INTERVIEW with Virginia Jewiss, who inte

INTERVIEW with Virginia Jewiss, who internationalizes Italian cinema, or “How I Made Sean Penn Cry”

by Dianne Bennett

If you stayed for the credits of this year’s Oscar-nominated Italian film, Io Capitano, you would have seen an American name, Virginia Jewiss, listed under “translation by….” Jewiss acknowledges that “adaptation” is a more accurate description of the multi-faceted work of those who, by translating materials from the original language, help attract international audiences and obtain distribution for a foreign film. It’s a profession that by necessity has expanded in recent years as more films are made for the worldwide public, very different from the tasks of the person who simply dubs or provides subtitles (though neither of those is a “simple” task) for a strictly foreign film.

For Jewiss, a Dante scholar, it all started with a request that she make Sean Penn cry.

I recently interviewed Virginia Jewiss, a friend of ours whose career we have followed for years, about this evolving field and about language in film.

Right, Virginia Jewiss with

Italian director Matteo Garrone.

Let’s start with what to call your work on film. Should I always look for you under “translation by…” or “translator,” even though you prefer “adaptation”? There’s no consistency as to how that screen credit is given. It’s not even on the official credit list of the so-called “universal standard” of IMDb [the online Internet Movie Database, now owned by Amazon]. Translation is what I do when I bring a book across from Italian into English. When I translate literature, the original work already exists—the translator gives it a new voice, in my case, English, but the translation does not alter or erase the original. In film, translation happens before the film is made and is an essential step in getting the work to the screen. So in the film world I prefer the term “adaptation.”

It seems as though the industry does not entirely understand the role of this work. The film industry is still very much in the infancy stage of recognizing the true value of the work of adaptation at various stages of the production process. I’d like to think that the recent boom of highly celebrated films dealing with language will lead to a deeper appreciation of the role of the translator.

Left, Jewiss with Italian director

Paolo Sorrentino, in Los Angeles.

Maybe we should start even earlier in the process and ask what IS a foreign film; in your case, what’s an Italian film these days? You began by working with the Italian director Paolo Sorrentino on This Must Be the Place, a 2011 Palme d’Or-nominated film in English, starring Sean Penn. It also won Best Screenplay at the 2012 David di Donatello awards, given for Italian films, I note. In the past, there was a lot of resistance to the idea that an Italian film could be made in English. Even Sorrentino was criticized for making a film in English. So, what does this criticism mean? What does it say about our idea of national cinema, our expectations for a “foreign” film? Sorrentino’s response was to say, “okay, you want an Italian film?” Here it is: La Grande Bellezza [“The Great Beauty,” which won the Oscar in 2014 for what was then called Best Foreign Language Film]. It’s in Italian, smack in Rome, a Fellini-esque film, as if Sorrentino was saying, “I can still do this.” And then his next move was to make Youth, starring Harvey Keitel and Michael Caine, set in Switzerland but filmed in English [another of Jewiss’s adaptations]. I think a lot was happening in those early years of Sorrentino moving back and forth between English and Italian. He carved out a creative space for directors to make films in languages other than their own.

Yet all of the awards in the film industry operate along national lines. Yes. At the Academy Awards, there’s the French entry, the German entry, the Italian entry. The question then becomes, what makes a film Italian? And at the moment, the answer to that is, it’s an Italian director and an Italian lead production company. But the film can be made in any language. I’m hoping that scholars’ and viewers’ expectations that the language of the film has to be the same as the country of origin has shifted because of Sorrentino’s works like Youth and [TV’s] The Young Pope, [Matteo Garrone’s] Tale of Tales and Io Capitano, and other films that are coming out, not just in Italy, but in other countries too. Directors in many countries are asking “what is the language—or languages—in which this particular story should be told?”

The two young cousins in their trek across the desert, speaking and picking up different languages. Left, Seydou Sarr as Seydou and Moustapha Fall as Moustapha.

