Director Ron Howard vs. the Vatican

In a move that the Vatican is claiming to be simply a publicity stunt, director Ron Howard has stated that the Holy City interfered with his efforts to obtain permits to film certain scenes from his new religious thriller set in Rome, "Angels & Demons." The movie, which is based on the best-selling novel written by Dan Brown, the author of The DaVinci Code, stars Tom Hanks in another story about the secret ancient brotherhood known as the Illuminati. The group is supposedly a conclave of religious leaders developing a high-tech weapons system intended to tear down the Vatican.

Howard said that he didn’t even try to secure cooperation on the part of the Vatican because he had encountered so much opposition during his filming of The DaVinci Code, which was also about the Illuminati, and the story had enraged many leaders of the Catholic church. This new movie continues the story of Robert Langdon, a symbologist from Harvard, who is recruited by the Vatican to help them after the Illuminati are responsible for kidnapping four of the cardinals who are being considered as candidates for being the next pope. They threaten to murder one cardinal each hour and then blow up a bomb to destroy the Vatican.

Howard says the Vatican exerted some influence over his petition for permits to film parts of this new movie. He was told that he would not be allowed to shoot scenes located in Rome where there were churches in the background of the scenes. "When you come to film in Rome, the official statement to you is that the Vatican has no influence," Howard said. "Everything progressed very smoothly, but unofficially a couple of days before we were to start filming in several of our locations, it was explained to us that through back channels and so forth that the Vatican had exerted some influence."

Howard said that he wasn’t all that surprised, but the move did frustrate him. But still, he was able to stick to the plot and his intentions for the movie in spite of the restrictions, by recreating some of the scenes directly on the sets. For example, in filming the Sistine Chapel, where popes are elected, Howard recruited about 20 workers in the production crew to pose as tourists and visit the chapel to take pictures of all the floor mosaics, frescoes, and paintings inside. They took as many pictures as they could until they were told they couldn’t take any more photos.

Rev. Federico Lombardi, a spokesman for the Vatican, would not comment on the allegations Howard made about the interference from the church, claiming that the charges were simply intended to incite interest in the movie. However, Rome’s diocese did confirm last summer that it had banned some producers from being able to shoot scenes inside two of the churches in Rome because the film does not conform to the views of the Catholic church.

In 2006, Howard’s previous film The DaVinci Code brought in over $750 million from worldwide ticket sales. The movie was very controversial, prompting calls by church leaders to boycott the film because it proposed the idea that Jesus was married and had children. It also depicted Opus Dei, a conservative movement in the Catholic church, as being a murderous cult. Although church leaders’ reactions to this latest film are not as vocal, one Italian bishop has said that the movie is offensive and defamatory to the Catholic Church.

When reporters asked Tom Hanks what the hardest stunt was when he was filming, his answer made them laugh. "There is not a regular cobblestone, there is not a straight step, there is not an easy way to cross any street in all of the Eternal City," he said. "Essentially death traps and twisted ankles await you any time you try to go out for a slow stroll. How we did not come out with shin splints and ace bandages around our limbs I will never ever know. "It must have been divine intervention."