“Director’s block is like writer’s block, except that it’s public rather than private. My 8½ crew called me ‘the magician,’ but the film I was going to make had fled from me. I considered abandoning it, but I could not let all of those people down who believed I was a magician. It came to me that I should make a film about a director who has director’s block.
“It had been said that my films are autobiographical. True. I often use something that really happened to me.
“When I was about seven, my parents took me to the circus, and I had the strong feeling that I was expected there.”
I know Fellini would have been highly complimented by the choice of Daniel Day-Lewis to play Guido in NINE. Since the character in NINE represents Fellini, I can imagine Federico saying something like, “Such a fine actor, so good-looking…so thin.”
Guido, in both 8 ½ and NINE, while being inspired by Fellini, is only part of the real man. In life, Fellini was rather shy and self-conscious. In his imagination, he could be Guido. As Marcello Mastroiani, and now Daniel Day-Lewis, Fellini was vicariously able to be the character of his imagination without upsetting his less turbulent personal life with his devoted wife and star, Giulietta Masina. “I am her best director, if not her best husband,” he told me.
Fellini would have appreciated the actresses chosen to be the women in Guido’s life – Nicole Kidman, Kate Hudson, Penelope Cruz, Marion Cotillard and Judi Dench. Fellini was not the Casanova he sometimes was rumored to be, he, himself, having spread the rumor. “I have a playfully adulterous mind,” he told me. “In my mind, I never get tired of living out my sexual fantasies. In life, they would interfere with my work.”
Fellini would have been extremely pleased and certainly rather amused to lean that Sophia Loren was playing his mother. She was his choice to star in Journey With Anita, a film he never made. Anita was a girl with whom the story’s director has a brief fling. The film eventually was made by another director, with Goldie Hawn playing Anita. In real life, Goldie Hawn is the mother of Kate Hudson, one of NINE’s stars.
Fellini never saw the stage version of NINE on Broadway (he hated flying), but he was pleased by the idea that his films were enduring, and that both 8½ and Nights of Cabiria (which became “Sweet Charity”) were the basis of musicals delighted him. He had grown up loving the Hollywood musical, particularly those of Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, who inspired his film, Ginger and Fred. I’m certain that Federico would have appreciated that NINE is in the tradition of the great Hollywood musicals without imitating them. Music was always important in Fellini’s films and he would have been thrilled that Rob Marshall was at the helm. His direction is never intrusive and always in control.
Rob Marshall has given us the definitive homage to Fellini, always in the spirit of the great Italian director yet never imitating him. I think that Fellini would have been especially pleased by NINE because it is not a re-make of 8½, but a true homage, which stands on its own. I can’t speak for Federico, but I can hear him saying, as he often did, “What do you think, Charlottina?”
I almost saw 8 ½ with Federico. During one of my visits to Rome, I was told by Fellini that a small theater was showing the film, many years after its release, and we rushed right over only to find a decrepit cinema, mutilated print, ancient projectors and miserable sound. Except for a snoring man and an attentive dog who seemed to be enjoying the film well enough, the theater was empty.
Fellini rushed out in panic, calling back to me, “You can stay if you wish. I ran out, following him, to Cafe Rosati, to drown our sorrows in coffee and patisserie. That was the day I almost saw 8½ with Federico Fellini.
I knew Fellini well enough to know that he would’ve slid down into a theater seat to see NINE and he definitely wouldn’t have left. Sliding down in the seat was left over from his childhood spent at the Fulgar Cinema in Rimini when he saw a film he truly enjoyed and didn’t want his mother to find him, and drag him away.
Fellini’s life exceeded even his dreams. “Life is the combination of magic and pasta,” he told me, so I believe he would have suggested that after you’ve seen the magic of NINE, you go out and have a meal of delicious pasta. – Charlotte Chandler, author of I, Fellini
“Be Italian. Live today as if it may become your last.” — “Be Italian,” NINE
Passion, fantasy, lust, love, art, style, delusions, dreams – life has always been a circus for world-famous 1960s movie director Guido Contini (Daniel Day-Lewis)… only now he can’t escape it in the vibrant and provocative dramatic musical, NINE.
Renowned for his brilliant moviemaking and desired by many, Guido is about to kick off production on his highly anticipated ninth picture, ITALIA, when, suddenly, the bottom drops out of both his ample creative powers and his fervid love life, as they simultaneously unravel out of control.
Surrounded by a panorama of astonishing women—his tempting mistress Carla (Penelope Cruz), his devoted wife Luisa (Marion Cotillard), his muse Claudia (Nicole Kidman), his costume designer and confidante Lilli (Judi Dench), a flirty journalist from Vogue (Kate Hudson), an instructive prostitute from his childhood (Stacy Ferguson) and his beloved Mamma (Sophia Loren) – Guido searches for inspiration and possible salvation amid the free fall.
As he does, the historic Stage 5 at Cinecitta Studios in Rome is lit up by Guido’s most evocative desires, memories and dreams—which transform into dynamic, expansive musical fantasies—as NINE draws ever closer to the moment when Guido must overcome his demons and call “Action!”
