The tourists wandering through the grounds of Powerscourt House in Co Wicklow on an overcast summer morning looked startled when they turned a corner and saw two dozen people in elaborate period costume making their way down the steps at the front of the house. A blue hot-air balloon was suspended from a crane on the lawn, and coachmen sat patiently in their coaches nearby.
No, Powerscourt had not been turned into some kind of period theme park - it was serving as a set for the production of the movie, All For Love, which goes out on BBC 1 tomorrow night. Directed by Harry Hook, it was made by the Irish company, Little Bird Productions, for BBC Films.
As soon as the costumed actors and extras reached the foot of the steps, Miss Gilchrist (played by Miranda Richardson) and her niece, Flora (Anna Friel) held masks before their faces as they were announced on their entry into a marquee for a masked ball. In a trailer on another part of the estate, their costar, Jean Marc Barr, was catching a quick lunch in between scenes.
The film is based on Robert Louis Stevenson's unfinished novel, St Ives, a romantic adventure set during the Napoleonic wars. Barr plays the eponymous French army officer, Jacques St Ives, a hero, womaniser and rogue who has been reduced to the rank of infantry after deliberately insulting his commanding officer. Along the way he falls for Flora, charms Miss Gilchrist, and instructs the bumbling Major Chevening (Richard E. Grant) in the art of seduction. He also finds fortune in his grandfather (Michael Gough) and an adversary in his brother, the evil Alain (Jason Isaacs). The blue hot-air balloon is there on the set as St Ives's means of escape when he evades capture at the masked ball. "This film is so charming," says Jean Marc Barr, dressed in full uniform and stabbing his salad with a fork in his trailer. "It's an action movie, a comedy, an adventure and a love story. It's a very liberal adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson story. It's good to work with some real heavyweights like Miranda and Richard.
"And I love being in Ireland. I really feel at home here with the spirit of the people, the lilt, the mentality. You know, I have a piece of Irish in me. My great-great-grandparents, James and Alva Barr, emigrated from Northern Ireland in the 19th century. I try to consider myself Eurotrash." When Barr made his breakthrough in 1988 with Luc Besson's gorgeous French deep sea diving picture, The Big Blue, most audiences assumed that the young actor with the smouldering dark looks was French, too. In fact, he was born in America, the son of a US military man and a French mother, and he spent the first 20 years of his life living in America.
"Everyone asks me why I'm not working in America," he says, "but that's the road to madness, and I hate all that shit they're turning out." Instead, Barr has immersed himself in European cinema and he has forged particularly strong links with the maverick Danish director, Lars von Trier, for whom he has featured in Europa and Breaking the Waves. "Lars had told me he was going to make an adaptation of the Marquis de Sade's Justine, and I was happy to be involved, and then he went through a huge about-face in his life and decided to make Breaking the Waves instead. He said we're all so consumed and saturated by the commercial system that he decided to break all the rules: no camera stands, no rehearsals, and so on. It was a real exploration of breaking the rules." When Barr directed his first feature recently, he adopted the no-frills principles of the Dogma 95 initiative launched by Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg.
Jean Marc Barr lives in France with his Yugoslavian wife, a concert pianist he met at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London. Recently he has been going from one film set to another from "a small picture in Belgium" to England to join Simon Callow and John Sessions in The Scarlet Tunic, to France to co-star with Anna Galiena and Vanessa Paradis on The Myth of Cain Today and on to several countries to play a gay Egyptian fundamentalist sexually involved with a French agent in The Infidels. And Lars Von Trier wants him to learn to tap dance for his big-budget new musical, Dancer in the Dark with Bjork and Catherine Deneuve.
"It's actually very lonely," he says. "For the past year I've just been living in hotels around the world. It's all just sleep, eat, work. You can be a sex symbol and have no sex life!"
All For Love is showing on BBC 1 at 9 p.m. tomorrow evening