CRAZY ‘LOVE’

THE suitor was determined, impassioned, even obsessed. But however fervently he pressed his case, he couldn’t win over the object of his desire. Time and again he was told: I will not yield to you, not now, not ever.

Of course, Hollywood producers are in the habit of whispering sweet nothings to writers, even non-Nobel laureates, in hopes of making them surrender.

So for two solid years, Scott Steindorff wooed Gabriel Garcia Marquez to license the film rights to “Love in the Time of Cholera,” the Colombian author’s bestselling ode to spiritual fidelity and septuagenarian sex. It wasn’t a tussle for the faint of heart. But then, Steindorff didn’t make the leap from building Midwestern shopping malls to filming prized literary works (“The Human Stain,” “Empire Falls”) by being a wuss.

“I’m very driven,” he says, confessionally. “Doesn’t always work in your personal life.” Whether through his charm and sincerity, his checkbook, or some combination thereof, the producer finally prevailed.

Now, here is Steindorff, a middle-age movie executive in a damp white T-shirt, sweating under the Caribbean sun on a fall morning and apparently having the time of his life. That’s a good thing too, considering the somewhat quixotic nature of his mission: to take a beloved Spanish-language literary novel and spin it into a mainstream Hollywood romantic fable about a couple older than 30 whose last names aren’t Pitt and Jolie. And to film it in a country that, 40 years into a brutal civil war, still rates as one of the hemisphere’s most hazardous.

“They think I’m out of my mind,” the producer says of his pals back in Hollywood. “Everybody thinks I’m crazy.”

Undeterred, Steindorff has set up camp in this languorous, colonial-era jewel of a city, miles removed from Colombia’s tattered war zones, trailed by an accomplished, multinational crew: British director Mike Newell (“Four Weddings and a Funeral”), Brazilian director of photography Alfonso Beato (“The Queen”), and South African playwright and screenwriter Ronald Harwood (“The Dresser”). His polyglot cast includes Spaniard Javier Bardem, Italian actress Giovanna Mezzogiorno, Colombian John Leguizamo, Americans Benjamin Bratt and Liev Schreiber, and Mexican American Laura Harring (“Mulholland Drive”).

The cast is so stocked with big names that it can afford to fill a secondary role with the leading lady of the Brazilian stage, Fernanda Montenegro. Among the other, almost overqualified performers are some of Colombia and Mexico’s top up-and-coming film and television talent, including Catalina Sandino Moreno (“Maria Full of Grace”), Ana Claudia Talancon (“Fast Food Nation”) and Angie Cepeda (“Love for Rent”). Not to mention the nearly 6,000 extras.

Then, of course, there’s the source material, one of those rare books that scores with critics as well as a broad international public. Originally published in 1985, “Love in the Time of Cholera” tells the swooningly elegant tale of Florentino Ariza (Bardem), a lovesick gallant who spends 50 years pining after Fermina Daza (Mezzogiorno). A beautiful, ethereal, emotionally buttoned-up young woman, Fermina spurns Florentino’s feverish entreaties, giving herself over instead to a ho-hum bourgeois marriage with the sensible, fastidious Dr. Juvenal Urbino (Bratt).

From a polite but fixated distance, Florentino stalks his beloved through the decades like some tropical Dante. Over the years he succumbs to the temptations of the flesh -- several hundred times, all told -- but his soul never wavers in its deathless commitment to Fermina. The New Line production is scheduled for a November release.

“It’s like ‘Romeo and Juliet’ with a third act,” says executive producer Dylan Russell, who pushed his Stone Village Pictures colleague Steindorff to reread Garcia Marquez’s novel a few years ago.

Hollywood stories about love and sex among the varicose-veined seem to come into vogue maybe once every 20 years, and then chiefly if the characters’ lust is played for yuks or the old folks somehow can be transformed into adorable, hyper-hormonal adolescents (e.g. “Cocoon”). Far rarer, says Russell, are films such as “The Bridges of Madison County” that successfully depict the complex emotional chemistry of an autumnal affair.

Steindorff, though skeptical at first, seems to have come around to the idea that the film could succeed with a younger demographic. “My marketing guy wants to market the movie for younger audiences, which also was kind of shocking to me,” he says. “But you know, it’s a very popular book in universities in America. So I think it can resonate to a younger audience.”

