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Johnny Depp stars as an American tourist whose playful dalliance with a stranger leads to a web of intrigue, romance and danger in The Tourist. During an impromptu trip to Europe to mend a broken heart, Frank (Depp) unexpectedly finds himself in a flirtatious encounter with Elise (Angelina Jolie), an extraordinary woman who deliberately crosses his path. Against the breathtaking backdrop of Paris and Venice, their whirlwind romance quickly evolves as they find themselves unwittingly thrust into a deadly game of cat and mouse. Directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Screenplay by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and Christopher McQuarrie and Julian Fellowes.
ABOUT THE FILM
When Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck presented his vision of The Tourist to producer Graham King, it took King all of 30 minutes to decide that he wanted to finance and produce the film. "I wanted to make a film that would be one of those experiences where you just sit back and enjoy life for a couple of hours," says Henckel von Donnersmarck.
"When Florian sent me the script, there was a combination of factors that made me want to sign on," says King. "In the past several years, he had seen a lot of scripts and passed on a lot of scripts - he had his choice of projects - so I was intrigued that he had taken to this one. Having Angelina Jolie attached didn't hurt, either."
The Tourist, directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, written by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck and Christopher McQuarrie and Julian Fellowes, is a GK Films and Columbia Pictures presentation in association with Spyglass Entertainment. Spyglass developed the property before GK Films stepped in to finance and produce.
Jolie had been attracted to the project by the potential of the strong female character and by the chance to work with director Henckel von Donnersmarck, and to have him co-write the script. After a very early meeting, it was clear that the director and star were on the same page about the kind of movie they wanted to make. "The Lives of Others is a beautiful, intelligent film, but also heavy," says Jolie. "When we met, he was very clear that he wanted to make a movie that was luxurious and fun, something that would be exciting for people to watch but didn't take itself too seriously. It was a perfect match."
Now the most important step for director and producer was to find the right male lead. Says Henckel von Donnersmarck: "We really needed someone who wouldn't be eclipsed by Angelina. When we brainstormed over what actor could be a true partner for her in terms of attractiveness, intelligence and acting skill, the only name that kept coming to our minds was Johnny Depp."
Johnny Depp and Oscar-winning producer Graham King have been friends for years, and, recently, have teamed up on several projects. After wrapping one such collaboration and with an eye toward working together again, King mentioned to him that Donnersmarck and he were looking for a leading man to star in a fun, exciting, sexy thriller opposite Angelina Jolie, and both felt that he would be perfect for the part.
So Donnersmarck and Depp had a meeting and talked about The Tourist: "I presented the kind of character I envisioned for him, and he liked it," says Henckel von Donnersmarck. "Our meeting lasted three hours instead of one, and we laughed so much that I realized I needed to introduce a lot of humor into the script to do justice to Johnny's charm."
Obviously, Jolie and Depp are two of the most engaging, charismatic, and talented actors working in film, but as the film requires its characters to share an immediate attraction to each other, all felt it was a good idea to meet and talk before signing on. And believe it or not, that is how Angelina Jolie and Johnny Depp met for the first time. Despite being two of the biggest movie stars, they had not entered each other's orbit until they sat down to discuss The Tourist with the director and producer. King sat quietly and watched them interact, watching to see how the actors would get along. Perhaps it was no surprise that they clicked from the first moment. "There was complete instant chemistry between them both," says King.
"Graham called me right after that meeting and was so excited," adds producer Tim Headington of GK Films. "Later, when we started filming and seeing dailies, it was just like magic on tape."
For Henckel von Donnersmarck, they were the perfect leads for this film. "They're great movie stars, but more than that, they are great actors, and I wanted to give them roles in which they could really show what they can do. Elise is charming and delicate and feminine and strong, all at the same time; Frank is winning and charming and funny, just like Johnny is in real life."
"Having either Angelina Jolie or Johnny Depp in this film would have been extraordinary, but the pair together is that perfect combination you dream about but rarely, if ever, happens," says co-screenwriter Julian Fellowes.
In The Tourist, Jolie plays Elise Ward, the paramour of the criminal Alexander Pearce, who has disappeared. "There are a lot of people looking for him," says Jolie. "He's stolen a lot of money from a gangster. The gangster wants revenge - and his money back - and the British want him for the taxes on the money he stole. Everyone's looking for him, including Elise, who hasn't seen him for a long time and isn't quite sure when he'll turn up again."
Playing off rumors that he has drastically altered his appearance, Pearce gets word to Elise: get on a certain train for Venice, choose a stranger of approximately Pearce's height and build, and make everyone else believe that man is Pearce. She chooses the American math teacher Frank Tupelo (Johnny Depp), who's headed to Venice to try to mend a broken heart. "She throws him into an adventure he's not prepared for," Jolie adds.