The innovative, award-winning Broadway musical sensation inspired by the movies—NINE—comes full circle back to the screen stirringly re-invented as the richly cinematic story of an artist’s epic mid-life crisis by Academy Award®-nominated director Rob Marshall, who brought Chicago so dazzlingly to life.
Based on the Tony Award winning Broadway musical NINE, with book by Arthur L. Kopit, music and lyrics by Maury Yeston and adaptation from the Italian by Mario Fratti, the film is written by Michael Tolkin and Anthony Minghella. The film is produced by Marc Platt, Harvey Weinstein, John DeLuca and Rob Marshall. The executive producers are Kelly Carmichael, Michael Dryer, Gina Gardini, Ryan Kavanaugh, Arthur L. Kopit, Tucker Tooley, Bob Weinstein and Maury Yeston.
Unusual Way
Few Broadway sensations have cinematic roots as deep or as sexy as NINE—a story about art, dreams, love and the emotional exhilaration and inspiration that can only be found at the movies—which now comes full circle back to the big screen in a completely re-imagined adaptation by director Rob Marshall of Chicago fame. Marshall unfolds the drama of an artist’s mid-life crisis in his own original cinematic language, forged of emotion, music, imagination and kinetic cinematography, that turns the inner lives of director Guido Contini and the women who inspire him into stirring visual fantasias.
It all began with Federico Fellini. His 1963, Oscar-winning masterpiece film, 8½, a daringly surreal and magical tale about a director’s creative crisis, became one of the most talked-about, analyzed and influential movies of all time. Overflowing with a carnival of imagery fused from one man’s tantalizing memories, dreams, flights of fancy, nostalgia,and demons, it became to one of the first films that fully exposed what it really feels like to live inside the madness and wonder of the modern human condition. On top of that, along with Fellini’s other movies, it inspired people around the world to aspire to the dream of living inside the sensual world of an Italian movie.
Since then, many leading contemporary filmmakers have paid homage to 8½ in their own distinctly individual ways. Bob Fosse spun his own life into the surreal fabric of All That Jazz, the dance-driven story of a brilliant, self-destructive choreographer trying to come to grips with his past, his women and his mortality. Woody Allen took a completely opposite approach with the comic Stardust Memories, in which he starred as a disillusioned filmmaker plagued by hallucinations and alien visitations as he confronts the meaning of his work and the memories of his greatest loves.
The Broadway version of NINE, with book by Arthur L. Kopit and music and lyrics by Maury Yeston, began with another young artist’s Fellini obsession. Yeston had fallen madly in love with 8½ when he first saw it as a teenager. Years later, while teaching music at Yale University in the 1970s, he turned the movie’s image-driven story into a genre-expanding stage musical, ultimately heading to Rome to meet with Fellini and receive his creative blessings. Yeston decided that if he added the extra element of music-and-dance to the director’s unforgettable vision of a man’s mid-life battles with women, lust, spiritual yearning and creative fulfillment… it would it add up to NINE.
When the production premiered on May 2, 1982 at the 46th Street Theatre, what it also added up to was a massive hit. Directed by Tommy Tune, NINE featured the unusual combination of a singular male lead surrounded by 24 female actresses representing every facet of feminine power, strength and beauty.
The show ran for 729 performances and became the must-see of the season, dazzling audiences with its inventive, visually striking, high-style design and arresting musical numbers—and sweeping five Tony Awards that year. The allure of the show continued with a Broadway revival garnering another 8½ Tony Awards and countless touring and regional productions.
But NINE was destined to undergo another artistic transformation—back to its original inspirational medium: the movies. The idea emerged as Rob Marshall and Harvey Weinstein began searching for a follow up project to Chicago, the spectacular story of Prohibition-Era crime that revolutionized the whole concept of merging drama with music and dance, and went on to win six Academy Awards®, including Best Picture. In the meantime, Marshall made his award-winning adaptation of Memoirs of a Geisha (winner of three Academy Awards), but in late 2006, he and Weinstein announced that their next project would be NINE.
Just as Fellini had personally given to Maury Yeston full creative liberty to use the elements of 8½ like sculptor’s clay to create his theatrical work, Yeston now granted to Rob Marshall the same freedom to give the play a new life on the screen.
“I was absolutely delighted to hear that Harvey Weinstein wanted to make a film of NINE and even more excited that Rob Marshall was going to direct it,” says Yeston. “I feel very strongly that cinema is a director’s art and I wanted Rob to fell completely free to adapt and transform my stage piece to take full advantage of the very different medium and possibilities of film. I literally told Rob: ‘make believe I am dead, because you must approach this with radical freedom and bring yourself fully to it.’ Everyone knows that you can’t just point a camera at a stage and make a movie. It was obligatory for the director to redefine NINE in all of its elements, and that is precisely what Rob did.”
