Oct 5 - harvey
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
Novelist Deborah Moggach
It all started 20 years ago when I bought a painting at auction — a Dutch painting, dating from Vermeer’s era, of a woman getting ready to go out. Her maid was bringing her a necklace, her manservant was bringing her a glass of wine. Something in her expression intrigued me. She looked as if she was off on an assignation — something illicit, something furtive.
I hung her in my sitting room and gazed into her face. There was a story behind there somewhere. I longed to step into the painting, into her life, and disappear into those rooms with their chequerboard floors and marble fireplaces. So I decided to write a novel about an adulterous love affair set in Amsterdam during the Golden Age.
novel 1999
shot i 2014 – released 9/1/2017
1630 amsterdam
When I started my research, I discovered that something extraordinary happened around 1636. The whole country was gripped by a craze for gambling on tulip bulbs — “Tulip mania,” it was called. Huge fortunes were made and lost as people made bets on what color the blooms would be — the most valuable being “broken” or striped petals. It was the first great speculative bubble, a foretaste of the dot-com and property bubbles, and I thought it would make a marvelous plot for a novel, demonstrating, as it did, the human capacity for self-deception, greed, and lust for beauty.
1630s Amsterdam. It’s a city in the flush of a new modernity built on the wealth of international shipping and trade. Art patronage is robust. Hitting the sweet spot between the drive for profit and the fetishization of objects of beauty is the exotic tulip. The flower’s bulbs have become the subject of frenetic bidding in the back rooms of taverns, a commodities exchange that creates overnight fortunes and sends some investors into the canal in suicidal despair.
Cornelis Sandvoort (Waltz), a wealthy importer, has no need to speculate in the tulip market. A widower who has taken a much younger second wife, Sophia (Vikander), his pressing concern is immortality: He longs for an heir. When she hasn’t produced one after three years of marriage, he seeks a different form of afterlife, hiring an up-and-coming painter, Jan van Loos (DeHaan), to memorialize him and Sophia in a portrait.“king of peppercorns” is a deal that she feels bound to honor because he saved her from a life of poverty. But then again, he’s sixty-something, stodgily Protestant and refers to his penis as “my little soldier” — something that we can safely presume the bedroom-eyed Jan does not do
The ruff which was worn by men, women and children, evolved from the small fabric ruffle at the drawstring neck of the shirt or chemise. They served as changeable pieces of cloth that could themselves be laundered while keeping the wearer's doublet from becoming soiled at the neckline.
The discovery of starch allowed ruffs to be made wider without losing their shape. Later ruffs were separate garments that could be washed, starched, and set into elaborate figure-of-eight folds by the use of heated cone-shaped goffering irons. Ruffs were often coloured during starching, vegetable dyes were used to give the ruff a yellow, pink or mauve tint. A pale blue colour could also be obtained via the use of smalt, though for an unknown reason Elizabeth I took against this colour and issued a Royal Prerogative "Her Majesty's pleasure is that no blue starch shall be used or worn by any of her Majesty's subjects."
At their most extreme, ruffs were a foot or more wide; these cartwheel ruffs... required a wire frame called a supportasse or underpropper to hold them at the fashionable angle...
to make a ruff – go here http://www.elizabethancostume.net/ruffmake.html#easy
portrait of katharine parr – 1540s precurors to ruff 1550
1560 get bigger starch
1570 big ft wide – wire understructure
1600-1650 out of favor for a dropped collar
goffering ironSpanish fashions remained very conservative. The ruff lingered longest in Spain and the Netherlands, but disappeared first for men and later for women in Franceand England.
By the end of the sixteenth century, ruffs were falling out of fashion in Western Europe, in favour of wing collars and falling bands. The fashion lingered longer in the Dutch Republic, where ruffs can be seen in portraits well into the seventeenth century, and farther east. It also stayed on as part of the ceremonial dress of city councillors (Senatoren) in North German Hanseatic cities and of Lutheran clergy in those cities and in Denmark, Norway, the Fa620s, styles were relaxing. Ruffs were discarded in favor of wired collars which were called rebatos in continental Europe and, later, wide, flat collars.roe Islands, Iceland and in Greenland.
uffs remain part of the formal attire of bishops and ministers in the Church of Denmark (including Greenland) and the Church of the Faroe Islands and are generally worn for services. They were abolished by the Church of Norway in 1980, although some conservative ministers such as Børre Knudsen continued to wear them. Ruffs are optional for trebles in Anglican church choirs
Tulip Fever takes place during the 17th century at the height of Tulipmania. Tulipmania was a period in Holland's history when speculating and trading in tulip bulbs went berzerk - much like our recent real estate market - and solitary tulip bulbs sold for insanely high amounts - several times more than the annual salary of certain skilled tradesmen. Like our real estate market, the bubble burst, and many people were financially ruined. This was news to me and I found that factoid incredibly interesting. Supposedly the economists still used the term "tulipmania" to indicate a potential bubble-like economic market!
The introduction of the tulip to Europe is usually attributed to Ogier de Busbecq, the ambassador of Ferdinand I, Holy Roman Emperor to the Sultan of Turkey, who sent the first tulip bulbs and seeds to Vienna in 1554 from the Ottoman Empire.[14] Tulip bulbs were soon distributed from Vienna to Augsburg, Antwerp and Amsterdam.[15] Its popularity and cultivation in the United Provinces (now the Netherlands)[16] is generally thought to have started in earnest around 1593 after the Flemish botanist Carolus Clusius had taken up a post at the University of Leiden and established the hortus academicus.[17] He planted his collection of tulip bulbs and found they were able to tolerate the harsher conditions of the Low Countries;[18] shortly thereafter the tulip began to grow in popularity.[19]
The tulip was different from every other flower known to Europe at that time, with a saturated intense petal color that no other plant had. The appearance of the nonpareil tulip as a status symbol at this time coincides with the rise of newly independent Holland's trade fortunes. No longer the Spanish Netherlands, its e
It is now known that this effect is due to the bulbs being infected with a type of tulip-specific mosaic virus, known as the "Tulip breaking virus", so called because it "breaks" the one petal color into two or more.[22][23]
broken bulbs”—tulips whose petals showed a striped, multicolor pattern rather than a single solid color. The effect was unpredictable, but the growing demand for these rare, “broken bulb” tulips led naturalists to study ways to reproduce them. (The pattern was later discovered to be the result of a mosaic virus that actually makes the bulbs sickly and less likely to reproduce.) “The high market price for tulips to which the current version of tulipmania refers were prices for particularly beautiful broken bulbs,” writes economist Peter Garber. “Since breaking was unpredictable, some have characterized tulipmania among growers as a gamble, with growers vying to produce better and more bizarre variegations and feathering.”
Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-tulip-fever-180964915/#yJ137t0D8WacCPcz.99
Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv
Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twittert the peak of tulip mania, in February 1637, some single tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsworker.
