The most distracting thing about the breasts was not that they were naked, or enormous, or even inflatable – but that, from my point of view, they were hanging directly over producer Gabriella Martinelli’s head while she, unaware, explained the finer and more heartfelt points of her latest project, The Lives of Saints.

We’re sitting in a University of Toronto frat house that has been taken over for the day by the shoot of the four-hour miniseries and this, the green room, is clearly the lair of some absent, hardy partying Sigma Nu. Whoever he is he owns many posters of cars and women, drinks dark microbrew by the case, and has mounted on his wall a set of giant blow-up boobs – bigger than beach balls, with nipples like pink road pylons.

Downstairs, screen legend and two-time Oscar winner Sophia Loren (A Special Day, Marriage Italian Style) is rehearsing a scene with director Jerry Ciccoritti (Trudeau) and Jessica Pare (Stardom). The $11-million adaptation of the acclaimed books by Nino Ricci is the first of three prestige projects for CTV and…

Geez, those things’re really distracting. Should I say something? I’d sit somewhere else but she’s got the only other seat in the room.

Martinelli (Romeo + Juliet, M. Butterfly), head of Toronto’s Capri Films, explains that she fell in love with the novel back in 1990 and immediately wanted to adapt it, but held off upon learning that a trilogy was in the works.

‘I really liked the idea of this long saga about Italian immigrants and following this young boy Vittorio, seeing him grow and seeing the effects of displacement,’ she says, perched on the desk chair. Like the main character, Martinelli was born in Italy and came to Canada when she was very young. She optioned the entire trilogy, promising Ricci not to develop the material until all three books were done.

‘Which took awhile,’ she says with a laugh. ‘He writes very slow.’

She sold the idea to both CTV and Italy’s Mediatrade and, when Ricci’s third book came out in 1999, immediately put screenwriter Malcolm MacRury (Man Without a Face) to work on a script, condensing all three books into two, two-hour installments. ‘The last two books are very interior, very difficult to translate,’ she offers, ‘so we tried to make them more dramatic.’ MacRury also rewrote two characters as one, with Loren in mind. ‘I felt this would be a really good vehicle for Sophia and she became the thread that tied all the books together. Her character became the real life of a saint.’

‘Big test’

Loren joined the cast after meeting Jerry Ciccoritti in Geneva. ‘That was the big test, to bring him to meet Sophia. He was really nervous but had completely gone to town to look fantastic and she loved him,’ says Martinelli, adding that Ciccoritti’s painstaking prep work was what got him the director job. ‘The first time we met he’d read the scripts, the books – he was breaking it all down and talking about the period and so many things… He’s very passionate, and when he cares about something he’s really into it. It was very impressive.’

‘I was all over it like a dirty shirt,’ says the director. ‘I just kept pounding away at it until they said, ‘Okay, you’re the guy.”

Lives will air sometime in the ’03/04 season, one of few projects that survived this month’s Canadian Television Fund LFP decisions. Lives and two other CTV minis skipped the fund and instead drew cash from the BCE Benefits Fund.

The story follows young Vittorio, played by Fabrizio Filippo (waydowntown), from childhood in a idyllic village in post-war Italy to life on the frozen farmlands of north Ontario in the ’50s and ’60s – where what’s left of his family is pulled apart by culture shock and their own deep, dark secrets. Pare co-stars as Rita, his half-sister, and Loren is Aunt Teresa, a stern matriarch struggling to keep the Innocente family together. Sabrina Ferilli, Kris Kristofferson and Nick Mancuso also star.

Alongside Ciccoritti is DOP Fabio Cianchetti, lenser of Bernardo Bertolucci’s Besieged and The Dreamers. Giovanna Arata (Young Casanova, The Insider) produces for Mediatrade and Rocco Matteo will hand his production designer duties to Maurizio Sabatini when the shoot moves to an abandoned Italian village in early summer.

Today’s scenes are set in the ’60s and the frat house’s main floor has been redone as Rita’s swinging bachelorette pad. A great mass of TV and stereo equipment, black leather furniture and, of course, a foosball table have been pushed aside to make room for beaded curtains, a ratty mattress, easels and a punishing excess of orange shag.

Between takes Loren disappears into her white minivan, which seems to serve as a trailer. It is never more than a few metres away. Pare, made up like a flower child, runs by and waves.

‘Usual trickiness’

Ciccoritti is playing to his strengths with this one. He painted a charmingly romantic picture of Toronto’s Little Italy in 1998 with Boy Meets Girl and, as evidenced by Trudeau and other projects, he has a knack for both magic realism and for recreating the look and feel of past decades. Lives is set in 1951, ’54, ’59, ’64 and ’69 and he and Cianchetti are shooting on different stocks, depending on the era and the mood. ‘All my usual trickiness,’ he says, smiling broadly.

Like his boss, Ciccoritti also has great personal interest in Lives and is drawing inspiration from his own Italian roots. He rewrote a few scenes based on his family’s past and has encouraged the crew to bring their own memories and histories to the table, all with Ricci’s blessing. ‘I told Nino what was cut and what was going to be in the script and he thought about it, for about four seconds, and he looked at me and smiled and said, ‘You know? It looks like you’ve improved it.”

‘Every frame of this film will smell authentic,’ he adds, ‘and we’re doing everything we can to avoid the cliches. I made a list of the things that won’t be in my movie, like Italian people sitting around a table, yelling at each other over food. Things like that.’

But just as Italians, in far too many movies, holler across tableloads of spaghetti, so do Canadians, in just as many TV movies, recount the sad, quiet struggles of rural immigrants. How will Ciccoritti avoid the cliches of yet another TV period piece?

‘All immigrants to this country go through the same thing,’ he says, ‘the same spiritual and psychological crises. The language of it is different, depending on the home country, but it’s all the same. We can avoid the cliches because we’re aware of them. I think this is going to touch everybody.’