Normally when books from the past are adapted for TV or movies, the filmmakers seem to present our ancestors as stiff and formal, much like the statues that have been carved of them. Upon learning that writer-director Jeff Baena has retooled two segments of Giovanni Boccaccio 14th century novel The Decameron, it's easy to imagine The Little Hours featuring costumed British actors reciting their exchanges as if the content were somewhat less urgent than a traffic ticket.
Thankfully, Baena, who co-wrote I Heart Huckabees with director David O. Russell and directed the zombie romantic comedy Life After Beth and the broken engagement/bachelor party flick Joshy, refuses to treat classic literature as a moldy artifact.
Baena explains why his movie about a cloister features mostly American actors, torrents of profanity and rampant sexuality.
It's on the page.
"Giovanni Boccaccio, who wrote The Decameron, wrote in the Florentine dialect of his time as opposed to Latin, which was more common. So his intention was for it to reach the masses as opposed to being something that's a little far removed from us," he says. "When you're watching a movie that takes place in a specific time period, especially if it's not in America and it's not in England, for some reason, the default way of speaking is in a British accent. I sort of wanted to buck that trend. As I stated earlier, my intention was to make this more relatable and to make these people seem more like us than the way most movies make them seem like they're removed from us."
While London-born Jemima Kirk (Girls) has a supporting role, the cast of The Little Hours is almost exclusively American. To make their banter sound less formal (sticklers would probably insist on Florentine Italian), Baena took an unusual approach.
"I wrote down what the actors are saying, but I didn't actually write down their lines, so I told them what they were going for," he says. "So like, in every scene it's not like people were just sort of finding the scene. It was completely worked out, and the gist of what they were saying was worked out. I just wanted it to be in their own voices, so it sounded a little more real as opposed to something a little more contrived and forced. Most of the comedy doesn't come from shticky one-liners. It comes from the story. You create dynamics and situations and conflicts, and then you use that conflict and develop it."
Boccaccio might have approved of a scene where Sister Fernanda (Aubrey Plaza, Baena's personal and professional partner, who has starred in all of his directing efforts and produced this film) berates Massetto with a flood of hateful, profane insults.
"Presently, as Massetto went working one day after another, the nuns fell to plaguing him and making mock of him, as ofttimes, it betideth that folk do with mutes, bespoke him the naughtiest words in the world, thinking he understood them not," the author quipped.
A Different Sort of Calling
Although I was raised Protestant, nuns were an important part of the small town where I grew up. They were kindly, devout women who took care of us and contributed to the city as a whole.
Being a nun in Boccaccio's era was another story.
He warned his readers, "Fairest ladies, there be many men and women foolish enough to believe that, whereas the white fillet is bound about a girl's head and the black cowl clapped upon her back, she is no longer a woman and is no longer sensible of feminine appetites, as if making her a nun had changed her to stone."
Baena says his film his been dubbed "the naughty nuns" movie because many of the women in the cloister had callings other than divine ones.
"I wouldn't even say that going into a convent was even an option. It was an obligation," he explains. "If you were the youngest daughter or a divorcee, or if you were a spinster or your husband died or if your father just wanted to have influence over the church -- there were lots of reasons -- but ultimately you were sent to a convent almost like it was a school and then at some point, you would be married off. And if you don't get married off because your dad couldn't pull off the dowry or if he just wants to keep having influence over the church, you just get stuck there, and you're just a victim of consequence. It wasn't until like the mid-1400s when women started choosing to go to convents, almost as an act of feminism. It was a situation that was completely beyond their control."
This might explain why Fernanda, Allesandra (Alison Brie, Glow) and Ginerva (Kate Micucci) treat their ministries the way some frustrated artists act when working retail. In the spirit of the women assigned to convents, Baena includes a song by Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), who became a theologian, composer, playwright and botanist while serving as an abbess.
"The fact that she was a composer and that her music was disseminated shows that there was a little bit of leniency toward her following her passion," he says. "The vast majority of women who were nuns in that time period were not happy with their station in life. More often than not, they found their own ways of either quietly or wildly rebelling or getting in trouble or somehow getting away with it."
Baena grew up in a Jewish family in Miami, but says his cast grew up in the faith of Hildegard and her fictional sisters.
"Kate Miccuci wanted to be a nun growing up, and Aubrey grew up around nuns, and Molly Shannon grew up really Catholic and used to do weird sex stuff with her Barbie dolls," he says. "I'm sure that having someone with knowledge of the Catholic Church is helpful, but I don't think it's essential. Also this wasn't designed to be an explanation or an attack on the Catholic Church at all. It was just sort of contextual. If you make a movie set in the Middle Ages, it's impossible not to have the Catholic Church involved. Obviously, the original source material is satirizing the church, but for me I was more focused on the gender politics of the time than the actual institution of Catholicism."
Boccaccio's World
It the cast were from the New World, Baena and his crew filmed The Little Hours in picturesque Tuscan locations that have changed little since Boccaccio's lifetime.
"We were in rural Tuscany so there's the inherent beauty to the landscape and the authenticity to the locations. But at the same time, we were removed from any kind of filmmaking infrastructure. The closest you can get is Milan or Rome, which are both about four hours away. Most of my crew was American. There were Italians who sort of filled in for every department. The majority of the people on the crew were Americans so we flew everyone out. I think that being in that sort of rural area ... brings everyone closer. It's sort of like you're in summer camp or something", he recalls.
Plaza, John C. Reilly (who plays a kindly, alcoholic priest) and Shannon and many other cast members have worked with him before. Asked it was difficult for him to recruit actors for his off-center films, Baena says, "I think because it's an unusual idea, it's easier to get people on board because nobody wants to be doing the same stuff they're doing all the time. They want to try new challenging things. When you pitch an actor, 'We're going to do a 13th-century convent film in Tuscany for a month.' I think if you have a creative bone in your body that's something you would jump at. In fact John C. Reilly told me that when he's doing some of these like out in the middle of Asia or one of those massive, green screen studio films, he said he wishes he could go do a Middle Ages nun movie for real."
MovieStyle on 09/01/2017