Behind-The-Scenes Story Of 'Woman In Gold,' And The Film's Connection To Boston

"Woman in Gold" refers to a 1907 elaborately detailed painting by Gustav Klimt of Adele Bloch-Bauer. When the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938, they seized the painting. The efforts of Adele’s niece, Maria Altmann, to have the work returned some 60 years later is the subject of a new film.

"It was an amazing story already," said director Simon Curtis, but I thought the film could take us behind the closed doors and take us behind the emotion of it."

Curtis cast Ryan Reynolds as the young, fresh-out-law-school attorney who doggedly pursued Altmann’s claims all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and Helen Mirren, as Maria Altmann.

"It’s a very complicated character," Curtis said, "and I am so thrilled Helen Mirren took it on."

Altmann struggled to maintain her fight for the painting’s return in the face of steely resistance. The government had refused to part with a piece so tied to the national identity, it had become known as Austria’s Mona Lisa. At times Altmann lost her resolve.

"She’s someone marked by events in her early years," said Curtis. "If you think about her early twenties, she had to say goodbye entirely to her life and her family, never to see her parents again. She then reinvented herself in California, lived a long and happy life in California, but I think always underneath was this pain about what she had left behind."

"Woman in Gold" alternates between Altmann’s court battle and her life in 1930s Vienna. Curtis filmed on location using photographs of documented anti-Semitism as his guide. A reminder too he says, that past is prologue.

"It’s also a very timely reminder I hope, this film, as we’re in this troubled century now, to remember some of the mistakes and terrible things that happened in the last century," Curtis said. "That’s the film's main theme: remember us, don’t forget."

I spoke to Jim Braude on Greater Boston about the film and Rothschild heir Bettina Burr, who recently gifted her family's art collection, restituted from the same Austrian Ministry of Culture, to the MFA. Watch my February  interview with Burr .