Just Ignore the Rewrites

Screenwriter Vera Blasi need only close her eyes to return to her native Brazil. In her mind, she hears her nanny lulling her to sleep, singing about Iemanja, the Goddess of the Sea. She can smell the aromas wafting from the kitchen, where the mixture of sea salt, sweet onions, garlic and shrimp would create a symphony of flavors in her mouth. The earthy smell of rain and mud takes her back to those languorous childhood afternoons, as she waited out the tremendous thunderstorms that would suddenly sweep across Sao Paulo.

Ahhh saudades (a melancholy longing), you can almost hear her sigh.

To Blasi, Brazil is not only a country--it’s a state of mind. Brazilians write songs, poetry about their country, not as patriots, but as if Brazil were a lover.

Wanting to compose an ode to her native land, Blasi wrote “Woman on Top,” scheduled for release by Fox Searchlight in July. The romantic comedy, starring Spanish actress Penelope Cruz, could be compared to the films “The Scent of Green Papaya” from Vietnam or “Like Water for Chocolate” from Mexico, where food is a central character, capturing part of the country’s essence, and where affection for the homeland is palpable.

Although Brazil’s poverty was forcefully captured by Walter Salles in his Oscar-nominated 1998 film, “Central Station,” Blasi wanted to show the other side: the romantic, colorful and hopeful Brazil that coexists with the bleaker part.

“Brazil is so big and has so many different aspects, I wanted to write something that explored the beautiful side,” Blasi said. “I didn’t have a theme or a message at that point. I just wanted to show my country to people.”

The film is really a comic fable about a young Bahiana--a girl from Bahia--played by Cruz who flees Brazil and her philandering husband to discover herself.

On her voyage, Isabela (Cruz) settles down with a childhood friend in San Francisco, where she finds work as a cooking instructor. Her culinary skills--and breathtaking beauty--land her on a local television cooking show, where she becomes one of the most popular attractions.

Soon enough, she learns a few lessons about herself, love and her destiny. The film, which is in English, is saturated with vibrant reds, blues and yellows by French cinematographer Thierry Arbogast. Brazilian music, composed for the film, is constantly in the background, as are elements of magic realism often associated with Latin America: Isabela casts spells to deal with her romantic setbacks.

The fact that such a film was made is somewhat of a miracle considering neither Blasi nor director Fina Torres (who’s from Venezuela) were well-known when production began. Cruz was proposed for the leading role two years ago--before American audiences or studio executives knew who she was. Now the 24-year-old Cruz is a hot property in Hollywood--to the glee of Fox Searchlight executives: She’s been on the cover of GQ and Vanity Fair, starred in Pedro Almodovar’s Oscar-winning “All About My Mother,” and has a lead role in the upcoming “All the Pretty Horses,” directed by Billy Bob Thornton and co-starring Matt Damon.

Executives at Fox Searchlight are hoping to capitalize on Cruz’s growing fame and the film’s lively comedy and appealing Brazilian style to sell “Woman on Top” as a more mainstream movie, not a small, art-house flick.

‘We really believe that this is a very commercial film that will appeal to all members of the audience,” said Joe Pichirallo, senior vice president for production at Fox Searchlight. “It crosses all ethnic and age barriers. We have the marketing resources to really push this film out.”

The screenplay underwent several incarnations--some so extreme that Blasi no longer recognized her story. Eventually, the film was completed for less than $10 million, and Blasi’s original story was restored.

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“Woman on Top” has many autobiographical elements, including one that has the main character spinning.

Blasi is an avid cook herself, enjoying not only Brazilian food, but also the Italian and Lebanese cuisine of her heritage (her father was Lebanese, her mother Italian). Her English is lilted with a soft Portuguese accent that becomes especially apparent when she says “Brazil”--she pronounces it “Brausil,” with a melodic inflection.

“I thought everybody in the world had this strange background where people came from every place,” said Blasi, who lived both in New York and Sao Paulo during her teenage years. “For me the strange thing was when I had friends who were completely one thing and didn’t know anything else. Brazil is very much a melting pot, just like the United States.”

Blasi said she always dreamed of Bahia, a northeastern province of Brazil. Bahia is a sensual, tropical corner of the massive country, still beating with the rhythms of the drums brought by Nigerian slaves who landed on that side of the continent in the 16th century. “For us [in Sao Paulo], Bahia is like an exotic country,” she said. “I also think it’s very sensual to have a character who is always cooking.”