1841 by the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, written by British journalist Charles Mackay. At one point 12 acres (5 ha) of land were offered for a Semper Augustus bulb.[10] Mackay claims that many such investors were ruined by the fall in prices, and Dutch commerce suffered a severe shock. Although Mackay's book is a classic, his account is contested. Many modern scholars feel that the mania was not as extraordinary as Mackay described and argue that not enough price data are available to prove that a tulip bulb bubble actually occurred.[11][12][13]Properly cultivated, these buds will become bulbs of their own. The mosaic virus spreads only through buds, not seeds, and so cultivating the most appealing varieties takes years. Propagation is greatly slowed down by the virus. In the Northern Hemisphere, tulips bloom in April and May for about one week. During the plant's dormant phase from (Northern Hemisphere) June to September, bulbs can be uprooted and moved about, so actual purchases (in the spot market) occurred during these months.[26] During the rest of the year, florists, or tulip traders, signed contracts before a notary to buy tulips at the end of the season (effectively futures contracts).[26] Thus the Dutch, who developed many of the techniques of modern finance, created a market for tulip bulbs, which were durable goods.[16] Short selling was banned by an edict of 1610, which was reiterated or strengthened in 1621 and 1630, and again in 1636. Short sellers were not prosecuted under these edicts, but their contracts were deemed unenforceable.[No deliveries were ever made to fulfil any of these contracts, because in February 1637, tulip bulb contract prices collapsed abruptly and the trade of tulips ground to a halt.[32]The collapse began in Haarlem, when, for the first time, buyers apparently refused to show up at a routine bulb auction. This may have been because Haarlem was then at the height of an outbreak of bubonic plague. While the existence of the plague may have helped create a culture of fatalistic risk-taking that allowed the speculation to skyrocket in the first place, this outbreak might also have helped to burst the bubble.[33]
17 years in the making spielberg
The mystique of Tulip Fever, such as it is, is wrapped up in its infamously troubled release. Justin Chadwick (The Other Boleyn Girl) was tapped to direct in 2013, when star Alicia Vikander was still an up-and-coming ingenue. Four years down the line,
Tulip Fever screened at Cannes in 2015 and was subsequently set for a theatrical release deep in the heart of awards season. Then is was pushed to the following summer. Then, a week before it was supposed to come out, it was shifted again to the movie dead zone that is February. February came and went. No Tulip Fever. Finally, it was given a release date of September 1st, with a review embargo set to lift after the first public screenings had already taken place. (Never a good sign.) Somewhere in there, a radical thought began occurring to people: Could it be that… Tulip Fever… isn’t good?
If Tulip Fever’s not good (and it’s not), the question then becomes: Can it be bad enough to justify its infamy? Four delays, people. Or is Tulip Fever just bland—a boring, forgettable misfire that’s gained its iconic stature through coincidence alone.
Tom Stoppard wrote Tulip Fever with Deborah Moggach. Moggach wrote the novel upon which the film is based, about a pair of star-crossed lovers in 17th century Amsterdam. Sophia (Vikander) is the young, gorgeous bride of older Cornelis (Waltz), a wealthy merchant who hires artist Jan (DeHaan) to paint him and his wife. As will happen, Sophia and Jan fall in love.
Now, Tom Stoppard knows from costume dramas. He wrote or co-wrote the screenplays for Shakespeare in Love and Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina. As a playwright, he penned Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. The man has one Oscar and four Tony Awards. He can do a costume drama in his sleep. And Tulip Fever is every over-the-top costume drama trope shoved into one movie. No, forget “one movie”—Tulip Fever is six movies, minimum. You have your star-crossed lovers and the young beauty trapped in marriage to an older man. The woman is rich; the man is poor but scrappy. There’s the helpful servant, played by Holliday Grainger, who is contractually obligated to appear in at least two period dramas a year. The servant, Maria, has her own lover, a fishmonger named Willem (Jack O’Connell); their romantic travails check the requisite Upstairs Downstairs/Downton Abbeybox. There’s a fake pregnancy plot and two fake deaths. Judi Dench plays a nun. Zach Galifianakis is your requisite fool archetype. Oh, and the whole thing is set against Amsterdam’s booming tulip market, which is exactly what it sounds like—a stock market where frenzied merchants buy and sell tulip bulbs, which is an actual thing that happened in Amsterdam during this period. So that’s one thing your average costume drama doesn’t have: flower economy.
If Tulip Fever is six movies carelessly slopped together into one, one movie that it isn’t is the erotic thriller it’s being marketed as. I want to be perfectly clear about this, because it’s hilarious: TULIP FEVER IS NOT AT ALL A THRILLER.
Here’s where the fake pregnancy comes in. Cornelis wants an heir, but he thinks he’s been cursed by God. As he tearfully tells Sophia in one scene, his first wife died in childbirth; told by the doctor that either the wife or the child would survive, but not both, Cornelis prayed to God that the child would be the one to make it through. Wife and child died, and Cornelis has been racked by guilt ever since. So, naturally, Sophia cooks up a plan with her unmarried, pregnant servant Maria to pass Maria’s pregnancy off as her own and then “die” in childbirth, leaving Cornelis with a child (to be raised by Maria) and Sophia free to jet off with Jan. Oh sure, just make your husband feel responsible for another wife’s death. And for no reason!
In the Amsterdam of 1636, animated by the cult of money and that of beauty, among the shops of the most extraordinary traders and painters, speculators pushed the price of tulip bulbs to the stars. It seems easy to get rich without fatigue, and the city palpitates with new and attractive possibilities. Cornelis Sandvoort (Christoph Waltz), a rich and mature merchant, decides to commission the portrait of his bride, the beautiful Sophia (Alicia Vikander), to a promising painter with an extraordinary talent, Jan van Loos (Dane DeHaan). It is a fatal encounter, marked by an overwhelming sensuality but also by the thousand dangers that the two lovers will have to face in the overheated atmosphere of a financial euphoria on the verge of madness.
In Bruges
production design by BAFTA winner Simon Elliott, and luscious, period perfect clothing from Oscar winning costume designer Michael O'Connor
painted furniture, the abbey and market place, the townspeople crowding the docks and canals, the neck ruffles and luscious fabrics worn by the well-to-do, the quirky headgear and cape worn by Maria.
In July 2013, it was reported that director Justin Chadwick, the man behind The Other Boleyn Girland Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, would helm the adaptation of Deborah Moggach’s bestselling novel Tulip Fever, which had been in the works for around a decade by that point. The project seemed like another attempt at Oscar glory from its distributor The Weinstein Company, with all the markings of success: A two-time Oscar winner in the villain role (Christoph Waltz); a rising star from Sweden in the lead who was destined for greatness (Alicia Vikander); a script by legendary playwright Tom Stoppard; and a supporting ensemble of plummy British greats united under a story of passion amidst the tulip mania of 17th century Holland. What could possibly go wrong?
2015 Cannes Film Festival, responses weren’t glowing but it was still early days, and by that point in time, Vikander was well on her way to Oscar glory, which would surely help sell the film.
