– the story of the artist’s strange and fascinating marriage to his tyrannical wife Gala – was still a “daunting task”.
“In the 70s she was infatuated with a young man named Jeff Fenholt who was playing Jesus in Jesus Christ Superstar on Broadway. She decided that Jeff was a genius and she was going to make him a star. This caused great jealousy and tension, that was part of the drama. At the same time Dali had his own new muse, Amanda Lear.“We started looking at Dali in the 1970s, the older Dali, with flashbacks to the younger Dali [played by Ezra Miller], which are rendered like an old movie.
Key to the possibility of getting the film made on a budget was the finding of its central location, which stood in for the historic St Regis hotel in New York, where Dali and Gala lived on and off between 1966 and 1973. International travel was complicated by the pandemic, so the team, led by UK producer Chris Curling, identified the Adelphi hotel in Liverpool as an appropriate stand in.
Casting Kingsley was another way to elevate the relatively low-budget project beyond its means. “It’s interesting working with an actor of that league. When he arrives on set, he brings a whole performance that you’re so drawn into. He completely inhabited the part. When you turned the camera on, he’s living it,” she comments.