Original subtitles

Memo to the chief of studio security from head of production of Gore Vidal's

Caligula.

No journalist, photographers, friends, or even family of those involved on the

production will be allowed on the set.

Everyone, repeat everyone, will carry at all times an identity card producible on

demand.

These instructions must be adhered to.

I'm Gore Vidal, and I've written a screenplay about one of the most

extraordinary, some think one of the most wicked young men that ever lived,

the Roman Emperor Caligula.

Rome's really buzzing about the film.

They're a little shocked, maybe, that something like that is going on right

outside the city.

There are many rumors around town.

I don't think I can refer what I've heard now here.

Everything one has heard about Caligula is pure fantasy.

That's probably because no one's been allowed on the set of the film.

Many of the terrible things that we are going to show in this movie are indeed

from history, are indeed from the only two sources that we have, Suetonius and

Tacitus.

And they may be true or they may not be true, but whatever they are, they are

representative of something that...

Those who are interested in history have known for 2,000 years and which until

now have never been, how shall I say, divulged to the general public.

What you are about to see is a documentary on the making of Gore

Vidal's Caligula.

Hello, are you running?

This is Malcolm McDowell speaking from the set of Gore Vidal's Caligula.

And we're now at the end of the film, very nearly. We have another three days

to go.

It's very nearly Christmas and we're all freezing.

The last shot was actually filmed on New Year's Eve.

It was very cold and here in Rome an incredible motion picture saga was

drawing to a close.

The brief tragic story of a young man to whom the inexplicable vagaries

of human history had decreed an empire had been told.

I have existed from the morning of the world, and I shall exist until the last

star falls from the night.

Although I have taken the form of Gaius Caligula, I am all men as I am no man,

and therefore I am... a god.

What's it like with your husband?

What's what like?

He's so fat. He's disgusting.

He's not. He's just loud. But tiny where it counts.

How do you know?

I saw him at the bars.

The rumors, speculation, and controversy generated by Gore Vidal's Caligula

still continue to this day.

Malcolm McDowell.

The young British actor who achieved international stardom in Stanley

Kubrick's Clockwork Orange plays the very demanding role of Caligula. What's

happening to you now?

Nothing. His 77-year-old grandfather and predecessor, Tiberius Caesar, is played

by Peter O'Toole.

Sir John Gielgud plays Nerva, senator, friend of Tiberius.

Teresa Ann Savoy plays Drusilla.

Caligula's sister and favorite lover.

Helen Mirren, member of Britain's Royal Shakespeare Company, plays Saisonia, his

wife.

The film was directed by Tinto Brass, with additional scenes

directed and filmed by Bob Guccione and Giancarlo Lui.

It was early in the Roman spring when construction began on the first of the

64 huge and complex sets that alone distinguished this film from

any of its epic predecessors.

And work on a scale reminiscent of the late Cecil B. DeMille's more spectacular

efforts continued for over a year.

Hollywood on the Tiber.

had once more returned to Rome.

The reasons for filming this picture in Italy are fairly obvious.

Firstly, it is the historic site of

the Roman emperors. This is where Caligula lived, where he loved, and

where he died.

And apart from that,

Making a film of this magnitude, particularly because we had to start

from scratch, that is to say, every single prop had to be manufactured,

every bit of costuming, clothing, wigs, the architecture, it all had to be done

over again.

There was no such thing as a prop house in Italy that was prepared, or anywhere

else in the world for that matter, that was prepared to supply the sort of

things that we needed.

And in fact, we needed hundreds of artisans, not just men who were

particularly expert in the area of costuming, sandal making,

propping, whatever description, but men who have a particular artisan, with a

particular feeling for Italy, for Rome, the kind of architecture that we

encounter on every single street corner.

And there's no greater concentration of this sort of talent anywhere else in the

world. Italy is the best.

And also because Italy is, and particularly Rome, is the home of Danilo

Donati, whom I personally feel, and I think a lot of critics will agree with

me, is the very best art director that a film like this could have.

Danilo has won at least three or four Academy Awards.

He's probably the finest costume and set designer in the world.

