Director took painstaking care in adapting Garcia Márquez’s beloved novel for screen

British director Mike Newell hadn’t even wrapped his adaptation of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire when he heard that another well-known novel — this one even more beloved and admired than J.K. Rowling’s book — was about to be turned into a movie.

Newell’s small-scale, character-driven body of work (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Enchanted April, Mona Lisa Smile) made him an unexpected but inspired choice to direct a Harry Potter movie. But the filmmaker knew the odds were much lower he’d land the gig of directing Love in the Time of Cholera,an adaptation of the classic Latin American novel by Nobel Prize-winning Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez. After all, at least the Potter kid was a Brit.

Or, as the animated, 65-year-old filmmaker puts it himself: “Why on Earth would you choose an Englishman in late middle age to direct this movie?””*

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