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Angels and Demons producers get round Rome ban

Cameramen posed as tourists in order to shoot footage for Angels and Demons, the prequel to the Da Vince Code. The producers of the film had been banned by the Holy See, which falls under the Pope's control, from filming in and around Rome's churches.

In order to get round the ban, the producers of Angels and Demons used undercover cameramen. Posing as tourists, the cameramen took over 250,000 photos and shot hours of video footage, according to The Guardian. The secretly gathered material was used to digitally recreate the monuments and buildings within St Peter's Square.

Officials of the Catholic banned the film makers from shooting in and around Rome's churches as a result of assertions made in The Da Vinci Code, also by Dan Brown. Leaders were said to be "still smarting" from the claims in the book that Christ had married and fathered children with Mary Magdalene. "Normally we read the script, but this time it was not necessary," said Father Marco Fibbi, spokesman for the diocese of Rome. "The name Dan Brown was enough."

"The ban on filming put us in serious difficulty because we were not able to carry out the photographic surveys necessary to reconstruct the setting," the film's special effects supervisor, Ryan Cook, told Italian film magazine Ciak. "So for weeks we sent a team of people who mixed with tourists and took thousands of photos and video footage."

The paper points out that the film's director, Ron Howard, had earlier hinted that an unusual approach was taken to get round the ban. "We didn't shoot at the Vatican officially. But cameras can be made really small," he said in an interview on US television.

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