And I wanted him. He was part of the package of excellence that we were

putting together.

And Danilo's a strange guy. It's very difficult to get him outside of Rome.

From bronze to clay to plaster.

This. is the god Jupiter.

Sculpted and cast exactly as if the Romans themselves would have created the

original. A mold is made, covered by various thin layers of plaster.

Then a final thick layer is spread over all to form the outer shell.

When it dries, it's chipped away.

to reveal the finished statue underneath.

Expert draftsmen, using photographs of the remains of many Roman vessels,

together with other historic references, executed their most extraordinary work

to date.

It was to be the largest single prop ever designed for a motion picture.

A Roman ship, which would never put to sea its 300-foot nautical brothel,

was gold-leafed from stem to stern.

and was decorated with hand-carved, larger-than-life statues.

These sculpted figures and ore carvings were models based upon detailed

research of actual Roman artifacts, which are like this material, hidden in

the secret vaults of the Museum of Naples, and shown in this book,

containing photographs of the ruins of Pompeii.

As history teaches us, sex, as expressed in many of its forms,

was a way of life to the Romans.

When I heard from Franco Rossellini that Gore was going to do this

script, I was delighted.

I took the first opportunity to go to Italy, to Ravella, where he lived, and

spend three or four days with him just discussing the script and some of the

ideas that we had conceptually in the beginning.

And I found him to be enormously well-informed, enormously himself

excited by the project.

And he had this great willingness to pour himself into it.

Not just to sit down and write the script, but to go, to make a personal

pilgrimage to some of the historic sites that involved the life and death of

Caligula.

I knew that Gore would be as liberal and as liberated as I wanted him to be and

as I wanted the film to be.

I've always been interested in the Roman Empire.

Since, after all, like so many of us, I'm a child of the American Empire, and

empires tend to be more like one another than different from one another.

In a sense, we are looking in a mirror, and we are seeing not just an emperor 2

,000 years dead, but we see ourselves.

It's odd to think that

18 years ago, almost exactly, I was here in Italy writing

a film called Ben-Hur. There's a photograph of the first day of shooting

with Charlton Heston, William Wyler, the director.

And now, 18 years later, I'm back in Rome, and we are doing a movie

called Gorby Dow's Caligula.

History tends to be pretty much what we make.

Each generation has its own view of Roman emperors.

It was a strange society that's not as corrupt as it is sometimes

depicted.

And, of course, there was slavery.

You could own another person.

Caligula lived nearly 2,000 years ago.

The question is, why do a story about a young man who was murdered 2,000 years

ago? He was an emperor of Rome. There's much written about.

We don't know whether what we know is true or not.

We know that he did exist.

He was regarded as a monster.

And I think what attracted me to Caligula as a character is what happens

if you take a normal young man, rather ordinary,

and you give him absolute power of life and death over everybody in the world.

And I think it's a fascinating study to watch as Caligula begins to regard

people as things.

In a sense, when you allow people the

power to use other people as things, you begin to treat them

As toys and as children sooner or later break their toys, so Caligula began to

break people, to murder them.

I'm not particularly in love with blood and violence, but there is a degree of

that.

When Caligula became emperor, I think he tried to be a good emperor.

He tried to be popular.

In fact, he always was popular with the people until the end of his life.

Today, we begin a new era.

All those who have been exiled from Rome, I do now recall, I grant a

general amnesty.

I think the most interesting thing about him is his terrible family.

His grandfather, by adoption, the Emperor Tiberius, in whose reign was

born Jesus Christ.

Tiberius managed to murder Khalil, his father, his brothers, put away most of

the family.

So as I begin the movie, the story...

You see this young man terrified that this wicked old man, played by Peter

O'Toole, is going to murder him.

So in a sense, one has great sympathy for Caligula. It's not his fault that he

was born into this family. And it's not his fault that his grandfather would

like to murder him.

So suddenly it's a case of who will murder whom.

My colleague has survived.

And I find that very terrible things were done by him.

Some of these things we show in the film.

Very slowly.

I want him to feel death.

I want him to smell death.

His wife's expecting her first child.

