Where was 'Cyrano' filmed?

Unlike many modern blockbusters, Cyrano – the new romantic musical based on 17th-century writer Cyrano de Bergerac, starring Peter Dinklage – was shot entirely on location in Southern Italy, swapping sound stages for historic private homes and backlots for the streets of golden Noto.

It seems like a lot of luck went into the making of the movie, directed by Joe Wright. The film decamped in Noto – a destination we've called Sicily's ‘hidden gem’ – because of a side trip in search of the country's best cannolis. The cast and crew narrowly avoided Mount Etna's eruption while filming on the active volcano. And location scouts managed to find a number of palazzos in near perfect, ready-to-film condition.

We sat down with Sarah Greenwood, the production designer behind Cyrano and movies like Rebecca, Pride and Prejudice, and Atonement, to get the scoop on just how lucky they got, the filming locations you can see for yourself, and where to find those top-tier cannolis.

What was the scouting process like? How did you find Noto – and what was it about that particular Italian town that made it the right fit?

We were very specific: we went there to go to Noto. Prior to starting [working on Cyrano], I was in Italy scouting for another film that didn't happen. We were all over – we had come down the Ligurian coast, down the Amalfi coast – and one of the locations we went to was the San Pietro hotel, this beautiful hotel, and we were chatting with hotel manager and he said, ‘If you go to Sicily, you must go to Noto because my friend has the most amazing cannoli bakery.’ Lo and behold, we find ourselves in the southern tip of Italy looking at these old derelict tuna factories, and the location manager mentioned that we were very close to Noto and asked, ‘Shall we go?’ 

So, we drove to Noto and my socks were just blown off. It is the most incredible place with all of this baroque architecture. It's a UNESCO World Heritage Site and is just so beautiful. We spent the afternoon eating cannolis, wandering around this amazing town, taking photos – and that was that. When I came back, I was showing Joe [Wright] these photos and he said, ‘That looks amazing, if we ever do Cyrano, that's where we’ll shoot it.’ A whole two years later, Joe says, ‘You remember that town?’ So, I found my photos and we dug up some more off the internet in the middle of the pandemic. And Joe said to Eric Fellner at Working Title, ‘We're going to go to Noto, we're going to shoot this in this one place, and it's going to be like a theatre – we just will locate ourselves there.’ And about 12 weeks later, we were shooting.

All because of a cannoli.

All because of a cannoli, which was delicious, by the way. I can’t remember the name but I can tell you where it is: As you come in through the beautiful arch [called the Porta Reale], walk all the way down to where the square opens up. The cannoli shop is just after the town hall on the left. When we went to shoot, it was obviously during the pandemic, so the cannoli shop was shut the whole time. And while I know there are lots of other places you can get cannolis, this one particular place really is the best in Sicily.

You managed to use lots of existing buildings in Noto – and beyond – as sets. I’d love to start with Roxanne's apartment. Where did you find that in town?

That was Palazzo Castelluccio and it’s a couple of streets up from the main square. It's privately owned by a Frenchman, but it’s open to the public. It's absolutely exquisite. He bought it in a very perilous state about 20, 30 years ago and he restored it amazingly. It's full of incredible furniture that’s not historic to the house, but it's historic to the period and later. It's a real gem. And then we used the backstairs, because we wanted it to look a bit more like she was in the back quarters of the house. But it was all there, at that one palazzo.

So often, movies will film one part of a scene in one home and the other part in another home two countries away. What was it like to really double down on one town and be able to film so much there?

It is a very complete world – and a kind of magical world. We all know that the story [of Cyrano] is in Paris in 1640 or something, but we weren't slavish to the period. It was the feel of the place, and the atmosphere of being in a warm place. Knowing so much about period films, you know when it’s okay to bend the rules – like for the costumes, you can cherry-pick the best bits [of that time]. As far as shooting in one place, that was part of our deal to get out there to shoot anyway, we literally promised that we would shoot it all in one place – which of course we didn’t, but we shot probably about 70 per cent of the film in Noto. I don't know how you feel when you're writing, but when you have a limitation, parameters, it actually makes you more creative; you think better with parameters around you. So we were saying, Okay, we have to find this here, we have to make this work. The bakery [in the movie] was in fact the kitchens of the [Palazzo Castelluccio] – that was all in the same place. In fact, Cyrano’s room three years later, that was in there as well, in this derelict cow byre.