You brought up Matteo Garrone’s Io Capitano. It was nominated for an Oscar for Best International Feature from Italy, yet, in its tale of two young cousins emigrating from Senegal across Africa to—they hope—Europe, the production does not set foot on Italian soil, features no Italian actors, and has very few Italian words. “Io capitano” [“I, captain!”—perhaps better translated as “I’m the captain!”] are two of those few words. Talk about your experience with that film. First let me say that Garrone spent a long time gathering material. He interviewed people in refugee camps and migrants who had made their way to Italy. Garrone is a kind of a neo-neorealist in that he often combines elements of true stories from which he crafts the fictional narrative, but every episode of Io Capitano is in some way true. As he listened to people’s stories, he came to realize the kind of story he wanted to tell.

Okay. Where do you come in? Garrone wrote an initial screenplay in Italian, but he knew the film would be made in some combination of other languages. He wasn’t sure exactly which languages those would be at first—that would depend on where the boys’ journey would start, the route they would take, the people they would meet. But he needed an English script before the location could be selected or actors cast. I usually come into the process very early—as soon as a first full Italian screenplay is ready—because the English version is what gets circulated in order to obtain funding and secure co-producers, which is what allows the project to move forward. Until Garrone charted their journey, I couldn’t introduce linguistic nuances that would locate the story in a specific geography. I used a fairly standard yet emotionally charged English. So my process on that film was very different from my work on This Must Be the Place, where the dialogue had to convey the various Englishes of Dublin, New York, and beyond.

So you are writing a screenplay in English even when the film ultimately might not be filmed in English. Yes, English is the language you need to get everyone on-board. If we are hoping for backing from a French or a German or an Irish production company, they are reading that screenplay and evaluating whether they’re going to invest in it. They read the script or synopsis in English. When Sorrentino made The Hand of God [E’ stata la mano di Dio, his 2021 film set in Naples], he knew from the get-go that it was going to be filmed not only in Italian but in Neapolitan. There’s no English in it. Yet he still needed an eloquent, convincing English-language screenplay to send around. That is how you get your funding, and also how you begin to negotiate world distribution rights. Even for a film that is going to be filmed in Italian, which is the language of the original screenplay, English plays a crucial role in the creation of the project—even if once the money comes in, that script is set aside. It will come back in a strange way later, though, because I usually end up curating [not initially writing] subtitles if the film or TV series is going to be taken to international festivals where a lot rests on those subtitles.

Let’s return to Garrone’s Io Capitano. You did an English version, which, as you indicate, in some ways doesn’t exist in the final version of the film. The English version continued to evolve as Garrone’s thought process evolved. That original Italian script was turned into English, became the basis for some of his exploration of which languages to use, and was further revised once the casting was done. Garrone invited people in Senegal, the characters, the actors he had cast, as well as many other people involved in the project, including refugee-consultants whom he had on the project, to stand with him behind the camera, to make sure that the story he was telling was true to their experience. The co-producers need to be kept abreast of the changes that are happening, so the English screenplay gets continuously updated as the project evolves over the life of the making of the film.

Io Capitano, as you’ve indicated, is a complex film in terms of multiple languages, of the language of the film evolving. Beyond the English script, how did that work? Garrone continued to talk with migrants as he and his team began focusing on Senegal. The narrative starts in Senegal, and the script is clever in that it has the boys speak Wolof at home with their families, but then when they’re walking to school, they start speaking French, because that’s how they’re doing their schooling. It is a beautiful expression of their linguistic mobility. But that’s not all. As they make their way east and north to the coast of Libya, other languages are added in to reflect the places and people they encounter. A linguistic odyssey.

Was there a similar process with Garrone’s earlier film, Gomorra [in English, “Gomorrah”—a “true crime” drama based on a best-selling Roberto Saviano exposé of gangs in and around Naples]? I translated Saviano’s book, but I didn’t work on the film, so I can’t speak to that. I will say that Gomorra is set in that southern Italian city and uses such a thick Neapolitan dialect that some scenes were subtitled into Italian when it was screened in Italy. Garrone has been thinking for a long time in a very sophisticated way about the power of language. All of that accumulated experience also informed the language choices and the language sensitivity that came into lo Capitano.

