beautiful butt. When they reward him by holding the gun to his head, he suddenly protested, he couldn’t handle that scene. And the assistant director had to go and give him a hug." Pasolini regular Franco Citti was to play one of the soldiers' studs, but he did not appear. Laura Betti was also going to play Signora Vaccari, but also because of legal problems and prior commitments to Novecento declined the role, though she doubled the voice of Hélène Surgère in post-production. Uberto Paolo Quintavalle (the Magistrate) was a writer; he knew Pasolini working on the newspaper Corriere della Sera. He was chosen for the role because he had all "the characteristics of a decadent intellectual". Aldo Valletti (the President) was a friend of Pasolini from the time of Accattone. Giorgio Cataldi (the bishop), another friend of Pasolini, was a clothes seller in Rome. Paolo Bonacelli (the Duke) had participated in several small Italian productions of the 1950s and 1960s, and would later appear in several major Hollywood productions. Filming Several outdoor scenes were filmed in Villa Aldini, a neoclassical building on the hills of Bologna. The interiors were shot in Villa Sorra near Castelfranco Emilia. The noble hall of the building and the courtyard were filmed in the Cinecittà studios. The town on the Reno replaces the fictional location in Marzabotto. The shooting, carried out mainly in the 16th-century Villa Gonzaga-Zani in Villimpenta in the spring of 1975, was difficult and involved scenes of homophilia, coprophagia and sadomasochism. The acts of torture in the courtyard caused some of the actors to suffer abrasions and burns. Actress Hélène Surgère described the film shoot as "unusual", with nearly 40 actors being on set at any given time, and Pasolini shooting "enormous" amounts of footage. She also noted the mood on the set as "paradoxically jovial and immature" in spite of the content. In-between working, the cast shared large meals of risotto and also had football games played against the crew of Bernardo Bertolucci's Novecento, which was being filmed nearby. It also marked the reconciliation between the then 34-year-old Bertolucci and his old mentor after several disagreements following Pasolini's criticism of Last Tango in Paris (1972) and his failure to defend it from drastic censorship measures. During production, some reels were stolen and the thieves demanded a ransom for their return. Using doubles, the same scenes were reshot but from a