Now to getting it made into a film. Steven Spielberg had also bid on it and for years and years tried to make it but unfortunately couldn’t. Eventually my team at Miramax got together with his team at DreamWorks and made it a joint venture. We had a brilliant screenplay from Tom Stoppard, a great cast in Jude Law, Keira Knightley, and John Madden directing hot off his triumph with Shakespeare In Love. Which just goes to show — even after all those alleged battles between Miramax and DreamWorks, here we were, reunited with the director of Shakespeare In Love and the producer of Saving Private Ryan, making a movie together. Everything was going swimmingly, sets were being built, everyone was excited, and then BAM!, the British government changed the tax law, and a movie that started with a $30 million budget doubled to $60 million and we had to close it down. But we were determined to make it. So along comes the director Justin Chadwick with this incredible cast of Alicia Vikander, Christoph Waltz, Judi Dench, Dane DeHaan, Cara Delevingne, Matthew Morrison, Jack O’Connell, Holliday Grainger and Zack Galifanakis. Working on a much lower budget, we created 1634 Amsterdam in an English boarding school in Norfolk, a Herculean feat of production design. When you see the film, beautifully shot by Eigil Bryld, expert production design by Simon Elliot, equally great costume design by Michael O’Connor, it’s a spectacle. But it took longer than it should have to get it all done and in our business that means, “Uh-oh! Something must be wrong with it.”
s a $48 million DreamWorks production in 2004, directed by John Madden (Shakespeare in Love) and starring Jude Law, Keira Knightley (or perhaps Natalie Portman), and Jim Broadbent. The film was in active pre-production, with sets built and some 12,000 tulips planted, when the U.K. government closed a tax loophole and the financing collapsed. Those 12,000 bulbs, Moggach said, were given to her friends and neighbors in London, sprouting everywhere as a reminder of a film that never was.
Moggach isn’t some Hollywood neophyte: She wrote the screenplay for the 2005 Pride and Prejudice and saw her novel These Foolish Things adapted into the film The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. So there remained interest in Tulip Fever, which was finally resurrected as a film by the mega-producer Harvey Weinstein. Though its budget was lower, at $25 million, Weinstein still assembled a big cast and hired Stoppard to work on the script; many more tulips were planted, and the film was finally committed to celluloid in 2014. That, usually, would have been the end of that.
Cressida Bonas in the movie Tulip Fe prince harry
How did you begin to dream up costumes that captured 17th-century Amsterdam?
“You start by meeting with the production designer and looking at images. The great thing is that this is the Golden Age in Amsterdam, with all the great painters like Frans Hals and Anthony van Dyck. There were thousands of painters painting there, so there is a massive amount of material. We found lots of references and put them on mood boards. Then I sketched something up.”
How did you go about developing Alicia Vikander’s character, Sophia, throughout the film?
“The idea for Sophia was strong looks done in typical Dutch fashion when she goes to be Cornelis’ wife because he and his family are dressing her. As the affair progresses, the clothes become more revealing: her collars and caps start going, and her dresses become less strict and robust. At the end, she’s in a bodice with a simple, more demure costume.”
What were some key elements in the costumes for Christoph Waltz’s character, Cornelis?
“Cornelis and Sophia are rich Protestant merchants. That meant including the colour black and big ruffs. You’d think he was wearing plain black, but it was black silks with textures, and often the fabric was even cut through to show pink lining underneath. There was a class to the fabric, because to dye a fabric black [in those days] showed a sign of wealth. It was a difficult three-step process. For the ruffs, I met with some old colleagues of mine from The School of Historical Dress who were doing classes on ruff making. Ruffs were a huge industry in Amsterdam, keeping them clean and making them stiff involved multiple steps, so you paid people to do it. People were displaying their wealth by wearing them around their necks.”
What types of colours and patterns did you concentrate on and why?
“There’s a scene where Cornelis and Sophia are together wearing these linen nightshirts with tulip embroidery. It was important to do because that was a form of embroidery people used on their linens called blackwork. If you look closely at old portraits, you’ll see linen creeping out from a dress or a doublet with this specific embroidery. I was also interested in pinks and oranges. They seemed to compliment all the black quite well.”
How many costumes did you have to make?
“I never count, but I’m sure we probably made around 50 principal character costumes, 25 nun costumes, and 35 orphan girls. And there would have been probably 500 extras costumes that were hired. We had two-and-half months before we started shooting, and continued to make costumes while filming.”
Tell us about your team.
“I had a couple assistants, a costume supervisor, and a team of 20 to 25 costume dressers. There was a workroom with a cutter who cuts all the patterns, and under her were 8 people. Then there were costume houses that were making things under my designs, and also outworkers around the world making linens for the ruffs, collars, and cuffs. I worked with a dealer in Turkey who supplied a lot of the material for the clothes and jewellery, and shoemakers in Italy. We also hired extras costumes from Spain and Italy. Every day there was a big crowd.”
Michael O’Connor behind the scenes with actor David Harewood.
How does working on a period film differ from working on a contemporary production?
“A lot of work and detail go into historical work. You have to manufacture everything from the colour of the thread to the size of buttonholes, hooks, and bars. You’re constantly feeling the weights of fabrics to see if they’re right for the draping. They’re very time consuming and expensive. In modern films, sometimes the answers are right in a shop.”
What’s it’s like for you to go sit in a theatre and watch a film you’ve worked so hard on?
“You always try for 100 percent, so it’s quite difficult and personal. You’re critical of your own work and think, “Maybe that could have been longer or shorter or less this or less that.” On the whole, it’s exciting, and the rest of the team is genuinely like, “Wow, amazing!” For Tulip Fever, Deborah Moggach was in the film as an extra, and it was great having her look at the costumes and hear her say, “They look wonderful!” I was really pleased about that.”
Do you have any favourite looks from the film?
“I liked doing Holliday Grainger and Jack O’Connell’s characters’ clothes. But my favourite things were the ruffs. They were such a beautiful learning process. We’d send them to the starch room to decide their shape, and they’d come back stiff like a cake. And wearing them, you felt like you were in that time. Doing historical things is part of the pleasure—you’re reliving history a little.”
TAGS: COSTUME DESIGNER, FEATURED, MICHAEL O’CONNOR, TULIP FEVER
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Production Design by
Art Direction by
Bill Crutcher
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supervising art director
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Costume Design by
Producer Alison Owen read the book Tulip Fever before it was even published and instantly bought the option.
Within forty-eight hours of buying the option and sending it out, Owen had offers from Stephen Spielberg, Ridley Scott and Harvey Weinstein. Due to a series of obstacles, however, Owen took another fifteen years finally to go into production on the film, which she now sees as a positive setback: 'I was devastated when the film fell through the first time, because I'd felt that it was very much of the zeitgeist. Little did I know that it was actually becoming more and more zeitgeisty, if that's possible! The recession that we were experiencing when I first optioned this book was only the start of a bunch of financial consequences that we've been suffering globally ever since. If anything, it's a lot more relevant now then it was then."
Fifteen years later, her tenacity and vision finally paid off and in May 2014 the film went into production.
