On the set of Letters to Juliet: week one

Cliccate qui per la versione italiana.

Shooting has begun on Thursday, June 25th, in Verona, Italy, for the American rom-com Letters to Juliet, directed by Gary Winick (Charlotte’s Web) and starring Amanda Seyfried (Mamma Mia!) and Gael Garcia Bernal (The Motorcycle Diaries, The Science of Sleep) as a New York couple who travels to Verona with different purposes. He wants to learn all the secrets of Italian cuisine to open up a restaurant in the Apple, while she wanders around, enchanted by the beauty of the city. She then discovers a letter, written in 1951 by Claire Smith (Vanessa Redgrave), eager to find her lost Italian lover (Franco Nero). The two then leave for Siena, hoping to reconnect in some ways the old couple.

The plot is very simple, average romantic comedy stuff, but the location is quite unique: living in Verona, I can assure you that this is one of the most under-used cities in the world, on film, and the reason may be that it’s a very small town, with narrow streets that can make for a very difficult shooting experience. Nevertheless, the producers of Letters to Juliet chose to shoot on location, and in some of the narrowest streets in town. You can judge by yourself looking at the pictures below.

I tried to sneak around the set, asking for information to anyone I could talk to, but I found no weird gossip stuff: on the contrary, everyone assured me that the actors are lovely, and the shooting is going on smoothly, with only a slight delay due to the bad weather, which they probably didn’t expect coming to “sunny” Italy. A friend of mine, not working on the movie, even got introduced to Bernal and she told me that he spoke to her for a good 20 minutes, like they were old friends! Charming bastard…

Anyway, I talked a lot, but saw very little, due to the fact that the shooting mostly took place in this very little square, and every entrance was heavily guarded. Below you can see some of the pictures I was able to shoot. The first one is from one of the alley that lead into the square. The second one is a little staircase, which also ends in the square, and plays an important part in the scene – we’ll get to that later.

In the evening, I went back only to find that the set had been moved and was now in the main street near the little square. There I saw Christopher Egan (Eragon) – whom I hadn’t recognized in the first place, being that I’m not exactly an Eragon fan – in a car, ready to shoot a very boring scene that goes as follows: he drives the car for about 20 meters, turns left and stops. He then gets out of the car, and stares at the camera, watching the staircase I mentioned before. I guess he plays a sort of third wheel character, and that’s the part where he sees the couple and stares at them with jealousy and envy, and blah blah. They shot the same stuff four or five times before I wisely decided to get the hell out of there, since I was starving! I don’t think I lost anything important, though.

Fun fact number 1: in the picture below you can see a bunch of guys polishing the car. I guess they were told to get rid of any single raindrop left, probably because they had started shooting before a storm hit the town at 6 p.m., and they had to match different scenes together. But that’s just my guess. Anyway, it was funny to see Egan waiting in the car, cold and emotionless. I wonder what he was thinking. Some dude near me said something like “Isn’t he tired of waiting in the damn car?!”, and his friend answered, “I don’t know, the guy gets really good checks!”.

Fun fact number 2: Franco Nero and Vanessa Redgrave, who are married in real life, play two long lost lovers in this film. Anyway, Nero is not here yet, and I suspect that he will be seen only in Siena, but they told me that maybe he will come here early, just to discuss his scenes and some of his dialogue with Winick. Redgrave is already here, on the other hand, but hasn’t shot anything.

Check out our gallery for all the pics I was able to shoot. On Monday, the set will be moved to an even larger street, and hopefully I will be able to take some pictures of the main cast. Stay tuned for more!