LET ME TELL YOU WHY MY FIRST FEATURE FILM WILL BE AN ADAPTATION INSPIRED BY “THE LITTLE PRINCE” SET IN NYC.
How do ideas become constant thoughts? How do thoughts become reality? How do dreams materialize day after day?
How did a constant thought turn into a script, a storyboard, a budget and a ROI, the filming of a proof of concept trailer, the unstoppable search for amazing world wide renowned actors?
I read the original “Le Petit Prince” in French, when I was ten for the first time and I loved it. I didn’t ask myself questions, I took it as it was. Children live the experiences they’re fed without questioning them and when they do have questions the answer does not hold as much weight as the emotions and feelings that have sprung from the experience itself.
I love to remember how it felt to be a child because the zest for life still lies within me in anything I do. Oh if I still feel it!
I discovered the book The Little Prince would have entered public domain in the majority of the world while I was filming my short film Without in 2015. I got excited. Just like a child. This was an exceptional creative opportunity!
I decided to wait until I could really dedicate myself to this endeavour to begin writing the screenplay… In fact, I waited until Without got accepted to its first festival: Fargo, February 2016.
One night, when I had really started to think about the screenplay, I had an epiphany… to read the book as though I were a child! EUREKA! I came to the conclusion that the book will always remain a mystery if we don’t follow the author’s initial dedication: “To Léon Werth, when he was a little boy”.
I read the book once. I read it again and then it became clear to me. The most extraordinary film adaptations are those that manage to transfer written work, as a whole, to film while maintaining the text’s essence completely intact. “The Color of the Sun” remains faithful to what Antoine de Saint-Exupéry does in his Le Petit Prince.
One day, 3 years ago, while I was talking to my beloved friend, Anouk Rozzo, she mentioned NYC could have been a great city for my film! And she was right! The city flashed before my eyes with its thousands characters and different areas… and then I saw him, a golden haired boy looked at me in the streets of Harlem after a long trip from who knows where.
What happened after this enlightenment was completely crazy.
“The Little Prince” is one of the bestselling books in the world, ever! This intriguing work has been read, deconstructed and analyzed by millions of people who remain a passionate and devoted audience.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s classic novel has been translated into +250 languages and dialects. A remarkable 200 million books have been sold worldwide, since first published in 1943.
“The Color of the Sun” is inspired by this timeless classic and it adapts it to one of the world’s best known urban settings: New York City. This film unites the classic sojourn of the little man through the rough and tumble urban jungle of NYC’s iconic boroughs. The coupling of this classic tale with New York City is not frivolous or gratuitous, but it is surprisingly authentic.
See full video about the project on our Kickstarter campaign HERE.
Here’s the shocking discovery.
After I had decided to set the film in NYC I found out to my greatest surprise whilst reading Stacy Schiff’s Biography of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, that our beloved aviator, poet and novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote “Le Petit Prince” in 1942 while exiled in New York City.
As Antoine prepared to leave NYC and join the French airforce again, he knocked on his friend’s, Silvia Hamilton, door wearing his military uniform and said: “I’d like to give you something splendid, but this is all I have”. Thus, he gave her a package containing the manuscript and the drawings of “The Little Prince”, which the Morgan Library & Museum acquired from Silvia in 1968, which I held in my hands not long ago, whilst conducting research to work on the screenplay.
My conviction of setting my film in NYC strengthened and became natural… the setting of my adaptation would have been the very city in which the story was imagined, written and published for the first time.
New York City is a multi-faceted metropolis, each borough, each area, has its own strong personality, revealing the great diversity and richness of its inhabitants’ life styles. The boy embarks upon a journey that will change the pilot’s life forever. But what happened after was completely crazy.
Each little-prince-reader has his or her own theory about its meaning. What is so terribly beautiful about this latent story lies in the text’s own nature: that of a trip, physical and mental as it may be.
So I began to travel with my fantasy. I began to write. It was as though I had become part of the book and transferring its meanings to present society in NYC became natural and organic. I was a flowing river. The script was finished in a short amount of time. What took longer were the edits.
I read multiple times. I read it alone. I read it with an audience. I read it with friends who are not in the movie business and I read it with people who are in the film business. Everyone got emotional. Everyone was touched. But what mattered the most is that fans didn’t feel betrayed. Exceptional Little Prince expert Howard Scherry was satisfied — actually my silly pride nudges me to use the adjective enthusiastic about the screenplay and to me, this is key to a successful screenplay adaptation.
What I tried to do in my screenplay is behave as though Antoine had taken by the hand to guide me through. Never leaving me.
I soon decided to create some storyboards and character drawings to accompany the script. To do this I went through hundreds of artists’ works and finally I found my man: Riccardo Cena. His style was just what I needed and he knew the book. For months the electronic path between New York City and Turin (Italy) was inundated of my emails carrying pictures of all my film’s locations, stickmen portraying characters and kilometric scene descriptions. Riccardo returned emails with amazingly detailed sketches and a knowledge of understanding feelings, people and places which surpassed my expectations by far.
I adored what I was seeing. Hope you will too.
DUE TO THIS WIDE VARIETY OF CHARACTERS I DECIDED TO PERSONALLY APPROACH SOME EXCEPTIONAL ACTORS.
Let me present them individually.
