28/02/2006

Shooting began yesterday in Thailand on Alain Berbérian’s Treasure Island, a very liberal adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s famous novel, starring Gérard Jugnot, Alice Taglioni, Jean-Paul Rouve and Vincent Rottiers. Initially entitled La Baronne et le pirate (lit. “The Baroness and the Pirate”), the project is based on a screenplay co-written by Fabien Suarez, Sion Marciano, W. Solal and Fabrice Roger-Lacan.

The story unfolds in 1700 and follows the famous treasure hunt led by the fearsome one-legged pirate, Long John Silver (Gérard Jugnot), who is accompanied by an impoverished baroness (Alice Taglioni), herself an adventurer and owner of a boat; a courageous and naïve young man who has the treasure map etched in his faulty memory (Vincent Rottiers, a standout from Eric Caravaca’s The Passenger [+see also:
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Produced by Jean-Pierre Ramsay-Lévi for Fit Productions, Treasure Island received support from the private Hungarian Concorde Film Trust. Filming will run 11 weeks (until April 7) in Thailand, from mid-April to mid-May in Budapest and then from May 20-27 in the UK. The film’s DoP is Slovenia’s Vilko Filac, who worked on Emir Kusturica’s Underground. The film will be Alain Berbérian’s sixth feature (his first being 1994’s Fear City). One the most bankable directors at the French box office, Berbérian has created a niche for himself with popular comedies such as Dead Weight (2002) and L’enquête corse (2004).

(Translated from French)