Note: The following contains spoilers for “From Scratch”.
Showrunner and co-creator Attica Locke repeatedly persuaded her sister Temby to write her one-of-a-kind love story as a memoir, which eventually became the New York Times bestselling book “From Scratch” and is now a memoir. Awesome popular netflix series.
The two sisters sat down with TheWrap for an interview about adapting Temby’s memoir into the new Netflix limited series, revealing how they took Temby’s story from one page to another.
“When I was writing a foreword for my book, and I put all the themes that were there, and I’m a first time author, I had never written a book, and it literally was food, death, love, travel, racism. It’s adoption,” Temby said. “When the book came out on offer, some of the initial reactions I got were, ‘Well, she can’t do that. As a new author you can’t put all those things in one book.’ And I remember thinking to myself, ‘But I lived them, but they are my truth. What did you wish to speak about?’ And it really made it clear to me my purpose and mission for writing this because I thought, ‘Okay, wait a minute, I’m no unicorn here, being the only one, we’ve got to put this down.’ “
Attica, who has written credits on “When They See Us” and “Little Fires Everywhere”, was working with Hello Sunshine on another project when she shared an early version of her sister’s manuscript with officials there. Fast-forward to the fiery pace of the show’s development after she received a call saying it “needed to be turned into a TV show immediately.”
“But if you’re a unicorn, I thought you were supposed to say that,” Attica added in pair conversation. “There are even more reasons for this book to exist. You are unique.”
Attica herself has written five books, including her 2019 book “Heaven, My Home,” a sequel to the Edgar Award-winning “Bluebird, Bluebird.” Her third novel “Pleasantville” won the Harper Lee Award for Legal Fiction and was also long-listed for Bailey’s Award for Women’s Fiction. “The Cutting Season” won the Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. A former fellow in the Sundance Institute’s Feature Filmmakers Lab, Locke also works as a screenwriter, and makes his first forays “from scratch” as showrunner — across two continents, five cities, and three languages.
“Long ago we made a decision that, because the book is so mosaic in structure, we decided to tell the story chronologically in a straight line, but to come up with a device that would tell the audience that it was a woman. that reflected back,” Attica said. “We realized that it would be difficult to capture all the ups and downs and all the emotional ups and downs while passing the time, that it would hinder your ability to sit with the lives of these two people. will, as if it were lived, and that’s what we wanted more than anything, so once we made that decision, it gave a lot of information about how we were going to get everything.”
Tembi’s book describes three summers—what Attica calls “the three-act drama of healing”—spent in Sicily, but for budget purposes and given the limited number of episodes, these seasons were condensed into one summer. Done, which provided one of the more challenging parts of the series’ concept. The story follows a character based on Temby – Amy Wheeler (Zoe Saldana) – as she meets the love of her life while studying abroad in Italy and begins a love story for the ages that is not without its difficulties. Is.
“We also knew that, when we go from one page to the next, we are asking the audience to go on many different journeys, and I have a great gift of writing the book in the messages that come back. ‘Someone once told me, ‘What I love about your book is that it meets the reader where they are,'” Temby said. “So if the reader is going through grief it’s their is for. But if they’re just a traveling person, or they’re just interested in family dynamics, or just food, it meets the reader and is kind enough to plug in, so we knew in that adaptation we had to respect. Gotta give all these story threads and that people, if they want to dive deep and focus on that, but then there’s the next thing, because with life, there’s always the next thing that’s happening. ,
To create mental distance from their own life story, Tembi and Attica decided to change the names of all the characters in the story apart from their roles and elements of identity. Zoe Saldana’s Amahle “Amy” Wheeler represents Tembi, Danielle Deadweiler’s Zora Attica fills the role, and Eugenio Mastrandria’s Lino Ortolano portrays Tembi’s late husband Sarro. The show begins with Amy and Lino falling in love, and it takes viewers on an emotional journey through the ups and downs of a well-to-do life, ending with Lino’s death from cancer. But there’s also an optimistic final episode that hints at new beginnings. So much love
“We’re piecing together a lot of stories, a lot of themes, because I think that’s how life is always going to be,” Temby said. “I go to the grocery store to buy apples, but I’m still a black woman who might bump into someone in the parking lot who says weird things. And then I get in my car and my Sicily My mother-in-law calls me and I talk to her in Sicily. It all happens in five minutes, so this is our show.”
The mix of music lays the foundation for this storytelling, which includes Italian songs, blues, and more.
“There are some songs that were scripted, and it is true in real life that my brother-in-law Saro loved blues. He loved the musical tenor, but part of a run with Arno, they talk about the blues. It was scripted that Blues would open episode 2,” said Attika. “Otis Redding was written to close that episode. We gave people directions. We gave our director our music supervisor things that we thought would fit, and then we got out there and helped too We have selected a lot of songs that are in the series.”
