“While you're reading it, or while I was reading it, I was nodding away going, 'Yeah, that's right. I bet that's right. I bet that's right. I'd go with that,'" said McKellen. “I can understand why people are exorcised by the affect that the book might have, but I think that most people that have read the book praise it for being a rattling good yarn. That's what the movie will be, too. I do know Catholics who, you would think, might take offense at some of the suggestions about whether they've been economical with the facts over the years. Who say, 'Look, we should welcome this attention. Let’s welcome the debate,' and are all for the movie being as popular as the book because religion is relevant to our lives, I would think. So it's good PR really. There's no such thing as bad publicity, isn't that the phrase?”
The Da Vinci Code director Ron Howard grew up in the public eye and McKellen wants audiences to know Howard’s public persona isn’t a mask. Howard is as genuinely thrilled to be directing and working in films as he appears. “You've been watching him for years and he's like that. He's absolutely like that. He's enthusiastic as a kid about it all. He's nervous. He can't quite believe, I think, his luck that he's allowed to play with the grownups. I get that feeling from him quite strongly. He is super-efficient so when he tells you, when he first talks to you and says, 'I want you to film on this day and you will end on that day.' That's the way that it works out, which is brilliant.”
McKellen feels it's Howard’s acting background that makes him such a successful director. "Having been an actor himself, of course, he's very sympathetic to the problems of acting and can often see things, I think, that another director wouldn't because he can see what's going on. He and Tom [Hanks] got on extremely well and that was important. You felt that they were sort of twin leaders of the enterprise and then Akiva Goldsman – very unusual being there the whole time. He's the screenplay writer. He and Ron you felt at times were directing it together. I mean, they were puzzling over problems together. Everything was shared. It was all very open and I hadn't expected that.”
The cast prepared for the shoot by rehearsing in Paris. “We rehearsed for about two weeks in Paris, which is a bit unnerving when you suddenly find that you're working with Tom Hanks. You sit around a table with him for four or five days and hear what he has to say and had him listen to what you've got to say, you then relax. Ron was very good in that way, of just getting everyone together. [He’s] a good party giver. He has his own sort of party.”