We're not quite sure who the father is. Him or God.

Soon. The great love of his life was his own sister, Drusilla, and I think that

that has to be shown.

And you will be my queen.

You can't marry a sister.

You can in Egypt.

But we're in Rome.

And you already promised.

And when she died, I think he began to change.

And he picked as his enemy the ruling class of the country, which was the

Senate.

Treasury, which was a considerable amount of money that Tiberius had

amassed. He was giving it away to the people in order to be popular.

Meanwhile, he was systematically killing off the members of the Senate.

Systematically, he began to rape their sons, their daughters, their wives.

He was fairly indiscriminate.

And this, more than anything else, shocked Rome.

It was a pretty unshockable society.

And finally, at the end, they could take it no longer.

So their dignity assaulted and affronted.

They conspired to murder him.

And then finally, at the age of 29, he was murdered.

would be murdered.

And in a sense, what is quite exciting in the character is he looks forward to

it and he plunges into death, which for him is the last great trip.

People think of him as a revolutionary or a figure of

fun or a madman.

There are so many aspects to him. We know very little really about him.

Just the information that was given to us through a historian, a Roman

historian called Suetonius.

And he was from the other side of the family.

So Suetonius paints Caligula as a very wicked madman.

That's the only reason that Suetonius can see why he did so many, on the face

of it, crazy things.

My interpretation of the character is not quite like that.

You think I'm a lunatic, don't you?

You don't understand me.

We worked on the script, naturally.

I wanted to work on my own character, my own part, and we wanted to take it a

few steps further and give Caligula a definite point of view and give a reason

for this so-called madness.

Yes, Jupiter.

What?

Yes, I hear you.

What?

Speak up!

He's very angry because I'm the king of the gods now.

But he has to do what I tell him.

Don't you, Jupiter!

I suppose I see Caligula as, to put it in a nutshell, the ultimate anarchist.

I, Caligula Caesar, command in the name of the Senate and the people of Rome.

The Roman Empire, like any other empires, are made up

purely of bureaucrats. The army and the priests and everything else, and he

systematically goes...

from one institution to the other, trying to provoke them and trying to get

an action out of them. And this is why, in our view, the misconception is that

Caligula was completely mad.

Things are going far too well, Longinus. Too well?

Yes. No wars, no catastrophes, nothing.

Yes, Lord.

Can't you ever say anything except, yes, Lord?

No wonder life's so dull.

Having no work

to do?

Anyway, he tries to destroy these institutions.

Of course, naturally, he never fails. I mean, he does fail.

simply because it's impossible to destroy the bureaucracy.

And I think that that is a very relevant point for modern-day audiences.

Tiberius's palace, once poised on the topmost point of the tiny jewel-like

island of Capri, provides the setting for our story.

Today, the ruins seem harmless.

But the legends passed down to us tell of terrible happenings.

Here is where Tiberius used to walk.

And up here is where he indulged in his favorite way of disposing of

those who displeased him.

It is still called the

Tiberius Jump.

When Tiberius died on the island at the age of 78, Caligula inherited the city

and an empire.

Indeed, the world.

The Rome of the first century AD was a city of enormous contrasts.

On one hand, there was great poverty and squalor.

And there were those whose life was a constant search for bread and a corner

to sleep in.

Human rights were unheard of.

And whereas the terrible games at the Colosseum had not yet started, people

were already being thrown to the lions.

On the other hand, there were the privileged few who had much more than

they could possibly need.

And here, the film draws some succinct parallels with Western society as we

know it today.

Today, Caligula would be seen as a revolutionary, a dangerous radical.

Is it any wonder that the memory of this fledgling emperor

despite his three brief years on the throne, should survive these 2,000

years.

I think the only reason for dealing with a historical figure is if you

have something to say about the way people are today, the way people have

always been.

be Gord Vidal as Caligula, but I myself, sitting there in the audience, would

never do the dreadful things that Caligula did.

Well, I think that there is a Caligula in everybody.

This, after all, was a pretty normal, average young man put into an abnormal

and extraordinary situation.

