AFTER a while the experience began to suggest one was watching a 17th century painting in motion. In the distance on the vast estate, smoke billowed up to the sky as more than a dozen characters in striking period clothing cleared the debris from the smouldering wilderness which would become the site of a great, maze like ornamental garden.
From the balcony of the big house, three men in long, rolling wigs, elegant frock coats and shining, high heeled shoes surveyed the scene.
The scene was the sprawling estate of Mount levers Court, just outside the town of Sixmilebridge in Co Clare. The estate is the principal location for the filming of The Serpent's Kiss, a fascinating story of landscape gardening, sexual intrigue and deceit set in Gloucestershire in 1699.
This is a world in which there is more to most of the characters than meets the eye, as the audience will discover through a series of spiralling revelations. In that respect, it's appropriate that the movie is being produced by Robert Jones, producer of the tantalisingly complex thriller, The Usual Suspects.
The production designer, Charles Garrad, and the film's Irish costume designer, Consolata Boyle, are working for meticulous authenticity, but The Serpent's Kiss is not going to be yet another British heritage picture, Jones insists. Nor will it resemble Peter Greenaway's The Draughtman's Contract, even though there is some similarity between the broad outlines of the two movies.
"It has to be a million miles away from Peter Greenaway and Merchant Ivory," Robert Jones says over coffee in the film's production office, a house on Main Street in Sixmilebridge. "It's important that the house is not lavish, that there's an authenticity to it. It's about people and their emotions, not about tea cups and sets."
Trainspotting star Ewan McGregor, the hottest British actor of the 1990s, co stars in The Serpent's Kiss with Greta Scaachi, and the formidable supporting cast features Pete Postlethwaite, Richard E. Grant, Donal McCann, Charley Boorman, Ruaidhri Conroy, Gerard McSorley, Pat Laffan, Britta Smith, Susan Fitzgerald and relative newcomer Carmen Chaplin.
The film's original screenplay is by Tim Rose Price, and the movie marks the directing debut of the Oscar winning French lighting cameraman, Pierre Rousselot who previously worked in Ireland when he lit Neil Jordan's, The Miracle, giving a distinctly Mediterreanean look to Bray and its seafront.
Tim Rose Price's uncle was the prolific and sonorous English character actor, Dennis Price, and his mother, coincidentally enough, came from Quin, just five miles from Sixmilebridge. He is producing the film with Robert Jones and John Battsek.
"The three of us spent a huge amount of time on the screenplay," says Jones, a former musician who was just 23 when he was made managing director of the video division at the enterprising Palace Pictures in London 12 years ago.
"Tim was fantastic," he says. "Some writers are precious to the point of being self destructive, but Tim listens and he can come up with fantastic resolutions. We heard Philippe Rousselot was interested in directing and we met him. He seemed to have exactly the same take on it, in that none of us wanted to make a standard period film. We wanted, something more earthy and different, like Tom Jones or The Piano."
Robert Jones and his team scouted locations in England, France and even South Africa and New Zealand as they sought the perfect house for the movie. "The film is very location dependent and the main house in the story is a 17th century William & Mary house. We wanted to shoot last summer, but we could not find the right place. I hate putting films back, but it always works out in the end. This year I looked again in England and then came to Ireland and spent a day in the National Library, looking for non fortified houses in Ireland. There are not many of them but I drove for 600 miles looking at them."
Finally, he found Mount levers Court outside Sixmilebridge, which continues to function as a working dairy farm throughout the filming of The Serpent's Kiss. "This house had no Victorian additions which would have cocked it all up," he says. "It was like this house was made for our film. We've been here on and off for the last six months and in full force for 10 weeks of pre production before we started shooting planting trees, barley, wheat, rape, mustard. We re all agricultural experts now! And we washed and re decorated the house in the style of the period."
THE film is a UK/French/ German co production with a healthy budget, according to Robert Jones.
"It's more than we had on The Usual Suspects, which was around $6.5 million, but it will look about three times as expensive as its cost. We have some Section 35 money in it through Merlin Films and that was a nice by product of shooting here, but ultimately we're here for the location. That was the foremost consideration."
The Serpent's Kiss deals with a pompous, nouveau riche foundry owner named Smithers who lives in a large country house with his wife, Juliana, and their daughter, Thea. He is played by Pete Postlethwaite, who received an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Giuseppe Conlon in In the Name of the Father. Greta Scacchi is Juliana, who is bored with him, and Carmen Chaplin is Thea, who is considered mad by her parents but really is just a teenager - a nonexistent concept in 1699. Thea feels much more at home in the natural wilderness to the rear of the house.
To work his way back into the affections of his wife, Smithers commissions Meneer Chrome (Ewan McGregor), a Dutch gardener, to design and build a garden on the grounds. Chrome is a flamboyant character who makes an entrance like a pop star in his long, flowing yellow coat. He is immediately attracted to Thea - and to her mother, who regards him, at least, as a diversion.
Richard E. Grant plays Juliana's really snide cousin, with Donal McCann as a nasty physician; Ruaidhri Conroy as his apprentice; Charley Boorman as a secretary who's constantly trailing the designer; Pat Laffan as the local forge master; Britta Smith as the family's cook and Gerard McSorley as her husband, a grumpy gardener on the estate; and Susan Fitzgerald as Mistress Cleavely, who has designs on Smithers.
What follows is a tale of manipulation and deceit. "All these strands get drawn together in the first half of the film," says Robert Jones, "and in the second half they get really stirred around in the pot as the fireworks go off.
"It's actually going to be a very funny film and a very visual film as you would expect from Pilippe, though he's really good with actors, too. He's very pragmatic and practical. We have a very happy set here.
