For Italian producer and distributor Andrea Occhipinti, shepherding “Elsinore” to the big screen carries a significance that transcends being lead producer of the buzzy movie that last night opened the London Film Festival to a standing ovation, with few dry eyes in the Royal Festival Hall, after making a major splash in Telluride and Toronto. This moving but also very funny film about Scottish “Chariots of Fire” actor Ian Charleson who gave a triumphant final performance as Hamlet at London’s National Theatre in late 1989, shortly before dying of AIDS at the age of 40, germinated from an encounter in Rome between Occhipinti and Charleson in 1987. That year Occhipinti, a former actor, co-founded his Lucky Red shingle with American business partner Kermit Smith, “who at the time was HIV positive,” he says.
Smith passed away in 2001. I lost a lot of friends,” he says. On the day after “Elsinore’s” triumph in the city where the film is set, Occhipinti spoke to Variety about its long journey.
I met Ian Charleson in Spain in 1984 on the set of the mini-series “The Sun Also Rises” in which I played a small part as a bullfighter. It was summer and we were a group of actors: Leonard Nimoy, James Seymour, Robert Carradine and Ian were the leads. Ian was the finest of the group, the most wicked.
Then I saw him again, three years later, in Rome. He was shooting Dario Argento’s “Opera.” He was completely different. And probably at the time, though he didn’t tell me, he was already HIV positive.
I remember Ian told me, “my life is a mess.” He was not happy, and he introduced me in Rome to his friend Ethan Silverman. So then Ian dies, and Silverman came to Rome because he was preparing a film with Barry Levinson, and he said to me: “It’s so sad about Ian. Do you know what happened the last months of his life?” And he told me the story.
He told me that Ian wanted very badly to play Hamlet, and that when he was called to play Hamlet, he was sick. He had AIDS, but he really wanted to do it, and so on. So I said: “Ethan, there is a film here.” I had emailed Ethan saying: “I cannot forget that story about Ian wanting to play Hamlet.
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