Visitors to Sicily this summer will encounter a far friendlier welcome.
And great cannoli.