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Mike Newell on Love in the Time of Cholera
By Fred Topel | Image property of New Line Cinema.
Love in the Time of Cholera is the film version of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's epic romance. Director Mike Newell of course had to condense it for a two hour plus film, but one thing he kept from the book was the bookend, opening with the main characters in old age.
Newell Enjoys Love in the Time of Cholera
"The novel was always a guide for us," said Newell. "The beginning is outlandish. You have a man falling out of a tree because he's bitten by a parrot. You have an old, old, old man in bed with a naked girl of about 17-18. Then extraordinarily enough, you have that old man going to the old woman whose husband just died saying, 'I have loved you for 50 years and I'm now pledging you my heart all over again and would like to marry you.' It's outrageous and outlandish. It's Marquez. He's one of the great writers ever. He has that kind of cheek and gall and surprise. If you don't do that, if you simply let it unroll from young to old, I don't think that you have done that sort of seizing the audience in surprise."
Marquez actually gave Newell his blessing. The director himself had more issues with adapting a favorite book. "I'm satisfied with the movie because what the book says is that Farmina is all her life a great beauty and she's timid. She's not sure whether she's lived her life. Did I really love him? He was a good man but did I really, really love him? She thinks that all the way along, all the way through. She gets married for the wrong reasons. She has a stressed relationship with him and yet at the end, she can perfectly honestly say that it was a good marriage. It was a good marriage. It's just there were stresses in it. But she's tinted and Florentino isn't timid at all. Florentino is wild and brave and crazy and loves her to distraction all his life, and has 622 other lovers. In the end, what the book says is now is now. I know we're 70, we're old people, we might die tomorrow. Marry me now and at least we'll get 24 hours. So the book is a great heroic, as well as everything else, as well as how delicate and subtle and careful and well observed it is. It's a great heroic affirmation of life, of positiveness, of belief and doing things. That we got. If we got that, we've got a version of Marquez. How could we ever be literal? If we were going to be literal, I would need 16 hours of television to do it. What we do have is a film that sees what the book is about and does that. Sure, there were things that killed me to leave out."
Love in the Time of Cholera
Right from page one of Marquez there were scenes that Newell yearned to film, but could not realistically budget for a theatrical film. "I loved the very first chapter. I loved this silver haired old bulls*tter coming into the room and saying, 'Don't worry, it's suicide, clearly suicide but the police don't have to know that and we'll do this, that and the other.' Then there is this fantastic image of him opening his medical bag and inside his medical bag is chaos. The chaos is his life. He looks so great from the outside, Juvenal, and the bag which is literally his impedimenta, and those enormous elegances of construction are wonderful. I used to read the book every couple of weeks, while we were shooting."
Those moments remained on the set to inspire the filmmakers. "I used to read it every couple of weeks for pure pleasure. I would sit down and say, 'Why don't I read up? I'm shooting that in the next couple of days. I'll just check it out of the book.' I would just cruise on through and love it. But the making of a movie is not the writing of a book."
Love in the Time of Cholera opens to theaters on November 16th.
For the trailer and more movie info, go to the Love in the Time of Cholera Movie Page.
Fred Topel
Sources: Image property of New Line Cinema.
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