Planet Zeffirelli

Filmmaking legend Franco Zeffirelli is being melodramatic. It’s simply his way.

“I devote to photographers hours of my life,” begins his self-parody. “And I never see a picture. I sit patiently for horrible people like you, who use and manipulate me, take my essence, my life, my looks, and I never get back anything. Please,” he begs, coming in for the kill, “break this trend, please.”

Of course Zeffirelli could have simply asked the photographer to send him a photo, but that would go against everything the director of big beefy masterpieces has come to stand for.

Zeffirelli set a precedent for himself in 1967 with his sumptuous directorial film debut of “The Taming of the Shrew” starring the red-hot couple of the moment, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

Since then there have been more than a dozen movies--some hits (“Romeo and Juliet”), some flops (“Endless Love”), some controversial and many sentimental. But all bear his trademark passion for a stirring story--even such a departure as “The Champ,” starring Jon Voight and Faye Dunaway, was a three-hanky tale of human strength and tragedy.

In his 72 years, the master of all things classical has also directed countless plays and operas (and will direct the L.A. Opera’s presentation of “Pagliacci” in September). He has even tackled politics, and is up for reelection to the Italian Senate this month. His often outspoken nature has gotten him into trouble on numerous occasions--especially when a bold statement he made about Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” was construed as being anti-Semitic. (He denies the accusations vehemently.)

Needless to say, not everyone likes his films. The lush visuals and relentless attention to period detail that have come to define Zeffirelli’s lofty style have drawn criticism for being burdensome and even distracting. His movies have been called “little postcards” for their picture-perfect appeal.

But despite the fashions of the times--at any given point over his 50-year career--Zeffirelli has remained true to his vision.

“I don’t understand why people criticize my work,” says Zeffirelli, whose newest movie, “Jane Eyre,” opened Friday. “It’s like resenting Van Gogh because he uses beautiful colors. That comes from this culture where art has to be punitive, art has to make you feel guilty. You must suffer or else it is not art. In the end, that annihilates the real purpose of art, which is expanding, freedom, imagination, creativity--not mental constipation. I happen not to be on that kind of planet.”

Perhaps his language is a bit florid. Perhaps he can sound grandiose and even self-aggrandizing at times. But, as his friends and co-workers attest, this is no pretense.

“He’s Baroque, deeply Catholic and romantic--that’s why he’s such a great director of operas by Puccini and Verdi,” says Glenn Close, who played Gertrude to Mel Gibson’s Hamlet in Zeffirelli’s 1990 screen version of Shakespeare’s most famous play.

“He gave me a lovely image I carried with me through the performance,” she continues. “He said, ‘The halls of the castle are filled with her perfume.’ He’s vital, loves high emotion--he loves people to be passionate about what they do. He has a real joie de vivre.”

Sitting in a posh European-style hotel suite in Manhattan recently, far from his Rome residence, Zeffirelli doesn’t look like an eccentric legend. He is dressed in Rockport-style shoes, an unbuttoned oxford shirt and a red knit tie that he has casually unlooped to reveal a hint of undershirt and a glitter of gold at his neck.

But as he begins to talk--through a rushed lunch and several cigarettes--his gentle Italian lilt and the slightly devilish upsweep of his eyebrows betray an old-world charm. He makes proclamations about art, freedom and beauty in mundane conversation--and for him it is. This, after all, is the planet of Franco Zeffirelli.

“I’m the most positive thinker in the world. I never get depressed,” he says, explaining how he has managed to survive in the business of filmmaking despite an often unenthusiastic reception of movie classics by financial backers and audiences alike.

When he feels the depression coming, he takes his seven Jack Russell terriers for a run or listens to opera. “Depression is the opposite of creativity. You have to create always.”

Opera has also solved for Zeffirelli a very real dilemma that every director faces, which is finding the next job. “Opera is like a silent friendly river that carries you gently and smoothly through the storms of life and profession,” says the director whose original name, Zeffiretti (from the opera “CosiFan Tutte”), was misspelled on his birth certificate. “There is a certain moment when you’ve said farewell to a film when you ask yourself, ‘What is the right thing to do now and where do I find the money to do it?’ . . . But I’m spared the anxiety and tension because I go back and do opera--I can wait until a good idea comes to my attention.”

Indeed, it has been six years since Zeffirelli’s most recent American release, “Hamlet.” Part of that delay came when lackluster interest forced the original distributors of “Jane Eyre” to drop the project, which was on-again, off-again for three years.

Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein ultimately saved the $12-million picture by snapping it up for international distribution.

But Zeffirelli is no stranger to the unreliability of funding. Back in 1968, no one would finance a little project Zeffirelli wanted to do following his star-studded “Taming of the Shrew.” He first approached Warner Bros. with his plan of making “Romeo and Juliet.”

“They said: ‘ “Romeo and Juliet” with two unknowns? No, forget it,’ ” he recalls, smiling now at the studio’s lack of foresight.

The two unknowns, of course, were Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting, and the film, which included a controversial nude love scene, was one of Zeffirelli’s most successful, winning Academy Awards in 1968 for cinematography and costume design. “That movie eventually saved Paramount because it grossed in two years $50 million and is still making money,” Zeffirelli says proudly.

Today, with a resurgence of interest (read profit) in the classics, Zeffirelli says backers are more eager to fund the kind of work he’s been doing all along.

