I went to Sardinia in September 1995 having taken a job as an English language teacher in a private school. I had absolutely no Italian apart from ciao and grazie and was immediately aware of the language barrier facing me. I knuckled down to getting a rudimentary grasp of Italian.
One of the things I used to do was to leave the television on in my apartment so I’d be hearing the language constantly, immersing myself as much as possible. Early on in my time in Sardinia I noticed how all the famous TV shows and Hollywood films were dubbed into Italian. There’s a large industry in Italy based around dubbing. Just as in countries such as France, Spain and Germany, all foreign films and TV shows are dubbed into the native tongue.
I think it’s fair to say that most of the actors who work in this industry would not be household names. The central character in my novel, Max Pellegrino, is one of these – an actor who has never had a breakthrough hit and has pretty much resigned himself to the stability and regularity of dubbing and voiceover work. That is until a famous Hollywood star comes to shoot his new film at Cinecittà studios. That particular studio is where epics such as Ben Hur and Cleopatra were shot. More recently it’s been used for films like Gangs of New York and the latest James Bond film, Spectre, but in the 1950s and 1960s the term Hollywood on the Tiber was coined in reference to the large number of American productions which shot on location in the Eternal City.
I can’t remember the exact moment when I came up with the idea for the novel. Possibly it was after watching Tom Cruise yelling “show me the money” in the Italian version of Jerry Maguire or Peter Falk as Columbo uttering his immortal “just one more thing” in a Roman accent that sparked my imagination, but an idea for a story came to mind about this obscure Italian actor who has spent most of his professional life in the dark of the studio providing voices for famous Hollywood stars. One of the central themes of the novel is that of instant celebrity. This has always fascinated me – how an individual who has never experienced a modicum of fame and fortune reacts to it being thrust upon him all of a sudden.
I’ve always had a huge interest and passion for cinema and I think the novel conveys that. I have to credit my parents for this as they used to take me, my brother and sister to the cinema on a regular basis. There were no multiplexes back in the 1970s so we had to be content with the twin-screen Capitol Cinema in Thurles where we saw an assorted range of films from The Magic of Lassie to Raiders of the Lost Ark. I think those early trips to the cinema have stood me well. Hopefully the novel is a testament to this.
