To adapt the novel for the screen, producers headed to southern Italy and enlisted Neapolitan-speaking actresses, an elaborate set and thousands of extras
The new television adaptation of “My Brilliant Friend” attempts above all to re-create the story as readers imagined it.
The screen version of Elena Ferrante’s best-selling novel, the first in her four-book Neapolitan series, will air on HBO in eight one-hour episodes starting Nov. 18. The story follows the complicated friendship between two girls, Elena and Lila, who meet at a Naples school in the 1950s.
“Why mess with a good thing?” executive producer Jennifer Schuur said of the efforts by the series to stay faithful to the novel. “You see moments in the book that you’d never imagine you’d see in real life.”
The drama is performed in Italian and, more trickily, Neapolitan, such a singular dialect that even many Italian viewers will need the subtitles.
The Italian co-production was shot in Caserta, a city outside Naples, with a 215,000-square-foot set on which the crew built 14 apartment exteriors, a church and a tunnel. The actors playing Elena and Lila as children and teenagers are Neapolitan speakers.
The show, with roughly 150 actors and 5,000 extras, makes its push for authenticity clear in an early scene when Lila throws Elena’s doll into a dark cellar with both daring and treachery. “That’s the moment when their story comes together in a whole new way, and so that felt like, ‘Let’s get this right,’ ” Ms. Schuur said
The four books in the Italian series have sold 10.2 million copies world-wide. More than a third of those were English-language editions.
On screen, the story doesn’t unfold in a hurry or paint its drama in primary colors, posing a possible challenge for viewers who like more adrenaline in their TV. “Given the subtleties, given the complex psychology at play that isn’t always necessarily communicated verbally by our actors, it is a show that you have to lean into,” said HBO co-head of drama Francesca Orsi, adding that the network’s viewers have embraced such shows in the past.
HBO hasn’t announced plans for a second season. The network typically orders a second season only after the first debuts, Ms. Orsi said. The hope, according to Ms. Schuur, is to dedicate a season to each of the four novels, which all-told span six decades.
Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym, and the secretive author has never revealed her real name. (In 2016, an Italian journalist said he had uncovered her identity, though it was never confirmed.)
Ms. Ferrante played a key role in the screen adaptation. The novelist reviewed screenplays and provided notes to director Saverio Costanzo, who also co-wrote the scripts. In 2007, the director had sought to purchase the film rights to one of Ms. Ferrante’s novellas but the project didn’t go anywhere.
Ms. Ferrante remained a mystery to the show’s production crew, communicating only by email and mostly just with Mr. Costanzo. The two never spoke, he said, but through their correspondence he discovered a savvy collaborator.
“She has an impressive talent for screenwriting, a sense of the scene that is not obvious for a literary author,” Mr. Costanzo wrote in an email translated from Italian. “She wanted to make sure that the soul of her text would be respected, but she was never defensive or conservative. Quite the opposite, she was always open to every mutation her text was undergoing as it was being turned into a film.”
The show will premiere in the U.S. shortly before it does in Italy. The series has been sold to more than 56 territories around the world.
Ms. Schuur, who once wrote a fan letter to Ms. Ferrante, said landing the job was a long shot. Her Los Angeles team laughed her off the phone when she first told them how much she wanted to adapt the series for the screen. “They were like, ‘You and everyone else on the planet.’ ”
HBO joined the project through Italian producer Lorenzo Mieli, who worked with the network on “The Young Pope” and secured the rights to all four Neapolitan novels with Italian production company Fandango. HBO brought on Ms. Schuur, who tried to bring American storytelling sensibilities to the work of distilling more than 300 pages into eight hours of Italian TV.
The series departs from the book, which is narrated by Elena, by offering more material from Lila’s point of view. Gaia Girace, who plays the teenage Lila, said she grappled with the mercurial character. “Lila is very complex, and it took me awhile to understand her well,” she wrote in an email translated from Italian. “Thanks to Saverio’s precious advice, and by reading the book and coming closer to her, I understood who she is.”
Margherita Mazzucco, who plays the teenage Elena, said she hasn’t considered what the series could do for her career in America. “Right now, I cannot even conceive the possibility of landing in Hollywood,” the Italian actress wrote in a translated email. “Let’s see what happens with the TV show.”
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Source: www.wsj.com
