THE joy of sets. On a bitterly cold night in Budapest two Saturdays ago, the temperature had dropped well below zero in the vast open space that is Heroes' Square. The film crew, accustomed to working in all weather conditions, were sensibly dressed, while Madonna and Antonio Banderas were sheltering from the cold in their well heated trailers.
Out on the square the movie's catering team passed around welcome cups of mulled wine as Alan Parker and his team marshalled thousands of Hungarian extras into position for yet another massive scene in his epic screen musical of Evita. The scene was a workers' rally in Buenos Aires, and by nine o'clock everyone was in place, many of them carrying torches and banners.
Madonna and Antonio Banderas took their places at the front of the throng and the whole assembly stood there frozen in time - and frozen from the cold for a few seconds until Parker called "Action!". The soundtrack music blasted from the speakers and the stars and the extras burst into life, marching vigorously through the square and chanting "A New Argentina".
They did it again and they did it again until Parker re grouped them to shoot the scene from a different angle while the two stars retreated to the warmth of their trailers. "It's just another day on the set of Evita," Parker laughed as the horde of ever patient extras was organised into new positions. Much earlier in the day, hundreds of Hungarians stood for hours behind the barriers of the closed set to watch the filming of one of the movie's most elaborate scenes - the funeral of Eva Peron through Buenos Aires, as the cortege stops at the Congress building. Thousands of flowers and wreaths lined the sides of Budapest's Museum of Fine Arts, which was disguised as Argentina's Congress building for the day, and the extras poured onto the set.
The day's call sheet required 50 military officers, 50 foot police, 20 naval officers, 12 dress officers, 300 middle class men, 300 middle class women, 100 aristo women, 51 descamisados, eight pall bearers, 15 palace guards, five nuns, 12 naval police, 50 choir, 300 non fitted extras, 300 working class men, 700 dark dressed extras, 200 soldiers, 60 sailors, 60 nurses, 40 aristocratic men, 100 assorted cadets, 15 singing workers, 50 mounted police and 20 stunt artists.
The extras were listed in the order they were due to be in costume and make up, and those departments were busy from 6.30 a.m., six hours before all 3,000 extras were in position on the set.
Finally, at the head of the cortege was Jonathan Pryce oozing gravitas as the grieving Juan Peron, along with the actors playing Eva's mother, sisters and brother.
"Bring on the aristos and the middle class," second assistant director John Gallagher yells into his walkie talkie. "Keep `em coming. I can handle them." Looking totally at ease in the middle of all this, Alan Parker discusses how the scene will be shot with the movie's gifted young lighting cameraman, Darius Khonji, who lit Delicatessen and Seven, and to get an overhead view of the throng, Parker hops onto the camera platform and is hoisted into the air on a crane. Then the tanks roll into the square, and the army motorbikes, and the Requiem for Evita pounds out on the sound system.
It is a spectacular sight, and just one of many epic scenes in a hugely ambitious production which has a budget in the region of $60 million. However, Parker says that the most thrilling scene toe shoot was a night time scene in Buenos Aires, when Madonna came on to the balcony of the presidential palace, the Casa Rosada, to perform Don't Cry For Me Argentina before 4,000 extras.
"Once we started shooting the scene, I had a feeling unlike I've experienced in my professional life," Parker says. "We shot all through the night and we did the last shot just as the sun came up. It was amazing. It didn't feel like making a movie because all the extras were Peronists and you didn't have to gee them up to get them going. They absolutely knew what to do.
Sitting in her trailer the next day, Madonna looks positively regal in a diamond necklace, long ear rings and full length dress. She's perched on a high stool while I sit on a sofa, looking up as I ask the questions. Is this some kind of power trip, I wonder. Not at all, as it happens. She is wearing a sheer satin dress for her next scene, in which she dances a tango, so she has to let it hang down to the ground as it would get it crumpled if she sat on the sofa.
