“I looked at almost a dozen chateaux in the area between Roussillon and Bonnieux before coming back to the first one we saw, La Canorgue,” the director states about the location where his company of 125 craftsmen spent most of their nine-week shoot in the Provençal region, which coincided with the vineyard’s prime harvesting season for the next year’s vintage.
Scott chose La Canorgue due to its spectacular western view looking out over the Luberon, and the magical dusk light that bathes the main house in the late afternoon. The film company, under the watchful eye of veteran location supervisor Marco Giacalone (who worked with director Scott on “Kingdom of Heaven”) and French location manager Thierry Zemmour, took over the vineyard and chateau for much of the nine-week shooting schedule in the South of France.
According to Nathalie Margan, who runs La Canorgue with her father, Jean-Pierre, the Margans were hesitant when approached by the production, because the shoot coincided with harvest time. “But, we knew the shoot would be an adventure,” Nathalie says, “so we took on the challenges that came with it.”
Margan describes the experience of huge trucks, vast amounts of equipment and 125 cast and crew swarming all over her property as “initially strange, but ultimately thrilling. It was great to participate. We were asked a few times to suggest how a real winemaker would have done things or what the technical terms were for this or that. They made their movie without disturbing us, and we made a good wine without disturbing them.”
“La Canorgue was interesting,” says production designer Sonja Klaus, noting the production worked hard to restore the chateau for the shoot. “We re-landscaped the ground, putting in statutory and ornamentation. Inside, the whole point was to have this slightly dilapidated, lived-in, comfortable feeling – a feeling of shabby chic…cluttery, lived-in, and homey. We wanted the place to feel as if one was staying with your favorite uncle or your favorite aunt.”
Outside the house, among acres of vines, Klaus had a more daunting task, one she never expected. “Ridley's words to me, when he first asked me to do it, were, ‘We're just going to hang out in the South of France and throw a few props around,’” she says with a laugh. “And I thought that sounded nice – until he added, ‘Oh, and by the way, there's a tennis court. I think we might have to change the swimming pool, or build another swimming pool for all the stunts.’
“There was this field at the back of the house, which was actually in a perfect spot for a tennis court,” says Klaus. “The snag was that it wasn't big enough to put a tennis court on it. So we actually cheated it, made the tennis court slightly smaller. But, when you watch it on film you won't know that.”
Another key chateau shooting location was its empty pool, where Crowe got the opportunity to flex both his comedic and physical muscles. “We have a running gag where Max falls into the pool and then realizes he has fourteen-foot sheer walls, and he simply can't get out,” says the actor. “The pool doesn't have any water in it, so he has no way of getting out.”
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