From Book to Script to Screen
For Alison Owen, Deborah Moggach's novel was a fascinating read: 'It's got so many layers it's hard to condense them, but that's the challenge, trying to fit everything into the script. It's a fantastic love story set against this amazing backdrop, and at the heart of it, it's a metaphor about love, lust and passion.
The most highly valued tulips were the ones that broke into colors and stripes and were called breakers. At the time, they had no idea why that happened, but in actuality it was because of a virus. Ironically, the most valuable bulbs were the ones that were diseased, carrying the seeds of their own destruction, ultimately rotting. Of course that's a wonderful metaphor for the adulterous love that takes place in the novel. It is this wonderful love, this great passion, but because it's an elicit love, it also carries the seeds of its own destruction."
'It was the first stock market crash; the first time that people got really obsessed with buying things that weren't technically worth anything, giving them extreme value to the point that they became completely invaluable."
Alison Owen and Director Justin Chadwick previously collaborated on his first feature film, -The Other Boleyn Girl'. He explains that whilst shooting -Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom' in South Africa, his Producer Harvey Weinstein had shown him the script and he loved it, saying: 'I loved the ride of it. I went back to the book, I love the book too. It's a real page turner, and I defy anybody to pick up that book and not read it in one sitting."
He continues: 'I wasn't particularly looking to go back and do a period movie, as I wanted to make something that was modern, but this felt completely modern and I could approach it in a way that was contemporary and visceral.
It was at a time when working class and middle-class traders could actually have vast wealth. They'd just newly discovered that the world was round. Ships were going around the world bringing cargo in from all over and they were questioning the presence of God and what that meant to them. There wasn't the class system that there is, or was, in this country. It was a really intoxicating time, where money was sloshing around."
The Characters
Sophia Sandvoort
Adds Producer Alison Owen: 'I was always vehement about Sophi being very young because the plan itself is a bit crackpot, the product of a young girl's imagination. If it was an older woman that dreamt it, you would either think she was a bit stupid, or that it was too Machiavellian. It was essential to have the exuberance and the simplicity and innocence of a young girl who would really believe she was doing a good thing for everybody." She continues: 'It's a tough one, you want to catch somebody who is just on the rise and Alicia is breaking through to great things. She's an extraordinary actress."
For Dane DeHaan, Vikander has the ability to bewitch, as he describes the moment that Jan meets Sophia for the first time: 'When Sophia walks down the stairs Jan is taken from the start by her beauty. He's very curious as to how she got herself in the position of being married to the older man. He has so many questions, but ultimately he's blown away by her beauty." He continues: 'De Bye [Kevin McKidd] is a very rich collector that Jan hopes to sell a painting to, but he tells Jan that his work is lacking obsession. Jan is really happy to drink a beer all day long and paint for as long as he can get by. When Sophia walks down the stairs, his obsession with her begins and he learns what it means to be obsessed. Sophia becomes the object of all of his paintings and he can't stop thinking about her, which fuels the passion and the love that he has for her and his need just to be with her."
Before he met Vikander, DeHaan watched some of her films and was immediately thrilled at the prospect of working with her: 'I watched -A Royal Affair' and it's just unbelievable how good she is. She's speaking all these different languages, but she is still so captivating and internally complex. She really is such a brilliant actress, that I was excited to work with her and discover who she was."
Vikander explains how important it was for her that she sat for the portrait of Sophia that was used in the film: 'I actually sat for a painter to make the portrait in the film and it is quite intense. In my job I look into people's eyes that I don't know that well, but when a painter looked at me, I got a bit scared because he was really trying to figure out who I am. The relationship between the painter and the person that gets painted is quite intense and I definitely brought that to the scenes with Dane. It really helped both of us to have that context to Jan painting Sophia. I think it really brought out the passion."
Jan Van Loos
Chadwick was also thrilled with the casting of Dane DeHaan: 'I'd seen Dane in independent movies, and loved the way he had an edge to him, and a romance to him. He hadn't played a leading man before, which was exciting for me, and to him. I thought there was something about Dane that could just capture that spirit and sensitivity of the artist, but also the danger for a man who was prepared to go to any length for somebody he loves, and the passion that he needed." Adds Alison Owen: 'Dane is so charismatic. When the camera's on him and he smiles, it feels like the sun's come out and you don't want to look anywhere else. He even pulls off the feat of looking very European and fits into the period very well with real grace and elegance." She continues: 'You really believe him as an artist, you can see he's interested and has that kind of mentality. The paintings were such a feature of this, that they had to be good and Dane had to feel realistic and credible as a painter."
DeHaan describes why Jan was an interesting character for him to play: 'Jan is very much a true hero. He's untroubled, just a hero that goes wholeheartedly at something in the name of love. I haven't really played a hero like that before."
Playing an artist convincingly was always going to be difficult and yet was an essential component for DeHaan to master in his need to make the experience as real as possible. To that end, he spent some time learning how to paint under the tutelage of artist Jamie Routley, whose portraits have been exhibited, amongst other places, at the National Portrait Gallery in the BP Portrait Award Exhibition and is the artist who painted the portraits used in the film. Explains DeHaan: 'I'm not a painter, and going into this I'd have given myself a third grade drawing level. Then I met Jamie, who trained in Florence in the seventeenth century style. He makes his own paints and paints as Jan would paint. Jamie was an amazing, invaluable resource because he gave me painting lessons and taught me how to make it look real."
He continues: 'A lot of times in movies, you see this really stereotypical movie version of a painter just standing in front of the painting at his easel. But that's not really how it was done. It was about stepping back and taking it in.
Everything you see in the movie is authentic to how these Dutch painters were probably painting. It was important for me to get that right and to get it accurately. I think I may be high school level at this point in my painting."
For Alicia Vikander, it was a pleasure to perform opposite DeHaan: 'He has such intensity to him, and he's a brilliant actor so I was very excited and happy when I knew we were going to do this together. That intensity that I'd seen before, he is really bringing to the character of Jan as well – and that is very sexy."Adds Kevin McKidd, who plays Johan de Bye: 'He's a very committed serious young actor playing a young artist who's passionate about his work. Dane's instincts are bang on and he knows what he's after, but he's willing to try out other ideas. Sometimes, when you've got the pressure of being the lead actor I think it can shut you down a little bit and make people feel uptight, but he's very free and willing and wanting to play with all of us."
Cornelis Sandvoort
Justin Chadwick explains the casting of Christoph Waltz: 'Christoph was one of the first casting ideas for the film. The book hints at an older man, and the screenplay hinted at somebody much older. However, I felt that it was better to have somebody a little younger; a powerful man, a merchant, who had made his fortune, who was still alive and would add a dynamic to that relationship that was more complicated. Some people might watch the film and root for Cornelis, and that felt important and was a new way of thinking about that character. That really was the starting block, and once we got Christoph in, we could make Cornelis into a powerful man, not this doddery buffoon of a character, as was originally written, but a real force. That casting choice amped up the danger and it amped up the emotion of what Sophia was doing to him. Christoph is a master – he is a joy to work with, and we were very lucky that we were able to carve out some time with him, because he's such an important key role in the film. And just having him in there sets the tone. It's unexpected, and this cast is not what you thought it was going to be. It's not your usual British period drama. This is a much more exciting, dynamic, eclectic cast than was originally thought."