And I think that if I can communicate to an audience

That in this monster there is something that is in present in all of us

But for one reason or another generally lack of opportunity

Or some ethical sense that stops us therefore we are not in

action Caligula But I'm trying to go to something much deeper Which is that

in our dreams?

We are Caligula

And what, after all, is a film? What is celluloid?

But dreams made into a kind of shadow reality.

I know that there is a terrible controversy between the

director and the author, Gore Vidal.

The director told me that the writer wanted to do a realistic film and had

done an extensive amount of research.

On the other hand, the director wanted to do something completely different and

said Vidal had no understanding of history.

By now, I think everybody in America is aware of the... Well, I think everybody

in the Western world is aware of the problems between Gore Vidal and our

director, Tinto Brass.

Gore was struck by the fact that a great number of directors today take credit

for the films that they produce. They're known as the authors of the films.

And Gore felt that the true author of the film was in fact

the man who wrote the screenplay, not the director. He said that

directors were really parasites and that they lived off the backs of the authors.

And that a director would be well advised to simply follow the directions

as well as the dialogue of the script writer.

Well, this is as unrealistic, in fact, as some of the subsequent antics of

Tinto Brass.

What Tinto Brass says is that he's trying to make a film on the

effects of power.

I've heard about this film ever since they were trying to put it up.

in the house of Gore Vidal when he had finished writing the script.

And he also asked, as a friend probably, my advice

on who would have been the best director.

And I said, jokingly, that in order to make a film on a sexual maniac

and a madman, you needed another sexual maniac and madman.

And... The only answer was Finto Brass.

Who is Caligula for me?

Surely I know exactly what he's not.

He's not what he is for Gore Vidal, that's for sure.

Anyway, from what comes out from Zvetonius, it seems that

Caligula wanted the power just to use it in a

positive way.

even a moral way but that from a moment a certain moment on he started becoming

he became crazy foolish and totally immoral so

i did a how do you call it um spiritually

spiritual meeting and i evolved the spirits of caligula and he told me that

i was correct the 65 percent

in the interpretation of his character.

So, well, I am happy. The 65% is a good percentage.

And now I hope to keep the 65% and, if possible, even to bring

it to the 70, 80%. That would be really a good, good...

percentage in front of such a big character as Caligula was.

I'm using sex, surely, because I believe deeply in sex as a medium of

communication.

I mean that everybody understands the language of sex.

Action!

The Imperial Brothel.

As you can see, ladies and gentlemen, we have gone to great expense to bring you

the finest flesh in our empire.

victims that power does.

I'm deeply convinced that power is something that is absolutely

immoral.

Morality of power is immorality.

I must admit that power, I hate it deeply, but it also appealing to me

deeply.

There is such a big amount of energy, of vitality involved with power that it can

be fascinating.

But at the same time, I think that it is a duty of an artist to warn

people about the dangers that are implicit in power and mainly in the

men of power.

If one takes into consideration that a film is really the work, it's probably

the only art form today that's made up of the collective

efforts of a great number of people.

And both Gore and Tinto really have to accept, not only in the practical

sense, but in the philosophical sense, that neither one nor the other of them

are all important.

And that they are, together with everyone else, contributors.

Contributors to a single final work of art.

An enormous work of art.

An enormous work that could never have been completed without all the efforts

of all the people that were involved.

Many, many talented and creative people.

The rigid disciplines and pressures of filmmaking were felt by all.

But there was no letting up.

And as time passed,

Men and machines seem to contribute to a single goal.

People.

Work.

The days and the nights punctuated the continuous labor.

The flow of time.

Of life.

Uniting the legends of yesterday with the work realities of today.

Night became day.

And day became night.

And the strain of all those long hours began to make its present obvious.

But in the end, as always, the show went on.

The Emperor!

Alice Caligula, came about as a result of the decision that we took in the very

beginning, and that was to bar the press.

This is the kind of decision that one doesn't take lightly because one wants

as much publicity as one can get.

But because of the extraordinary nature of the film,

even to the way in which it was being cast,

We didn't want people with the wrong idea to

start talking about what they had seen and exactly what we were doing.