The movie’s assets also include the brand-name appeal of Garcia Marquez, 79, journalist, novelist, the alpha male of Latin America’s literary lions, a writer who even in the twilight of his career is still treated like a rock star from Tijuana to Patagonia.

Yet Garcia Marquez’s books have had a hit-and-miss history of screen adaptations, possibly because they are so fully realized as literary works. Some adaptations, such as Ruy Guerra’s “Erendira” (1983) and Arturo Ripstein’s “No One Writes to the Colonel” (1999), took risks that paid off in finding a visual equivalent to the author’s fanciful imagery and ironic ruminations. But the writer’s signature magic realism, the metaphorical richness that’s so mesmerizing in the pure realm of a reader’s imagination, can seem constricted or, conversely, over-the-top when rendered in cinema’s shot-by-shot syntax.

Pulling a film together

HARWOOD, who won an adapted-screenplay Oscar for Roman Polanski’s “The Pianist” (2002), acknowledges that when he first read the novel many years ago, “I was totally overwhelmed by it, but I never thought of it as a movie, I have to say. I thought it was too complex.”

Garcia Marquez has no actual control over the final screenplay, but Steindorff says that he consulted with the author, who passed along notes and reviewed the shooting script.

“I remember the first draft of the script, he said, ‘The problem is that you and the writer have done too true of an adaptation. You need to depart from the book,’ ” Steindorff recalls. “And he has a great sense of humor, so we laughed and laughed.”

Besides the script challenges, director Newell is keenly aware of the difficulty involved in trying to weave a variety of accents and acting styles into a coherent movie brimming with romantic intrigue and comic pathos. Working with dialect coach Julie Adams, the actors have had to master an English in the style of costeno, the lilting, Caribbean-inflected Spanish spoken along Colombia’s northern coast.

“The casting process itself was difficult,” says Newell, open and enthusiastic despite the wilting heat, “because there was no clear choice of actor known to Hollywood who would get the commercial pressures off your back, at least no one who would say yes. And so the commercial pressures were very much on my back. And the producer was remarkable in that he would follow me every step of the way.... It was a kind of form of suicide that we were intending to commit. Nonetheless, he came and committed it alongside me.”

Though Newell doesn’t speak Spanish and never had been to South America, he’s fluent in the idioms of romantic comedy and adult-oriented fantasy, having overseen such films as “Enchanted April” and “An Awfully Big Adventure.” “Cholera” cast members are quick to praise his flair for directing comedy and his unflagging considerateness toward his actors.

Even so, Newell says he’s aware of murmurings across the continent that the film should’ve been made in Spanish, not English, with a Latin American director running the show. His response is measured but emphatic.

“Does it mean that we’re not allowed to do anything outside our own language?” says Newell, who acknowledges he lobbied “shamelessly” to direct the film, his follow-up to “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.” “Are we not allowed to do Czech versions of ‘Hamlet,’ or Brazilian versions of ‘War and Peace,’ or whatever? I understand about sensibility, and that’s very important. I mean, you have to learn the sensibility.... It’s an extra layer of the imagination that you have to put into it.”

On location

THE movie’s luxuriant locale alone should sell a few tickets to terminal romantics. Centuries ago, Cartagena grew rich as the fortified stronghold where the conquistadors brought their ill-gotten New World riches for shipment back to Spain. The conquerors left behind a city whose tranquil plazas, cavernous churches and bougainvillea-shrouded homes, some of them captured in the film, have been buffed by time and the elements to a weathered perfection.

Garcia Marquez’s novel evokes the so-called Heroic City in all its moldering grandeur, its beauty as well as the horrible stenches and stultifying heat. The author knows the scene as well as anyone, having grown up nearby, where he batted out his first fictional short stories while working as a newspaper columnist and reporter in Cartagena and the neighboring port town of Barranquilla.

Enhancing the movie’s overripe aura is the period setting (the late 1800s through roughly the 1930s), with its stifling clothes, vintage cars and even a replica steamboat for the climactic journey on the Magdalena River, during which the aged Florentino and Fermina shed their clothes and the last of their pretenses and defenses. Though the film makers initially considered shooting in Manaus, Brazil, they changed their minds after seeing Cartagena.