Adds Alison Owen: 'Christoph has made Cornelis a much more fully realised character than was originally anticipated. He has much more depth and is much less of a cuckold and a buffoon from that medieval renaissance tradition.
Christoph makes you feel everything that you need to really believe the plot. One thing that we needed that was a very hard balance to achieve was to make him feel kind enough that you would sympathize with him, yet not so kind that you wouldn't feel that Sophia had a good excuse to want to go and sleep with the painter. He needed to be dangerous enough that they would be a little bit scared of him and would want to leave. You have to have all of these qualities without one tipping over the other and Christoph is a perfect blend of them all – he really does make you feel sorry for him. He's a real man, a powerful man. You understand why Sophia would be drawn to a young guy of her own age, but you also understand why you wouldn't want Cornelis after you either. You can write those qualities in a book or script, but to actually show them is something else."
For Deborah Moggach, the writer of the novel Tulip Fever, on which the film is based, the casting of Christoph Waltz added a dimension to the story that she greatly appreciates: 'We've got a very stunning actor playing Cornelis, and that brings a whole new dynamic to that marriage. It makes it much more interesting because he's got a face which is filled with sorrow and depth; he's got huge nous to the way he acts. Christoph is a wonderful actor, but because he's so attractive and younger than I would have expected, it makes the dynamic between him and Sophia really interesting. We care about him much more. He's not just an old duffer blithering on about tulip bulbs and his business down in the docks. He's a man who's suffered hugely with the loss of his first wife. There's a relationship between them which is much more interesting and that was thrilling to see played out."
Dane DeHaan was interested in the juxtaposition of the characters of Cornelis and his own character explaining: 'I think Cornelis and Jan are polar opposites. Cornelis is the businessman, he's money minded and trying to take advantage of what's going on in Amsterdam at the time and really capitalize on the spice trade. He's all about making money for himself. Jan is the exact opposite. He wants to be able to express himself and he wants to create things and become a better artist and live that life. He's not so concerned about being rich; he really just wants to be able to get by and to continue to create. They really don't get along with each other from the start because Cornelis is there looking for answers and Jan is there wanting the process of painting the portrait to unfold in a natural way."
Vikander found working with Waltz very satisfying in that he was able to bring a lightness of touch to some very intense and emotional material. She explains: 'He brings a lot of humor to the screen, but also in real life too, so I had a lot of fun working with him. He was going off to another project so we did all of his scenes in the first three weeks and we got to work quite intensely together creating our characters. It was interesting to see how we were able to, hopefully, nail the humor that is needed in certain scenes and then still keep the authenticity of the emotions in other scenes which are heartbreaking. We've seen Christoph in a lot of big films where he's very funny, but it was nice to see him be so delicate in this film and emotional."
Maria and WillemSays Chadwick: 'The heart of the film, for me, was Willem and Maria – the workers, the actual people that are making it happen. One is a fishmonger and one the maid of the house. It was important that they had a tangible chemistry together. Holliday Grainger and Jack O'Connell, from the moment you see them on camera, you just fall in love with them as a couple because they have that magic screen chemistry that rarely happens and they just completely physically connect. That gave us a real good heart and backbone for the film."
Holliday Grainger describes her character's love for Willem: 'Maria is a young maid to Sophia and Cornelis and is quite good friends with Sophia because they're of a similar age. She is head over heels in love with Willem and it's a lovely relationship in the script because it's a proper love. It's not the fevered romance of Jan and Sophia nor the sedate marriage that Cornelis and Sophia have. Their relationship feels quite modern in its trueness and it's quite tender, as well as being raunchy some of the time – she's a maid, he's a fisherman, they both want to roll around!" Adds Jack O'Connell, who plays Willem, on the subject of their love: 'It's a really uncensored, genuine, potent love between Willem and Maria. Their dreams have such a currency, that it's almost solidified."
Grainger was also interested in the connection between her character and Sophia: 'The relationship between Maria and Sophia has an interesting dynamic in that they're similar ages and they both come from poor working-class backgrounds, yet they've ended up in completely different places in life. There is a definite kind of maid-mistress relationship, but at the same time they become incredibly close through the pregnancy because they're relying on each other, both physically and mentally. Maria's got Sophia's future in her hands, and if it wasn't for Sophia's plan, Maria would be destitute and on the streets with a child. They've sacrificed a lot for each other and so there's this unspoken bond and appreciation which makes it really sad when eventually, after the drama of giving birth, they have to part forever."
Grainger also really enjoyed working with Jack O'Connell: 'We spent quite a lot of time in rehearsals hanging around and pretending to rehearse, which is always useful to get to know each other and find out where your dynamic sits. Jack is great to work with. We ended up improvising our first scene together and he's the best to improvise with. He's got such a strong instinct and hates it if it doesn't feel true and real."
For Jack O'Connell, Willem brought an important dynamic to the overall film. He explains: 'Willem's a working man. The cliché would be a sort of version of a working-class hero, but that doesn't write itself. The intention is that Willem is likeable. We like Willem, and we'll forgive him from time to time, hopefully. But within this storyline he represents, along with Maria, a lower social class than the one that Jan, Cornelis and Sophia would represent." He continues: 'He's a working man, he doesn't prioritize himself, he's very selfless, and these are traits that I really respect in people too. To be able to bring it into my work, I have to be thankful to the likes of Tom [Stoppard], to give me that sort of blueprint originally. In order to depict Amsterdam, I think we have to get an insight of almost the bottom of the pile. I guess Willem takes his own initiative in going and gambling on these tulips, and there's no guarantee for him. It's going to go either way for him, and it's all or nothing, so there's jeopardy in it, it's not an overnight decision."
For O'Connell, the contrast of Willem and Maria's lives with those of his employer adds an interesting juxtaposition to the narrative: 'In comparison to the aesthetic, this visual nature of what we're depicting the upper classes as being – the luxuries, the pleasantries, the shiny, spick and span clean nature – once you're in a sector that can't afford any of that, for me, in this story anyway, it shows a heightened version of everything that I think Jan and Sophia and Cornelis certainly want to achieve for themselves. Free of any greed are Willem and Maria, and that's why it was important for Holliday and I to make each other laugh on camera. We were able to improvise some stuff as well and get genuine laughter out of each other and seem totally happy with each other. I think that form of unity is a form of medication for the two of them. And I consider Willem a bit addicted to Maria."
Some Supporting Characters
Alongside the four main characters, there a host of interesting personalities who add richness to the story.
Zach Galifianakis plays Jan's manservant and friend Gerrit. Galifianakis explains: 'I was interested in it because the story was really great and the atmosphere in which it takes place. You do tend to look at all the elements when you're trying to figure out if you can do a job or not. The script, to me, was enough. But the fact that Justin was directing it and that there are these really legitimate actors as well helped too." In addition, Galifianakis had a soft spot for the character: 'Gerrit is the assistant to a struggling artist – he's a minion. He's not the brightest guy, but he's sweet."