"It was a rush," she says of the first time she walked on to the balcony of the Casa Rosada to sing Don't Cry For Me Argentina during that all night shoot. "It was amazing because I could honestly say Eva stood here in exactly this spot, looking down on all these people. I really felt I was in her shoes at that moment."
She was determined to secure the role of Evita. "I've been pursuing this role doggedly for years along with about 20 other actresses," she says. "Eva Peron is a fascinating woman, probably one of the most important female characters in 20th century history. I think everything about her is interesting, unique, outrageous, fascinating, all of those things from where she started, which is nowhere, to what she became, which was amazing."
The first manifestation of Evita dates back to 1976, when the album of Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber's opera was first released. Alan Parker was 32 then and had just made the move from commercials and television films into cinema with the vibrant musical, Bugsy Malone. "I bought the Evita album when it came out and two days later I inquired whether Tim and Andrew would like to make it as a film. The message came back that they wanted it to be a stage show first."
Four years later, after Parker had finished filming Fame, the impresario Robert Stigwood asked him if he would like to make a movie of Evita. Not wanting to make another musical directly after Fame, Parker declined the offer and the movie passed through many different hands over the next 15 years - from Ken Russell to Glenn Gordon Caron to Oliver Stone.
"As the years went by," says Parker, "and other directors were going to make the film and different people were mentioned to play Evita, I always viewed it from afar, thinking I never should have let go of it in the first place. I always kind of regretted that, so it's an old passion of mine, and I regretted it even more when I heard Oliver Stone was going to do it. And then he didn't do it, and then I was asked again. It's a weird thing."
Evita is essentially a fusion of Parker's twin preoccupations in cinema, merging the vital power of music in his work with potentially controversial social or political subjects. What explains Parker's sustained attraction to the story of Juan Peron, a former colonel in the military who, in 1946 at the age of 51, was elected president of Argentina, his career substantially boosted by the charisma and popularity of his second wife, Eva Duarte, who died of cancer in 1952, when she was just 33 years old?
"I believe Evita is both an incredible personal story and an extraordinarily strong political story," Parker, says. The enigma of Eva Peron is the reason why it is such a great story. To this day there are so many different views of her in Argentina. It was very clear from the very beginning, when I first went to Argentina, that she's thought to be either a saint or a whore, depending on your political point of view, so we knew we were never going to please all the Argentinians with this film."
ALAN Parker first met the Argentinian president, Carlos Menem, in June of last year to ask him for the use of the Casa Rosada in the film. "He was obviously very concerned about how we would portray Evita because he's a Peronist," Parker says. "In his office he has a huge portrait of Eva Peron behind his desk and a big statue of the Madonna, because he's a converted Catholic. Every time I met one of his ministers over the next six months, the answer was the same - no.
"They wanted to see the script and I said that, from a creative point of view, I needed the freedom to express myself as I saw fit. But I always promised them it would be a balanced film, which I believe it will be. Then, just two weeks before we were due to finish shooting in Buenos Aires, Menem met with Madonna, Antonio, Jonathan and myself at Los Olivos, his private residence just outside Buenos Aires, and I asked him again. We put forward our case and he looked at his ministers and he said, okay, you can have it. We nearly fell off our chairs."
Michelle Pfeiffer had been Oliver Stone's choice to play Eva Peron when he was involved with the project. Alan Parker was in London in December 1994 when he finally decided to direct the film version of Evita. For the starring role, he chose a present day icon to play a mid 20th century icon. "I got this eight page letter from Madonna asking to do it," he says. "It was obvious that she was very passionate about wanting to do it. I talked to her and I thought she could do it.
"She has had a lot of vocal training to expand the range of her voice and she was determined not to cheat in any way. She wanted to hit every note exactly as it was written. I think she's going to knock people's socks off with how good she is in this singing, acting, understanding the role and getting inside it. She's done all of that and I couldn't be more pleased."
Alan Parker's film of Evita is arguably his boldest venture to date, given that, by his calculation, 98 per cent of
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