SUNDAY afternoon's double-bill screening of Salome and Wilde Salome at Harrogate Odeon will be followed by a satellite question-and-answer session with writer, director and actor Al Pacino and actress Jessica Chastain.

This live Q and A event will be hosted by Stephen Fry at the BFI (the British Film Institute as it used to be called) in London and will be projected to more than 200 cinemas around the country. In 1997, Fry had played Salome playwright Oscar Wilde in the film Wilde.

Salome is a film of Pacino and Chastain performing Wilde's most notorious works, while the Wilde Salome documentary follows Pacino as he struggles to mount the play and the film made, while undertaking his own journey of discovery into Wilde's story.

Salome, incidentally, was Chastain's first film role, for which Pacino takes some credit for discovering her at the Juilliard performing arts conservatory in New York City. Pacino's act of calling in writer-director Terrence Malick to watch the film in the editing suite led to Chastain's casting opposite Brad Pitt and Sean Penn in Malick's 2011 experimental drama The Tree Of Life, propelling her to stardom.

Salome, banned in London in the late-19th century, is a tale of desire, greed and revenge that follows the legend of King Herod, his lust for his young stepdaughter, Salomé, and her sexual baiting of John the Baptist. Wilde’s adaptation has spawned multiple stage productions, including an opera by Richard Strauss, and influenced work by Nick Cave and U2.

Pacino says of his filmed version of the play: "Salome is my attempt to merge play and film. The mediums can collide and my hope is to have them unify so that you're seeing pure theatre on film. To make that hybrid effective has been my goal; to have the more naturalistic photogenic qualities of film complement the language-driven essence of theatre."

Wilde Salome is, in Pacino's words, a "kind of a collage of a film", representing the struggles and highs and lows of presenting a challenging piece of writing by a literary genius of the 20th century, Oscar Wilde.

Pacino explores what it was like to put on the play in Los Angeles and to engage with the resulting problems and issues, as well as participate in the discovery of a new star, Jessica Chastain, as Salomé.

"Fifteen years ago I was in England and saw Steven Berkoff’s production of Salomé," recalls Pacino. "It was the most arresting, powerful, beautiful thing that I had seen in years. It really struck me. The odd thing was I didn’t know it was Oscar Wilde who wrote it. It wasn’t the Oscar Wilde I knew, famous for some of the greatest comedies ever written.

"I performed the play with Robert Ackerman in New York at the Circle in the Square uptown in full regalia, full costume and eye makeup. It was a very creative experience for me. I did it again on Broadway with Marisa Tomei in 2003. She was great, she did a great dance. But even after that I couldn’t let it go. I wanted to know more about Oscar Wilde."

Tickets for Sunday's 4pm screening are on sale at odeon.co.uk or on 0871 224 4007.