Even directing a TV series based on an Elena Ferrante book isn’t enough to score a meeting with the mysterious writer.
At HBO’s TCA press session on Thursday, Saverio Costanzo, who directed the network’s adaptation of “My Brilliant Friend,” said he’s yet to meet the author.
“We have been mailing to each other,” he said, according to Vulture. “I don’t know who she is and I don’t want to know … she is, in my opinion, a very good scriptwriter … I’ve been mailing to the publisher. The publisher would send it to her and then back to me. And then we have tons of paper.”
Both he and one of the show’s producers, Lorenzo Mieli, made it clear that they didn’t feel the need to meet her in person, either.
“I think it’s one of the most well-kept secrets in Italy’s history,” Mieli said. “At the end of the day, nobody cares because we know [the secret of her identity] is very important to her.”
Famous for using a pseudonym, Ferrante’s true identity has been a topic of near-constant fascination in the literary world since she became a publishing phenomenon in her native Italy, and then the rest of the world, in the 1990s and the proceeding decades.
In 2016, an article that used financial records to conclude that a Rome-based translator was behind Ferrante’s work outraged fans of the author and other writers. The next year, a computer analysis at the University of Padua determined that the work was actually that of the translator’s husband, a published author himself. Neither theory has been confirmed, though in interviews Ferrante has repeatedly denied being a man.
“My Brilliant Friend” will premiere on HBO this fall.