Of course, not everything goes according to Elise's plan. "Imagine a woman who is elegant, sophisticated, and educated, who falls for a guy who is not any of those things," says Henckel von Donnersmarck. "She has this grand master plan, and falling for him was not meant to happen."
"I wanted this to be a thriller that was simply a fun time at the movies," says King. "Two extraordinary actors, with amazing chemistry, set in an exotic, bigger-than-life location. Who wouldn't want to go on an adventure in Paris and Venice with Angelina and Johnny?"
Depp says that he likes working with Graham King because "Graham is a renegade. He understands the rules of the game, but he doesn't necessarily adhere to them. He thrives on the risk factor, and that makes him unique. He likes a challenge, he's got great taste, and he doesn't care what other people are doing. He cares about what he believes in."
The screenwriters set the film in Venice, which, Henckel von Donnersmarck says, lent the film its entirely unique atmosphere of beauty and danger. "Somebody once said that Kodak owed most of its revenue to Venice," says Henckel von Donnersmarck. "In terms of art and beauty, it's the richest place in the world - there's nothing else like it. In reality, the city is sinking and falling to bits, but we wanted to show the glory of the place. We asked ourselves, how can we show the city from its best side? There are elements of the plot that are dangerous - but, thanks to Venice, not so dangerous that you might feel miserable about it."
Production Designer Jon Hutman adds, "There is something about being there. The water, the architecture, and the history combined create something very special. What we have tried to do is take these existing visual gems and fit them into the story."
Not only was it the right creative choice to shoot the movie in Venice, but surprisingly enough, the choice made practical sense as well. "It seems like a crazy thing for a studio or producer to allow, but we had a very limited window in which to make the movie. We didn't have time to build the Venice interiors on a soundstage. For entirely practical reasons, we had to do the unheard-of thing."
The setting called for the film's action sequences to be striking and written especially for the city. Stunt choreographer Simon Crane - a stunt legend after working on films ranging from Cliffhanger to Saving Private Ryan to Hancock - was charged with planning character-driven action sequences unique to Venice.
"Anyone can dream up an action sequence," says Crane. "But if it doesn't fit the tone of the film, it's totally worthless. It's all about believability."
A good example is the scene in which Frank, attempting to escape would-be murderers who are convinced he is Alexander Pearce, leaps across Venice rooftops - just as Casanova did as he attempted to escape jealous husbands. "It came to me when reading about Casanova. Of course, Frank is the anti-Casanova," says Henckel von Donnersmarck. "I thought, wouldn't that be a fun way to present him - not as a great, confident lover trying to escape the cuckolded husband, but running for his life from gangsters. It reinforces the character and also presents all the beauty of Venice - it was a lot of fun."
Another action sequence that made full use of everything Venice had to offer was the canal boat chase. Henckel von Donnersmarck captured the action with multiple cameras over seven nights. Jolie even learned to drive several kinds of boats for the sequence. Crane has worked with Jolie on several films - including Salt and Mr. and Mrs. Smith - and says the actress, as always, was committed to getting the action right.
"Every day, we tried to add more detail and texture. One night, shortly before we shot the sequence, I came home from work in the early morning hours and saw this beautiful fog, all over Venice," says the director. "I thought, 'Oh, it would be really nice to have that in the film.' So we went pretty heavy on the fog to try to recreate that beauty. It was really a good way to use the dark side of the city, the danger that comes with the romance."
Creating such a stylized stunt sequence - and at night, no less - was a challenge, not least because the team was prevented from rehearsing in the actual location. However, it was a challenge perfectly suited to Crane. "We rehearsed everything on open water, with buoys and other markers," he says. "It was a challenge, but you just have to do it."
ABOUT THE CHARACTERS
Angelina Jolie plays Elise Clifton Ward, a beautiful (of course!) and mysterious woman involved in a romantic relationship with the wanted thief Alexander Pearce - but keeps her true motivations close to the vest. "She's instructed by Alexander to take a train from Paris to Venice, and while on the train find a man - someone of Alexander's height and build," says Jolie. "She finds Frank and throws him into this adventure."
"My character in this film is different than any other film," says Jolie. "Florian gave me very specific direction. My natural modern rhythm is quicker and harder. At the beginning of the shoot, Florian's note to me was to slow down, as Elise lives in a world of quiet luxury and elegance."
"Angelina wakes up in the morning and is glamorous and feminine, and I wanted to capture that about her on film in the character of Elise," says Henckel von Donnersmarck.
"Florian is probably one of the most intelligent human beings I have ever met in my life," Jolie continues. "Come on: he speaks six languages. When we shot in Paris he spoke French; when we shot in Italy, he spoke Italian. And a couple of our stunt guys were Russian and he would speak to them in Russian."
