A star-studded ‘Mamma Mia!’ shot in Greece

Islands provide outdoor locations for hit musical

Pierce Brosnan is just one of the many actors who are expected soon.	Academy-award winner Meryl Streep has proved her singing skills in previous films.

By Panayiotis Panagopoulos - Kathimerini

Famous actors including Meryl Streep, Pierce Brosnan, Colin Firth, Stellan Skaarsgard and Julie Walters are scheduled to visit Greece for the filming of “Mama Mia!.” Ranking as one of the most successful musicals of the past decades, “Mama Mia!,” which premiered in London in 1999 and is responsible for turning old Abba songs into hits for the second time, has enjoyed a solid run ever since. It has been performed in 130 cities all over the world – and is now expected at Athens’s Badminton Theater next May – generating a profit of some 1.6 billion dollars.

Outdoor filming will start this week on Skiathos and Skopelos, the two islands chosen by the Littlestar and Playtone productions to re-incarnate the anonymous Greek island where the musical is set. Playtone belongs to Tom Hanks’s wife, Rita Wilson.

Indoor filming, which took place at London’s Pinewood Studios, has already been completed and the film’s US release date is July 17, 2008. It will be distributed by Universal and in Greece by UIP.

The famous cast members have not yet arrived on the two islands, but the crew has already set up parts of the set and both Skiathos and Skopelos are getting into Abba mode. About 200 people will move to the islands over the next few weeks, including the cinamatographer, Haris Zambarloukos, who is of Greek descent. The production company has posted announcements for extras for the crowd scenes in Skopelos which have met with a great response. Who would pass up the opportunity to be filmed alongside Streep, the actress with the highest number of Oscar nominations, or the former James Bond?

Two Skopelos students have set up a blog, skopelos07.wordpress.com, with information and photographs of the filming preparations. A press conference on filming details is expected to take place soon, with representatives from the production as well as Tourism Minister Fanni Palli-Petralia, but it is not yet known whether it will be held in Athens or on Skopelos.

Both Streep and Brosnan have singing experience. Brosnan had worked as a singer before turning to acting and Streep has sung in Robert Altman’s “A Prairie Home Companion” and in Robert Zemeckis’s “Death Becomes Her.”