Update on Film Status
Taken from here: http://grhomeboy.wordpress.com/2007/02/16/a-celebrated-director-is-left-out-in-the-cold/
Theodoros Angelopoulos postponing filming of ‘The Dust of Time,’ the second part of his trilogy, as he awaits ministry green light
‘The Dust of Time’ the second film in director Theodoros Angelopoulos’s trilogy, ‘does not end with closure the way the previous one did. It is open… like a poem of tomorrow waiting to be read,’ he says.
The title “The Dust of Time” seems to be a symbolically apt one for the second part of Theodoros Angelopoulos’s trilogy which began with “The Weeping Meadow” in 2004. The celebrated Greek filmmaker has made numerous attempts to begin filming over the past two years, but the financial burden of the production appears to be a bit too heavy for the Greek state. The 1 million euros in funding promised by former culture minister Evangelos Venizelos has yet to be handed over as it has got lost somewhere between the corridors of the ministries of culture and finance. The director, nevertheless, is persevering, driven by the principle that “cinema is not a profession; it is the breath, the serum of life.”
Angelopoulos has spent a lot of time traveling to Russia in search of the perfect location, to the Ural Mountains and the Siberian steppes. He scouts locations in snowstorms, wearing his hat and Montgomery coat, envisioning the scenes, images of “a big world.” A few days ago, he had a brief meeting with Jeanne Moreau in Paris. The reason for the meeting was a telephone call from Cannes Film Festival President Gilles Jacob. “He said, ‘We are celebrating 60 years of the Cannes festival and would like a small contribution from the directors we love; a three-minute film.’ ‘But Gilles,’ I said, ‘My clapperboard shot lasts three minutes!’”
Angelopoulos’s idea for the flash film is based on a dialogue between two films: his own “The Beekeeper” and Michelangelo Antonioni’s “La Notte.” “It is a dialogue between two people,” explains Angelopoulos. “The present Jeanne Moreau and the late Marcello Mastroianni.” The location is an old cinema in the north of Paris and the only Greek on the crew was photography director Andreas Sinanos.
The filmmaker is now in Berlin, holding talks with the German co-producers of “The Dust of Time” and two of the lead actors, Bruno Ganz and Willem Dafoe, even though he has not completely abandoned the idea of having Ethan Hawke play Dafoe’s role. The entire project is in a state of flux anyway, but there is one thing that is very steady about it, and that’s the director’s persistence to get it off the ground, any any cost.
The central character in Theodoros Angelopoulos’s trilogy, in both the first installment, “The Weeping Meadow” and the second, “The Dust of Time”, is Eleni. “Essentially it is a trilogy about Eleni,” says the filmmaker. “The third part of the trilogy will be about an absent Eleni. The second part is a precise continuation of the first film. The story begins in 1953, on the day Stalin died, and ends in the present, in 2007. Basically, it is about the relationship between past and present. The narrative is not linear as it was in the previous film; it is constructed on many different levels. The central axis of the story is a love affair. It is about a woman, played by Valeria Golino, who loved two men in her life, Harvey Keitel and Bruno Ganz, and they both loved her back until the very end. She is on a journey in search of one of them, while the other follows her wherever she goes. Ganz plays a German Jew who fled to the Soviet Union to avoid being taken to the concentration camps. There, in Tashkent, he meets Golino. They are both exiled to Siberia. They live together for several years, yet her mind is always on Harvey.”
“A child is born and grows up in Brooklyn, New York, where he becomes a film director and tells the story of his own life and that of his parents. In fact, he makes a film of the story,” explains Angelopoulos.
Filming of “The Dust of Time,” however, has been canceled several times already and these delays are beginning to hurt the production. “The Greek side is not behaving at all well,” said Angelopoulos. “There is a strange silence, and I’m not at all sure what it means. I have a written commitment from the Ministry of Culture regarding funding. I have a contract with former culture minister Evangelos Venizelos for three films. I had asked current Culture Minister Giorgos Voulgarakis to honor the contract and he assured me he would, and also told me to meet with Finance Minister Giorgos Alogoskoufis. We met and he agreed too. This happened last May,” said Angelopoulos.