The Vatican has vetoed a request by the makers of Angels and Demons – a film based on Dan Brown’s best-seller of the same name – to shoot scenes in Rome churches.
‘Normally we read the script, but this time it was not necessary. The name Dan Brown was enough,’ Father Marco Fibbi, spokesman for the diocese of Rome, said in an interview Monday in an Italian magazine.
Brown also wrote The Da Vinci Code, which together with its 2006 film version drew sharp criticism from Roman Catholic clerics for a plot which suggests Jesus had children with Mary Magdalene.
Angels and Demons, which deals with a conspiracy at the Vatican during a conclave to elect a new pope, is mostly set in Rome and like The Da Vinci Code, features Harvard symbols expert Robert Langdon – played in both films by Hollywood star Tom Hanks.
The producers of Angels and Demons sought permission to shoot inside two Rome churches, Santa Maria del Popolo and Santa Maria della Vittoria, where key scenes including several grisly murders take place.
Following what is apparently a routine procedure when religious premises are concerned, the Italian state, the legal owner of the two churches, forwarded the request to the diocese of Rome, whose bishop is the Pope.
‘We often offer our churches to film productions that are in tune with religious sentiments, but not when a film follows a line of fantasy which harms such sentiments,’ Fibbi told the TV listings magazine Sorrisi e Canzoni (Smiles and Songs).
Since early June, director Ron Howard, who also made The Da Vinci Code, Hanks and other cast and crew members have been involved in filming on location in Rome.
But shooting involving the two churches and St Peter’s Basilica which also features prominently in the plot, was restricted to external shots, while according to Italian news reports, the interiors will be re-created in Hollywood studios.
The Da Vinci Code, an international box-office hit was like the book, banned in several Muslim countries on the grounds that it offended members of a particular religion.
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