Interview: Mike Newell (part II)

Yesterday we discussed with director Mike Newell how intimidating it was to adapt the work of Gabriel García Márquez and how he ended up casting Javier Bardem and Italian actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno in the lead roles.

Today in part 2 of our interview, we discuss some unconventional casting choices, and how adapting Marquez compared to adapting a Harry Potter novel.

Chris Bumbray: I found it bizarre that Florentino is played as a young man by Unax Ugalde, while Fermina as a young woman is played by the same actress who portrays her as an adult.
Mike Newell: The reason is this – and I don’t know if I’ll be forgiven for that. There’s definitely a problem with consistency, and Javier with the best makeup in the world can’t be gotten much below the age of 25. I wanted to be able to follow these characters over a large stretch of life, as done in the novel. I wanted the character to be credibly sixteen, so I had to get a younger actor. Javier was actually very helpful in finding Unax, telling me that “there’s this kid in Barcelona who’s really good and looks like me.” I tried to do the same thing for Giovanna (Mezzogiorno who plays Fermina). However I couldn’t find anyone who looked like her, and she had such flawless skin that she looked credible playing a much younger role.

CB: How does adaptting Love in the Time of Cholera compare to adapting Harry Potter.
MN: Chalk and cheese.

CB: Really?
MN: Well- Harry Potter is a book like that (holds hands extremely far apart), like two house bricks. Warners said to me: can you do this in one film? We don’t want to make two films, and there’s material for two- in which I thought they were wrong, there would not have been enough for a second film. An so, I said I do not want to me too, but there’s a slim but very good thriller in there about a guy who all these dreadful things are happening to him, and he doesn’t know why. Eventually he finds out why, but there’s absolutely nothing he can do about it. So I started to watch old seventies thrillers like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor- that’s what I tried to bring to the film, make it more of a thriller.

[Unfortunately, at this point in the interview- my tape recorder ran out of steam. I was so wrapped up in conversation with Newell that I didn’t even notice].

I asked him about his future projects, and he mentioned that a lot was riding on the writer’s guild strike. The interview took place about two weeks before the strike began. He said that for his next project, he wanted to do go back to Britain and make a much smaller scaled film, like Four Weddings and a Funeral. He was toying with the idea of making a light comedy about a factory full of seamstresses who form a union and go on strike. He also dropped a hint that he also had a big budget adventure film on the horizon, but at that point he thought that it would take a while to get that project off the ground.

Shortly after our interview, it was reported that Newell was in negotiations to replace Michael Bay as the director of Prince of Persia for Jerry Bruckheimer. As of yet Newell is not officially signed onto the project. 

New Line Cinema releases Love in the Time of Cholera opens wide on Nov.16^th.