He continues: “I have always felt a personal obligation to Fellini, who so graciously allowed me to adapt his masterpiece, who trusted me to honor and respect it. And now, Rob has returned this gift to me, and also to Fellini, by doing justice to the film.”
Marshall and Weinstein engaged two screenwriters with a unique perspective to tackle their vision of turning NINE into a drama with music: the Oscar-nominated writer/director Michael Tolkin (The Player) and the late, Oscar-winning writer / director Anthony Minghella (The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley), himself of Italian heritage and steeped in a profound love of Italian films. Their writing was inspired not only by Fellini, Kopit and Yeston, but by their own personal experiences with moviemaking, imagination and life. (Minghella would pass away before the film completed production, making NINE his final work.)
Simultaneously, Marshall began auditioning a roster of essentially every leading lady in Hollywood and beyond—because he always believed that the script should be written to the cast, rather than the other way around. Marshall, along with his creative partner John DeLuca, held singing and dancing work sessions with nearly every female star of renown while the screenplay was still being forged.
Meanwhile, Yeston told Marshall to “call me when you need me” and three weeks after their initial meeting, he was on the line. Shortly after, Yeston met with Marshall and John DeLuca around a piano to begin the process of adding three entirely new songs to his uniquely expressive score.
The idea exhilarated Yeston. “We talked about the fact that the stage show had several reality based songs that needed to be re-invented in order to fit the film’s concept: the songs exist as fantasies in Guido’s mind. So the film needed these new songs. It was a chance for me to re-imagine my own work for film,” he says, “and it couldn’t have been more exciting or satisfying for me to write new songs in a different art form for such brilliant stars.”
Despite the decades-long gap, Yeston found the characters seemed as alive as ever to him, especially with the film’s dynamic casting. He wrote the lullaby “Guarde La Luna” with Sophia Loren in mind as Guido’s beloved Mama. “The original song for Guido’s mother in the stage version is a quintessentially high soprano song and Sophia Loren is not a soprano so the song would not have the same effect,” he explains. “My goal was to write a song for Sophia that would still have the same lyrical and musical function but that would respond to her vocal range and, even more so, the very essence of this extraordinary woman whose DNA is part of the fabric of Italian cinema. I took some very haunting music from the song “Waltz from ‘Nine’” in the stage show and transformed that into this song.”
Yeston also wrote a new song for Marion Cotillard as Guido’s weary wife, Luisa: the powerful “Take It All.” It originally was going to be a trio for Cotillard, Nicole Kidman and Penélope Cruz but when that felt at odds with the narrative, a fresh idea emerged. “Rob and John came up with a premise for the song that completely opened a new world for me,” notes Yeston. “It was a chance to give the marvelously talented Marion Cotillard a heart-wrenching, soul-searing performance number and that is what she delivers in the film.”
Finally, Yeston wrote “Cinema Italiano,” a playful ode to the enduring pop culture influence of Italian movies performed by Kate Hudson as a style-savvy Vogue journalist. “Kate has a spectacular voice and is a great dancer so we wanted an up-tempo number rich with dancing and singing for her,” he says. “The song turned out to be a great idea for reasons that weren’t immediately apparent. It became a witty, entertaining way to show audiences of today how in 1965, Italian movies were the new wave of excitement and the very pinnacle of cinematic achievement. It was also a way to reveal how Italian movies not only gave the world a new film style but a new fashion style, as this realm of skinny ties and speedy sports cars became a lifestyle to which people everywhere aspired. Kate took all that and hit it out of the park.”
In addition to the three new songs, Yeston made changes to the lyrics and music throughout. “The songs needed to fit hand-in-glove with the characters as Rob envisioned them and the actors who portray them,” says Yeston.
While a few songs from the original play were cut to enhance cinematic fluidity, as is common with stage to screen transfers, Yeston feels nothing has been lost. “I have not lost any songs because they are still in the stage show. Instead, I have gained a newly transformed version of my work,” he explains. “From the moment I fell in love with 8½, NINE has been a life-long project for me. I love the material and I see it as an on-going process that never is final. At the end of the day, my work is a theory, and it takes performers in a particular medium to make it a reality or audiences. A new version doesn’t cancel out previous versions or future versions. That’s what makes it so thrilling.”
He adds: “Working on NINE with Rob Marshall and John DeLuca was the most life-giving, inspiring and welcoming experience of my creative life. They are meticulous, they are brilliant and the simply inspire changes for the better.”
Yeston also had a chance to hear his re-imagined and re-worked score recorded by a 50-piece orchestra conducted by the film’s music supervisor, Paul Bogaev, who also worked on Chicago. “It was thrilling to hear the music go from a smaller Broadway ensemble to a big orchestra,” Yeston confesses. “The music is richer, fuller, sweeping in its treatment. It’s the experience of a lifetime to hear my music like this and I’m enormously grateful.”
