Peter Greenaway flew to Lucca in late 2023 carrying a Wittgenstein epigraph and a screenplay dense enough to collapse a lesser director. He was 82. Dustin Hoffman, his lead, was 86. The subject was death — specifically whether it is necessary — and the setting was a Tuscan city of towers that Greenaway read as a structural echo of post-9/11 New York. The ambition was enormous. The warning signs were immediate. The first crew arrived from Rome with dozens of trucks of technical gear, built the sets, and then waited weeks for actors who never came. That early delay wasn't a fluke — it was a foreshadowing. Production finally got going in early 2024, and for a few months Lucca became, by the Livorno paper Il Tirreno's account, a Fellini-esque open-air film set, citizens as unwitting extras, familiar faces crisscrossing the historic centre on dollies. The city fell for it completely. The budget was €15m, drawn largely from Swiss private financiers Jumpy Cow Pictures, with Italian and Dutch tax rebates supplementing. The producer was Facing East, whose recent credits include the Robbie Williams biopic Better Man and a Liam Neeson thriller. A first assembly cut was delivered in late 2024 and reportedly received warmly. Then the relationship between director and producer broke down — badly. Greenaway's contract, sources say, gave him final cut. The producers, citing cost overruns, made their own more commercial version without him. Facing East has not responded to requests for comment. The result is two incomplete cuts in circulation, a live rights dispute, and a city that hosted the production with genuine civic enthusiasm now receiving no communication from anyone. Lucca councillor Remo Santini's statement — 'We're disappointed because, as a municipality, we've spent time and energy making this film... all is quiet... this stalemate isn't our fault' — has the particular exhaustion of someone who did everything right and is watching it not matter. The title has even become a casualty. Lucca Mortis has been renamed Tower Stories, partly because the city of Lucca doesn't want to be permanently associated with death. The irony is thick: a film explicitly about the necessity of death is being defanged before anyone has seen it. Wittgenstein's line — 'death is not an event in life; we do not live to experience death' — sits in the screenplay as a provocation. The producers appear to be testing a different thesis. People who have seen both cuts say they aren't dramatically different. The material is still Greenaway's: the visual splendour, the lush score, the operatic set-pieces, the narrative intricacy. Hoffman reportedly gives a very poignant performance as Jacob Zucchine, an elderly New York writer adopted as a child who returns to Tuscany to find his Italian roots — a character said to be partly modelled on Greenaway himself. 'It's a great legacy for Greenaway and not only for him, but for Dustin,' one crew member told the Guardian. 'It's a movie that needs to be finished and needs to be released.' The clock is not academic. Greenaway is 84. Hoffman turned 89 last month. The longer this sits in purgatory, the less likely either man can meaningfully participate in its release. And festivals and distributors face an obvious dilemma: will they programme a Greenaway film that Greenaway didn't finish? The dignity argument — invoked by those close to the director — is the right frame. You commission Peter Greenaway to make a film, you get a Peter Greenaway film. That was always the deal. Discovering this only after the assembly cut is not a production problem. It's a due-diligence failure.
