‘I Spat in His Face 16 Times’: Inside the Wild Making of The Name of the Rose

Nearly four decades after it hit cinemas, The Name of the Rose is still producing stories almost as strange as its plot, and the latest batch comes straight from the people who lived through the shoot. In a candid new oral history, director Jean-Jacques Annaud and actor Ron Perlman have pulled back the curtain on the making of the 1986 medieval murder mystery, revealing a production as chaotic and theatrical as the film itself.

Adapted from Umberto Eco’s dense, cerebral bestseller about monks battling over a lost fragment of Aristotle, The Name of the Rose was never an obvious candidate for a glossy studio adaptation. Yet Annaud, fresh off directing Perlman in the prehistoric drama Quest for Fire, became obsessed with the novel after reading glowing reviews out of Italy. He tracked down Eco himself, picking the author up from a Paris hotel for a drive to the airport and peppering him with questions about monastic footwear and the colour of medieval pigs. Eco’s answer was characteristically dry: he hadn’t bothered writing any of that detail into the book, so he had no idea either.

Casting The Name of the Rose: Connery’s knock on the door

Annaud wanted an unknown for the lead role of William of Baskerville, the Franciscan friar turned detective, and spent months scouting theatre productions around the world for the right face. But Hollywood agent Mike Ovitz had other ideas, repeatedly pitching Sean Connery for the part. The decision was effectively made for Annaud when Connery showed up at his hotel room door, screenplay tucked under his arm, and simply began performing the dialogue. According to Annaud, it was exactly the voice he’d heard in his head while reading Eco’s novel, and the casting was settled on the spot.

The rest of the ensemble came together just as unpredictably. A teenage Christian Slater turned up to audition for the young novice Adso having, by his own admission, skipped learning his lines in favour of getting drunk beforehand. The casting director was ready to throw him out until it emerged the unruly teenager was in fact her own son — and Annaud cast him anyway, convinced he had found something real. Slater’s on-screen love interest, meanwhile, was decided the instant he met actor Valentina Vargas in a screen test; Annaud never even auditioned the other two women he had shortlisted.

Spit takes, fire and a building sold mid-shoot

For Perlman, cast as the grotesque, half-feral Salvatore, the film demanded a level of physical commitment that went well beyond ordinary acting. In one notorious scene, he was required to spit directly in Connery’s face. Perlman found himself unable to fake the gesture convincingly, prompting Connery to pull him aside with blunt advice: if he didn’t actually spit, they would be shooting the scene all day. Perlman obliged — and then kept obliging, delivering real spit takes some 16 times over as the crew worked through retakes.

Built almost entirely on a custom hilltop set near Rome, the production of The Name of the Rose had its share of genuine danger too. During the climactic blaze that consumes the abbey’s library, Connery’s cowl briefly caught fire, and a falling timber struck 80-year-old actor Feodor Chaliapin Jr, who played a blind monk, knocking him to the ground. According to Annaud, Chaliapin’s first concern upon being helped up was not his own safety but whether the take had been any good — he was hospitalised and the shooting schedule had to be rearranged around his injury.

Even the business side of the production had its own drama. After four months shooting in Rome, Annaud returned to his production office in Munich only to discover it gone — producer Bernd Eichinger had quietly sold the building mid-shoot to help cover the film’s costs, something he hadn’t wanted to mention while filming was under way.

Taken together, the recollections paint The Name of the Rose as a production held together by improvisation, stubbornness and no small amount of luck — a fitting backstory for a film about monks arguing over forbidden knowledge inside a burning library. Decades on, it remains a touchstone for Perlman, Connery’s final word to him on set, and a vivid reminder of how unruly filmmaking can be even when the finished product looks meticulously composed.

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