of wine production. This enables Max to focus his entire attention on Fanny. Cast Production Development and writing Ridley Scott had owned a house in Provence for fifteen years, and wanted to film a production there. Scott Free president Lisa Ellzey recommended the works of author Peter Mayle, who had written best-selling books set in the south of France. Scott and Mayle were acquaintances and neighbours, having worked together in advertising and commercials during the 1970s, but as the author did not want to write a screenplay, he instead wrote a new book after discussing a film plot with Scott. “Ridley arrived with a newspaper clipping which reported on new wines in Bordeaux – ‘garage’ wines – which commanded huge prices without a chateau or pedigree. Yet, people paid a fortune for them”,Mayle said. “I saw this piece in the newspaper business section of the Times about a vineyard in France that was selling garage wine for over £30,000 a case,” Scott recounted about the 1996 clipping, which he still keeps in his files in London. “I was looking for an excuse to come back to France to shoot a film, and this story idea offered the perfect opportunity. I bounced this idea off Peter Mayle and he said, ‘That would make a good novel’. “And I said, ‘You write the book, then I’ll get the film rights.’ So, he wrote the book.” Screenwriter Marc Klein was brought in after Scott read an adaptation he did of The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing – eventually released in 2007 as Suburban Girl. Klein had to expand and alter the story of the book to make the adaptation "more movie-like". A particular focus was to add conflict, with changes such as turning Fanny from a gentle character to a stubborn woman who starts without sympathy for Max. Another addition was the scene where Max falls in the swimming pool, which Scott said was to demonstrate "[that] the house had not let him go". The director wanted to portray Uncle Henry on screen instead of just describing him. While writer Marc Klein first suggested depicting him as a ghost, Scott's attempts at that did not work so he used flashbacks which "occur just as another scene" where it would depict "the grooming of Max as child which will be used as payoffs for the three acts that follow". Casting Klein described Henry