Erin Free
“Megan! Megan! Megan!” It was on Tiber Island, while standing next to Aussie supermodel and eventual actress, Megan Gale, that filmmaker and author, Mark Lamprell, fell in love with Rome. The Australian director was on the tiny isle on The Tiber River in the middle of the Italian capitol for L’Isola Del Cinema, an outdoor film festival that was screening his 2000 debut, My Mother Frank. Megan Gale was the chief patron of the festival that year, and at the time, she was nothing short of a cultural phenomenon in Italy thanks to a series of sultry telco ads that had made her instantly famous.
Huge crowds of Italians had lined the banks of The Tiber River just to get a glimpse of Gale’s honeyed visage, and they were all chanting her name across the river, overcome with fevered excitement. “It was just such an extraordinary, hilarious, and magical experience,” Lamprell – who is currently in post-production on the comedy sequel, A Few Less Men – laughs to FilmInk. “I fell in love with Rome there and then, and I thought, ‘I’m going to return here.’ And indeed, over the next fifteen years, I went back almost once a year. I just had this love affair with Rome, and we’d go back as a family. I have no ancestral ties to Rome – I’m completely Celtic – but I just felt like it was my town. I’m still not entirely clear on why that’s the case, but I grew up Catholic, and the Roman influence on the rest of the world is just so enormous.”
The direct result of that love is Lamprell’s second novel, The Lovers’ Guide To Rome, an interconnected and tantalising twist of stories built on romance and set in the great city. Though an accomplished screenwriter (Babe: Pig In The City) and writer/director (My Mother Frank, Goddess), Lamprell doesn’t immediately gravitate towards that medium. “They float around as stories before they become anything,” he says of his creative pursuits. “I had a history as a screenwriter, but not as a novelist, so with my first book, The Full Ridiculous, my big concern was about whether anyone would publish it, or even read it. But I had to put that out of my head, and just write the thing.”
Novels and screenplays, as Lamprell points out, are totally different beasts, though they might share surface similarities. “With a screenplay, there are so many outside factors – like who you’re writing for, and what the demographic is – but with the book, I just wrote it the way that I wanted to write it,” he says. “It was a different journey down a road that I’d been down before. I loved the freedom of it. Screenplays are never written just by you. They’re a giant collaboration with other writers, directors, producers, and sometimes studio executives or funding bodies. There are lots of voices. That creates a collaborative energy that can be great, but it can also be draining. It can also be both at the same time. The great thing about a novel is that
it’s just you.”
Lamprell wrote The Lovers’ Guide To Rome in the eponymous city itself, actually sitting down to create in the very locations where his stories would take place. “It was like writing on plain air,” Lamprell says, instantly putting paid to the classic cliché of a writer needing solitude in order to drag their ideas from their heads and onto the page. “I could write in the middle of a dinner party,” Lamprell laughs. “It’s not a skill that I’ve developed, it’s just the way that I work.”
It’s a charming picture – the Australian writer with a lap top sitting next to, say, The Trevi Fountain, and birthing what would essentially become a love letter to Rome – and according to Lamprell, it’s indicative of the entire publishing world, which is far different to that of filmmaking. “It’s much more genteel,” he says of publishing. “There’s much more respect for the originator of the idea. In movies, there’s a necessary disregard for that person. Because so much money is being spent to make a film, the producers can’t mill around a writer and ask how they’re feeling about everything. You’ve just got to steamroll over those people and get the movie made. In publishing, that’s different. I’m not asking them to pay me…well, hopefully they pay me afterwards. The whole process is just much more genteel. You have an editor, and you get notes, but if you don’t like something, you can say so. The whole experience is quite nice.”
And how would Mark Lamprell feel if someone else bought the rights to The Lovers’ Guide To Rome and turned it into a movie. “I’m completely fine with it,” Lamprell says freely. “I’d love to see what someone else would do with it. Having been on the other end of it, and having adapted so many books myself, I don’t have any illusion of control. I know that, and it would be ridiculous for me to try and hang on. I’d love to see what would happen if a movie was made of the book, and I’d understand that it was no longer mine. It would become something else in the world, and that’s great too. But I’d know not to get too attached to it. I’d be happy to send my baby off on a raft down the river and wish it good luck.”
The Lovers’ Guide To Rome is available now.
