Besieged (1998)

Interesting facts

• Awards: 0 · Nominations: 1

Besieged is a 1998 film by Bernardo Bertolucci starring Thandie Newton and David Thewlis. The film is based on the short story "The Siege" by James Lasdun and was supposed to be a 60-minute teleplay until Bertolucci chose to expand it.

Production

Clare Peploe first suggested adapting James Lasdun's short story "The Siege", which first appeared in the author's 1985 book The Silver Age (published in the United States as Delirium Eclipse and Other Stories). Bertolucci conceived the project as a one-hour television movie, but expanded it for theatrical release after seeing the rushes projected on a large screen.

The short story differed from the screen play in three significant ways: it was set in London, not Rome; the woman came from Latin America, not Africa; and Kinsky was depicted as fat and much older than he was in the film. Peploe added a character, Shandurai's friend Agostino, as a way to contrast Shandurai's sociability with Kinsky's social awkwardness.

Most of the action was filmed and set at 8 vicolo del Bottino in Rome. The villa is currently being operated by the nearby Hotel Hassler as a separate boutique hotel named Il Palazzetto. As Bertolucci and Peploe first encountered it, the villa was as depicted at the end of the film, a largely unfurnished home with bare walls and an overgrown garden.

The African sequences that open the film and appear occasionally thereafter were shot last, over four days in Naivasha, Kenya, with an aerial shot of Lake Turkana, although no specific African country was identified or implied. After viewing the African footage, Bertolucci re-cut the first half-hour of the adjoining sequences set in Rome.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.