”What am I working on?” asks Jeff Goldblum’s character in the opening lines from the 1986 film The Fly. ”I’m working on something that will change the world and human life as we know it!”
It might not have quite that impact, but 21 years after the film’s release, its director, David Cronenberg, is working on a new incarnation of the story of the scientist who gets mixed up with a fly.
The Canadian is to direct an opera of his film, a co-production of the Los Angeles Opera and the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. The Fly, the opera, will reunite three of the key figures from the film: Cronenberg, who will direct his first opera, the composer Howard Shore, who wrote the music and went on to win academy awards for his work on the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Cronenberg’s sister, Denise, who designed the costumes for The Fly.
The star-power behind the production is considerable. It will be conducted by LA Opera’s general director, Plácido Domingo; singers including soprano Renée Fleming and baritone Rodney Gilfry are already being linked to the production; sets will be designed by Dante Ferretti, who won the 2005 Oscar for art direction for his work on The Aviator. Cronenberg has long had the bug to make an opera of his film, which itself was a remake of a 1958 film.
”You could actually write an opera based on The Fly,” the director told an interviewer in 1993. ”It could be a sort of a one-set thing, very inexpensive.”
His words could come back to haunt him. While a spokesperson the LA Opera said that the budget for the opera was still being decided, it seems unlikely that the director and his team will settle for a single set. The opera is scheduled to debut in Paris in July next year and move to LA in September.
Cronenberg said he was looking forward to working on the production. ”To be involved in this opera of The Fly is, for me, to travel back not only in time, but to another dimension,” he said. ”It’s a magical reliving of a part of my life, this time playing a completely different role in the creation of a very different animal. I can’t wait to see what happens.”
In the film which has the tagline ”Half man, half insect … total terror”, a scientist becomes crossed with a fly as he tries to demonstrate a matter transportation device to a journalist he is wooing. The film is a tender love story that leans on the tradition of Hollywood B-movie schlock and Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
”I always believed The Fly to be a classic opera story,” said Shore. ”It’s a tale of love and death, true love surviving in the face of physical decay and ultimate sacrifice. To bring this work to the opera stage has been a long-time dream.”
Describing The Fly as ”an unprecedented addition to the operatic repertoire”, Domingo said: ”It has long been my dream to unite the worlds of film with those of opera, especially in Los Angeles … Any commission of an opera is a gamble, as has been proven throughout music history. There are many operas which were commissioned and premiered but didn’t survive the test of time.
”Thus, there is no scientific formula for commissioning but only one’s instinct when one listens to a composer’s already existing works. I have heard many of Howard Shore’s scores for such films as The Lord of the Rings and, of course, The Fly, and knew that here was a musician who should write an opera.”
Previous attempts to translate films to the opera stage have met with mixed results, as have the attempts of film directors to work in the lyric theatre.
The Italian director Franco Zeffirelli is probably the most prolific film director working in both film and opera. His background in opera has led him to work extensively in the theatre and he has made several film versions of operas.
Exorcist director William Friedkin has also directed a number of operas in LA and elsewhere, including works by Puccini, Bartók and Strauss. Friedkin, who also directed the French Connection films and has made several notable documentaries, told the New York Times last year that despite the similarities between the two mediums, there were also important differences.
”A great actor needs and wants the same things a great singer wants,” he said. ”They want a psychological underpinning for their characters and a staging that works. In opera you have to have a God-given talent, not just read and perform. Then you have to be well trained and extremely dedicated. That is not as true of movie stars. The camera has to like them. Many actors do not do well on the stage.” – Guardian Unlimited Â