For Alison Owen, the casting of Galifianakis could not have been better: 'Zach inhabits the character better than I could have dreamed of. When you've been with a piece of material for a long time, you have something very clear in your mind's eye; the bad part of film making is when the process falls short of your expectations. When I saw Zach perform in the role, he was so much better than I could have imagined."
Director Chadwick was thrilled when Dame Judi Dench took on the role of the Abbess, a new character introduced into the screenplay that was not in the original book. He explains: 'You've got this illegal tulip world that's happening in the backs of taverns, and you've got these orphanages full of children that have been left by the wars that happened, and the famines and the plague. We needed a character that would connect all these worlds, and Tom [Stoppard] wrote in the very final draft of the movie a character which bound them altogether – the Abbess, which is played by the beautiful Judi Dench. What a joy! It was a dream come true for all of us. Her energy was just extraordinary from the moment she arrives on set. It upped everybody's game, and fortunately, a lot of the young cast had the chance to do a scene with her and she was just electric." He continues: 'There's something that comes from her eyes that just connects with other human beings. She's tough in the film, but she does it with such truth and grace. It was an honor."
Dench describes her character thus: 'The Abbess grows a lot of tulips and knows everything about the bulbs, from the sizes and how to weigh them to the price of them. She enables the story to go ahead. She gets her hands dirty and is very hard working. They're all proper working nuns. She doesn't stand on ceremony, she's quite rude, and she smokes a pipe."For Alison Owen, having Dench in the film was a coup: 'Whenever you watch a movie with Judi Dench in it, the excitement and the invigoration of the audience when she pops up is so palpable. When she's on screen it's like somebody making you sit up and take notice."
Matthew Morrison plays Mattheus, Jan's boisterous and fun-loving friend. As Morrison explains: 'Mattheus loves living. He loves booze, he loves art, and he loves women. He is really sophisticated, and I think he's bright, but he's a little lacking as an artist himself. He's gone as far as he can go, but he sees something in Jan that he's drawn to and he becomes good friends with him, and sees a great potential in him. He's a wheeler and dealer. He knows all the merchants, all the buyers and sellers, and the traders and he exploits his relationship with them."
He continues: 'You look at these costumes and think period piece, but it's really so current. We deal with this kind of stuff today in the stock market and it's this crazy world where they keep buying and buying and selling tulips and they keep increasing the prices of them. They think it's just going to go on forever and the reality is the bubble has to burst at some point. I think Mattheus is smart enough to know that that is going to happen and he's looking at everyone having so much fun and they're so drunk on the excitement of everyone around them, they don't quite see what is about to happen."
Tom Hollander plays Dr. Sorgh, who he explains is: 'An apothecary, a fertility doctor, who, as they don't have the right medicine in 1630, gets women pregnant by having sex with them. I think maybe he enjoyed it once upon a time, but now it's become burdensome and I think he'd quite like to be loved and not this seedy doctor." He continues: 'He is drawn into the deception plot of Sophia which all leads to the terrible tragedy for Cornelis, her husband, which Dr. Sorgh observes. He is both a comedy doctor, but also a compassionate man by the end of the story."
Yet another interesting supporting cast member is Kevin McKidd who plays Johan de Bye, who he describes as: 'A very well-heeled merchant, who has become a specialist in art dealing and becomes the benefactor of Jan. What I like about the character is that Justin [Chadwick] was adamant that he shouldn't be posh, just because he's rich, and he's somebody who's come up from the streets and made a lot of money."
For the artists' models in the film, present day models were cast, namely Cara Delevingne and Daisy Lowe. Delevingne explains that the models of that era were mainly prostitutes, but that her character, Annetje, was clever enough to take advantage of her situation: 'She's definitely a prostitute but she uses her worth. She steals money, she makes money, and she's a clever girl. In the tavern, she's got her blackboard up and is betting as well…She's not just selling her body; she's selling herself for a reason. I think women were not really respected in those times so she's clever and the men that know her respect her, so that's always good. I like to play strong characters, whether they're prostitutes or not. At least she's a strong one. She's a hustler. She's hustling. I think that's great."
Tulip Mania'Tulips then were new to Holland, and they were rare. To us the ultimate in Dutch domesticity, in the 1630s this fragile and changeable bloom represented novelty, unpredictability, excitement – a splash of the exotic east, a collector's item for the curious and the wealthy, rather than a simple and unpretentious flower in a jug on the kitchen table." - Anne Goldgar, Author of Tulipmania
Arriving from Constantinople to the Dutch United Provinces in the early seventeenth century, the tulip was considered to be a symbol of wealth and the ultimate in sophistication. With trade routes opening to the east and west of Europe, a privileged section of society emerged that had a disposable income to spend on ostentatious and beautiful objects including gardens and rare flowers, such as tulips. Indeed, many men and women of all classes now had a disposable income and enjoyed higher standards of living in comparison to other countries' standards of the era.
As time continued, the fascination with ever more rare varieties of the flower became a Dutch obsession and by 1636 they were being traded on the Amsterdam stock exchange.
By 1637, when the film is set, during this -Dutch Golden Age', Amsterdam was in a moment of great change. The Protestant Reformation had just taken place and the United Provinces were a great trading and shipping power around the globe. Amsterdam itself was very wealthy and cosmopolitan as well as a very liberal and free place to live.
In the 1630s, the Amsterdam stock exchange traded only between noon and 2pm and dealt in hundreds of commodities, although tulips were not amongst them. In time, the tulip traders found that meeting in back rooms of taverns served as a convenient meeting point.
There was a wide variety of bulbs on offer, from the cheapest single color variety up to the exquisite and delicately marked Semper Augustus tulip, which was very rare with perhaps a dozen blooms ever known to exist. Single bulbs of the Semper Augustus changed hands for twice the cost of a house.
To begin with, tulips were dealt by the bulb, and only in the summer season, but from the autumn of 1635, this changed when tulips which were still in the ground started to be traded. The bulb itself was now no longer the unit of currency, but it was rather a note promising the bulb to the buyer. These promissory notes meant that tulips could be traded through the winter months and that it was no longer tulip bulbs that were being traded, but notes about tulip bulbs that may not even have existed. This was the first futures market.
From December 1636 to January 1637 the tulip bulb craze reached its peak and could be said to have turned into a mania. However, by the first week of February the bottom had fallen out of the market and panic set in as traders realized that they had to sell as quickly as possible.
Despite attempts to regulate the market as everybody tried to sell commodities that they did not have, nor had they ever had, many of the tulip traders never recovered from the bust.
Tulip mania could be considered one of the earliest economic bubbles. It was a forerunner to the South Sea Bubble and all the other financial schemes that start with wild speculation and end with a crash of epic proportions.
