The actor and director on why The Return took 30 years to make, their joy at persuading Juliette Binoche to join them – and the punishing regime that earned Fiennes his battle-scarred physique
Uberto Pasolini likes to say he has been thinking about adapting The Odyssey for 30 years – 10 years longer than it took Odysseus to win the Trojan war. A nephew of the director Luchino Visconti, the 67-year-old Italian film-maker has lived in London for 50 years. Pasolini, who won a Bafta for producing The Full Monty, first approached Ralph Fiennes to play Odysseus in 2011, after the actor had made his directorial debut with Coriolanus, believing Fiennes might also be able to direct the film.
They got as far as a location scout in Turkey, where Fiennes, then about to play Prospero in a Trevor Nunn production of The Tempest, practised his “Such stuff as dreams are made on” speech in an abandoned outdoor amphitheatre at dusk. “It was me and two goats,” recalls Pasolini over a video chat. “I get the hair sticking up on the nape of my neck just thinking about it. It was amazing.” Wearing glasses and with a distinguished-looking beard, he comes across like a voluble Italian academic.