LUIS GUZMÁN: A dear friend who’s an actress, Mara B., introduced me to the amazing actress Johanna Rosaly (she acted in Oscar nominated masterpiece entitled per “Lo que Pasó a Santiago” in 1989) and she is a faithful Little Prince lover and fan. When she asked me how she could help, I told her I wanted to meet Luis Guzmán to propose a role. He has been in my head ever since I wrote the screenplay. Three days later after our meeting Johanna sent me Luis’ contact. We met in the Lower East Side, en El Barrio as he calls it, and his son, Cemi, joined the meeting too. They were both enthusiastic about the project and immediately showed interest in the role of the Latin King. It is useless to comment on the immense acting skills Luis owns. He is one of the greatest I know and to work with him will be an honor and a dream come true.
MICHAEL IMPERIOLI: I had exchanged several emails with Michael Imperioli and decided to show him the project when the screenplay was polished up. When you think of Michael, magnificent scenes from “The Sopranos” and “Good Fellas” come to mind and there’s a lot more to this exceptional Italian American actor. He is an amazing artist! For The Color Of The Sun I cannot think of him as anything else but a financial broker who lives in New Jersey and commutes to Wall Street every morning… he will go crazy when, during a foggy Summer night, a mysterious boy interrupts his stellar calculations.
PHILIPPE PETIT: I talked about the project to Michael C., a dear friend of mine. I gave him all the details and he told me he knew Philippe Petit and that his father, Edmond Petit, used to pilot planes in France with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and that they were very good friends. After THE WALK between the Twin Towers in 1974, Philippe walked many times on a high wire at Cathédrale saint john the divine that’s how he met my friend in NYC. Philippe, a man made of magical folly, was enthusiastic about the screenplay of The Color Of The Sun and the creative proposal I handed him. His character was born when I went to see the original manuscript at the The Morgan Library & Museum and I found out that Antoine had drawn many other things, among which an unpublished planet. It’s a rare beauty and I don’t want to reveal it now… I would love Philippe to act in a magical cameo, interpreting this wonderful character which was never published. It is extremely poetic and picturesque, like all the other characters in the book. I get goosebumps thinking about his scene.
To say the truth, there’s also one more actor I talked to and about whom I am extremely excited, but I haven’t gotten permission to mention in his name yet. However I deem it necessary to tell you about the way I got in touch with this exceptional artist, because what I understood after talking to him is that in life “on ne sait jamais” — as the Little Prince says whilst he begins to clean the extinct volcano.
Back to my story.
Ten years ago (Alas! I was 21) I visited some friends in London, one is actually the talented writer who edited my screenplay (Renata Pereira) and the other one is my current business partner on TheCreativeShake (Francesca Bianchi). I was sitting with the latter on the ‘tube’ when right in front of us, there sits our amazing Mr. Actor. Francesca looks at me and says (in Italian) “Oh Gosh… this guy is amazing and he always the ‘bad guy’ in movies”. I was shocked looking at this vision… I couldn’t believe such an actor would be on the subway and while looking straight at him I replied (in Italian too) “It’s true… he always plays the bad guys”. Our topic of discussion stared straight back at us and announced in PERFECT ITALIAN “It’s true… I always play the bad guys”. I was dumbfounded. We talked till he got off the train. I admired him for his humbleness and kindness. Unaware of what this encounter would have meant 9 years later, I thought meeting him was a dream and soon forgot about this fortuitous underground incident.
Fast forward 9 years.
Last year, I saw billboards and posters all around the city promoting his show on Broadway, he was co-starring with one of Hollywood’s most loved actresses… My heart started to beat fast thinking about out London rendez-vous.
I immediately bought 2 tickets to see his show.
I prepared a package containing screenplay, storyboard, a paper print-out of the picture we had taken on the subway in London, the book of The Little Prince and a heartfelt old-style hand-written letter.
After the show (a masterpiece) I ran to the theatre’s back exit (actors usually exit the theatre using this door), he never came out. I decided to try again the following morning.
The matinee show. At 9AM I was already there.
Mr. Actor (with a capital A) arrived soon after. I began talking to him as soon as he got closer. Naturally he didn’t recall our encounter years earlier, but he did accept my parcel and a few days after the show ended I received an email saying he liked the project and that he was interested in the role I had in mind for him.
Yes. It is bit frustrating… not being able to say who he was. However this particular experience pushed me to pursue all the other actors and slowly but surely our cast is beginning to get real. And this is all because of one lesson to be learned in The Little Prince.
“I believe that for his escape he took advantage of the migration of a flock of wild birds. On the morning of his departure he put his planet in perfect order. He carefully cleaned out his active volcanoes. He possessed two active volcanoes; and they were very convenient for heating his breakfast in the morning. He also had one volcano that was extinct. But, as he said, “One never knows!” So he cleaned out the extinct volcano, too. If they are well cleaned out, volcanoes burn slowly and steadily, without any eruptions. Volcanic eruptions are like fires in a chimney”. The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
In June, with the packaging money I raised I was able to film a proof of concept trailer. It gives an idea of that the film will be like.
Here are several extracts:
This film has been a roller-coaster of emotions. It has given me the chance to explore a thousand ways to take a couple of steps forward in a universe that is complex, in a process that is long and where usually there is no wrong or righ path to follow.
Sometimes things work, sometimes they don’t.
Sometimes I hear NO, other times I hear YES. And it is those YESSES one must listen to.
I am looking ahead. I listen to those positive inputs that nudge me to push harder every day, to believe in the value of what I am doing.
It is through our own will power that we know we will achieve what we want and although the road to making and distributing a film is long and winding, I know I am collecting all puzzle pieces, day after day, slowly placing them into the right spots…
To know more about the project check out the Kickstarter campaign:
If you have any questions, please write to: thecolorofthesunmovie@gmail.com
“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye” The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
