Midsummer’s Dream Team

“You can just point the camera in any direction on locations like this,” said actor David Strathairn, with a small sigh of pleasure. “It’s always going to look good.”

Hard to argue with that. Strathairn, in the costume of a Victorian-era aristocrat, sits in a garden chair on the grounds of the Palazzo Farnese, a huge, imposing 17th century palace some 60 miles north of Rome. He’s at the foot of a long, steep flight of grassy steps overlooked by a fountain nestled between two huge recumbent male statues. It’s a spectacular setting on one of those perfect Italian summer days--sunny and bright, the heat tempered by a light breeze carrying the fragrance of a dozen various blossoms.

Around Strathairn a cluster of crew members, roughly half Italian and half British, scurry around, setting up the next scene for the new film production of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” which opens Friday. It is being financed by Fox Searchlight for a modest $13 million to $14 million, yet features a large, stellar cast including Michelle Pfeiffer, Kevin Kline, Rupert Everett, Stanley Tucci, Calista Flockhart, Roger Rees and Strathairn.

The forest in which much of the action in Shakespeare’s comedy takes place was re-created at the legendary Cinecitta Studios in Rome. Apart from Caprarola, the film’s other major location was Montepulciano, a ravishingly beautiful hill village further north in Tuscany. Without doubt, the film’s settings encouraged many of the cast to participate, for fees far below what they can normally command.

As Flockhart (TV’s “Ally McBeal”) puts it: “When someone says to you, ‘So, do you want to do some Shakespeare in Italy?’ you don’t spend a lot of time saying, ‘Hmmm, I’ll have to think about it, let me get back to you.’ ”

The logistics of filming “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” are daunting, for the work requires 18 principals. And the budget confined director Michael Hoffman (who worked with Pfeiffer on “One Fine Day” and with Kline on the 1991 comic farce “Soapdish”) to a nine-week schedule last summer.

Yet Hoffman is philosophical about the pressure. “With ‘One Fine Day’ I had almost three times more money to make something far simpler,” he said. “The way this movie is conceived, it’s too large for the budget and certainly too large for the schedule. But I didn’t know what the budget would be. And besides, who’s going to give you more than $14 million to make a Shakespeare movie?”

Make no mistake, this is Shakespeare’s Shakespeare. It’s not “Midsummer Night’s Dream” reset in high school; Shakespeare isn’t a character in it, he’s just the screenwriter.

There is another problem. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” weaves four subplots into its narrative, each of them set in a separate world with its own major characters. First is the world of the court, where Duke Theseus (Strathairn) is about to marry Hippolyta (Sophie Marceau). To celebrate their marriage, a group of tradesmen, including the vain weaver Bottom (Kline), is rehearsing a performance of a play.

Then there’s the young lovers who escape into the woods: Hermia and Lysander (played by emerging British actors Anna Friel and Dominic West), Helena and Demetrius (Flockhart and Christian Bale). Unknown to these lovers, a fairy kingdom resides in the woods, including Oberon (Everett), King of the Fairies; Titania (Pfeiffer), the Queen of the Fairies; and Oberon’s servant, the mischievous sprite Puck (Tucci).

Add to all this the fact that the schedule had to be worked around Pfeiffer (she had a narrow window of availability and completed her scenes in eight days) and Kline. Consider too that working with foreign crews always slows down a working day: “You have to say everything twice on set,” producer Leslie Urdang said with a sigh.

It puts the idyllic nature of the setting into perspective. Yet the film was conceived and agreed upon with remarkable speed. Urdang, who runs a New York-based theater company that specializes in presenting the work of new writers, had already collaborated with Hoffman; they started discussing in 1996 a film of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” starring Pfeiffer and Kline.

“In April [1997], Michael finally said he was ready,” said Urdang. “He talked to Kevin, Fox Searchlight thought it was a great idea, then Michael asked Michelle. He sat down in September to start the adaptation, finished it in October, and by Christmas we were casting in London.”

She and Hoffman hit upon an eclectic cast, American and British, from film and TV. Yet the common bond is theater. Flockhart, for instance, became a star with “Ally,” but she has also been a theater actress for years.

“They’re all theater lovers, which is how they’re able to do Shakespeare,” Urdang said. “Roger, David and Calista have all worked at my theater company.”

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This version of “Dream” follows a spate of some 15 filmed Shakespeare plays in the last few years. “I’m glad we’re not coming at the tail end of them all, and there’s some separation,” Hoffman said.

“They were all so different, and several of them had a lot of things I admired. I’d been trying to work out what was the thread that held them all together. And of course the thread is Shakespeare. With his words, it’s like watching a movie in another language, a heightened language.’

Urdang and Hoffman were initially puzzled that “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” one of Shakespeare’s most enchanting and accessible plays, is adapted for film so infrequently. There has only been one major attempt to film the play: the 1935 Hollywood version, directed by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle, which starred James Cagney as Bottom and Mickey Rooney as Puck. In addition there were two British films based on Royal Shakespeare Company productions. The first, from 1968, was directed by Peter Hall, and featured Diana Rigg and David Warner; the other had a limited release in Britain early last year.

“We asked ourselves why almost no one tried it,” Urdang recalled. “It’s a comedy, it has love stories, everyone played Puck in high school or knows someone who did. There’s different generations of people among the characters, something for everyone. Then we tried it. And it’s hard.

“With the fairy world, it’s tough re-creating something that’s such an individual choice, part of people’s individual imaginations, because we have to decide what this world looks like. Then there was the question of special effects. We didn’t want to do the Tinkerbell thing.”