Sums up Harvey Weinstein: “NINE is a timeless masterpiece. Inspired by Fellini, one of cinema’s most profound auteurs, it is given a new life by the dramatic film writing of Tolkin and Minghella and the dynamic staging of Rob Marshall and John DeLuca. Nobody can stage sexier or more exciting numbers than Rob—and teaming up with this tremendous cast, he has put together something we’ve never experienced before. I can’t think of a better filmmaker to bring this story to the screen.”
Folies Bergere
“The film version of NINE is a complete re-invention. It is so wholly unique to the vision of Rob Marshall that it became its own journey creatively,” says producer Marc Platt (Wicked), a veteran of both film and Broadway. “While it is true in essence to the Broadway musical, NINE the movie has become very much its own thing. It keeps in mind the essence of what made us all fall in love with the original material—its spirit and voice—but then Rob made it his own. His NINE is a wonderful fantasy that deals with real ideas and emotions.”
Rob Marshall is no stranger to fusing Broadway classics with cinematic verve, which he did with Chicago. As a six-time Tony Award nominee for such shows as Cabaret and Kiss of the Spider Woman, his stage acumen is well known, but he is just as highly regarded as a filmmaker, most recently bringing Arthur Golden’s bestseller Memoirs of a Geisha to life on screen, and garnering multiple Oscar nominations.
Platt continues: “Rob has a unique background for this story in that he came from the world of the theatre as a dancer and choreographer, made the leap into directing for the theater and then became a film director. NINE is a film about a filmmaker, about the cinema and about creating, and Rob is a creator, so it was personal for him. He’s a man who understands cinema, its history, its academics, the technical aspects of directing a film, and the aesthetics. He also comes from the world of musicals—he grew up in that world, he understands how music moves narrative along. He understands how to integrate seamlessly the elements of music and dance, storytelling and design. In, that sense the movie NINE is the perfect marriage of director to material.”
Guido’s Song
At the heart of NINE’s drama is the artistic journey of Guido Contini, the suave, sensual, Fellini-like Italian film director who is universally hailed as the world’s greatest filmmaker—yet suddenly finds himself in a desperate search for inspiration for his next movie. He gets lost in his stormy relationships with a sea of beautiful women—who each seduce and confound him, spark his memories and open up his imagination to new possibilities, pushing him into the dream-like zone where creativity happens.
The role calls for a keen intelligence and simmering sexuality underscored by an unraveling sense of artistic vulnerability, and the surprise casting placed two-time Academy Award winner Daniel Day-Lewis in the part. Day-Lewis has been called the most gifted actor of his generation, disappearing completely into the skin of an unforgettable array of screen characters, including his recent Oscar®-winning turn in the California oil epic, There Will Be Blood—but he has never been seen dancing or singing in a film before. Nevertheless, Day-Lewis threw himself into the role with his prototypical intensity—even learning fluent Italian, in order to inhabit the character completely.
Maury Yeston, who has seen quite a range of actors take on the role of Guido, was impressed with Day-Lewis’s absorption into the role, but also his undiscovered ability to entertain as a singer. “It turns out that Daniel is a gifted singer and always was, but we just never knew it,” Yeston remarks.
Says cinematographer Dion Beebe of Day-Lewis’s departure performance: “There’s an intensity to the performance, but there’s also a lightness, a sense of humor and irony. Guido is a man whose world might be collapsing, but his mind is always ready to fly off into fantasy.”
Sophia Loren adds, echoing the entire casts’ sentiments: “Daniel is one of the best: scary, intimidating, hypnotic, beautiful, magnetic… unforgettable!”
Surrounding Day-Lewis—and alternately seducing and unsettling his character—in NINE is a knock-out ensemble of sexy, strong, glamorous women, each with her own vital role to play in helping Guido find his way through his creative maelstrom.
The roster begins with Oscar winner, Marion Cotillard—who stirred audiences with her lifelike performance as Edith Piaf in La Vie En Rose—takes on the role of Luisa, Guido’s long-devoted and long-suffering wife. Luisa was once his leading lady, and is still the woman Guido can’t live without, but now she has taken a back seat to the many other temptations in his life. She is acutely aware there will always be a price to pay for loving a creative artist like Guido, as she confesses in her number, “My Husband Makes Movies” and the new, heart-wrenching number “Take It All”—but his behavior brings her to the brink of a momentous decision.
In preparing for the role, Cotillard thought a lot about her character’s motivations and her life before Guido. “Luisa was an actress when she met Guido. I think she dedicated her life to him, because their love was stronger—at that time—than her ambitions as an actress. Now she feels she has given everything to this man,” she explains.
Continues Cotillard, “In the time they have been together, Luisa has accepted many things about Guido. He is a director. He loves women. He needs women. He takes love and energy from these women. He needs Luisa, but he doesn’t fully realize that she must have something in return. Luisa gives everything to Guido, but she has reached a crossroad where she has to decide.”
Guido’s irresistibly lusty yet delicately needy mistress, Carla, played by Penélope Cruz, who won the 2008 Academy Award® for Best Supporting Actress for another incendiary role in Vicky Cristina Barcelona.
