‘Cyrano’: Read The Screenplay From Erica Schmidt That Gave Joe Wright A New Way In To Classic Tale

deadline.com:

Editors note: Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series debuts and celebrates the scripts of films that will be factors in this year’s movie awards race.Cyrano filmmaker Joe Wright had long mused about tackling a fresh screen interpretation of Edmond Rostand’s classic century-plus-old play Cyrano de Bergerac, the tale of the admired but solider who, inwardly deeply insecure about his prominent snout, expressed his hidden feelings for his love Roxanne by putting his words in the mouth of her handsome suitor Christian.He was enraptured by the 1990 film version starring Gerard Depardieu. “I saw it when I was an anxiety-riddled adolescent and the story, about feeling unworthy of love, had a profound effect on me,” says Wright. “But I couldn’t see making a new version because I could never see past ‘the nose.’ ”It wasn’t until Wright learned of theatrical writer-director Erica Schmidt’s innovative musical production of the Cyrano story, which found an alternative way into the source of the principal’s reticence and punctuated the raw, romantic emotions with an absorbing series of songs composed by members of the rock band The National.“In my stage version, it was always a Cyrano without a big nose,” says Schmidt. “Typically with [stagings of] the Rostand play, you have a very accomplished and usually very handsome actor wearing a very large fake nose, talking about how horrible his nose is.

I wanted to get at something real, underneath; an insecurity that the character alone feels.”“I felt that there is a universal truth in that, how we all do this to ourselves and to the ones we love,” she adds. “We all have ‘the nose’ that we imagine the other person hates — or the thing that we blame for our not being loved or not being seen