Derek Jarman's Caravaggio [antikvár]

A Film on the Life of a Painter In May 1978 I took a train to Rome after my film Jubilee opened at the Cannes Film Festival. I booked myself into a small hotel near the Spanish Steps and wrote the first of the scripts for a film on the painter Michele Caravaggio. I certainly didn't imagine then that this film was going to occupy the next seven years of my life; fortunately I'm not clairvoyant, as I'm sure that if I had known there were to be seventeen more scripts and a dozen more trips to Rome pursuing this elusive project, I'd have dumped the carefully bound results in the attic along with another half dozen or so scripts labelled 'maybe'. But each time I was about to knife Caravaggio, the words 'No hope no fear' - engraved on the painter's dagger - would flash into mind, I would catch the glint of gold, and begin the process of refinement once again. There were hopes of investment - an improbable Italian tycoon showed interest and was duly feted at the Royal Academy Caravaggio show, vowing he would make the film in front of the painting Seven Works of Mercy. His last project, a life of Pope John Paul made at the height of Solidarity, had put the world on red alert as the Polish army rolled out its tanks to stage a Second World War battle on the Russian border. An American satellite picked up what was for a brief moment thought to be a Soviet invasion. It seemed to me at the time a highly appropriate end for Western civilization, tripped up on a celluloid life of the Holy Father. In the event Michele Caravaggio, a mere murderer, was small beer and forgotten. Unlucky script thirteen. Scripts fourteen and fifteen were written in collaboration with Suso Cecchi d'Amico, who had written the script of Lampedusa's The Leopard for Visconti and films for nearly every major postwar Italian film director. I learnt a great deal about Italian film from that collaboration - 'all good film scripts' said Suso, 'are written in seven parts'. The British television Channel Four initially seemed interested, but they ditched the painter who had 'invented' cinematic light, along with the independent elements of British cinema, for a flat brew of their own devising. Film-makers muttered on street corners. I painted pictures, wrote a book, and went back to my first love, working with an old Super 8 camera. In 1982 I designed Stravinsky's opera of the Rake's Progress for Ken Russell in Florence - Ken said give Caravaggio up. Sitting with him in the Edinburgh Filmhouse three years later and two weeks from shooting, with L475,000 of the British Film Institute's money, we mused over a film culture which only exceptionally allows its directors to work at home. The 60s generation of Roeg, Russell, Schlesinger, are now expatriates, sacrificed to the dollar. 'Derek,' he said, 'I'm going to make Moll Flanders in Italy.' 'I suppose you could pretend you were in the South of England in one of those Palladian villas in the Veneto' I said. 'No, in Rome!' 'Ah, Cinecitta.' 'No, Derek, Mussolini's house. It's just like every English country house but with sun and palm trees! And you're finally making Caravaggio in a warehouse on the Isle of Dogs in London's derelict dockland.'