“There is this tremendous sense of authenticity,” says Newell, “and you wander around and you realize that he actually was writing about this place, the place that you are shooting in, which is a very strange feeling indeed.”

As the on-location filming drew to a close last fall, several cast members were in a mood to contemplate the vagaries of romance and time lost and regained, as they sat between takes munching on papaya soused with lime juice.

Lighting a cigarette in his trailer, Bardem says that one of the greatest hurdles for the three principals -- him, Bratt and Mezzogiorno -- is portraying how their characters age through love during the course of half a century.

“It’s like an Olympic game,” he says in fluent, slightly irregular English. “You’re going to run, you’re going to swim, you’re going to go on bicycles. It’s like everything put into a little pot, where you have to really minimize, to put a lot of effort but at the same time minimize it. Because otherwise it’s nothing more than an exhibition of skills. And the audience don’t want to see any exhibition of anything. If they want that, they will go to a museum. They want to see something real, something they can attach emotionally to.”

The actor believes that Florentino’s complexity derives from him being not only a creature of grand, tempestuous feelings but also a man of great spiritual and emotional purity. He’s striving after not only a woman’s body but toward a heightened consciousness, akin to a search for the divine. Even after 600 sexual encounters, some part of Florentino remains a virgin, Bardem contends.

“It’s -- one thing is to be unfaithful, and one other thing is to be disloyal,” the actor says. “That can be a tricky part, or that can be a very kind of funny excuse for somebody who’s cheating on somebody else. But there’s truth in there.”

“Love in the Time of Cholera” is written in what Newell describes as a “confessional” style that hints at some element of autobiography, or at least deep insider knowledge. In the past, Garcia Marquez, who declined to be interviewed for this story, has indicated that the novel was casually inspired by his parents’ courtship (sometimes it’s reported as his grandparents).

Newell says the movie appealed to him, in part, because he always had wanted to make a film about his own parents’ marriage, “which was functional for 50 years and then descended into catastrophe, really, for the last five years, they just couldn’t live with one another for the last five years, and you thought, ‘How can that possibly happen?’ ”

The answer that Garcia Marquez provides, Newell says, is that some relationships are bandaged and re-bandaged for decades, until the bandage finally starts to unravel, revealing what was always hidden but unacknowledged.

“You always look back at old boyfriends, old girlfriends, and you wonder what life would’ve been like if you had gone that way,” Newell says. “And this is somebody [Garcia Marquez] who’s taken those wonderings and actually made a plot out of them, which is extraordinary. And so you find yourself sucked in by your own life.”

The novel’s dominant third-person narrative voice takes a comic view of human folly, softening our sometimes cruel self-deceptions. Harring, the former Miss USA who plays Sara Noriega, one of Florentino’s numerous conquests, says that from what she has seen of filming, Newell “is doing an amazing job” of keeping the sense of love’s comic madness.

“His sense of comedy, he always wanted it real, which makes it funnier,” Harring says. “A lot of people say, ‘Well, you know, a Latin film should be directed by a Latin.’ Mike has a sensitivity, because you don’t want to make this film overly Latin. You need refinement in this film too, because things are so odd and you need that sensibility. And only an Englishman can have that perfect touch, to keep the comedy real and classy.”

Garcia Marquez was in his late 50s when he wrote it, and the novel’s perspective on love is recognizably that of a man with some serious romantic mileage on him.

“The curious fidelity of Florentino to Fermina, that 50-year fidelity, is a kind of middle-age ideal,” says Harwood. “Regret is not part of his vocabulary because he lives in hope. And it is hope fulfilled.”

Steindorff, a divorced father of three children, says he can relate to the author’s view of midlife’s special brand of craziness. At the time he began making the film, he says, he was haunted by the feeling that his professional success had come at the cost of missing out on deeper things.

“The character that I related to a lot -- and this is not in an egotistical way but in a kind of dysfunctional way -- I’m very persistent and I don’t give up, so I really related to Florentino,” Steindorff says, managing a smile.

Sometimes love means never taking no for an answer.

reed.johnson@latimes.com