Picasso, like Hopkins , liked to get his way. When we come in he wants to change his chief mistress Dora (Julianne Moore) with the younger Francoise (Natascha McElhone). Francoise wants assurance that the loving with Dora is permanently over. She is convinced -- over a Picasso dinner with both women. Incredibly, the seemingly naive Francoise was able a decade later to leave Picasso becoming one of his few lovers to go on to another life without him. In 1964 she cashed-in with her book ‘Life With Picasso'. Hopkins brings her man -- knowns asun monstre , the tyrant as a brainbox -- to life. Hopkins pushed his ‘Nixon' movie with the usual dedication as well as the bald head he had accepted for Picasso. Throughout interviews he would constantly work his hand over his scalp; the lack of hair was not natural when he was being Tony Hopkins, actor. Mention the Picasso project and his hands never venture towards his head. He ticks on the role. His latest screen incarnation covers the decade from1943 when Francoise Gilot first met Picasso to when she walked out on him with their two children, Claude and Paloma. We also meet some of his other women: his first wife the dancer Olga Koklova (Jane Lapotaire); Marie-Therese Walter (Susannah Harker); his second wife Jacqueline Roque (Diane Venora). James Ivory and Ismail Merchant failed to enlist the help of Francoise Gilot who is now 74 and lives in New York . She and her son Claude plan their own film project and Claude, the administer of the Picasso estate, was able to ban the use of any Picasso paintings or reproductions being show in the rival film. The locations were free -- other than Picasso's studio on Rue des Grands-Augustins which was recreated at Pinewood Studios. And there was plenty of material to help Ruth Prawer Jhabvala to write her screenplay despite Gilot refusing the rights to ‘Life With Picasso.' Warner Brothers who co-produced the film had the rights to Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington's 1988 biography ‘Picasso: Creator and Destroyer' which includes long interviews with Gilot. The screenplay emphasises how important women were to Picasso's art. ‘Each served as his muse and was then discarded,' said Ivory adding:' Each gradually ceased to interest him very much except in a kind of negative way. And as his love for her faded, as her influence on him became a negative one, an irritating one, his paintings reflected that. Picasso created an emotional disaster zone around himself.' Hopkins says he thrived on playing the artist. ‘It took me time to ‘'feel'' him physically. I looked at lots of photographs of him and what film there is and tried to get the spirit of the man. ‘He was full of energy and life. In the photographs you see he was the maestro, the master of everyone around him. ‘He was probably the classic male chauvinistic pig. He treated women abominably yet he was an incredible man. I'm sure I would have been seduced by him, taken into his aura. I think people who generate such energy and colour in their lives are seductive, like flames. You get a great sense of power from it. What is interesting is how his life shaped his art, that it caused the art to be the kind of thing that it was.' Hopkins could be talking about himself. His hell-raising days ( ‘I drank to kill my self-contempt' ) over he established himself as a world-beating star. His Oscar for ‘Silence of the Lambs' put him on Hollywood 's Most Wanted list. Now, following ‘Nixon' and Picasso, he can be anybody he wants to. It's being Anthony Hopkins that's difficult. |
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