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Italian Actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno from Ferzan Ozpetek’s “La Finestra di Fronte” (Facing Windows) and Vincere talks about speaking English with a Spanish Accent in “Love in the Time of Cholera.
An Interview With Giovanna Mezzogiorno
In epic romances, audiences may follow characters from youth through old age. In Love in the Time of Cholera,ctress Giovanna Mezzogiorno plays the love interest Farmina from 17 to 70. Even her male costars got a few breaks.
Mezzogiorno Talks Love in the Time of Cholera “I’m the only one who went from 17 to 70,” said Mezzogiorno. “Javier [Bardem] had another actor [playing him as a teen] and Benjamin [Bratt] just came out at 30. That was hard. That was hard because when Mike Newell at the beginning asked me if I felt like doing that, because at the beginning they thought to take three actresses, a little girl and older. But when he asked me ‘Can you do that, do you think we can work on that and I would like very much you to do that’ I said to myself he was in a way giving me a very, very, very big responsibility. That doesn’t come often in a life.”
Wearing old age makeup was only the beginning of her difficult performance. “I spent one month before shooting in Cartagena for working with a movement coach. I think the hardest thing is not to do an imitation. A person of 72-years-old is not moving like a dead. That’s not true, that’s not true. It depends. So we tried to make the different old people, Florentino, Farmina, Juveno based on their character, on their lives which is what happens. You get old as you lived in a way, as your character, your suffering, your unhappiness. I tried to make my old Farmina still straight, still strong but old. That was challenging, exactly.”
Perhaps playing her younger self was an even greater challenge. “I have to go back to 19 which is hard. I’m 32. When you are 32, you have years and years of things on you that makes me be like here now. The way you move, you relate to people, it’s your story. So you have to take that away and go back to being clean. It’s hard. But exactly again, not going into an imitation of a la la little girl because that’s not true. Farmina is still Farmina. Farmina is going to be Farmina from 20, at 17, 40, 50, 70. But she changed because of course the body changes, the voice changes.”
Compound all of this with shooting in a foreign tongue. Mezzogiorno is Italian playing a South American speaking English with an accent. “That was very hard for them. I say them because it’s not me. They said to us that we had to speak English because making the movie in Spanish would have been very limiting for the movie of course. But at the same time, we had to all sound the same. I’m Italian, Javier is Spanish, John and Ben are American, Catalina is Colombia. We had to find a common sound. We’re mostly actors so we tried to make an English Latin sound but all the same. We worked again with a coach for it. Two hours a day with tapes.”
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