Peter Greenaway’s new movie was supposed to mark a glorious swansong for him and his lead actor Dustin Hoffman, the Oscar-winning star of The Graduate and Tootsie. Both men were in their 80s when shooting began in Lucca, Tuscany, in late 2023. Neither knew the storms ahead or that this was going to turn into arguably the most troublesome project in Greenaway’s career.
Turn the clock back to 2023 and Greenaway, who has been based in the Netherlands for the last 20 years, could hardly conceal his excitement during a Q&A at International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (IDFA) in the huge art deco Tuschinski theatre in Amsterdam in November 2023, after receiving a lifetime achievement award from the festival. He told the audience that he would be flying to Italy the next morning “and that, all being well, we will start shooting seriously in the next couple of days”. The film was then called Lucca Mortis, and Greenaway explained that it explored death.
He said he had already made “quite a number of films” about sex (“Eros”) “but the other thing was Thanatos (death). There are, and have been, some extremely good films made about old age. I am thinking of [Ingmar] Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, for example, but not that many.” “Our film is really about notions of death and it asks the rather absurd and ridiculous question – is death necessary?
The popular media is absolutely covered now in considerations about assisted death, about euthanasia, about the legitimacy of suicide. I believe that we must take death more seriously.” Greenaway’s pitch was that Lucca Mortis isn’t a horror picture “full of coffins and skulls and macabre activities”. Instead, it a drama about a New York writer contemplating his mortality; a man who wants to round off his life in the neatest, most elegant way possible.
Jacob Zucchine (Hoffman) was adopted as a kid and eventually grew up in the US. He returns to Lucca in Tuscany in search of his Italian roots. The film is set around the time of 9/11.
Like New York, Lucca is dominated by looming towers and these inspire the author to write stories but also to feel that death is stalking him. Ominously, Lucca Mortis encountered difficulties right from the outset. In late 2023, the director and his crew arrived in Lucca but the lead actors weren’t yet there.
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