Cruz was instantly attracted to Carla’s colorful role in Guido’s life, as the woman who intends to battle for him, no matter the cost. “Carla has hope, conflict and pain in her relationship with Guido,” Cruz observes. “When she is around him she feels alive, because he makes her feel special, but it’s a real roller coaster with him and he also causes Carla a lot of grief. Their relationship has been going on for some years and I think she simply can’t let go. She sees only what she wants to see in Guido. She feels ready to fight for him to the end.”
Cruz threw herself heart and soul into NINE, and says she was constantly inspired to go further by her director and fellow cast members. “This film has been an incredible experience and most of that is because of Rob Marshall,” she says. “He has a brilliant talent and generosity. He sees everything, yet he manages to be honest with everyone. He only wants to bring the best out of everybody. We had all of these women working together, and he made each of us all feel special, every minute of the day.”
She relished the chance to sing and dance, especially in the provocative number “Call From the Vatican.” “We rehearsed for weeks and weeks, which I loved, and then when we shot the number, I was so sad, because I knew I would never get to do it again,” she confesses.
Another woman who has long been in a slippery, symbiotic relationship with Guido is his inspiration and muse, the international film star Claudia Jenssen. They have built their stellar careers with each other, but now, as Guido grows desperate for inspiration, Claudia does the unthinkable: she turns down the lead role in his film.
Starring as Claudia is Oscar winner Nicole Kidman, whose diversity of roles has spanned from Virginia Woolf in THE HOURS to a an overwrought modern New Englander in Margot at the Wedding. She also starred in another innovative film that helped to kick-start the modern era of the re-imagined Hollywood musical: Moulin Rouge. In NINE, Kidman gets to sing the most recognizable song “Unusual Way,” recently recorded by Barbara Streisand.
Kidman recalls being instantly energized by the themes at the core of NINE. “It’s the study of a man who’s having a breakdown and looking for resurrection—and all the women in his life. It’s about artistic and human nature, about the crimes and lies Guido has committed, and his search for his lost authenticity and decency,” she says.
She was equally enticed by the filmmakers at the helm. “NINE was the film everyone wanted to do,” she says. “Rob Marshall had his pick. He came to me and said, ‘Would you play Claudia?’ and I said, ‘Absolutely.’ I was sitting with him in the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel, in the middle of a press junket, so it was a very movie star moment!”
She continues: “At that stage, they didn’t have a male lead, so we all kept our fingers crossed… and as fate would have it, Daniel Day-Lewis stepped into the role. He’s so true to his art and it’s so beautiful to be in the orbit of someone like Daniel, to be one of his many women.”
Another of those women is Guido’s nurturing confidante and costume designer, Lilli, who is played by Judi Dench, the venerable British star of stage and screen who won the Oscar for Shakespeare in Love and has been nominated six times. Dench took pleasure in the very different kind of relationship Lilli has with Guido; and in Lilli’s flamboyant personality, evidenced by her spectacle-admiring number “Follies Bergere.” “Lilli is obviously older than Guido, and knows him very, very well, has worked with him many, many times and, yet, like the other women in his life, she is utterly bewitched by him,” says Dench. “Who wouldn’t be?”
Lilli, Dench notes, sees herself as Guido’s self-appointed protector. “She wants to remind him that he doesn’t have to be so full of apprehension. She’s trying to catch his imagination again, and remind him of the fun they’ve had making beautiful movies. She sees that he’s bogged down and her goal is to break through that so that he can become the person she knows he can be.”
Life also imitated art for Dench in the role. “Strangely enough, I started out training to be a costume designer in the theatre!” she explains. “So that was nice, to kind of understand the world my character inhabits. I couldn’t put it into practice now—and I never had to worry about the costumes on this film because Colleen Atwood is a miracle worker—but I know that world very well.”
Dench previously worked with Day-Lewis under different circumstances, playing his mother in Hamlet at the Royal National Theatre, and knew the degree to which he penetrates his roles. “It was just lovely to get another opportunity to work with him,” she says. “He became completely Italian; and that’s Dan. That’s the way he does it and it was wonderful for the rest of us, because when you’re doing a scene with him, he makes the work completely seamless.”
A mischievous flirtation for Guido comes in the form of the impeccably fashionable Vogue journalist Stephanie, a new role created for the film. Kate Hudson, an Oscar® nominee for her vibrant performance in Almost Famous, takes on the flashy role. “Stephanie,” she notes, “is an obsessive fan of Guido Contini. She adores his films and Italian culture in general. She is one of many women who all want a piece of Guido!”
For Hudson, the very notion of doing a musical was completely new and refreshing, and she was particularly excited to perform one of Maury Yeston’s new songs: the buoyant pop ode to style, “Cinema Italiano.” “I’ve never had an opportunity to do something like NINE before,” comments Hudson. “I’ve taken dance classes and worked with different choreographers, but I had never done a big number with hair and make-up and lights before this. Luckily, Rob and John prepared us with six weeks of rehearsal which was like a training camp. We sang and danced every day on a mock up stage.”
