March 4, 1999

Istvan Szabo, the Hungarian director of Mephisto and Colonel Redl, initially wrote the script for The Taste of Sunshine with plans to shoot it as a mini-series for German TV. "It started in my mind with how in the whole of Middle Europe, not just Hungary, people's private lives have been influenced by history and politics," he explains.

"I wanted to tell the story of one family and how their whole life is deeply affected by the various movements in Europe. . . So I wrote this story, showing how these supposedly different regimes--be they an Empire, a republic or a foreign dictatorship--have put individuals under pressure. All regimes promise happiness, but dreadful things have happened in that name. Authority uses people. When it no longer needs them, it throws them away or destroys them. This enormous experience is only the experience of the 20th century. It is extraordinary that in one life, say that of my grandfather, a man could experience the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Nazi and the Communist Regime. Instead of showing one life through different ages, I thought it might be more profound to tell the story through three generations."

When Szabo described the project to his Hungarian-born friend Robert Lantos--then Chairman and CEO of Alliance Communications--Lantos asked to read the script. Six hundred pages long and written in Hungarian, the script was an imposing read, but Lantos was hooked from the first pages. "I flew back from Budapest to Canada and began reading it on the plane and couldn't put it down . . . It was a fascinating story and I knew I had to talk to Istvan and say forget mini series, forget television; we have to make this as a movie. It is a great magnum opus; if anything has the sweeping size to be a movie, it is this. So many movies get made which should be TV and this was the other way round."

Reworking the script as an English-language, feature-length screenplay presented a formidable challenge, and nearly three years passed before the new script was ready. However, Szabo found the process satisfying: "It was a marvelous experience to discover how a few words could tell the same story as we had previously told in hundreds of pages. To compress something helps you be more poetic."

As the production began to take shape, Szabo and Lantos focussed their attention next on casting the more than 150 principal roles. For the main characters of Ignatz, Adam and Ivan, the pair decided to approach British actor Ralph Fiennes. Says Lantos, "Probably for the first time in my entire professional life, we have landed our absolute first choice for leading actor. So often it doesn't happen for so many reasons, either they are not available or there are other problems. But in this case Ralph was our very first choice."

Fiennes describes himself as a fan of Szabo's work and says he was drawn by the quality of the script. "It is deeply humane without being sentimental. It is as rich as any great novel."

Of the first of his characters, Ignatz, Fiennes says: "[He's] a man who wants to be accepted as a member of the establishment of Hungary. He is a middle class Jew who wants to be assimilated successfully; he wants to feel the safety of the Establishment and the legal system. The infra-structure of the Empire is what gives him his raison-d'etre, to the point of neglecting the woman he loves."

"By contrast, his son Adam is a sportsman. He lives through his body, he's a championship top athletic fencer and his motivation is to succeed as an athlete. He too wants to be assimilated, but he's a physical man and has the linear vision of any sportsman. He is blind to social change, to the rise of Fascism, so in one sense he is quite limited. But in another he is the most romantic because he is a bit of a swashbuckler."

Fiennes sees Ivan, son of Adam and grandson of Ignatz, as "the most crippled and wounded psychologically by seeing his father murdered in a concentration camp. He's the most conflicted; he has literally no roots. He comes out of the war with a kind of Messianic determination to fight for Communism and take revenge on the Fascists. It's only when he sees the corruption of the Communist Regime and recognizes it as the same mindless corruption as Totalitarianism that he is able to make a change. He does it in the most fundamental way, by changing back to his family name."

Joining Fiennes in the cast are actors from Hungary, England, Germany, the United States and Canada, including William Hurt, Jennifer Ehle (Paradise Road), and Rachel Weisz (Stealing Beauty). Canadian actors Deborah Kara Unger (Crash), John Neville (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen), and Molly Parker (Kissed) also appear, the latter in the role of Hannah, a love interest of Fiennes' Adam.

Producer Lantos, now working primarily as a feature film producer with a distribution deal with the newly merged Alliance Atlantis Communications, notes that The Taste of Sunshine, shooting in and around Budapest, represents a first for him: "Other films we have made here have been for logistical reasons, but this one is shot here because the talent is from here and it is about this country. For that reason, it has different resonances for me as I am from Hungary. This film is about how you never escape your roots; in the story it takes three generations of the Sonnenschein/Sors family to understand that."