So the result was that a considerable amount of rumor was bandied about and in

fact picked up by the press all over the world.

But it was always rumor.

No one to this day to this very moment unless they've actually seen the film

knows what's in it

And it was important to, once we had begun, to maintain the secrecy of

production. We had people who, cameramen who tried to break in. We had people who

tried out for parts of the film who were in fact journalists rather than actors.

And I'm happy to say that although a few pictures, a few still pictures were

pirated and secreted out of the organization, out of the studio, out of

the production, that...

No one person or no one collection of photographs or no one

grouping together of stories and rumors can tell exactly what happened, exactly

what we did. That was and remained at all times an absolute secret.

One by one I watched you murder your family, your friends.

The best men in Rome.

I went one day to the set and saw Sir John Gielgud and Peter O'Toole lounging

around in the bathroom with lots of naked, pretty little boys.

And I was impressed.

Liar!

This unusual secrecy surrounding the production, particularly because of the

few selected exceptions to the rule and the planned leaks to the news media,

created a great deal of interest and gossip around Groton.

People in the media did guess that unusual things were indeed happening

behind those closed doors.

And some of them may even have deserved the rumors they themselves had

generated.

We've heard things about...

really explicit and somewhat degenerate sex scenes.

And the studio, of course, is encouraging all that, I think.

They just keep saying, oh, well, you'll see, you'll see.

And they've barred people from the set.

We've heard a lot of

News. Malcolm McDowell in bed with his horse.

News.

Malcolm McDowell going to bed with his sister.

Those kinds of things. They got people a little bit excited.

Incest and homosexuality shown rather explicitly, but nobody knows what

kind of aversion we'll get here in Italy. I don't know. I'd like to see the

original, if it is as bad as they say.

We have lots of sex in the film.

I think in Rome of that time, the decadent period of Rome, that sex was

used as a pleasurable exercise and not frowned upon. It was only when the

Christian ethic came into being that the famous Roman orgy

was frowned upon.

But we treat it as part of everyday life and therefore...

People enjoy it.

I never thought I would find myself in a real live orgy.

It was exciting. It was tormenting.

I love sex.

It comes very naturally to me.

It's the embodiment, if you like, of all the good qualities of life.

You can feel happy. You can feel sad.

It can bring out all kinds of emotions in you.

It's fun.

It's people.

It's togetherness.

It's great.

Quite an experience. I got a chance to watch and to look around at everybody

else. In fact, most people looked like they were enjoying it.

I suppose when I was looking at the other girls doing their thing, I was

wondering what they were thinking.

It was a real orgy. People were actually doing it.

and I was not in the least inhibited. I did not feel shy or that

I was doing something bad.

I wasn't ashamed of anything that I did in the film because it's something that

everyone does all the time.

The Romans admitted it, but we don't. We have hang-ups about it.

And the film is explicit, sexually explicit, there's no question about it.

Now, nowhere do we make any apologies for this.

Nor do I wish now to provide any kind of exceptional rationale or apology.

Suffice it to say that in order to make this film historically accurate, and it

was an important part of the original concept, we decided to show life in Rome

exactly as it was.

And that meant taking into consideration a new kind of morality, a kind of

morality that was peculiar to Roman culture, the Roman mores.

I've always had fantasies of being in something like that, performing sex on

film.

I was excited, anxious, and...

They told me the movie would be strong sexually, but I didn't know specifically

what I would do, what I was going to do.

But at the time, I became very close with Annika DiLorenzo,

who was the pet of the year.

And we preferred to do something very sexual in Caligula

with one another, knowing we could trust each other.

knowing that we were beautiful together, knowing we could imagine that

and that we could act it out.

It was spontaneous.

We didn't pre-plan it.

We made love together.

There was no jealousy. We related to each other.

So we did it.

indicates nothing more than the fact that we see Rome as

accurately as possible in the historic sense.

And we think this is absolutely vital to the success of the film.

The reason why we decided to make Caligula in the first place was to

bring together two diametrically opposed

Aspects of the film industry.

The traditional overground establishment side.