Another aspect of this internationalization of films is the use of language itself almost as a character in a film, or at least as a point of reference for identity and emotion. You’ve mentioned the “boom in highly celebrated films about language.” What are you seeing in these films?

Several films nominated for Oscars this year foreground language in innovative ways. Anatomy of a Fall [a French production which won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay this year and was nominated for Best Picture, but not for Best International Feature] unfolds around the very question of language. In this courtroom drama, a fascinating blend of French, German and English, the wife [the protagonist, Sandra, a native German speaker] is forced to testify in French, and she keeps saying, “I can’t express myself in French.” One of the problems in their marriage is that the husband [Samuel, who is French] feels that it’s an imposition that they speak in English at home. But she says, “No, English is the place that we meet. I’m living in your country, so when I go outside, I have to speak your language. But what about me? What about my language?” Language becomes, in many ways, the emblem of their marital crisis.

The year 2023 might be seen as a breakthrough year for language in film. You mention other foreign film nominations for that year. Let me mention another Oscar nominee, Past Lives. The main character is a Korean woman who now lives in Brooklyn and is married to an American. A childhood friend from Korea comes back into her life and unsettles her marriage and her sense of self when he asks, “Do you dream in Korean? Who do you speak your native language to?” These two films offer fascinating studies of how you construct—and alter, evolve—your identity through language.

Io Capitano seems to bring it all together for you. Filmmakers need to think daringly about language, to recognize all that is at stake with language and dialect choices. And to me, this journey of Io Capitano, where the languages shift and meet other languages, captures the epic quality of the boys’ journey of education. Their delight in learning Italian and their excitement from time to time in the prospect of going to Italy—in addition to everything else the film does—is a powerful reflection on the power of language in storytelling.

What else does the “translator” or “adapter” do with English? I often also will translate into English a soggetto, that is, a synopsis, and then in addition a longer treatment. Standard “intro to film writing” textbooks teach that “first what happens is somebody writes a subject and then they write the treatment, which is longer, and then they write the screenplay.” I’ve been on many projects where a screenplay gets greenlighted and then you back-write the rest of the material that’s supposed to go with it. The Academy Awards, the Cannes Film Festival, they have strict rules for entering a film for competition—that artfully crafted paragraph that’s going to get your film entered into a festival—so we might do 20 rewrites of that back and forth. I am often drawn into that kind of activity too.

What’s your relationship to the writing of subtitles? You mentioned earlier that you might “curate” them. I curate, but do not write, subtitles. Let me praise the subtitlers who have an incredibly hard job, and who—similarly to what I do—perform a challenging sort of translation/adaptation/interpretation. We’ve all watched subtitled films where the characters talk for five minutes, and the subtitle is just one line. It’s a very difficult art and science that has to take into consideration how many milliseconds a shot lasts, what you need your audience to hear and what they need to see. One rule is that on a closeup of a face, only one line. You never want to distract the eye from the actor’s face—when so much is conveyed through expression. In a shot with several people, you can have two lines, but you are always making tough choices about which pieces of the conversation to highlight. Another rule: never put a punctuation mark in the middle of a line, because it stops the eye, and you can’t afford the delay of that split. You need to keep the viewer’s eye moving. That’s why questions we can hear on the screen are often turned into affirmative statements in the subtitle.

When do the subtitlers come into the project? Subtitling is one of the last post-production steps. The subtitler is given the whole film and has very little turnaround time. I’ve been brought in several times to curate some of the subtitles, not because the subtitler hasn’t done a good job—on the contrary—but because I’ve been living with the story from the very early stages of the project. So it makes sense that, once the subtitles are done, the film will come back to me, and I add nuance to some of the dialogue. I can bring that perspective because I’ve carried those characters around with me sometimes for a year or two. The subtitler who has to turn around the film in a week doesn’t have time to really internalize the story in the same way.