Tembi acted as the final filter on the Italian song selections as she was the only one speaking Italian in the writer’s room and development stages. One song was deemed inconsistent to the lyrics and suggested what they did – ‘Philomena isn’t in a romantic relationship with Amy, she doesn’t want to take Amy to bed, she doesn’t’ – even though it sounds pretty cool.
“Having lived in Italy, traveling there, I have a kind of voice with regards to Italian music, and I go for it and it’s more like contemporary Italian artists, but I also know older Italian artists. .and so especially for the restaurant scene in the pilot when Leno cooks for Amy Volare for the first time, I got a song,” Temby said. “I was like, ‘I feel like this is the moment’ and when it was combined with that scene, the magic happened, and that became the template, the energetic template that we kept looking for. When a kind of sonic experience came from the picture. It kind of got a new kind of alchemy, so we knew we were on to something, and often we liked the juxtaposition of a sort of R&B sound against an Italian setting. And we continued with the sound. Were playing with that association of image.”
“From Scratch” was Netflix’s first US production since lockdown, and people were getting ready to vaccinate. Attica still felt she found a rhythm in making a show about human intimacy and connection, even though they were physically separated by layers of PPE. A scene provides a prime example, in which Amy’s family work together to move her and Lino’s adopted daughter Idalia (Isla Colbert) to a hospital cancer ward so that her father does not allow children on that floor. Despite this, his father could be seen.
“It is inspired by real life. I had to walk my daughter into the hospital to see her father, my husband. It is an important part of the book, and it is written to illustrate the ways in which we should focus and center the child’s experience when illness occurs in a family and, in particular, if there is a possibility of death. ‘Basically, like you can’t make out a kid from the experience,’ Temby said.
“So it happened in real life. And my parents were involved in our lives around the time my husband was going in and out of the hospital. For the screen, we chose Herschel (Keith David) who brought him in, And we made it kind of like ‘Mission Impossible,’ ‘Oceans 11.’ And it was a pleasure to see the family working together like this. It becomes a visual metaphor for that, me. Know that in my own life, my family was coming together to support my daughter at a really important time, and what a joy it was when I didn’t screen with Italia and Leno together. You see that relief, you feel that relief. She’s waiting to see her father, and it’s the same for a lot of kids when they’re allowed to see a seriously ill parent. No. It’s painful.”
The final episode outlines the future of Amy and Idalia and Philomena after Lino’s death, focusing on the roots of the family in Sicily that remained strong there.
“We knew that in Sicily being only one full episode, it was going to have a lot of heavy lifting and the fact that this was going to be the final episode, we knew as storytellers that we were going to leave the audience after a huge emotional turn. Were asking.And with the loss now invest in a whole new place [these] New characters in a whole new language,” Temby said. “To get them to meet Sicily, fall in love with it, and feel good in an episode that was done. It was an act that the book does over the course of the book, but we had an episode to do “
The finale still honors Saro’s memory in showing a new beginning of hope between Amy and her mother-in-law Philomena (Lucia Sardo).
“I think respecting the beauty and simplicity of his hometown, and all the people who were part of making [Saro] Who he was and the place he was on screen was a way to honor him and to honor a Sicilian that is changing, a generation of old ways of women dressed in black, that is changing and dying, and so on screen. To honor that, is a way to honor him,” Temby said. “And also to see what can happen when two people choose each other. Just like in the pilot, Amy and Lino choose each other. In that finale, Amy and Philomena choose each other and really Our series in this is about how we choose and create a family. I felt it not only happened in real life, but it took a lot of respect to show the world this and the possibility of hope even in loss. That’s it. You can still feel a sense of hope when we choose each other and we choose family and we choose love and all that.”
Attika felt that the show also pays tribute to Saro through his portrayal as a father figure.
“One of the really special parts of the show, because it was one of the things I most respected and admired and loved about my brother-in-law, he was such a good father,” Attica said. “All the scenes between Lino and Idalia melted my heart and on set, Eugenio and Isla, the actors, had such a great rapport between them and so just being able to capture that part of Saroo, which is a part of their joy. There was a big part in life. Being a father was going to happen, and so I’m proud of those scenes, they made me happy. And that’s one way I think we honor his spirit.”
Temby outlined the following message, with Attica’s enthusiastic acceptance of what the audience would take away from the show.
“I hope people understand that any conversation about loss or death is really a hidden conversation about how we want to live our lives, how we want to be loved and that we are all bigger than our differences. ,” said Temby. “We are so much more alike than our differences, we are greater than any boundary, any language difference, and that if we choose to step beyond our direct life experience and what we know, we can The more love we can get, the more detail we know is possible.”
“From Scratch” is now streaming on Netflix.
