Past imperfect

It was Visconti's dream project. So why did his attempt to turn Proust's most famous work into a four-hour movie result in tantrums, two law suits, and a vendetta?

This is the story of the greatest movie Luchino Visconti never made, a movie that ended in a series of lawsuits, bitter recriminations and a bizarre feud with Harold Pinter, which the writer refuses to discuss to this day. No one can say why it went so spectacularly wrong, but this is how it began.

On the last day of shooting Death in Venice, in August 1970, Visconti offered to buy lunch for Dirk Bogarde in a village pensione in the mountains outside Bolzano. They had been up since 2am trying to catch the light of dawn for a key shot: Bogarde was in his linen suit sitting in a plum orchard pretending to be on the Lido in Venice. In their parting conversation, as the 64-year-old Italian director daintily peeled the fatty skin from a sausage, he mentioned to Bogarde that he was keen to start work on a cherished project. "I am thinking to make the Proust La Recherche," he ventured in his thickly accented English. "You must think of Swann perhaps, yes?"

He quickly found an enthusiastic producer in Nicole Stéphane (a Rothschild by birth, she had also been an actress in Melvilles Les Enfants Terribles and starred as Madame Curie in Franju's biopic). For over six years Stéphane had been trying to hire just such a director, despite haughty dismissals from the likes of François Truffaut ("I wrote to the woman producer that no real film-maker would allow himself to squeeze the madeleine as though it were a lemon"). She'd been hanging on to the hope that René Clément would make the film with her, but it only took lunch at the lavish Principe di Savoia hotel in Milan to persuade her to go with the glamorous Italian Count. Helpless against the full force of Visconti's charm, she cried, "you are saying all I wanted to hear!" and "I must kiss you!" at the end of the meal, agreeing at once to give him permission to make the film and that she would produce it.

No sooner was Dirk Bogarde's white linen suit safely packed away and Bjorn Andresen sent trotting off back to school than Visconti set the wheels for his cherished Proust project in motion. He would start filming in France in August 1971, and move on to Venice.

What was it that Visconti said that so convinced Stéphane? He certainly identified strongly with Proust. "Every page could have been a description of his own life," notes Visconti's biographer Gaia Servadio.

A scion of an ancient family, name-checked by Chaucer and given a Dukedom by Napoleon, Count Luchino Visconti di Modrone was born in 1906, one of seven children. For the first eight years of his life, he lived at the family palace at Via Cerva, a vast enchanted cave swathed in velvet drapes, brocades, gilts and mirrors, staffed by a host of flunkies dressed in black-and-yellow livery (to the end of his days he always had liveried retainers in his houses, and cooks delivering daily menus, which he would correct). The social rounds were understood from an early age, and set in stone, as the great and the good visited the proper salons in a strict rotation; it was the Gallarati Scottis on Monday, the Viscontis on Wednesdays, the Borromeos on Thursdays and on Friday the Ricordis.

He adored his mother and went to live with her when she installed herself at her family villa at Cernobbio after divorcing Visconti's roguish father (whose bisexual infidelities had become notorious; he was even supposed to be a lover of the Italian queen). Every evening, like the breathless and haunted narrator in A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, the young Luchino waited for the sound of his mother's footsteps coming to kiss him goodnight, the swish of her gown on the grand staircase and the instant when she'd stoop over him, swathed in tulle and exuding the subtle scent of Chevalier D'Orsay. Mother and son were very close, even making a pact that at the point of death she would wait for Luchino's farewell kiss before giving up the ghost.

No other director, in fact, has proved so consistently Proustian, either in his personal sense of recall on a loved and vanished world, or the pathology of his own sexuality. The cast-iron sirens in Rocco and His Brothers? He passed them everyday as a child before they were relocated and forgotten during the rebuilding of Milan. The subject matter of The Earth Trembles? Based on his parents' experiences after an earthquake, when they went to the aid of Sicilian peasants. The savage attack on Nazi-sympathising Germanic industrial families in The Damned? Tailored to his mother's origins in a super-rich Longobard family and their industrial fortune. The count played by Burt Lancaster in The Leopard? Modelled on Visconti himself. The hand turning the pages of the D'Annunzio novel in the opening sequence his final film The Intruder? Visconti's own hand.

