Taking Liberties With Captain Corelli

Adapting a hugely popular novel for the screen is never an easy task. And adapting Louis de Bernies' Captain Corelli's Mandolin - an epic tale embracing love, politics and history - was always going to be a challenge. So director John Madden (Shakespeare In Love) and screenwriter Shawn Slovo took some liberties with the original text. The film, which focuses on the love triangle between a Greek girl (Penélope Cruz), her fisherman fiancé (Christian Bale) and the titular Italian Captain (Nicolas Cage), differs in a few ways from the novel. Madden told Time Out, "Louis writes in a particular style in which dramatic narrative is not the highest in the list of priorities". So he and Slovo have concentrated on the romance, and even added scenes that weren't in the book. The film sees Corelli and Mandras (the Greek fisherman) meet, while in the novel they never encounter each other. Madden defends this decision, saying, "Everything that is in the film is implicity there in the book. It's just a matter of how you distill it and how you lift certain things to the surface." Captain Corelli's Mandolin is released on 11 May.