It’s an incredible feat.”Īs an added challenge for Schuur, she’s the sole American working on the show - and she doesn’t even speak Italian.
“You can turn a corner and feel like you are in this old Italian Neapolitan neighborhood. “You walk and you can get lost,” says Schuur. The series was filmed on a 215,000-square-foot set built outside of Naples, which included 14 exterior apartment buildings. You have to go to this one small place in the South.” So you can’t even just cast from all of Italy. Then, on top of that, you have to find actresses who speak in the Neapolitan dialect, because that was the only way to bring this to life in an authentic way. “You’re going to have four sets of actresses playing the characters over time, so that … is a challenge. “In the books, it lives and dies by the girls and watching that relationship over the course of 60 years,” she says. Schuur (who’s also worked on “Hannibal” and “Big Love”) says the casting process was no walk in the park. In the eight-episode first season, which is based on the first book, “My Brilliant Friend,” Elena and Lila are played by newcomers Elisa del Genio and Ludovica Nasti as children, and Margherita Mazzucco and Gaia Girace as teens. It isn’t HBO’s first foreign production (it shares producers with “The Young Pope,” which was also foreign) but it’s the cable network’s first foreign-language drama with subtitles. Set in Naples, Italy, the story follows childhood friends Elena and Lila across decades spanning from the 1950s to 2010. “ Saverio will email through her publisher, and then her publisher will pass it along and she will email back,” says Schuur. “Her identity is as guarded from us as it is to the rest of the world,” says Jennifer Schuur, the only American executive producer on “My Brilliant Friend,” airing Sunday at 9 p.m. The international bestselling four-book series has sold more than 10 million copies in 40 countries, but its author is unknown - using the pseudonym Elena Ferrante.
Nobody knows who wrote the wildly popular “ Neapolitan Novels” - not even the creators of HBO’s Italian-language adaptation of the literary phenomenon.
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