Opposite the extraordinary Elise Clifton Ward is Frank Tupelo, an American math teacher. "My main interest was to play the ultimate ordinary man," says Depp. "The people who are perceived as 'normal' are the ones I find the strangest, really: they have tics and flaws and weird mannerisms. This is a guy who hasn't really lived much of a life, so that was the great challenge - to play him as hyper-normal."
Depp also enjoyed the opportunity to work with Henckel von Donnersmarck. "Not only is he sweet, humble, giving, caring, loving, clever, and super smart, he was beyond collaborative," says the actor. "He was very much into the fact that things have to happen organically. He trusted that when Angelina and I got into the ring together, things would take shape."
The filmmakers surrounded Depp and Jolie with a cast of actors and famous faces.
Paul Bettany plays Acheson, the policeman trying to track down the gangster Alexander Pearce. "He's become obsessed with catching Pearce," says Bettany of his character. "He's been trying so long and has been foiled at every turn. But the thing about this movie is that nobody can be taken at face value - not even my character. His investigation is complex and twisted - his motivation is complicated for personal reasons."
"Florian is exacting, demanding, and specific," says Bettany. "There is an enormous amount of detail in his direction. He does it in an entirely charming way, but he will not move on until he has exactly what he wants."
Timothy Dalton, best known, of course, for his portrayal of James Bond, takes on a very different kind of British government agent in The Tourist: as the policeman Chief Inspector Jones, he is ultimately in charge of the men leading the investigation into Alexander Pearce. "In The Tourist, I play the role of Chief Inspector Jones, a number-crunching, budget conscious policeman who is in overall command of the operation to capture Alexander Pearce. His concerns are not in the morality of either the crime or the criminal but in simply getting hold of the enormous amount of money Pearce has stolen. Alexander Pearce has 744 million in illegal assets that, given he is a British subject, we might seize! And interestingly, he goes about it using his own particular sense of what is right and what is wrong, his own decent and worldly morality."
Steven Berkoff plays the villain Shaw, a gangster who wants to find Alexander Pearce even more than Acheson does, if that's possible. "My character is a curious mix of devil, charm, and sophistication," says Berkoff.
Berkoff continues, "I have scenes with Angelina Jolie that are very intense and feature knives and guns. She made it so easy and kept her cool. She is fearless and very, very trusting. She doesn't bat an eyelid in an intense situation - she is so focused."
SHOOTING IN VENICE "Shooting in Venice gave this film a very special, joyful, and very beautiful flavor," says director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. Read more
ABOUT THE COSTUMES Two-time Academy Award-winning costume designer Colleen Atwood lent her talents to create the unforgettable wardrobe for The Tourist. Atwood was assisted by her international wardrobe department team of ten people strong, from the UK, U.S., and Italy.Read more
ABOUT THE SCORE Oscar-nominated composer James Newton Howard provides the score for The Tourist. "James Newton Howard has been one of my favorite composers ever since he made me cry during My Girl, made my heart race during The Fugitive and made it almost stop during The Devil's Advocate. Read more
ABOUT THE CAST
Academy Award and three-time Golden Globe winner ANGELINA JOLIE (Elise Ward) continues to be one of Hollywood's most talented leading actresses. Read more
JOHNNY DEPP (Frank Tupelo) most recently headlined an all-star cast as the Mad Hatter in the worldwide box office hit Alice in Wonderland. Read more
ABOUT THE FILMMAKERS
Writer/Director FLORIAN HENCKEL VON DONNERSMARCK was born in Cologne, Germany in 1973. He spent his childhood and youth in New York, Berlin, Frankfurt, and Brussels. In 1991, he went to Leningrad to study Russian Language and Literature. He graduated two years later in Saint Petersburg as a state-certified teacher of Russian as a foreign language.From 1993 to 1996, he completed a degree in Politics, Philosophy, and Economics at Oxford University. After an internship with director Lord Richard Attenborough, he decided to study fiction-directing and enrolled at the University of Television and Film in Munich. His four-minute student film Doberman, which he shot in 1998 from his own script, was screened at over forty festivals throughout the world and won him many awards, among them the Max-Ophuls Prize and the "Shocking Shorts Award" from Universal Studios. His first full-length film, The Lives of Others, which he again wrote and directed, brought Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck over forty international awards, and the film won the 2007 Academy Award® for Best Foreign Language Film. He is a member of the French Order of Arts and Letters, the Bavarian and Northrhine-Westfalian Orders of Merit, and the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.