And the underground side.

The X-rated side.

Because X-rated films, for better or worse, have become an industry. They are

a force that has to be dealt with in our society.

And I felt that the fastest and best way, the most meaningful way to deal

with this kind of a force was to bring it right up.

to date and make it acceptable, make it part of the establishment aspect of

filmmaking.

And Gore Vidal's Caligula offered an opportunity to do this in a way that I

hadn't imagined before.

Hence the use of people like Malcolm McDowell and Peter O'Toole's John

Gildgood and Helen Mirren, members of the Old Vic, the Royal Shakespearean

Company, to give it the kind of acting guts.

the kind of quality that are really needed.

There are scenes in Caligula that will shock, surprise, and no doubt offend a

great number of people.

But if I can just use the word rationale for a second, the rationale for this is,

this is not pornography, this is paganography.

This is the morality of pagan Rome, pre-Christian Rome, where one can see

the liaison, the relationship.

The profound love that existed between Caligula and his sister.

That we can show this love affair in all of its beauty.

And indeed in all of its tragedy.

Because that's the way it was and that's the way it was accepted.

Another particularly good reason for doing this film was because it gave us

as a company a terrific advantage.

And that was of using the beautiful girls that we portray in the magazine,

the Penthouse Pets.

And indeed, I brought 13 of them to Italy with me.

13 gorgeous girls, two of whom were Pets of the Year.

And because of the...

extravagant use of female beauty in any film dealing with the

court of the Roman Caesars.

This gave us, I think, an advantage over almost anybody else who would be making

that kind of a film.

One, two, three, four. All right. Now move a little bit to the right.

All right.

Ellen, let's do the other step. Now.

Good. There followed many rehearsals, many trials, and

some errors before the actresses were ready to become priestesses and enter

the pool of the sacred goddess Isis.

Go ahead.

Two thousand years ago, the poet Ovid demonstrated in verse that he too

had a keen eye for the feminine form.

I admire a girl in makeup for what

she is, and a girl without for what she could be.

I love the pale, and I love the golden.

The swarthy are lovely too.

Black hair on snow-white shoulders reminds me of Leda's raven locks.

A platinum blonde of flaxen-haired aurora love, I find,

pathologizes life.

I fall for the young and feel for the not-so-young. One has the looks, the

other... The experience.

Put it like this.

There's beauty in Rome.

To please all tastes and mind are all embracing.

I know that this film about Caligula is going to be very

expensive because in Italy they used to make historical Greek and Roman films.

That is this one.

There was one scene in particular shot in the Roman Senate which had been

rebuilt.

There were more than a hundred senators and a large number of extras.

I've seen certain scenes

which were very impressive,

and I've seen several scenes which were being shot, and it was clear that the

style of the actors was very original and intense.

This is certainly not going to be a conventional historical film.

It doesn't matter.

It's all right. It's only a show.

I would say that Caligula is probably a film about power, about the structure of

power in old Rome, but a film that would also tell about how power is exercised

nowadays and how power is abused.

It has an irresistible mixture of art and genitals in it.

It's an adult film.

I really think the film is going to be an enormous success. It has to be.

It has things in it that no one has ever seen before in a motion picture. And I'm

not just talking about the X-rated aspects of it.

It's the kind of film that, no matter what the critics say, you're going to

have to see it.

My lords, I am now to be married to Sisonia, the mother of my

son, Caligula Germanicus.

People are going to have to go and see this film, whatever.

Because it is so richly embroidered with life.

We're happening with a whole human drama.

You are now mother, wife, and son-in-law.

But you cannot possibly absorb all that there is in this film with one viewing.

It's going to make a tremendous splash wherever it's shown.

In fact, I defy a normal, healthy, young American male or woman

to not go and see Gore Vidal's Caligula.

I think the film is going to be something.

I think it is a film that will be widely discussed around the world.

And everybody's dying to see it.

Simply because I think it is a very entertaining picture, and I think...

That, in the end, is what people want to see.

Whatever Gauvidal's curricula may be, one thing is certain,

it will, without question, be the most widely seen and talked about film of

our time.