Then came her big moment in front of the camera. “It was an entirely different and terrifying experience,” she admits, “but also absolutely incredible and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”
Also joining the cast is a veritable Italian screen legend in real life: Oscar winner Sophia Loren, who says she was bowled over when Rob Marshall offered her the role of one of the most important women in Guido’s life: his always influential mother. Marshall told the internationally beloved actress that he could not contemplate making NINE without her. “He explained it was a small role, but said he would only make the film if I would play Mama,” Loren explains. “So I joked to him that I would do it to save his career because I liked CHICAGO so much. But it was really something I wanted to do. I mean for an Italian girl to be in an American musical is something.”
Loren loved having the chance to perform the third new song from Yeston: the lullaby “Guarda La Luna.” She also was thrilled to work with a cadre of today’s most illustrious female stars. “To work with Nicole Kidman, Penélope Cruz, Judi Dench, I wondered if we would all kill each other!” Loren laughs. “But no. It was like family. It was wonderful because none of us had ever done a real Hollywood musical, so we were rooting for each other and we really became lasting friends.”
Rounding out the family of women who came together for NINE is Grammy winning artist Stacy Ferguson—known universally as Fergie—who embraced the haunting role of Saraghina, the Roman prostitute whose romantic advice had a lasting impact on a very young and impressionable Guido, as recalled in the powerful number “Be Italian.”
Once Ferguson won the role in a hard-fought audition, she set out to make it totally her own, diving into cinematic research. She says, “I watched lots of different films from that era, to get the raw physicality of Saraghina. I wanted this character to take over from me. It really came together when we started to do the routine with the girls and I got to work with the boys on the beach. That really gave me a sense of who she was, and what she meant to Guido in his life.”
Ferguson found herself greatly admiring her character. “Saraghina is a very earthy, raw woman, in the way she walks and moves. She’s full of life and fire,” she explains. “But there’s subtlety to it. She loves Guido and the boys, and enjoys teaching them, but she’s kind of having a joke with herself as well at the same time.”
The way that Ferguson embodied all of those qualities took Maury Yeston aback. He says: “I think the world will be stunned by Fergie’s performance. Of course, she is a first-rate recording artist but the revelatory aspect of her performance is that she is also a fantastic film presence.”
Each of the women involved in NINE agree that the film was an unusually fun and rich experience. Summarizes Penélope Cruz: “When things go well on a set it is contagious. There are many different elements to NINE but Rob Marshall brought them all together like a magician. What he did with this movie is going to blow people away and I think we all felt lucky to be part of it.”
Yeston says he was blown away by the non-theatrical cast’s ability to so fully embody his lyrics and songs. “I was very much impressed with the quality of the vocal performances. They are poetic, lyrical and truly moving,” he comments.
Adds Marc Platt: “The skill of Rob Marshall, John De Luca and their terrific team of associate choreographers and vocal coaches allowed each of our cast members to realize their full potential. In each of these extraordinary actors was always the ability to sing and dance, but the key was to allow them to feel safe and to have the confidence to give bravura performances that I think will be revelatory for audiences.”
Adds Harvey Weinstein, “Outside our key crew of Dion, Colleen and John (who started with Rob on Chicago) I was the only one in this group that has worked with Rob before. On Chicago I had the opportunity to observe Rob’s process which is nothing less than exhausting to behold and it was the same on NINE, actually maybe even harder. If he’s not on the floor working on the numbers with the dancers he’s meeting with the music team listening to the musical numbers and making tweaks or meeting with his designers or working with his cast. On Chicago he directed 3 big movie stars on this movie he’s directing 8! Rob has that rare talent; if he’s working with 5 or 500 people; each of those people will feel they have his full attention, respect and those people will go out and give their all to delivery for Rob.”
Designing Nine
To allow movie audiences to experience NINE in a distinctly cinematic way, Rob Marshall wanted to invite them to inhabit an Italian movie, moving back and forth between the sleek, Mod streets of 60s Rome through which Guido zooms in his pale blue Fiat Alfa Spyder; and the dreamlike fantasies that erupt from Guido’s imagination, evoking his lust and love, his imagination and frustration, his nostalgia and his yearning to find a path to his future.
To do this, Marshall and his long-time partner, choreographer and producer John DeLuca, gathered around them many of the exceptional artists who helped them to create the kinetic beauty of Chicago and Memoirs of a Geisha. They put together a team that includes two-time Academy Award winning production designer John Myhre, two-time Academy Award winning costume designer Colleen Atwood and Oscar winning director of photography Dion Beebe.
The trio was excited to reunite—especially on a movie that’s so in love with the emotional power and visceral beauty of the movies. Says Dion Beebe: “If the stage was our playground in Chicago, then moviemaking was our playground in NINE. We all wanted to exploit cinematic ideas to transform the Cinecitta soundstage into the stuff of a man’s imagination.”