So the project was set. Eight months was spent writing the script (363 pages long), which opened in a Venice Hotel and ended with an orgy in a homosexual brothel, and Marcel later mingling with frightened Parisians seeking shelter from the German bombardment of 1918. Six weeks were then spent on scouting for locations. La Ferrière, the belle-époque château belonging to Guy de Rothschild, was selected, thanks to Stéphane's connections, along with sites in Combray, Trouville, Doncières, Cabourg, Paris and Venice. Some actors received contracts. Silvana Mangano was to be Oriane de Guermantes and Alain Delon the narrator Marcel. Brando was approached to be Charlus, but the producers favoured Laurence Olivier. Helmut Berger was pencilled in as Morel and Brigitte Bardot asked for a role, (and was given one), as the ageing Odette de Crecy. Charlotte Rampling was to be Albertine.

In all the film was to last four hours and cost an astronomical five billion lire, but when Stéphane baulked at the price and asked to be given more time to raise the finance, Visconti, in an aristocratic huff, started preproduction on his next film, Ludwig, informing Stéphane of his decision at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival.

The dream project then unravelled with extraordinary rapidity. Visconti genuinely intended to return to A La Recherche, but Stéphane felt wounded by his behaviour, and turned to Joseph Losey to make the film she wanted, who in turn commissioned a Pinter script (three hours long). She sued Visconti. Visconti counter-sued. There was a stalemate. Losey could not make his film without Visconti's permission and Visconti – convinced he had an all-but divine right to this material – vowed never to give way.

It's hard to say, of course, whose production would have worked best. The Pinter script begins and ends with a close-up of a patch of yellow wall, a detail from Vermeer's View of Delft. And Visconti's version? "I think you can safely say [his] A La Recherche would have had wonderful costumes and sets, and would have been very beautiful and nostalgic," says Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, whose book of Visconti (revised and newly published by the BFI) remains the only serious critical mainstream work to be published on the director in decades. "I think it would have been all about the loss of childhood, but would also have been very overwrought and decadent, and full of lesbians."

In the end neither film was made and, in a curious coda to the whole affair, Visconti got his revenge on Pinter by staging the latter's play Old Times in Rome in 1973 and completely sabotaging it. By now quite ill after a heart attack and stroke, and recovering in his mother's house at Cernobbio, Visconti directed the play from his Rolls Royce, which he had driven into the auditorium of the Theatre Argentina. The staging was a fiasco – he introduced such new elements as full nudity, lesbian sex and masturbation.

Pinter's agent tried to get the production closed down, and eventually Pinter himself flew to Rome and flyposted his protests to the glass doors of the theatre. Visconti's line was that Pinter was a mere "radio playwright" and that his work needed "fleshing out". For good measure, he refused a direct approach from Nicole Stéphane to sign away his rights to Proust, haughtily allowing her representative to visit the theatre to see him, then refusing to acknowledge the letter from Stéphane in his hand.

It was a bitter conclusion to a glittering project. In the end, though, Visconti was thoroughly relieved not to have made A La Recherche. Always unshakeable in his superstitious beliefs, he was convinced he would die as soon as it was finished. The film would have been so autobiographical, he decided, there would have been nothing left for him to say. He went on to make Conversation Piece and The Intruder, where, once again, he dressed the leading lady as his mother. "My mother wore veils just like these," he told his costume designer. "She was swathed in veils in 1910 when she went to La Scala followed by a valet." He died very shortly afterwards, in 1976.

There will be a Visconti retrospective at the NFT (020-7928 3232) until 29 May