Love in the Time of Cholera
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发布于: 11年前
Love in the Time of Cholera
REPORTER: Now the themes of isolation and delusion are also present in Love in the Time of Cholera, a new film based on the deeply personal novel by Colombian Nobel prizewinning author and the man often credited as the godfather of Magical Realism Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Love in the Time of Cholera tells the story of a hopeless romantic played by Javier Bardem, yep, the very same actor who just won awards galore as the psycho killer having a bad hair day in No Country for Old Men. His character Florentino devotes more than fifty years of his life, hopelessly in love with the fragrant Fermina, played by Italian actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno. Mostly from afar until the death of her husband Dr. Urbino, allows him to once again profess his adoration and stake his claim for her affections.
JAVIER BARDEM: I have waited for this opportunity for fifty one years, nine months four days. That is how long I have loved you, from the first moment I cast eyes on you until now. I will meet you once again my love, eternal fidelity, ever last love.
GIOVANNA MEZZOGIORNO: Florentino, please, get out of here! Get out, and don't show your face again for the years of life that are left to you. And I hope that I buried you in that.
REPORTER: Let it be said in the mean time, Florentino's spent most of his adult life sleeping with more that 600 women and unusual way perhaps to display his eternal fidelity. The screenplay's been adapted by Ronald Harwood, who's had enormous success of late with The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. And is directed by the British filmmaker Mike Newell, perhaps best known for Four weddings and a Funeral, Donnie Brasco and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. However things have not gone so well for this latest project, which is being critically slammed upon its release. It's certainly an unenviable task to try and condense Marquez's dazzling prose into the language of film. So when I meet up with director Mike Newell, I asked him first, wasn't he daunted by the project?
MIKE NEWELL: I did it because I, I loved what the book said, of the way that it said it and even though I felt that it wasn't going to be possible to do the book without having 16 hours. I loved the book so much that I wanted to do what I could.
REPORTER: What were the biggest problems there for you when you looked at the adaptation from the book?
MIKE NEWELL: Well the biggest problems were stylistic in a way, because of what Marquez does. He gave me a set of notes when the script first came in and he said very good, eh, all the things that you would expect him to say. He's quite cantankerous, um, but he said, where is my stitch work? And I thought, what on earth is stitch work mean? And I realized that what he meant was that you never discover it in a straight line, the characters are always you set of a lot of line and he's take you back and fold it. It's like making strudel dough, you fold it, you punch it out, you fold it again, you punch it out, that's how he writes. And I think that's what he meant by stitch work, the way everything if folded and then embroidered and then folded and embroidered again. And I can't give him his stitch work because if you try to do that, the thing will turn to sludge in film terms, that was the greatest worry. I think it was always there, I think it is there and at the same time there were compensating things for me, which mean that, while knowing that I should still go on.
REPORTER: Lets talk about the casting, the younger version of Florentino is played by one actor. Obviously, Javier Bardem plays him as an older man. How confident were you that that could be bridged?
MIKE NEWELL: I think really the greater difficulty is why didn't I do it for both roles. I did it with Javier because, Javier could supremely do the old age but he couldn't do the young, you couldn't get him below 24, it was just not possible. And so, I was very unwilling to change the story to the degree that I felt it would be changed if I simply said, look this is about a guy who falls in love at 24. So we doubled him and as far as Giovanna, the girl who plays the love of his life is concerned, she could make the age. And I knew that that was a very, it was a dangerous thing to do and so I looked and I looked and I looked for the same trick and didn't find it, simply didn't find it and so what am I gonna do, there we are.
REPORTER: It's almost like, make a bigger point of it and you possibly could have done in both had changed. Is that, is that fair?
MIKE NEWELL: Yes, totally fair, sure, coffin and nail.
REPORTER: Okay, lets talk about some bigger theme in the novel and how you try and translate them in the film. And inevitably the sociopolitical background of this, in this novel, about the change in, in the advances in medicine and what, who being represents which is the confuter and tackling things like cholera against, if you like, the old fashioned romanticism that Florentino represents?
MIKE NEWELL: To start with that's a very elegant formulation of how modernity vs. tradition works in the uh, works in the book. And I'm not sure that I had space for that. I think when you ask this sort of question, and I asked it of myself all the time and did while I was shooting. You think to yourself, well why are you doing it, what is going to be there? If you're not doing this stuff and what I said was, that there is a direct quote right in the end of the movie which is almost the last paragraph of the book, that is in the caption of the river boat of which they hold up. He says, uh, I discover to my joy that it was life not death that was, uh, triumphant. So that he, as you watch these people growing older, with all of the characteristics which I tried to give them, the writing the novel says, that growing older, is, is a triumph if you have not been defeated, growing older is a triumph. And I worried away at the title, what does Love in the Time of Cholera means? Do I believe in love? Is love anything? I was absolutely not convinced that love was anything, certainly not as practiced by Florentino, you know, a life long devotion towards one woman and 623 lovers, um…
REPORTER: Virginity of the soul, I think it's called.
MIKE NEWELL: All right, okay, I wished I'd though of that,
REPORTER: You have done such a wide assortment of films in your life, your career.
MIKE NEWELL: Actually, I would screw career, screw success. If just once in a while maybe one or two people are actually going to go and see it in which case they might then, we can look. And if they've read the book, then that's good news.
REPORTER: It's very altruistic, does that?
MIKE NEWELL: Well yeah, but I mean there's no, during the older world service, it takes. I'm not selling the movie through you, I'm simply telling you the truth. And, and I got my bum bitten pretty badly, I didn't care. When an audience goes to see this movie, it is going to feel, eh, to some people as if they own it, it is the bible, it's one piece, its one of, you know, the half dozen greatest novels ever written, um, how could it possibly be smudged and fingered in this way. Um, but there are a lot of people who are going to see it, who won't have read the book, who might read the book again, who will take with them a kind of miasma of how wonderful South America is and then they'll discover the book which will show them really how wonderful South America is, and that writer is, and that will be good.