ResearchTulipomania – Mike Dash – Indigo 1999
Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age – Anne
Goldgar – The University of Chicago Press 2007
Dutch Art – Inspiration and Execution
The writer of the novel Tulip Fever on which the film is based, Deborah Moggach describes how her interest in Dutch art inspired the work: 'Twenty years ago I went to a sale at Christie's because I'd seen this painting in the auction. I loved it to bits and I bought it. It's painted in 1630, I think, and it's of a woman getting ready to go out. She's wearing a little fur-trimmed velvet jacket, which was the fashion of the time, and she's looking out of the canvas at us with a rather enigmatic expression on her face. Her maidservant is bringing her a little pearl necklace to put around her neck and her manservant is bringing her a glass of wine. She's obviously quite pampered, quite rich, but her face was just enigmatic, and I thought, -She's up to no good; I wonder where she's going? Is she getting ready to go out? Is she going out somewhere she shouldn't be going out?" I hung the painting in my sitting room and gazed and gazed at it, and this story came to me.'"
Moggach continues: 'At the time I was living with a painter and he got very involved with the story too. As I was writing the book inspired by this painting, I was doing up the house that I'd bought for him and me to live in and he drew me drawings from Vermeer paintings, drawings to illustrate the book as I wrote it. He was also renovating the house like a Vermeer. We would build a fireplace that he'd copied from a 17th century Dutch painting. It was wildly romantic. We split up in the end, but it was lovely at the time."
Moggach was deeply affected by Dutch art of the time and explains: 'I wrote the book in this great fever of love – both for my partner but also for Dutch art, because they tell such stories. In this quiet domestic scene of this woman getting ready to go out there was a whole drama going on. I think in that short period in the 17th century, after paintings were religious in the 16th century and before the baroque period, these domestic paintings provided very thrilling narratives.
They're like film stills because you've got an arrested moment of drama and you feel if you blink, that woman is going to get up and move across the room, that man who's watching her as she's playing the virginal is going to move off with her, and the maid who is sweeping is going to run off with the servant. Those paintings tell us so much about normal life then and you feel like you are entering the household of these people and that's where the story was."
Production Designer Simon Elliott's inspiration for the film was Pieter de Hooch and Gabriel Metsu, which he explains are 'much richer and darker than people associate with the period. Most people think of Vermeer. He's very light and the walls are very light, but we wanted darker and shadier."
Adds Elliott: 'Obviously the paintings of the period are a huge inspiration. But when you start reading any of the historical documents you suddenly discover that these paintings are the biggest marketing campaign ever. They are the advertising of the period and were to show off artists' technical skills. They were meant to flatter the home owners of those patrons who commissioned the paintings, so they weren't exactly truthful. The light wasn't falling into those windows because the houses were so cram packed in the narrow streets. There weren't as many beautiful marble floors as people would not have been able to afford them – so there's a little bit of gloss in the paintings of the period. We took the essence of them and stripped them back, finding what we love about them and then trying to put something a bit more real on them."
The device within the film that draws Jan and Sophia together is the portrait commissioned by Cornelis. To that end it was essential to Simon Elliott to ensure that the finished painting would not be a disappointment. He explains: 'I came up with the idea of finding an artist whose style would lend itself to our movie without forcing them into painting in a style they didn't know or couldn't do. We hoped that with a little direction regarding background or props or costumes, we would end up with a painting that was more authentic." Elliott found Jamie Routley and hoped that 'the benefit of having him meant that we were able to capture the various stages of his pieces in the interim stages before the finished product. It was a new experience for the actors as they actually sat for him. They were sitting for a proper portrait rather than somebody in a dark room painting from some hurriedly taken snapshots. We were able to create a real painting and hopefully that will be conveyed on the screen."
He continues: 'You see the main portrait in about four states. There is the main canvas, prior to which, you see Jan's studies as he comes to the house to start his work. We've gone for the tradition of Frans Hals who painted larger canvases in the studio, and then when he came and saw his sitters in their home, he would do studies. In our story, Jan comes to the house and sketches Cornelis and Sophia. He does some head studies and then there are some interim stages plus some charcoal sketches before we start seeing the big portrait being painted."
For Producer Alison Owen: 'The genesis was very much in Dutch art and we wanted to convey that, but we didn't want it to be all about the art as this is a big story with big themes. We didn't want it to be static. It was very important to make it un-precious and very gritty and earthy. At the same time as we were invoking all those Flemish paintings and the Rembrandt and Vermeer, we were also relating it back to people's emotions and the present day as well. There's nothing static about the way we shot it. The camera's always moving and reminding us that these people are living and breathing and have emotions and feelings. I think that's the meeting of the cerebral, the Tom Stoppard adaptation and the instinctive, which is Justin's direction."
Adds Christoph Waltz: 'The past few years, I've developed a deep interest in Dutch and Flemish art of the 16th and 17th century. The art is beautiful and the paintings express not just what they show – they express what's behind what we see. They express a whole world, a whole era of civilization and humankind and spirit. That's why they are masters to a degree that is immense. You really feel, even if you don't quite fathom the depth of the painting, that there is something that you have to live up to. The challenge of looking at art from that period, or of great art altogether, is really that you have to widen your horizon. You are required to rise to the occasion and that effort is immensely gratifying."
The Look of the Film'Although we're making a period movie, we've approached it with a modern sensibility. It was really important to drop the audience and the actors in amongst it and have a 360° world. I didn't want us to be hamstrung with the fact that it's period, so I wanted a kind of real living, breathing world, that almost smelt real," describes Director, Justin Chadwick, who continues: 'There are only little areas of streets that have not been messed up by 21st century technology or modern buildings. It meant that we had to build a whole 360° world because I never wanted the camera to stop. I always wanted the camera to be on the move, to be in amongst the streets, following the characters. I felt that was important to understand this kind of breathless love story that Deborah [Moggach] and then Tom [Stoppard] had written, so we built it. That was a massive challenge actually to realize a 360° world that had scale."
Adds Director of Photography, Eigil Bryld: 'We try and keep the camera moving as much as possible just to be in amongst the action. We use a lot of hand-held and steadicam and we track a lot because we want to feel like the world is behind the camera as well." He continues: 'I think the real danger with any period film is that it becomes about the sets and the costumes – all the glory and the beauty. We have all of that in front of the camera, but we didn't want to treat it politely. We wanted to keep it very real and be in amongst it and have the drama unfold around us rather than in front of us."
Chadwick, who worked with Production Designer Simon Elliott a few years previously on -Bleak House' which was serialized for the BBC, explains: 'Simon is a very creative designer and has an amazing team that would be able to realise a great epic landscape. They built the whole world of the film and we even ended up building a canal. The film really drops the audience right in it and we were able to move the camera through the worlds of that team's imagination." The Amsterdam of the 1630s was quite small and as Simon Elliott explains: 'It's quite rough and hasn't had its huge makeover. It was a quagmire, a foul cesspool. It was a swamp on the edge of nothing. There are lots of descriptions of it being very dirty, very infested. They only got over the Plague eight years earlier, so there are a lot of contributing factors to why it feels very claustrophobic and very dirty at this period. Although Dutch housewives are famous for keeping their homes very clean, beyond their front door was a kind of festering swamp."
Adds Dane DeHaan: 'The more real that things can be, the more it helps because I have to create a fully realized world for the way that I work. They've built some really incredible sets and then packed them with extras and eels and pigs that make it feel like a fully realized world and which certainly makes my job easier."