You’ve said what the subtitlers do is similar to what you do. Is it translation? Subtitling is a particular form of translation. I think of it as a distillation, because you have to choose short words, you have to choose uncomplicated words. You have to think about punctuation along with all the other rhythms of the ear and eye. It’s an essential activity, often very misunderstood and maligned, when instead it’s bridging vast linguistic and cultural distances, allowing us to experience films in languages we don’t understand. [2 Film Critics’ post “To Dub or Not To Dub: Rethinking the Cineaste's Aversion to Dubbing” deals with these issues.]

I’ve saved the personal for the end. Having followed your career, we were around when you first got into the “business,” as it’s called in Los Angeles. Your entire professional life you’ve been a scholar of Italian literature, with a focus on Dante. Where did you veer off? I did a PhD in Italian, taught Dante at Dartmouth, Humanities at Yale, and am currently Director of Public Engagement for the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins, where I also teach Italian and film. The first novel I translated was Vita by Melania Mazzucco, an extraordinary and partly true story of her ancestors who migrated to the US. I was fortunate to work with Jonathan Galassi, the publisher at Farrar Strauss and Giroux, who then asked me to read a new book I had never heard of, tucked way in the back of a bookstore in my neighborhood in Rome, that was Saviano’s Gomorra. A few weeks later that same book was in the window of every single bookstore in Italy. Things exploded when Saviano began receiving death threats for his daring exposé of the mafia—the book became an overnight sensation. I began working on it before this dramatic shift. Saviano was going to drive me around Naples, on the back of his Vespa, so that I could see the neighborhoods that he talked about in Gomorra. The night before our day in Naples, he called me from the Police Headquarters and said, “we’re not going. It’s not going to happen. I’m under police protection.” I did see him in Rome, though, and worked with him closely on Gomorra and then later on Zero, Zero, Zero, his book about the cocaine industry. He would come to dinner at my apartment, his police escort sitting outside my building the whole evening.

That’s your foray into translating not just Dante, but popular books. It’s still not screenwriting. Your first “adaptation gig,” let’s call it, was, as we’ve discussed, with Sorrentino on his first English-language film This Must Be the Place, with Penn. Sorrentino had written the screen play specifically for Sean Penn and said he would only make the film if Sean Penn said yes. But Sean Penn doesn’t speak Italian. And at the time Paolo didn’t speak much English. The producers contacted Rosaria Carpinelli, Melania Mazzucco’s literary agent and asked, “What do we do with an Italian screenplay that needs to make its way into English in a convincing enough way that someone like Sean Penn will accept this role?” Rosaria gave them my name. I am eternally grateful to her.

That was your opening, and you took it? Not so fast! One of producers called me and asked if I would translate the screenplay. I said no! I didn’t know anything about screenplays. I’d never even read one. I had no idea what was involved, and I was afraid it would be quite technical. Being Italian, the producer said, “Come on, meet me for a cup of coffee.” So we met in the Trastevere neighborhood of Rome, had a coffee, and he explained: “We have this screenplay, we think it’s really good, we want Sean Penn to star in it. We have no money. But if we can get Sean Penn to read the screenplay in English, and it moves him so much that he cries, he’ll say ‘I want to be this character.’ If he says yes, we can then go to other production companies and say, ‘we have Sean Penn, please give us millions of dollars,’ and they will because everyone wants to work with Sean Penn, and we will make the movie. So all we’re really asking is that you make Sean Penn cry. Do you think that you could do that?”

Don’t keep me in suspense. Did you make Penn cry? Yes! I read the screenplay, and it made me cry. So I knew Penn would too, once I moved it into English for him. I worked with Sorrentino and his producers to come up with a screen-ready script in English, which is what they used to shoot the film.

Has signing on to do a film changed for you much since then? Today when anybody wants to bring me on to a film project, I first sign an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) and then a 10- to 20-page contract. But my first film started with a coffee in Trastevere and a handshake. That was that

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INTERVIEW with Virginia Jewiss, who internationalizes Italian cinema, or “How I Made Sean Penn Cry”