CHRISTOPHER McQUARRIE (screenplay) was born and raised in Princeton Junction, New Jersey, where he attended West Windsor-Plainsboro High School South with director Bryan Singer and actor Ethan Hawke. In lieu of college he took a job working as an assistant teacher at a boarding school in Perth, Western Australia, and later hitchhiked around the western half of the continent. Returning to the United States a year later, he went to work for a detective agency in New Jersey for the next four years. In 1992, he applied to the New York City Police Department and was on his way to the academy when former schoolmate Singer offered him the opportunity to write their first feature film, Public Access, winner of the 1993 Sundance Film Festival's grand jury prize.Singer and McQuarrie collaborated again on the 1995 film The Usual Suspects, for which McQuarrie received best screenplay awards from Premiere magazine, The Texas Board of Review, and the Chicago Critics as well as the Edgar Award, The Independent Spirit Award, and the British and American Academy Awards. The film was later included on the New York Times list of the 1000 greatest films ever made, and the character Verbal Kint was included on AFI's list of the 100 greatest Heroes and Villains of all time. In 2006, the Writers Guild of America voted The Usual Suspects #35 on their list of 101 Greatest Screenplays.McQuarrie spent the next several years dividing his time between rewriting studio movies (such as Singer's X-Men) and developing a screenplay on the life of Alexander the Great, written with Peter Buchman, for Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio. (Scorsese and DiCaprio chose to do The Aviator first, making way for Oliver Stone to produce his version of Alexander.) McQuarrie also wrote and directed The Way of the Gun, and more recently McQuarrie has developed a script with co-writer Dylan Kussman about the life of John Wilkes Booth, and The Last Mission with co-writer Nathan Alexander detailing the harrowing last hours of WWII in the Pacific. He co-wrote (with Nathan Alexander) and produced Valkyrie, directed by Bryan Singer. Current projects include Champions, Wolverine II and The Monster of Florence.
JULIAN FELLOWES (Screenplay by) was catapulted into Hollywood's A-list of writers when he received the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 2002 for Gosford Park, which was his first produced film. His work was also honored by the Writer's Guild of America, The New York Film Critics' Circle and the National Society of Film Critics for Best Screenplay, and Fellowes was named ShoWest 2002's Screenwriter of the Year. Directed by Robert Altman, the film starred Emily Watson, Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren, Kristin Scott Thomas and Ryan Phillipe, and received a total of 7 Oscar nominations, including Best Picture. His current projects include Romeo and Juliet, directed by Carlo Carlei and produced by Ileen Maisel, and to be shot in Italy next year. He is developing two new film projects. First is The Girl on the Landing, based on the novel by Paul Torday, a thriller about a young couple whose mundane life is reshaped once the husband starts being visited by strange hallucinations. Production is set to begin in Spring 2011. Fellowes is also set to write the script for a four-hour mini-series about the Titanic for ITV Studios.
Fellowes recently created, wrote and executive produced the smash hit ITV series "Downtown Abbey," which launched in the UK on September 24th
In 2005, Fellowes made his directorial debut with the critically acclaimed Separate Lies (Fox Searchlight), starring Tom Wilkinson, Emily Watson and Rupert Everett, for which he received the Best Directorial Debut award from the National Board of Review. His second feature as both writer and director was From Time to Time, a haunting ghost story spanning two worlds and two centuries.
Fellowes adapted the screenplay from Lucy M. Boston's book "The Chimneys of Green Knowe" for Ealing Studios, and it was released early this year.
Other credits include the original screenplay for the biographical drama The Young Victoria, He also wrote screenplay for Vanity Fair (2004). Expanding his talents to the world of publishing, Fellowes has authored 2 novels: the international bestseller, Snobs, (2005) a witty satire of the English class system and the clever mystery Past Imperfect, (2008/2009), like Snobs a Sunday Times Best Seller, published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK and by St. Martin's Press in the US. His critically acclaimed children's book The Curious Adventures of the Abandoned Toys was published by Henry Holt Books in 2007. Not limiting his talents to film and publishing, Fellowes has also written the book for the Tony nominated stage production of "Mary Poppins." A co-production between Disney and Cameron Mackintosh, "Mary Poppins" continues its run as a record-breaking hit on the New York stage and on its national and international tour. Educated at Ampleforth College in Yorkshire and Magdalene College, Cambridge, Fellowes studied at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. He completed his training in repertory theatre at Northampton and Harrogate before making his West End début in "A Touch of Spring" by Sam Taylor at the Comedy Theatre.
Prior to his writing and directing career, Fellowes was an actor best known for his portrayal of the incorrigible Lord Kilwillie in the BBC's popular Sunday night series, "Monarch of the Glen." He was also featured in "Aristocrats" (1999) as the 2nd Duke of Richmond for the BBC and in "For the Greater Good" (1991), also for the BBC, which was directed by Danny Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) and was his big acting break. In the cinema, he was seen in Shadowlands with Anthony Hopkins, Damage with Jeremy Irons, Place Vendome with Catherine Deneuve and Tomorrow Never Dies with Pierce Brosnan.
Fellowes's screenwriting career began in the 1990's in England with his successful, Emmy award winning adaptation of "Little Lord Fauntleroy," as well as the BAFTA nominated "The Prince and the Pauper," both for the BBC.
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