For actor Tom Hollander: 'These crafts are just staggering; the most fun thing is walking into a studio and seeing all that production design and all that brilliance, the detail and artistry that is just brilliant. There are so many hundreds of people crawling over the organism of the set and making it alive. You walk in through a slightly drab corridor and you're in Amsterdam in 1630. When it's looked at through a camera with smoke and light it looks amazing. It's magical."
The Sandvoort house set at Pinewood Studios was constructed as a stand alone building on two floors. Explains Director of Photography Eigil Bryld: 'The route we could have chosen was to build each room separately so we could take walls out, but right from the beginning we wanted to be able to move from room to room. We wanted to be able to move from the exterior to the interior seamlessly and without having to cut around it. It made it difficult in some ways as you can't move a wall as there's another room behind it. Also, it's on two stories so we could bring people up and down the stairs. In terms of logistics it's been a bit of puzzle, but I think it really adds to the sense of actually being there and being able to move freely around." He adds: 'Simon Elliott's design is really built up in layers and then you try and have a symphony of textures and different qualities of light. It brings it all to life and it's more than just a pretty image."
For Production Designer Simon Elliott: 'The Sandvoort House is an exaggeration of houses from the period, which were very narrow with limited frontage onto whichever street they were on. They went back a very long way and usually had some sort of yard at the back. What we had to do was make it a little bigger otherwise it wouldn't have been practical to shoot in. The problem with having something that's long and narrow is how you get natural light into the middle of the set. We moved what would be a back yard into the middle of the house and made a central courtyard. The house wraps itself around this central courtyard which enabled Eigil to have daylight streaming into the three central rooms. We're lit from the street side and then also from the central courtyard."
Describing the architecture of the house, Elliott continues: 'The front hallway is the public space of a Dutch house – it's where the master of the house would do his meeting and greeting and do any business transactions. Then you move through to a more private space ending up with the kitchens at the back of the house. Then we facilitate a suite of bedrooms above which are accessed through two staircases which are practical."
Eigil Bryld explains that: 'We wanted to try and stay true to the nature of what it was like living back then, and candles were expensive, so you would have very few of them. So, if you had to do something during the day that required light, you'd do it by the window. We're not making a documentary, but it informs the actors where and how to move in the room and grounds the film in a reality."
Bryld continues on the theme of light: 'Most of the interiors are quite dark and it's very rich in terms of texture. One unusual thing is that we have very high windows with shutters below, which creates a very steep light that falls in and automatically gives it quite a painterly look. It's not something that we strive towards, but rather because we're being true to the elements. It's more about contrast and the color of the light."
LocationsAlmost all of the interiors of the film, the Sandvoort House, the interior of the tavern and Jan's studio were shot at Pinewood Studios. While Tulip Fever is set in Amsterdam, Production Designer Simon Elliott explains why the exteriors for the film were also all shot in the UK: 'Financial implications are always a huge impact when you're doing a film of this nature, so that was a consideration, but also, what is left from 17th Century Amsterdam is few and far between. There are little pockets of it, but Amsterdam today is built of many layers of history. To strip all that back and try to reinstate the period in which the story is set wasn't going to work for us."
Adds Eigil Bryld: 'It's hard to design a movie like this because there is not much unspoiled architecture from this period in the UK. It's very easy to get cornered in and see very little. We tried hard to find locations and create environments where we could see 360° and move the camera freely. We didn't ever want to have a feeling that people were backed up against something or that we couldn't be in amongst it and actually be in the emotions and the drama and humor."
Director Justin Chadwick and Designer Simon Elliott had worked together at Cobham Hall in Kent ten years earlier on the television series -Bleak House'. Elliott explains why he returned: 'I have looked at every red brick Tudor mansion up and down the country. I had this crazy notion that I needed to graft a set onto an existing building so that we could get double the set for our money. What's interesting about Cobham is that one face of it is 250 feet long straight, so I thought it would be the perfect place to graft a canal. That's how the canal was born. It gave me the perfect façade because of the nature of the architecture. It's a raised ground floor with a terrace from which I was then able to build out to build the canal." He continues: 'It's actually a very simple idea to a problem we had, that rather than excavating tons and tons of earth we just built up – it's all scaffolding and plaster brick."
Camilla Stephenson, Supervising Location Manager adds: 'Cobham was the big find as there are a limited amount of properties that would work for the period and the style. When Simon [Elliott] saw the amazing length of the building he knew he could create a long street, typical of Amsterdam. He then came up with this magical idea of creating a canal here, and therefore Cobham Hall won the battle over all the others that we looked at." She continues: 'Simon's fantastic idea was that we would never try and dig a canal, we would build upwards from the road, so what is, effectively, the first floor of a building is our ground floor." The build took ten weeks.
For Alicia Vikander working on the Cobham set was a treat: 'They built this whole canal and three bridges and put in boats, and then there are eel smoking houses which are actually real and the butcher's house and all the things that are sold in the market, which are real. There were real pigs' heads and meat carcasses and masses of extras, children and musicians playing – I was just quite amazed and I just stood and watched for an hour. I was so happy I was not in the first scenes so that I could just walk around and get a feel for it."
The Market Square was also filmed at Cobham Hall.
The production also travelled to Norfolk to film various scenes including some on the beach at Holkham and the St. Ursula's Convent scenes at Norwich Cathedral. Explains Camilla Stephenson: 'My brief was to find the biggest cloister in the country and as far as I know, Norwich is the biggest so it fit perfectly. When you look at some of the paintings of the period you will see large churches and cathedrals in that stone with the same look and size and grandeur of Norwich Cathedral."
Adds actor Judi Dench: 'The cloisters are so beautiful and so is the light within them. In the middle of the cloisters the brilliant art department have built this wonderful garden that the nuns work in with wicker part tiers and everything is really growing. I don't know how they do it. It looks completely real. It's a proper working garden and it's lovely. I'm also acting with four big black pigs, two short horn cows, some warren hens, and twelve geese. Not only do you get to work with some cracking actors, you get to work with some cracking animals too."
Another challenge for Camilla Stephenson was finding a location for the dock scenes, finally settling on Tilbury Docks in Essex. She explains: 'Docks didn't look like they do now. We were very keen not to have a harbor to represent the Amsterdam Docks because that isn't correct for the period. Amsterdam would have had lots of small boats and the large boats would be out in the estuary or at sea and things would be transferred to smaller boats to come in to land. In seventeenth century Amsterdam, there were 5,000 boats docking a day. It must have been an incredible place, so we thought it would be lovely to see some more water and a bridge and a way into the city. In the end that is what we tried to create at Tilbury, a contrast to our market streets, and we got to use an amazing bridge that works perfectly for our period."
Other locations included the exterior of Jan's studio which was recreated in Charterhouse Square, City of London and the exterior and some interiors of the tavern, which were shot at Kentwell Hall, Suffolk.
from
http://cotedetexas.blogspot.com/2017/12/tulip-fever.html
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