Hoffman decided to set the story at the end of the 19th century, in the late Victorian era. For him, it was a fashion choice, not a historical one. In this era, women’s bustles and corsets were giving way to less restrictive clothing; men’s collars were loosening up and becoming less stiff.

“I wanted to use the line of the clothing as a metaphor for the repressiveness surrounding the young lovers,” he explained. “And when the lovers escape to the woods, some of the clothing comes off anyway.”

To tie in with the period, Hoffman has many of his characters move around by bicycle, not the usual mode of transportation for Shakespeare. “It just happened,” Hoffman confesses. “We didn’t have any money for visual effects, and I didn’t know what I was going to do about Puck’s speech: ‘I go, I go, look how I go,’ when he vanishes. And for some reason I had this image of Puck on a bicycle. So how would he have one? What if he’d never seen one? It developed from that.”

With Flockhart’s Helena, who doggedly pursues the apparently uninterested Demetrius, Hoffman employed a bicycle as a psychological indicator. “Bicycles are quite clumsy on set and Helena’s is part of her baggage, her belief about herself,” he said. “It’s this annoying thing that’s always bumping against her shins, an encumbrance of which she finally divests herself. But she battles and fights it all the way through the movie.”

“Helena’s incredibly obsessed,” says Flockhart in a break between scenes. ‘She’s after him, she chases him, she finally gets her man. I don’t think you could just say she’s in love. She takes abuse and keeps going.”

The next scene is one to delight all TV viewers deeply irritated by the character of Ally McBeal; in it, Flockhart gets a soaking. She stands in an alcove at the foot of the steps, and bemoans her thwarted plans with the words: “O spite! O hell!” At this point a sprinkler system below her feet starts up, leaving her thoroughly wet and cold.

Hoffman wants to do it in one take, but the crew member charged with operating the sprinklers mistimes the moment, and the jets of water arrive too late. A small army of helpers surrounds Flockhart, using hair dryers to remove the moisture from her long skirt. Resuming her mark, she observes everyone staring at her with dopey grins, awaiting her dousing.

“I don’t see what’s so funny,” says Flockhart, affecting indignation.

The following day is a big complex scene--a triple wedding celebration. A huge table in the form of

a semicircle has been set beneath a canopy on the terrace of the palazzo, with most of the leading players seated at it. Extras in formal dress sit below them at tables with silver cutlery. Other extras playing butlers and serving maids attend them. An Italian quintet featuring an accordion plays lilting music; an enormous green wedding cake covered in fruit is wheeled on set.

At the top table, the lead actors in black morning suits and the women in long dresses wait patiently, incongruously wearing sunglasses to protect against the day’s glare. Beneath her long skirts, it is clear Marceau is wearing sneakers.

Even more out-of-time, Friel reads a script sent to her by her agents. Strathairn, who as the Duke has begun proceedings by declaiming from the palazzo’s magnificent balcony, now joins the others, and smooths his hair by holding up a silver plate in front of him and gazing at his reflection.

The general air is relaxed and affable. Flockhart particularly seems to be enjoying her relative anonymity outside America. “I’ve been working so intensely on ‘Ally’ for 10 months, so getting out of the country and wearing period costume and hair and speaking Shakespeare is a relief and a diversion,” she noted.

Another American actor, Strathairn, admitted to feeling a tad intimidated by the British actors around him. “I mean, here’s the Duke, who sounds like he comes from somewhere between California and New England, and he’s making an attempt to be, umm, dukely, but he’s surrounded by all these [he affects an English accent] good speakers.”

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Away from the main set across the grounds of the palazzo, near a waterfall in an artificial cave hung with imported stalactites, is a peculiar sight: a man stripped to the waist, wearing track-suit pants.

His artificial ears are long and pointed, recalling Leonard Nimoy on “Star Trek.” On his head are two tiny horns. His hair is bleached blond and features a topknot bound tight by twigs and flower stems. On closer inspection this turns out to be Stanley Tucci, star of the film “Big Night” and the now-defunct TV series “Murder One.” He looks, well, puckish--which is only appropriate, for he is Hoffman’s Puck.

“They’re foam. Feel ‘em,” he said genially, indicating his horns and ears. Tucci, often cast as a bad guy conceded he might be an unusual choice for Puck, then speculated about Hoffman’s reasoning: “I think there’s a little danger I sometimes get across on screen that he wanted.”

Tucci had known about “Dream” because Fox Searchlight released “The Impostors,” the last film he directed. Filming in Italy was like returning home for him; his father, an art teacher, studied sculpture and bronze casting at an academy in Florence in the early ‘70s and brought the entire family with him. “It was great,” Tucci recalled. “I went to Italian school without speaking Italian and became fluent in a couple of months.”

He interrupted his reminiscing to shoot a bizarre scene. He had to step into a large circular portable pool filled with bubbling water, and wave at the camera with a knowing, sly expression.

“Stanley’s a wonderful actor,” said Hoffman later. “I wanted a mature Puck, one who had been around a little bit, was sort of tired and melancholy, around all these people who have someone to love. There’s a kind of deviousness Stanley can portray that I like.”

Hoffman has repeatedly returned to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” throughout his adult life. “I’ve seen 34 productions of the play,” he said proudly. And as a student at the University of Idaho in Boise, he and a group of friends disaffected with the university’s theater company started a Shakespeare festival. Its first production was, yes, you guessed it, with Hoffman playing Lysander, “trying to get a laugh whenever I could. It began on a lawn in front of a restaurant downtown 22 years ago.”

Hoffman has come a long way since that college production; still, it’ll be a neat trick if he can make this “Dream” look rich and expensive. But don’t rule it out--there’s something about Caprarola that can make departing visitors feel they’re leaving a truly enchanted kingdom.