The movie forced to shoot in the UK because Marlon Brando was banned from Italy: “We lost about $2m”
Nobody batted an eyelid when Marlon Brando caused difficulties for a production, because that’s what was expected of him, with the mercurial actor often a massive pain in the arse to work with.
However, there was one occasion where it wasn’t his fault. Most of the time, whenever a production featuring the two-time Academy Award-winning icon ran into trouble, it was caused by whatever he was doing, whether it was refusing to shoot scenes, learn lines, or generally being an arsehole.
It became more common as his career wore on, with Brando becoming the definition of a risk or reward hire: if you cast him, then you’ve got Marlon Brando in your movie, and his name alone guaranteed some amount of prestige. On the other hand, if you cast him, then you’re obligated to put up with all the bullshit that typically comes with it.
Funnily enough, it was a performance he didn’t phone in that caused so many issues. To cap off his remarkable comeback year, the star followed up Francis Ford Coppola’s seminal The Godfather with another Oscar-nominated turn in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, a film that’s never shed its controversial label.
Four years after its initial release, a January 1976 ruling by the Italian Supreme Court decreed that all copies of the picture were to be seized and destroyed, with Bertolucci slapped with a four-month suspended prison sentence. Brando, meanwhile, was hit with a two-month suspended sentence and barred from working in the country.
That wasn’t an ideal situation for producer Ilya Salkind, who’d signed the star to an incredibly lucrative deal to play Jor-El in Superman, which was planned to shoot at Cinecittà Studios in Rome. Tests were already underway to convince audiences that a man could fly, and no expense was being spared.
“Of course, nobody knew how to make the guy fly, whatever my optimism,” Salkind recalled. “In Italy, we lost about $2 million.” With money flowing down the drain, the entire production ultimately had to relocate to the United Kingdom to cause even more expenditure because “Marlon couldn’t shoot in Italy because of the lawsuit he had over Last Tango over obscenity.”
That also cost Superman its director, with Guy Hamilton a tax exile. He departed the project, Richard Donner was drafted in, Brando tried to convince the producers to let him play the character as either a sentient briefcase or a glowing green bagel, and a young Cary Elwes was handed the unenviable task of having to coax him out of his trailer with snacks every time he was required on set.
Brando behaved like Brando once the movie was shooting, so it didn’t really matter whether it was filmed in Italy or England, but it was thanks to Last Tango in Paris that it had to make the switch in the first place.