For a comedic touch, Blasi decided to endow the heroine of her story with a bizarre ailment: Isabela, like Blasi, has severe motion sickness. Carousels, Ferris wheels, swings, elevators, cars, airplanes, you name it, make Blasi sick. Doctors have told her the problem is probably caused by some irregularity in her inner ear. So, as a child, Blasi would sit in the parks watching her friends giggle on the merry-go-rounds and scream on roller coasters. As an adult, Blasi must always be in the driver’s seat; her malady has become the subject of bad jokes among her friends.

One day when she was driving to a Price Club in Los Angeles with screenwriter pal Susannah Grant (“Erin Brockovich”) and Grant’s husband, Christopher Henrikson, the subject of her weird illness came up. Blasi, of course, was driving. Henrikson laughed and asked her if she always had to be in control; was her sickness so severe, Henrikson wondered, that she always needed to be on top when making love? “I said, ‘Oh, my God, of course not! It’s not that bad!” But his wisecrack served as an ingenious twist to her story and inspired the movie’s title.

But making a quirky movie about a wacky Brazilian chef who casts spells on her lovers was not an easy task. Many elements in Blasi’s original screenplay were diluted when a different director came on board and reworked the script. The story sat in Fox Searchlight’s production slot for four years. Along the way, there were many cultural misunderstandings.

Torres, who moved from her native Venezuela to Paris more than two decades ago, was one of the first directors to be offered the script. But the proposed casting (Cruz wasn’t the lead at that point) was jarring to Torres, who saw Blasi’s original script as an authentic take on Brazil.

“In that moment I didn’t know Hollywood at all,” said Torres. “When I asked about the casting, it was so American, with [an actress with] blond hair and blue eyes, and I said, ‘I’m sorry I cannot do this movie. There is something so contradictory between the essence of this script and the proposed casting.’ ”

So Torres, who had directed the noted films “Celestial Clockwork” and “Oriana,” began working on another project in France. With Torres declining, another director came in and reworked the story.

“For me, that [Brazilian] sensibility was what set it apart and made it unique,” Blasi said. When that was gone, nothing else mattered.”

For example, that script reduced the references to Yoruba, the Afro-Latin American religion practiced in countries such as Brazil, Cuba, Venezuela and Colombia. Isabela had been turned into a near-feminist icon, too radical for Latin American sensibilities.

“It’s a very American idea that strength means being aggressive and assertive and you get things done,” Blasi said. “In our culture, strength is internal and never at the expense of being feminine.”

In addition, the second script had made Isabela older and 10 years into her marriage. Blasi had written her as younger and recently married. When Isabela catches her husband in bed with another woman, she leaves him and flees to San Francisco.

“A Brazilian woman is like a Venezuelan woman is like a Cuban woman,” said director Torres, who had read both Blasi’s script and the changed script. “If you find your husband betraying you once with another woman after 10 years of marriage, you take him by the hair and you smack him around. You don’t run away and say, ‘Oh, that’s it.’ For a Latin woman, the man has to really have a casa chica, live with the other woman, and the wife really has to feel lonely, abandoned, for her to say goodbye forever.”

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By 1998, the proposed director dropped out of “Woman on Top” and the studio contacted Torres again. She agreed to do the film if the studio allowed her to return to Blasi’s script. Fox Searchlight agreed.

With subtlety and humor, Torres and Blasi address Latin machismo and the ignorance--not to say prejudice--some people exhibit about Latin Americans. For example, there’s a scene in “Woman on Top” in which a television producer looks at Cruz’s brightly colored, Bahian-style dress and informs her, “The executives wanted to see you in something less . . . ethnic.” “I like things between the lines, I think it’s much more subversive,” Torres said. “Latin America has extraordinary values--cultural and humanitarian. You can express that through music, poetry and beautiful characters.”

Added Blasi: “I really believe that the more specific you are about a culture, the more universal the story becomes. Nobody lives in limbo. If you make a culture look like it’s neither this nor that, then it doesn’t become universal, because the people don’t look like they belong there.”

Blasi and Torres also worked on a book, which will be released along with the movie, that includes Isabela’s story as a fable.

“Little by little, when people see that you are really serious and that your ideas suit the story and make it strong, you win their trust,” Torres said. “This movie has been my most beautiful experience in my cinematic life. Isn’t that funny? When I came here, my French friends said, ‘Oh you are going to come back running because the studios are tough and they don’t respect directors.’ So now I’m thinking, ‘My God, this is a fairy tale!”