Nine

“When you’re working on a film musical, you really have to make it work as a film,” says Rob Marshall, the Oscar-nominated director of Chicago, whose latest movie, Nine, is based on the 1982 Broadway musical hit. “Bob Fosse threw away two of the main characters in his film of Cabaret. Fortunately Maury Yeston gave me carte blanche on Nine. That’s not easy to do when you’ve created something that works on the stage.

“When I met him, he said he wanted me to think of him as dead. He told me to make this film ‘as if I weren’t there’, but that he was there if I wanted him to write new material.”

Nine was a fantasy on stage and featured a cast of one man and several women. “It had no sense of reality at all,” says Marshall. “On film, you can’t do that. You have to change it and make adjustments, so we needed to have reality there, surreality which would encompass Guido Contini’s fantasy life in musical numbers and memory of himself as a child.”

Marshall and his producing partner John DeLuca brought in Michael Tolkin to write the first draft and work out with them which songs they were going to use and where they were going to place them. “Then the writers’ strike happened and after that Anthony Minghella came in and brought the piece to life,” says Marshall. “Minghella was an Italian himself, a film-maker and he taught Fellini. He would really test every scene with us over and over. He was working on it right until he went into hospital.” Minghella sadly died before the film went into production.

Movies of musical stage hits do not always work, explains Marshall, pointing to the 1958 film of Damn Yankees! as one that felt stagebound. “On stage you have to earn a ballad with a couple of up numbers,” he says. “On film you have to earn a ballad double.”

When Marshall finally cast Nine, he essentially had assembled big-name actors new to musicals, from Daniel Day-Lewis as Contini to Penelope Cruz, Sophia Loren, Kate Hudson, Marion Cotillard and pop star Fergie, who was new to acting. “I love working with actors new to musicals,” he says. “It’s a bit like I’m Henry Higgins, but the rewards are great. We had two months of rehearsal and it was crazy. People were singing and learning to dance every day.”