Waltzing with Brando is set to close the Torino Film Festival on November 30th to celebrate the 100th birthday of one of Hollywood’s greatest actors.
Titanic star Billy Zane plays Marlon Brando between 1969 and 1974 when the star purchased the private atoll Teriaroa.
The island is just north of Tahiti, where he shot Munity on the Bounty instead of starring in Lawrence of Arabia.
And it was while working on the shoot, he fell in love with the South Pacific region.
During this period, Brando recruited Los Angeles architect Bernard Judge (Jon Heder in the movie) “to build the world’s first ecologically perfect retreat on a small, uninhabitable island.”
Directed by Bill Fishman, Waltzing with Brando is based on Judge’s memoir of the same name and recreates moments from two of the actor’s most famous movies, Last Tango In Paris and The Godfather – on which ‘he was furious’ on set.
It turns out Brando only acted in the greatest film of all time, which won him his Best Actor Oscar, so he could fund his project on Tetiaroa, where most of the movie was shot. And Zane has released the first pictures of himself as Brando’s Don Vito Corleone and he is totally uncanny as the star, who died in 2004 aged 80.
Posting on Instagram, Zane wrote: “So grateful for the kind invitation to close the Torino Film Festival [on] November 30th celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Marlon Brando with our film Waltzing with Brando which honours the man’s passion for civil rights, indigenous rights and his little known commitment to the environment and sustainable design and architecture.”
Zane added: “This dramatic comedy is not your average biopic, as it focuses on a prolific five-year period in Brando’s life through the eyes of the young architect, brilliantly played by Jon Heder, he hired to realise his dream of building a zero carbon sanctuary on his privately owned Tahitian Island back in 1970! And the epic films Marlon at times even reluctantly made to pay for it all.”
Waltzing with Brando’s release date is TBC.