“Today you find financial support to make these films, not because the producers have developed culture and become passionate about the classics. It’s simply because there is a tangible audience that comes and pays money to see these films,” says Zeffirelli the businessman.

“There is an audience that cries out, ‘We are fed up with the cinema they are giving us. We want to have another kind of cinema!’ ” says Zeffirelli the artist. “I mean, how many times you can tell a thriller, how many times you can tell a special-effects thing, how many times you can have people killed and shot and this and that?”

With the classics, Zeffirelli says assuredly, there are countless ways to tell the same story. Even “Jane Eyre” has had two previous cinematic incarnations. Virginia Bruce and Colin Clive played Jane and Rochester in 1934. Then, in 1944, Orson Welles and Joan Fontaine played out the tale of the plain governess who falls in love with her dashing employer. But that version, much to Zeffirelli’s dislike, was set against a bleak, gothic landscape, full of darkness and mist.

“I’d seen the Orson Welles version many, many years ago,” says Zeffirelli, who did not watch it again before writing the script or shooting his picturesque film, full of green meadows and sweeping landscapes. “That was 50 years ago. It was in black-and-white and all shot in a studio. The big thing was Jane had to be pretty, so they cast Joan Fontaine, who never forgot playing pretty. That bothered me a lot.”

So Zeffirelli set about the daunting task of finding a Jane Eyre who, true to Charlotte Bronte’s heroine, was plain. He watched 15 screen tests, none of which satisfied him. Finally, his producer, Dyson Lovell, who cast “Romeo and Juliet” and who has produced half a dozen Zeffirelli films, discovered French film star Charlotte Gainsbourg (“L’Effrontee,” “The Cement Garden”).

When Lovell eventually got heron film, there was no doubt in his mind. She was Jane.

Marvels Zeffirelli: “She came out with a surprising personality. The test was a shocking test. She was not playing the role. She was it.”

Zeffirelli, who always likes a good fight in the name of his art, went head to head with the producers and distributors to cast Gainsbourg. “They wanted a bigger name or prettier girl, whatever,” he says.

He did let the producers have their wish when it came to Elle MacPherson. Zeffirelli agreed to cast the supermodel-turned-actress as Blanche Ingram, Rochester’s beautiful, if vapid, fiancee. “I didn’t particularly put much attention on the character,” says Zeffirelli, who gave MacPherson just a few lines. “We wanted a beautiful girl--her main purpose is to make Jane jealous--and the producers said, ‘Why don’t you take one which is the idol?’ . . . Elle is a wonderful girl. She is humble and full of good intention. She’s a bit off, but not that much. She’s all right.”

The chemistry, meanwhile, is palpable between Jane and the brooding and fiery Rochester (played by William Hurt), who employs her as a governess for his illegitimate child.

Working with Hurt, who is known in the industry for being as difficult as he is talented, posed an interesting challenge for Zeffirelli. Theirs was a constant struggle to get at the heart of an intensely complex character. “Bill forced me not to rest ever on my--whatever it is--stature. He made me understand I had to fight. Every moment of this film has been a struggle. Not with him. Within myself. Because of the example he gave me. He was devilish about himself.”

The shoot, which lasted three months in Derbyshire and Wiltshire, was neither jovial nor lighthearted. “The mood on this movie was very tense,” he says, furrowing his brow at the memory. “Because we were all very aware of the dangers of bringing back such an important masterpiece in today’s world. We had to slash through the book while trying to be faithful to its spirit and not to take liberties like they’ve done, I hear, with ‘The Scarlet Letter.’ ”

But Zeffirelli knows about difficult shoots. He did, after all, juggle the ever-feisty Taylor-Burton duo in “Taming of the Shrew” three decades ago.

“Well, that was a never-ending love-hate-love-hate exercise,” says Zeffirelli, falling into a soothing storytelling tone. “They were wonderful people. They did this charade for the sake of the others. I knew it from the very beginning and I was never impressed by that burst of temperament.”

Taylor, recalling her experience with Zeffirelli, says his technique inspired her performance as the headstrong and uncontrollable shrew in Shakespeare’s piece. “His enormous talent, professionalism, wit and selflessness make working with him an exciting exercise in self-discovery for an actor,” she says.

Taylor and Zeffirelli are still friends, and she visits him often in Italy during the summer. He speaks of his good friend with a delicate jab at her larger-than-life stature. What, for example, do they do on visits?

“Ah . . . we talk about Elizabeth Taylor. What will Elizabeth Taylor do, what will Elizabeth Taylor eat, what will Elizabeth Taylor wear?” He chuckles to himself. “Then she does certainly the right thing by taking care of my dog that is ill, talking to a niece of mine who is having problems with her boyfriend. She is very giving.”

Zeffirelli is also giving of himself these days--to a new kind of audience: the people on the streets. They are his constituents. As the representative for Sicily in the Italian Senate, he has devoted much of his time to helping underprivileged children.

“I have taken hundreds and hundreds of children under my wings. I’m fighting for their survival, education, their hopes in life,” says Zeffirelli, who as a child spent many years in an orphanage. “I see among them all the children I didn’t have. I’ve dedicated myself to these new lives, to help give them confidence, to tell them, ‘The world is yours.’ ”