Development and casting
Towards the end of the 1960s, Sergio Sollima intended to adapt The Tigers of Mompracem into the form of a single feature film. The director contacted several Asian actors for the role of Sandokan, even the famous Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune, and worked on the script for about a year. Despite this, the project did not take off and was abandoned. [5] In the seventies, Goffredo Lombardo and Elio Scardamaglia, producers of Titanus and RAI respectively, joined forces to create a television drama starring the famous pirate created by Salgari. Their true inspiration was the general director Ettore Bernabei, who had long insisted on the idea of reducing Salgari's novels for the small screen. [6] Damiano Damiani, Duccio Tessari, Suso Cecchi D'Amico and even Sergio Leone were considered for directing, but none of them accepted. [7] Lombardo and Scardamaglia then chose Sollima. The director was busy editing Devil in the Brain (1972) when Tullio Kezich came to him to propose Sandokan. [8] Sollima was enthusiastic, but made one condition: he would direct the drama only on real locations, with Asian actors and with absolute realism. [3]
Being a good connoisseur of Emilio Salgari, literary father of Sandokan and of the novels of the pirates of Malaysia cycle, Sollima had learned that all the author's works, although equipped with an apparently simple narrative line, were very difficult to transpose onto television. [5] [9] For the subject, Sollima decided to base himself above all on The Tigers of Mompracem and The Pirates of Malaya , expanding some subplots (English colonial development, the affirmation of the empire of the white raja James Brooke and the love story between Sandokan and Marianna). and the presence of some secondary characters (Yanez and Brooke). [7] [9] The screenplay was written by Sollima and Alberto Silvestri. [7] Sollima committed himself to the search for actors "who, despite their inevitable realistic dimension, were capable of suggesting something heroic, magical". [5] After having set aside Mifune for the role of Sandokan, Sollima organized a vast and complex research plan to find the protagonist's interpreter. The latter, Kabir Bedi, a young Indian of Sikh religion, who auditioned to play Tremal-Naik, was discovered in Mumbai in 1974.
"They examined me and told me that yes, perhaps I would have been good for the role of the nineteenth-century pirate imagined by Emilio Salgari - Bedi said in an interview - but that for a final decision I would have to present myself, at my own expense, to a casting in Rome. I decided to try my luck and the audition went well, so much so that they immediately paid for my hotel and began to hold me in high regard. Today - he continues - I want to pay a tribute of gratitude to the director Sergio Sollima who allowed my debut and to Rai who had the courage to launch into a production that was very expensive for those times". [10] The actor had a "plump" physique and had to undergo hard training in order to lose weight. Furthermore, he also took swimming lessons (he didn't know how to swim) and horse riding. [3] A problem regarding the cast for Sollima was Tremal-Naik who, for the director, had always been the "least personal character, the most difficult to make act [...], a faded copy of Sandokan himself". [5] It was decided to modify the character, making him "a sort of Mowgli from The Jungle Book a few years older". [11] The role went to the young Ganesh Kumar, a waiter who worked in a hotel in Madras. [3]
The role of Marianna Guillonk, Sandokan's lover, was given to Carole André, which Sollima had already contacts with her years earlier in his film debut, the western Faccia a faccia (1967). According to the director, Carole had the "right cosmopolitan charm", also because she was "the daughter of Gaby André, a French diva and an American Eli Smith who was a kind of gangster". Sollima went against the production which instead did everything to impose an Italian actress. [3] Although initially, Sollima had thought of Helmut Griem [7] for the role of Brooke, but ended up entrusting Adolfo Celi. In particular, Celi and Philippe Leroy were judged perfect by the director, who considered them «two authentic adventurers» (Sollima was evidently referring to Celi's Brazilian past and Leroy's past in the foreign legion, fighting in both Indochina and Algeria). [3] Sal Borgese was set to play Kammamuri, but was fired when the character was omitted from the script. The actor, however, will play the role in La tigre è ancora viva: Sandokan alla riscossa! which was filmed a few years later. [12]
Filming locations
After two years in the making, principal photography on the film began in July 1974 and lasted eight months. [13] There were no particular complications, apart from some difficulties in finding the sets. Initially, it was expected to shoot in Borneo, the theater of Salgari's stories, but the territory was judged too "uncomfortable". Sollima then moved the troupe to safer and easier territories such as India, western Malaysia and Thailand. [13] According to Sollima: «The palace of James Brooke (Sarawak), which in reality is the Istana of Kuching, quite squalid, was found in Trivandrum (Thiruvananthapuram), the capital of Kerala, in the extreme south of India, that is, the sultan's palace, with a very curious architecture, almost entirely in carved wood, with a very Malaysian atmosphere." The exteriors of the Sarawak peak were recreated by cleverly using some views of the famous Golconda and Bhongir forts. [14] The search for the island on which to set Mompracem therefore cost the director and the technical cast time and effort, in fact Sollima declared that he inspected various islands (that of Keramàn and those of Langkaw) before finding the right one (Kapas, an island that is at times rocky and at times rich in beaches and palm trees which had previously been a real refuge for pirates). [11] The search for Labuan. Sollima said: «Labuan cinematographic was born from an Indo-Malay collage. In Malaysia, in fact, there are very few traces of the period of English colonisation, erased if anything by those of the current "Americanization". The "nature" of Labuan, that is Malay, one hundred percent authentic, but the civilized, "English" part, we had to look for in India: Lord Guillonk's villa, the large park, the bush where the tiger hunt takes place. Then the tigers of course and the elephants and the "mahuts", or elephant drivers and certain scenes in which many "sipahi" were needed, that is, the Indian mercenary soldiers of the East India Company, we found all this in Madras (Chennai), the capital of Tamil Nadu, in southern India". [11] [14] Lord Guillonk's villa was simulated by the Blavatsky bungalow in Madras, named in honor of its former mistress, the famous philosopher and theosophist Madame Blavatsky. [13]
The "aerial" fight between Sandokan and the tiger was filmed by Sollima with the help of the same team that later supervised the special effects of Superman by Richard Donner. One day, in India, the director shot the tiger's leap, on another, in London, the leap of Bedi's stunt double. Then, thanks to the help of special effects, he linked the two sequences to the editing, making them coincide. [7]