Up on the set, Richard E. Grant looks frightfully foppish as he strides across the balcony of the house, wielding a cane and chatting with Pete Postlethwaite and Donal McCann, all of them in full period costume, while Ewan McGregor surveys the work of the estate workers down below. "I'm thrilled with the cast we have," says Robert Jones. "Ewan read this last year and committed to it, and he really stuck with it despite very heavy pressures. It's the sort of script actors love."
The only really difficult part to cast was Thea, the daughter, he says. Carmen Chaplin was the first actress they saw for the part and they came back to her at the end of casting and offered it to her. "It seemed like forever," she said when we met in her trailer before lunch was served on the set. She is the daughter of Michael Chaplin and granddaughter of the great Charles Chaplin, and her mother, Patricia, is half Irish half Trinadadian. "My parents used to go to Waterville to stay with my grandfather and I went with them when I was small."
Does her famous surname, make a difference in the film business? "Being in the business or not, I like my surname because I like my grandfather and I like his movies," she says. "At least I'm not called Mussolini! That would be difficult to carry.
"To me, I've always had my name. I guess it's more people on the outside who form their own ideas about it." This is her first substantial screen role. "It's everything I could have ever dreamed of."
Lunch is served and I join Philippe Rousselot for lamb korma on the lower deck of a bus which is serving as a dining area for cast and crew. One of the world's leading cinematographers, he won an Oscar for Robert Redford's A River Runs Through It, and the French equivalent, the Cesar, for both Diva and Therese. His many other credits include The Emerald Forest and Hope And Glory for John Boorman, Dangerous Liaisons for Stephen Frears and We're No Angels, The Miracle and Interview With The Vampire for Neil Jordan.
As it happened, as Rousselot was turning director for the first time on July 1st when The Serpent's Kiss started shooting in Sixmilebridge, Neil Jordan began filming The Butcher Boy on the very same day in Clones, Co Monaghan. "We exchanged telegrams of good luck," says Rousselot. "Having made The Miracle in Ireland, I know the country, so that makes a difference, and since then I've been back many times on vacation and seeing friends."
Wasn't Rousselot at one stage attached to direct Neil Jordan's screen adaptation of Brian Friel's Translations? Yes, but it didn't happen for all kinds of technical reasons," he says. "I was very attracted to the script and to the challenge with the use of language in it, and I still don't know if it would have worked as a film."
What makes. The Serpent's Kiss extremely difficult to summarise, he says, is the complexity of its plot and its characters. "You see different sides of them day after day as it goes on, which makes it very interesting. It's quite a serious story, but it's told with a lightness that's on the edge of comedy, always flirting with comedy.
"When we started shooting, that lightness and comedy came alive instantly. There was no forcing it.
"It's very rare to have a screenplay with so much character, emotion, comedy - and this extraordinary visual quality. Usually, you get one or the other." Is he seeking the painterly quality which the scene he has just filmed suggests? "Well, in a way, yes, he says. "The only images we have of that time are paintings. We have no photographs." For his cinematographer, he has chosen Jean Francois Robin, who went to film school with him in Paris 30 years ago and has lit movies such as Betty Blue and Nelly Et M Arnaud.
Her hair protected by an all encompassing net, Greta Scacchi retreats to her trailer after lunch. A multi lingual actress who has worked all over the world, she was born in Milan, the daughter of an Italian art dealer and an English dancer, and after their divorce, she was raised by her mother in England and Australia, where she began her stage career. This is her first film in Ireland, although she visited Dublin a few times in her student days.
"I've never worked on a film like this where there's nothing black and white about the script," she says. "It's a bit like life in a way, with all its ambiguities. My character might seem to be flirtatious or suggestive, or she might seem to be giving signals that she would like to be seduced, but in reality that wouldn't be what she wanted. As in life, people don't say things all the time because they've, thought the whole thing out. It's set 300 years ago, but it's a modern story."
Scacchi her surname, which is regularly mispronounced as Scatchee, rhymes with khaki - arrived in Clare fresh from a fortnight on the Cannes Film Festival jury. "I had the time of my life," she says.
"I was very lucky because now that I'm a mum, I don't see a lot of films, so it was a great way of feeling ahead instead of feeling behind. It was a very varied jury from very different backgrounds, yet with so many common threads. For example, over half of us had fathers who were painters, including me. And the films were so various, yet often there would be these uncanny but specific links between them."
Down the town of Sixmilebridge Ewan McGregor, still in full period costume, is settling down to a pint of a Guinness in the cast and crew's favourite hang out, Danny Casey's bar - within a week of the film starting shooting, Danny had his Casey's Bar/Serpent's Kiss cigarette lighters available in the pub.
A bright, witty and entirely unpretentious 25 year old Scot, Ewan McGregor has been turning out work of a remarkable quantity and quality over the past few years and he's fast shaping up as the most interesting and adventurous actor to emerge from Britain since Daniel Day Lewis. In the past two years alone he has moved, chameleon like, through leading roles in Shallow Grave, Trainspotting and the imminent releases, Emma, Brassed Off, The Pillow Book and Nightwatch, and in September, he reunites with the Trainspotting team for their first American production, A Life Less Ordinary. In the four weeks between making Trainspotting and Emma, he grew his hair back and got married, and he was accompanied in Clare by his wife and their baby daughter.
N the subject of his loyalty to The Serpent's Kiss in the face of many other offers, McGregor says:
"I think, on principle, if you're going to commit to do something, you should do it. It's dangerous territory when you start agreeing to do lots of jobs and then taking only the ones which will give you the most money. That's not going to do you any good in the long run.
"I've seen some of the rushes of the film and it looks great."
Ewan McGregor is willing to take risks and is not following anything like a traditional career path. "I really like being an actor, which means the most exciting part about it for me is that you get to learn about lots of different things - and you get to play all sorts of different people. I would get terribly bored if I was playing the same kind of character all the time."