Adds John Myhre: “Perhaps the only thing that could have been more exciting to us than a movie about moviemaking was the idea of a Rob Marshall musical about moviemaking. All Rob had to tell us was, ‘there has to be a transformation, the audience has to see Guido’s world transform,’ and immediately big ideas were being put about.”
The team split the design elements into three distinct realms: Guido’s complicated real life in Rome, and the luxe hotel spa that he hopes in vain will be his hideaway; the memory of Guido’s youth, and his very active fantasy life. The latter all takes place on a half-built set on a Cinecitta soundstage—the source of Guido’s creative anxiety—that morphs into different visual worlds.
Myhre explains: “We decided that when we first see the soundstage it had to be a real set—so we used H Stage at Shepperton Studios in England, which was an excellent match for Fellini’s historic Stage 5 at Cinecitta in Rome. Rob always wanted us to emphasize that this stage is the core of Guido’s life, where he makes it or breaks it. The set was designed as you would design a theatre set; all the lighting had to be figured out and the space needed for the dancers. But the biggest challenge was that the stage had to transform ten different times, sometimes overnight, into many different imaginative worlds—it becomes the Folies Bergere, it becomes a stylized beach, a 1960s fashion runway, a piazza in Rome, and more—and the challenge of creating each of those worlds was fantastic.”
All of this pushed the design team’s inventiveness to the very edge. “Each of the facades was designed so it could work for a specific number but could also be adapted for others,” Myrhe explains.
Some of the dance sequences also required extensive rigging. “For the number with Penélope Cruz as Carla, Rob wanted her to slide down a huge, 80-foot long, pink draper,” the designer recalls. “Technically, it was very challenging to do this so that it would be safe for her to perform over and over again. Ultimately, we used a conveyor belt that becomes part of the pink drape and allows her to fall out onto an eight-foot mirror in the middle of the dance.”
When it came to the film’s lush, sensual cinematography, Dion Beebe took his initial inspiration from the deeply personal tone and vibrant aesthetic of Italian cinema—especially its heyday in the 1960s when Italy produced a chain of history-making auteurs, from Fellini to Antonioni to Pasolini and Bertolucci—but crafted the film’s own individual style from there. “Italian cinema has always played a dominant place in my love of movies,” notes Beebe, “and it was always on our minds. Rob and I looked at a lot of films but we never set out to emulate Fellini. We made a pointed decision not to re-make his work. There are references to it. There’s homage. But I think NINE is very much, visually and stylistically, in its own musical genre. It combines the cinematic and the theatrical and those elements always seem to be come together magically when you’re working with Rob.”
From the start, Beebe and Marshall engaged in complex discussions about how to make this new version of NINE involve the audience through innovative lighting and fluid camera movement. Beebe recalls: “We had long conversations about how we would shoot and light the production numbers. With the lighting, just as we did on Chicago, we incorporated a lot of theatrical elements to really define the musical numbers as fantasies taking place in an alternate world. We were always looking for those punctuation moments where the stage transforms into pure fantasia.”
They were also looking for original ways to do that multiple times. “Since we had a space that we had to transform again and again and again,” he emphasizes, “we had to figure out how to keep it exciting each time without ever feeling like we were repeating ourselves. A big part of that was creating transitions that become part of the dramatic storytelling.”
Lighting was key, but so too was kinetic camera work. “Camera movement has always been important for Rob and myself in terms of shooting musical numbers,” Beebe states, “and capturing all the movement in the choreography. Rob likes to run the number all the way through and that’s important for the artists and the dancers, to build up pace and rhythm, but we also have to bring it alive for the camera. The use of dollies, cranes and tracks on these sets was essential, but it had to be done without interrupting the flow of the number and song.”
Like Beebe, costume designer Colleen Atwood began her creative process with the sexy, glamorous Mod looks of 60s Italian cinema, but riffed on her own fantasy interpretation of that look. “We did watch a lot of Italian cinema,” she explains, “which certainly influenced the style. But there’s also a hyper-reality to the world of NINE, so we took out all the things that weren’t as visually interesting from that world and left only the most striking elements.”
Atwood’s costumes are also created in direct response to the choreography, and to the movements the actors’ bodies had to make. “Before I design any costumes, I watch what Rob and John have choreographed and the costumes are very, very well thought out ahead to respond to the needs of the number,” she says. “The clothes have to fit very, very precisely which meant working closely with our large female cast.”
As for Daniel Day-Lewis’s outfits, Atwood recalls: “Daniel and I spent a day together early on and we went shopping to get a feeling for Guido—his suit, his shoes, his style. We ended up with a black silk suit that has a grace to it, a soft, iconic feeling. The tricky part with Guido is that clothes aren’t what this character is thinking about, but they still exude a certain beauty his character seeks.”
An unabashedly dazzling beauty is imbued in the rainbow array of ladies’ costumes that Atwood created, ranging from showgirl corsets to elegant evening gowns to slinky go-go miniskirts as she dressed every iconic incarnation of feminine energy, from starlets to prostitutes to a costume designer not unlike herself.
