By Harry Haun
06 Dec 2009

Tolkin, who shares Marshall's birthday (plus a decade), was tapped to start the screenplay. "By the time it came to me," he recalls, "I was standing on the shoulders of" — and here he cites the writers, first, of "8½" (Fellini, Ennio Flaiano, Brunello Rondi and Tullio Pinelli, who just died in March at the age of 100) and, then, of Nine (Yeston, Mario Fratti and Arthur Kopit). "I was given all these gifts by a lot of people who had been working on this a long time."

A ten-day trip to the Hamptons to work with Marshall on the screenplay turned into eight weeks. They started, he says, "with 3x5 cards on a long table, working through scene by scene by scene so that we could work on the basic idea of that. What I learned about musicals is that, if you achieve the emotion in the scene, then you have no song so you have to build just to the point of the song and then go.

"Then, the Writers Guild went on strike three days after I desperately handed in the draft, which was filled with notes and things in italics and footnotes. It was time to move on, and they brought in Anthony. What he did in, tragically, his last six weeks was to continue working in more of the characters I had loaded in the screenplay. By that time, I had many subplots, and Anthony did a lot of work trimming that."

Marshall's dream cast came true, thanks to big-spender Harvey Weinstein and some adventuresome Name Brand performers not used to singing in public.

It's almost a cast of solid Oscar gold, although the director did meet with Antonio Banderas, who was a Tony-nominated Guido in the 2003 revival.

"I thought he was fantastic in the revival — I really did — but I felt like I needed to explore the piece from a very new place. We were really creating a new musical, and I felt as if he had taken his Guido journey, and I really wanted to do something else."

"Something else" turned out to be Banderas' sometimes co-star and fellow Spaniard, Javier Bardem, who was pretty much set for the role — till, ironically, he won the Oscar. "And then he didn't want to work," says Marshall. "He was the first Spanish actor ever to win an Oscar, and it overwhelmed for him. He just needed to stop and step back for a moment. He couldn't commit to doing the movie when we needed him."

This major setback Marshall now tends to dismiss with a matter-of-fact, "Que Sera, Sera" shrug. "I'm a great believer in what's meant to happen, happens. You have to let things happen as they may. Of course, I never imagined in my wildest dreams that I could actually work with the greatest actor, in my opinion, alive."

Happily, by this point in pre-production, he had already started casting ethnically "outside the box" — particularly for the role of Liliane La Fleur. Liliane Montevecchi originated the part and inspired Yeston to write her "Folies Bergeres," in which she worked the longest red boa in theatre history right up to the Tony podium. Chita Rivera, doing Puerto Rican French, got it as far as a Tony nomination. For the movie, a titled English dame gets to strut her stuff.

Liliane's name has been shorted to Lilli, and she has been demoted from producer to costumer, which is just fine with Judi Dench. "I trained as a costume designer before I trained as an actress so I know how important it is to have a costume that empowers you," she says. "Colleen Atwood designed something quite organically on me. She had to do a drawing, but, when it comes to actually seeing you in it, there were certain things that changed, and she asks you how you feel in it. At least getting that costume, I felt that I might, in fact, have performed in a nightclub in Paris at some time. That was unbelievably empowering."

To get through the "Folies Bergeres" number, she recalls, "what was a help was that it happened on a stage, and the only kind of reference back I had was that I'd played Sally Bowles in Cabaret in London, and suddenly I thought, 'Oh, yes, this is what it reminds me of. Of course, it was difficult for the extras sitting there take after take after take after take to look as if they're enjoying it and having a nice time and smoking a cigarette. You want to scream at them, 'Like, fake it!' I didn't have a chance to do that, but anyway they stuck with me till the end. It was a long day."

Solving the Liliane problem with Dame Judi helped solve the Guido problem with Daniel Day-Lewis. Both are handled by the same manager, and the offer was made, startling the actor but not in an off-putting way. "I didn't really ask myself initially why I was drawn so much to it, apart from the fact that the script was so beautiful," Day-Lewis confessed, "but I suppose that, for anyone who does any kind of creative work — it tends to happen probably when you grow into middle age — you come to a time where you really question more and more frequently whether you have anything else to offer. At the very worst, you feel utterly bereft of whatever creative force it takes to do that work. So I guess I was interested in that dilemma — a man who is about to shoot a film, living in a wasteland of his own making."

