Moscow in Madrid Award-winning director David Lean also looked to Spain when he was forced to find a substitute for Moscow to film his blockbuster Doctor Zhivago. In the days pre-glasnost and perestroika, Boris Pasternak’s book had been banned by the Kremlin so a replica of the Soviet capital was painstakingly constructed from scratch outside Madrid, where most of the wintery scenes were filmed in temperatures reaching 90 degrees Farenheit although, when the sun persistently refused to stay out of shot, some scenes had to be filmed in Finland! The shoot lasted 10 months and included sequences in Soria, where the Varykino family estate was set, using frozen beeswax to replicate ice. For the charge of the Partisans across a frozen lake, a cast iron sheet was placed over a dry river-bed and fake snow (mostly marble dust) sprinkled on top. Lean was instrumental in bringing many other films to Spain, including Empire of the Sun and the 1962 epic Lawrence of Arabia, starring Peter O’Toole. Many of the desert scenes were shot in Almería and Doñana, Moorish Seville doubled as Cairo and Jerusalem and the city’s stunning Plaza de España became the Cairo Officers’ Club. The attack on Aqaba, one of the more stirring scenes in the movie with a spectacular pan shot of dust rising up from behind the charging Arabs, was reconstructed in the Tabernas Desert.
Spain’s magnificent Moorish castles have also come into play in the making of major movies. The 10th century castle in Molina de Aragón, Guadalajara, witnessed the investigations of Sean Connery in The Name of the Rose (1986); Loarre Castle in Huesca was chosen by Ridley Scott for scenes in his 2005 Crusades epic, Kingdom of Heaven, starring Orlando Bloom; and Spain was the principal location for the 1961 film El Cid, starring Charlton Heston and Sofía Loren. Time magazine reported that the 195-minute epic employed 7,000 extras, 10,000 costumes, 35 ships, 50 outsize engines of medieval war and four of the noblest old castles in Spain: Belmonte Castle in Cuenca, Ampudia and Torrelobatón in Castile and León and Peñíscola in Castellón. The latter, built by the Knights Templar in the 14th century, was reinforced with new walls for the film and is now a popular tourist attraction and emblem of the seaside town’s annual comedy film festival. Meanwhile, magnificent Los Hornillos Palace, surrounded by parkland outside the Cantabrian village of Las Fraguas, provided the exteriors of the haunted house setting for The Others, a 2001 psychological thriller directed by Alejandro Amenábar, starring Nicole Kidman,and based on Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw. The film won eight Goyas and boosted tourist visitors to the stylish mansion designed by English architect Selden Wornum, modelled on the Magdalena Palace in Santander. These are just some of the places in Spain to have experienced the magic of Hollywood. And, with Spanish cinema enjoying a Renaissance not seen since the days of Louis Buñuel and La Movida, the forthcoming Clash of the Titans blockbuster won’t be Spain’s last ‘take’ on the subject by a long way. n
Cinematic Castles
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