In the process, she used over 1,000,000 crystallized Swarovski Elements ™ to adorn 36 costumes. Nine different applications of crystal in 31 styles and 22 different colors were used to literally allow the characters of NINE to shine. Nadja Swarovski, Vice President of International Communication, says, “Swarovski is thrilled to have collaborated with Colleen on the showstopping costumes of NINE. It is an honor for the outstanding cast to be embellished with our crystal and Colleen’s artistry as a costume designer is perfectly showcased in these sparkling creations.”
Weaving in with Atwood’s array of costumes is the handiwork of Oscar winning Hair and Make-Up Designer, Peter King. King had never worked with Marshall previously, but he instantly caught the tone Marshall was after. “The challenge on this film was getting that feel for the 60s period while absolutely never being held back by it,” he explains.
King continues: “Rob was very specific that he wanted to reflect the ‘New Wave ‘look—the Brigitte Bardot, Claudia Cardinale look. It’s a tough look, not a perfect look. It’s a ‘just out of bed’ look that we felt was far sexier an image than the stiff formal look of England and America at the time. We didn’t emulate any particular film but looked at lots of images for inspiration. We went through hundreds of looks until we arrived at the right one for each particular character. Of course, what you are always trying to achieve in any film is to make it look as though you’ve done no work at all.”
After shooting on soundstages in London, the cast and crew regrouped to shoot where Fellini’s films were born: in Rome’s Cinecitta Studios, as well as at such iconic Italian movie locations as the Piazza del Popolo, the Via Veneto, and the towns of Anzio, Surti and Anguillara.
Everyone was inspired by the atmosphere at Cinecitta, one of the world’s most historic motion picture studios. Originally founded in 1936 by the dictator Benito Mussolini for propaganda purposes (under the slogan “cinema is the most powerful weapon”), the studio would flourish after the war, becoming home to numerous classic films, among them Quo Vadis, Amarcord, Ben Hur, Cleopatra, The Godfather II and Gangs of New York.
All the great names of Italian cinema became intimately familiar with the terracotta buildings in the tree-lined avenues around the massive sound stages. By the 1950s and 1960s Rome had become “Hollywood on the Tiber,” attracting the world’s most prestigious filmmakers to the Via Tuscolana.
“For anyone who loves film, shooting at Cinecitta is a thrill,” says John Myhre. “Just going in the gates for the first time was a life changing experience. It’s like no other studio in the world. You feel you’re going back into history, with these ancient terracotta buildings, stepping into the heyday of 1960s. We filmed at the front gate, doing a little work to get it back to the way it once look. And they also allowed us to repaint stage 5 to get it back to the way it once was, which was exciting.”
Once in Rome, the production took advantage of the city’s vast array of picture-perfect cinematic locations. “We wanted to capture the Rome of LA DOLCE VITA,” explains Myrhe. “We filmed on the Via Veneto, at the Forum and the Coliseum.”
The production also headed an hour south to the seaside town of Anzio—the scene of the Allied Landings during WWII—where they shot in a former casino recalling the grandeur of the past, with spectacular terraces overlooking the sea. The building provided several important locations for NINE: it was the Roman baths for a scene between Guido Contini and a Cardinal; it was the busy location production office for Italia; it was the terrace restaurant where a complicated dinner party was filmed; and it was the entrance and lobby of the hotel spa where Guido seeks refuge to no avail.
Filming concluded in the hilltop village of Sutri, an hour outside Rome, where two long, cold night shoots with Daniel Day-Lewis and Nicole Kidman completed a sequence that started with the song “Unusual Way” performed on H Stage at Shepperton Studios back in England.
With production completed, much of the film’s most intense work still lay ahead as Rob Marshall collaborated with the editing team of Oscar winner Claire Simpson (Platoon, The Reader) and Emmy-nominated Wyatt Smith (Tony Bennett, An American Classic) in post production.
Suddenly, all the film’s many artistic elements came together as one seamless fabric. Sums up producer Platt: “Rob demands the best from everyone around him. He’s so meticulous and has an eye for every single detail. That same is true for John De Luca in the choreography, for Dion Beebe in his cinematography, for John Myhre’s sets, Colleen Atwood’s costumes and Simpson and Smith’s editing. And of course that feeling permeated the cast. Throughout, there was this symbiotic relationship where all of our colleagues were demanded to their best, wanted to do their best and did do their best because the level of the story was that good. As Guido Contini says, you never know what a film will become. The cameras, the actors, the designers, the editors all do their thing, but the magic really happens when you put it in front of an audience.”
Production notes provided by The Weinstein Company.
Nine
Starring: Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cottilard, Penelope Cruz, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Kate Hudson, Nicole Kidman, Sophia Loren, Judi Dench, Fergie
Directed by: Rob Marshall
Screenplay by: Michael Tolkin
Release Date: December 18, 2009
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual content and smoking.
Studio: The Weinstein Company
Box Office Totals
Domestic: $19,676,965 (36.5%)
Foreign: $34,228,906 (63.5%)
Total: $53,905,871 (Worldwide)