Marion Cotillard — another nationality heard from (France) — brings her Oscar-winning Piaf poignancy to "My Husband Makes Movies," a figure of strength who finally has to walk away from the philandering filmmaker: "It takes courage to end a love story, to tell the man you love that you can't be so empty anymore."

	Stacy 'Fergie' Ferguson in "Nine"
	photo by David James © The Weinstein Company

To play the loose and lusty Saraghina, the initiating prostitute of Guido's boyhood, Marshall raided the U.S. record industry and nabbed Stacy Ferguson, the artist primarily known as Fergie, to sound the "Be Italian" blast. "What was interesting to me was that, when I'm doing the number, I'm not doing like myself," Fergie observes. "Whenever I sat down, I'd never cross my legs because that's not how Saraghina would sit. She wasn't a lady. The performance aspect of it is pretty much ingrained in me, but it was more about — for me — putting that together with the thought. I say 'Be Italian' many times in the song, and every time I said it I wanted it to have a different meaning because there are so many different things about being Italian: love of life, love of food, love of sex, love of dancing, love of singing — so it was putting all of that behind what I already knew and combining it, too."

Australia's Nicole Kidman lent her movie-star self to the role of Guido's on-camera muse, Claudia. Her first day after jet-lag, she wandered into the rehearsal room and found Kate Hudson — the token American actress — dancing up a storm with "Cinema Italiano," a new Yeston number that recalls "la dolce vita" in Rome of the '60s. "I went 'Wow! I can't wait to see that on film," Kidman remembers. "Maybe it will get her a Broadway show — because she certainly deserves one!

"It was interesting being around this cast. I think, when you're working, your egos are not a part of it because, if you love what you do, you're just so glad to be around other people who love what they do. I think that's what it is. It's a group of people — and you see it with our director. He's just in the trenches working every day. But that's who you need to be around to do good work. It's contagious, and it's also fun."

There are more kind words for Marshall from the Spanish Penelope Cruz, who plays Guido's mistress: "What makes him so unique is that he can be extremely picky. He can see everything. You can never fool him. He can really work you hard, and, of course, we want that as actors. He can do that being who he is. When I met him the first day, I thought, 'He's really one of the kindest people I've ever met, but I wondered how he will be in a situation under pressure.' One month goes by, two months go by, and he's always like this — to everybody. He's always kind to everybody. He never loses his temper. He never treats anybody without respect. You will see a lot of people who cannot handle this huge, enormous amount of pressure that he had in this movie with such manners. He's just such a beautiful person."

The director's response is a big, fat back-at-ya: "I had the greatest company of actors I could ever possibly imagine, and they had magic in them. It was important to me to create an atmosphere where they felt they weren't judged and they could do their greatest work. I remember when I first started to direct, a director came to me and said, 'Everybody's here on the set to serve you. Remember that!' And, as he walked off, I remember thinking to myself, ‘It's exactly the opposite.' I feel that my job is to serve the actors and protect them, make them as great as they can be. For me, I have to like the people I'm working with. It's very important to me — because it's your life, to spend time with them — and I really feel that at the core of my job is to make sure everything that they do is something I've served. I serve them. That's what I feel."

Amazingly, an actual Italian did manage to make the "Nine" cut. To play Guido's mother, Marshall picked Mamma Italy herself, Sophia Loren, who loomed over the press conference like a quiet icon. Somehow, inexplicably, she and Fellini never actually worked together on a film, although they did, however, occupy opposite ends of 1961's three-part omnibus called "Boccaccio '70."

Nevertheless, says Loren, "I was very happy when Rob Marshall called me up and said, 'We are going to do this musical about the story of Fellini, and I would like you to be in it.' I was very proud of it because I was the only Italian — eh? — in the film to be able to say that Italian movies are still wonderful all over the world. So I accepted in a very nice way. Rob told me — he was lying, of course — that he was not going to do the film if I was not in it, so I said, for the sake of his career, 'It's okay, I'm going to be in it so don't you worry,' and here I am, answering your questions . . ."

*

This month's Stage to Screens is dedicated to Michael Buckley, the tireless and enthusiastic show business journalist who took over this column in 2005. Michael died on Oct. 16, 2009, at the age of 66, following open heart surgery. In the days after the surgery, he told us he would like to take a month off before jumping back into his beat, and he regretted that he wouldn't be able to speak with the creators of "Nine." He was a valuable member of the Playbill family, and he is missed. All of his columns are archived in Playbill.com's Stage to Screens Feature Section.

(Stage to Screens is Playbill.com's monthly column that connects the dots between theatre, film and television projects and people.)