We were made so welcome by the town and the mayor, too. We even had this man with us called the Professore and he had a bunch of keys and was with us the whole time we were walking around. And everywhere we stopped and asked, ‘Can we go in here?,’ we would go in. Everywhere was open to us and every road we wanted to close was closed. Actually, the courtyard where we built the theatre was this hotel called the Seven Rooms Villadorata and all of the top crew stayed there as we were building the set and keeping them awake all night. We really did use these places.

One other set that I absolutely loved was the space where Roxanne holds her salon, where she and Christian officially meet for the first time. Where can viewers find that?

That was actually in Catania, in the Palazzo Biscari, which, again, was just exquisite. There's a funny story there: It’s still lived in by the same family [that built it] and was done out in the ‘50s and has just not been touched. We were shooting in the grand salon and [Roxanne] runs down this incredible staircase. That exact staircase was an absolute key reference for me when I was designing [the live-action] Beauty and the Beast. It was so funny. I walked around the corner and saw that staircase and just went, That’s the staircase. When I was working on Beauty and the Beast, I had no idea where it was, just that it was in some palazzo in Italy. The reason why we went [to Palazzo Biscari] was because we needed some weather cover for when we were filming nearby, on Mount Etna. The whole of Sicily struck me as being like how you imagine Italy to be 50 years ago. It has a real rawness to it and, and Catania has a lot of graffiti and it’s absolutely black, all the stone is lava. It was such a contrast to Noto, which has this beautiful honey tone that takes all the light.

What was it like filming on Mount Etna for the war scenes?

Etna is like a moonscape. Joe just loved the idea of having the soldiers on the black sand. We were filming in winter and they said, Oh, no, it never snows on Etna this side of Christmas. So we're up at the top of Etna, building the set with these massive cameras on wires, and it started to snow – and it snowed to the extent that it was [six feet] high. We had this massive platform with a huge technocrane on it and it was all freezing up. In the end, it was decided that we couldn't be up there because it was just too cold. It was such a shame but we retrieved what we could from the set and had to leave the platform because it was all so frozen and the icicles were horizontal. We went down the mountain, in theory, to be below the snow line, and lo and behold the whole snow came again. Then what happened was that it would snow overnight, but because the lava was so close to the surface, by midday the following day it would melt, so it would start off white and then it would go black. It was a continuity nightmare. So there’s actually a lot of [computer-generated] patching in there.

Then Etna erupted. She's always rumbling away, and at night you could see lava coming out. We had local seismologists on set and they said, this is what she always does, she will never explode in a hurry. But she was getting more and more active when we were filming. On the last day of shooting when we're striking the set, she started to blow and went on for three weeks. The crater that you see in the film, as you look straight ahead, is gone now. And the stuff we left at the top of the mountain, I think the lava came within about 12 inches of that massive platform. I really don't know what was left up there and what's covered in lava, but we were chased off the mountain. We were so lucky that we actually got enough footage.

The last spot that caught my eye was the fort, where Christian and the soldiers have their musical number, ‘Someone to Say (Reprise).’ Where did you travel to for that scene?

That’s [the Castello Maniace] on Ortigia, a little island off of Syracuse, in a fort that's been there for 1,000 years. It looks exactly like that and it comes out into the sea. Yet again it was such a phenomenal location that needed so little work. It's now the museum. It was part of the Norman conquest and it's actually got this beautiful, 11th-century great hall that looks like it's out of England. The thing is, it's like Noto itself – it's a little jewel, a gem. Don't be discouraged when you're approaching it through this scrappy Sicilian town. When you get into it, it's like Venice, where every every turn you make is just as incredible beauty.

'Cyrano' is in cinemas from Friday 25 February 2022