I’ve been callling Paolo Virzì’s film “the next big thing” for a while now and, I told you so! Il Capitale Umano is winning award after award and did great at the box office. It will surely be Italy’s submission to the Oscars in 2015.
Meet Stephen Amidon, the author of, Human Capital, the book on which the movie is based.
Stephen Amidon is an American author (Sorry Stephen! Thought you were from London!) and film critic. He grew up on the east coast and moved to London in 1987. His novel Human Capital was chosen by Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post as one of the five best works of fiction of 2004. The film adaptation of Human Capital, Il Capitale Umano directed by Virzi, opened to rave reviews in Italy in January 2014 and it premiered in New York at the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival where Valeria Bruni Tedeschi won best actress for her performance.
![Valeria Bruni Tedeschi]()
Valeria Bruni Tedeschi
The film has not yet become available to me, but I have read the book and it is quite the page turner. Can’t wait to see the movie!
Order Stephen Amidon’s ‘Human Capital.
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Stephen was kind enough to give me an interview about the book, and what it was like to make it into a movie.
It’s so interesting to me that you’re from England, have written a story about Americans, and now it’s on screen as a story about Italians. I’m sure it works because it’s such a universal theme, but do you have any thoughts about how your story my have changed when Italians got ahold of it? Either for the good or for the bad? Did it take on a new “Italian” life, in that sense?
Stephen – I’m actually from New Jersey, though I lived in London for twelve years, from 1987-1999. But your question is still a very good one. I must say I was a little apprehensive about how the story would change in an Italian setting, but was surprised (and gratified) by how similar Paolo Virzi’s version is to my novel. As I have joked before, the characters are the same – they are just better looking! I think the similarity is due, as you say, to the universality of the story’s themes, though I also think that Italy is right now going through a lot of the things America was experiencing when I wrote the book in the early 2000s: a new wave of wealthy people, a squeezed middle class, a generation of bewildered youth.
![Il Capitale Umano]()
Il Capitale Umano
Were there any language problems? Was anything that you’d intended lost in translation?
Stephen – Not that I know of! I’ve seen the movie several times and have no complaints at all. I feel blessed.
Is there anything that happened because of a translation problem, language or cultural, that made you think, “Wow, that’s not what I pictured!”
Stephen – The only cultural difference – and it is by no means a problem – is with the character of Quint, the hedge fund manager. In my novel, he was a poor kid who raised himself up from his bootstraps, while in the movie he is the scion of an old, noble Italian family. I think this is because Italians tend to look a bit askance at self-made millionaires. But it really doesn’t have any adverse effect on the story.
Did you work with Virzì or just kind of hand it over to him to see what he’d do with it?
Stephen – I actually wasn’t allowed to work with Paolo for contractual reasons that are too complicated to go into. However, since the movie wrapped we’ve become great friends.
What about the casting; everyone says it is perfect! Were you happy with it? If it had been a movie made in Hollywood, who would you have seen in the roles?
Stephen – I was astonished by how perfect the casting was – they are all now how these characters look in my mind. In terms of Hollywood, I think John C. Reilly would make a perfect Drew and Benedict Cumberbatch would be great as Quint. One can dream …
Carrie was my favorite character in your book and I loved when she said that Quint “was a strange boy nobody yet rated”. I can’t decide what it was that made him so attractive to her. Is it because she’d been shrewd and “rated him” before everyone else? Or had he been the shrewd one and had simply conquered her? Or were they just two kind of selfish and shallow people that were comfortable together?
Stephen – I always saw the attraction as being mutual. Carrie was someone who realized that she needed a strong man to latch onto because the world was not going to be kind to someone like her, who is not-quite-fabulous, where Quint mistakenly saw her as someone who would give him access to the gilded world he was always going to conquer anyway. Is this shallow? Maybe. I try not to judge my characters too much.
When I think about the dead man’s role in the story and how he was an oddly unemotionally involved “non-character” but so vitally important it reminds me of Marco Bellocchio’s movie ‘Bella Addormentata’, I think you handled this concept a lot better than he did. Have you seen this film and do you agree?
Haven’t seen it – but I will.
In it, a comatose woman was influencing everyone’s lives, the symbolism was so heavy handed. In your book, the man was just a shadowy reminder of everyone’s faults and culpability. How did you manage to handle this so delicately? Or have I missed the point?
Stephen – He’s kind of the forgotten man. I think it’s really interesting that Paolo made him poor, giving the crime a social dimension, whereas I had him be a yuppie on a racing bicycle. I think this is because Paolo is an old lefty from Livorno!
I’m in the habit of apportioning blame when I watch a movie or read a book, and it seemed to me that the dead man was to blame almost more than anyone’s. Have I misread this? He took a risk on his bicycle that night and paid a price for it, a price that almost everyone else in the book had to share.
Stephen – No, I’m afraid I don’t see that. Like I say, I try to steer clear of ideas like ‘blame.’ For me, tragedy and drama stem from situations where no one is to blame, or everyone is!