Sophia's Choice

When Sophia Loren plays one of your characters, there's no way around writing for the star.

By Vern Smith

The first time Malcolm MacRury talked to Sophia Loren was by phone. He was early in the process of adapting Nino Ricci's trilogy of novels featuring the character Vittorio Innocente into the TV miniseries Lives of the Saints, and MacRury was using Loren as his script's spine, writing a part for her that didn't quite exist in the books.

MacRury knew from the start that Loren had to be kept happy. Lives of the Saints was her vehicle. And already his star was telling him she needed more screen time.

"I'd just given her a treatment," says MacRury, whose credits include Man Without a Face, HBO's Lawyers, Guns and Money, and Street Legal. "She liked it but said, 'You haven't got my good stuff in there yet.' Okay, so now I have to do her good stuff. It was almost like a courting thing. I'd send her scenes, saying, 'Okay, here's the good stuff.' And she'd say, 'Oh yes, that's good, we need more of that.'"

Then, of course, there was that voice. That lush, smoky voice–"a protectable property," according to her website–to speak MacRury's lines.

"She's talking to me, and it's this voice you've heard all your life," he says. "You know that voice and you associate it with memories. I mean, this is someone who worked with John Wayne, Charlie Chaplin, Cary Grant. A distinctive voice, somebody you wanted to write for."

Plus, it was just plain neat writing for the star of such films as The Fall of the Roman Empire, The Man of La Mancha, and The Black Orchid.

"It was neat," says MacRury. "Aside from liking Lives of the Saints, that was the appealling part. I guess it's not that unusual. Certainly lots of movies are written with an actor in mind, to convince an actor to do it, tailor it to them. And from what I understand, family is very important to Sophia Loren. She comes from a very poor Naples background, so I think she could relate."

So they sort of hit it off, over the phone anyway. One less thing for MacRury to worry about as he retrofitted Ricci's trilogy for the small screen.

Principal photography on the four-hour, two-part CTV series began in Canada in March of last year, and wrapped in Italy that May. It's budgeted at $11 million.

Squeezing and cutting

I meet MacRury at the Pilot Tavern in Toronto's Yorkville district and plunk the books in the trilogy down on the table in front of him: Lives of the Saints, The Glass House, and Where She Has Gone. MacRury pulls his hair back and laughs when I ask how he boiled that (944 pages) into this (a 190-page script).

"It was about impressions," says MacRury. "Reading through the books and finding things you really like, things that you can use. And then trying to stitch it together into a story that will work as a movie."

Once he had thought about his first impressions, MacRury began cutting. Members of the extended family went first. Ricci's farm in Mersea, Ontario, near Leamington, went next–reset to Holland Marsh, which is near Toronto and made for a more practical back-and-forth between Yorkville and the old-world farm. Eventually, MacRury would also reset Vittorio's stint as an English teacher in Africa to a Baffin Island Native school. In practical terms, that allows Vittorio to get "as far away from his family as he can," escaping his world without forcing the production to go globe-trotting.

Likewise, Vittorio's teenage and college years–the focal point of book two–became quick blips in the narrator's screen life, "sort of making room for Sophia's character," MacRury says.

Loren plays Teresa Natoli–aunt of Vittorio as well as a composite of moral guardian figures in the books.

INT. TERESA'S CLASSROOOM – DAY
Teresa walks up and down the aisle with her POINTER in hand, grilling the all-boy class on their catechism –

TERESA NATOLI
Question Number 11. Who gave us the holy sacraments?

The boys start the expected response, but falter

CLASS OF BOYS
...Jesus.. did.. He does.. this through the... Church.. which.. is.. his Mystical... Body.

The pointer rocks in her hand. Making Vittorio nervous –

TERESA NATOLI
Pitiful. You're dreaming of your sister's unmentionables when you should be thinking of Our Savior.

Once he had created Teresa, MacRury's fear was over-balancing the story in Loren's favour.

"The tension of all three books is the story of Vittorio," says Lives of the Saints director Jerry Ciccoritti. "Now you've got not only an important character that you've invented, but she's also being played by Sophia Loren, the most important person on screen. So how do we shape the material we've come up with and also make Sophia happy? And how do we not overshadow that it's really a group story in which this one character is most important, but that character isn't the one played by Sophia Loren?"

