arizonska sobota

to adrienne o.:
The short I'm working on right now is about a Czech singer, and she does some lovely songs C&W in English and Czech. Her own songs. But her character is stuck tending bar or cleaning hotel rooms in England. She hates it. She wants to go to Arizona. The movie is called Arizonska Sobota (Arizona on Saturday). She smuggles to make some extra cash: diamonds or ecstacy, we're not clear about this. The movie is shot in Limoux (France), Barcelona (in the Gaudi building called Batllo, beautiful), and Lincoln. The story was being developed as we went along, and I got a long monologue scripted into Czech which Charlie (the Czech singer) translated and spoke in Czech. Basically a message to her Grandmother explaining why she had to get out of Czech and go to America.

I could make the story better if the character had another Czech relative/friend already in the USA, wandering around the desert and phoning Charlie to say "When are you coming, the ice is all melting," but just thinking about it a little bit led me today to this idea: Why not have her cousin in America calling and saying how cool everything is, but then she loses her job and something ugly happens (accident? legal? moral?) and then it's she who is calling Charlie saying she wants to go to Czech and get out of America. Even if you were reading your lines (as if somebody had written translations for you), this could work.

The key is to keep the whole thing in Czech. The piece is for Czech TV, number one, but also for the festival circuit where the competition is tough and different.

So do you think you could do a Meryl Streep and learn a few lines in Czech, or at least get thier pronunciation down? Let me know if you're interested.