Fashion and film fans waited with bated breath but were not disappointed with Wes Anderson's eight-minute short film for Prada, which premiered at the Rome Film Festival last week at the Movie Talks out-of-competition event, before being made available to the world at www.prada.com.
Prada, the Milanese clothing brand, collaborated with Anderson to do the advert. Anderson's mini, entitled 'Castello Cavalcanti', stars Jason Schwartzman as a racing driver and is a fun, bite-sized entry into a dreamlike Italian world and into Anderson's world.
Anderson, a man who sweats quirkiness and eats eccentric for breakfast, was the bold and best choice for Prada to create a little Italian dream in eight minutes. The Academy Award-nominated American director is known for his movies which often focus in some way around a family circle, something synonymous with also being Italian.
Actor and star of the film, Schwartzman said this movie was "romantic, our own contained beautiful little Italian world". Schwartzman, playing the role of racing driver Jack Cavalcanti, crashes his beautiful racing car into a statue of Jesus Christ in the main square of a town called Castello Cavalcanti, set in the '50s, only to realize that he has crashed in the town his family comes from, and a piazza full of his relatives including his great-great-great uncle Michelangelo.
The mini movie was filmed at Cinecittà and was the director's eighth roman adventure. He explained at the screening that Rome and Federico Fellini's 1973 film Amarcord were the inspiration for the movie. Roman Coppola, who teamed up with Anderson on this and another Prada short film about a perfume named 'Candy', said: "It is very easy for Italian filmmakers to break away from reality."
Watch the Prada ad by Wes Anderson, "Castello Cavalcanti":