Ciccoritti goes on to say, "The most important thing Malcolm did was come up with a spine hooking three books into one piece. That made it visual, made it a movie, and took it off the page. That was the good news."

It's all in the shading

MacRury read Lives of the Saints when it first came out and "loved it." But when he read books two and three after signing on, he "sort of felt like, 'Oh God, this is a bigger fish to fry than I thought.' The first one is quite fun and moving. A very lively story full of mystery, and I love the mysticism and superstitions."

So he focused on those touchstones, using as much of book one as he could, with books two and three playing into the themes of the first. MacRury says that in effect Ricci does the same thing, "because the story goes back to the village [in Italy that we first meet in book one] for the climax."

MacRury says Lives of the Saints wasn't a fraction of the "mammoth" research job of last year's Hemingway vs Callaghan, for which he had only a small piece of Morley Callaghan's non-fiction, "That Summer in Paris," to work with.

For that one, "I must have read 30 books, and I searched through The Toronto Star library," MacRury says.

"With this, it was finding a way to structure the true lines for the principal characters. Aside from the Sophia Loren character, these characters were not that different than from what Nino had created. It was just a question of shading."

At least in part, Lives of the Saints was also a job made easier by the narrator's mother, Cristina (Sabrina Ferilli). The literary star of book one, she has the village of Valle del Sole yammering like a convention of gossip columnists after she's bitten by a poisonous snake during a roll in the stable. 

Taboos then figure large when she gets pregnant while waiting for her husband Mario to send for her from Canada. The fact that she refuses to repent or even hide her "condition" is what makes her a real anti-hero, willing to say things others only dare think. But it's her ability to deliver dialogue snappier than any Callaghan or Hemmingway character that makes her a screenwriter's dream.

INT. JOHN CABOT 3RD CLASS CORRIDORS - NIGHT
The Ship's Doctor leans in close to the pregnant Cristina –

DR. BENTLEY
All I want to know is if the first one went full term. I don't like surprises and I don't like cheek.

CRISTINA INNOCENTE (in Italian)
You're a drunkard! Have you delivered a baby before or do I go find a gypsy?

Later, she finds herself explaining to Vittorio why he can't grow up to be the Pope's boss: "Too late. When the angel came, I was already in bed with St. Joseph."

Cristina dies in the first book. But MacRury wasn't about to lose one of his best characters so early.

"The whole play is told in flashbacks," he says. "It really couldn't have been done in a chronological way. So we begin in Canada with the family crisis. The father is having this breakdown, either on the verge of murder or suicide. But then the first part of the play is mostly in Italy, building to Cristina's death on the ship, while cutting back to the contemporary drama.

"We had Cristina in part one, and then what we have in part two is her doppelgänger, her daughter, Rita. More so than the books, she plays the part that it's basically her mother come to life. The love affair between Vittorio (played as an adult by Fabrizio Filippo) and Rita (Jessica Paré), his half-sister, is really him searching for his mother. Seeing in her, Rita, the same kind of free spirit that he idolized in his mother."

Finding the right role for Sophia

Still, the one common thread driving both story and process continued to be Sophia Loren.

"You've read the novels, and there's no part for her," MacRury says. "I mean you're talking about somebody who's a screen idol, made a hundred movies, won an Academy Award. People go crazy for her. No matter how great Nino's work is, CTV is not known for making Canadian literature. This is a big investment. For them to really get behind it, they needed a way of marketing it. That meant Sophia Loren.

"That was still the job; to create a character that she would want to do. Otherwise, there would be no film to talk about."

In this case, MacRury says addressing the business side also helped the plot. He used Loren's character as the bridge between the past and present. Teresa also gives Vittorio, who ages from seven to 26, something he didn't have in the books: a constant companion.

"And that's probably the saving grace," MacRury says. "The novels have no adult character that runs from beginning to end. They have Vittorio, but it's hard to have a kid be your lead while turning into an adult. You need to have somebody for that character to really interact with and butt heads with. And that's probably why it works. You needed a character who could carry the drama all the way."

See the Summer 2004 issue of Canadian Screenwriter for the complete interview.