SJ:	How did you get the role in the film, and can you briefly describe your character?
BARDEM:	I met Mike and I knew he was going to do the movie, and it was a book I always loved. I remember reading the book when I was 14, and of course I missed a lot of things. But I remember being totally shocked by some of the images in that book. And when I knew he was making the movie, I talked to him and he told me that he wasn’t sure if I could do Florentino or not. But I guess there was something in my eyes that begged for that role. Florentino is a man who is a romantic hero, but also—and that’s the great thing about García Márquez—when he gets romantic in a book, he always puts in a twist and reminds you that this is about magic realism and gives you weird situations where the most human behavior happens, but also the most ironical situations. So he is not a common man, he is a man with an obsession, but without being sick. He is a symbolic figure of what love should be.
BRATT:	The decision to play a role in the film adaptation of such a famous and beloved novel was not a question of “Should I?” but rather “How can I?” In my case, I was fortunate to have known the producer Scott Steindorff, and at his urging I spoke with Mike Newell for an hour over the phone. Later, as things got closer to a decision being made, the producers flew me to London to have lunch with Mike, ostensibly to see if we clicked in person. My character, Dr. Urbino, is brilliant and fastidious, a true renaissance man whose love of books, poetry, and music is equal to the love he holds for his city on the sea and its citizens. His approach to love is more practical than romantic, and that’s the way he has always been.

SJ:	García Márquez’s writing is so dense. How do you translate that to the screen?
NEWELL:	What takes the place of that density of storytelling is that a movie can do textures, show you what the period was like, what the weather was like. You can reinvent the world in which these events took place.
BRATT:	The trick is to get the essence of the world Gabo [García Márquez’s nickname] created in broader terms. Lucky for us, Cartagena [Colombia, where the film was shot] was not short on a very specific atmosphere that helped do just that. It is at once decayed and glorious, impoverished and rich, and never dull or boring. And always hot and steamy, a sensual place.
BARDEM:	The movie will never be the book. It’s impossible that any movie will be the book, because you read the book and you have your own images, where the movie is the director’s images. I think what I liked about the adaptation very much was that there was a certain flavor; the challenge of taking this huge story, the pain, the irony, all these emotional elements were there. And just the fact of working in Cartagena: all the descriptions he does on the page were in the shot. It’s so real, so alive, so colorful. I hope you can see that on the screen.