“This was something I was very wary of to begin with, because my area of activity is authenticity,” said Radford. The script is a collaboration with both Bocelli and Anna Pavignano, Radford’s collaborator on Il Postino. An international cast includes Antonio Banderas, whose films include Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Desperado, who plays the Maestro. The film takes the story up to the point where Bocelli was “desperate for some sort of success”, Radford added. Radford said: “The scene kicks off with him sitting at a typewriter, writing the story of the film, and he’s in the theatre … at the end, he goes through the theatre … and then steps out in front of a huge audience and starts to sing.” Now he has made new recordings to be used in The Music of Silence.Īndrea Bocelli, left, director Michael Radford, centre, and Toby Sebastian, who plays Bocelli in The Music of Silence. It has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide. Literally by clicking his fingers he can tell you how far away a wall is.”īocelli has just released a special 20th anniversary edition of his hit album, Romanza, which includes two new versions of the song that catapulted him to stardom, Time To Say Goodbye ( Con Te Partirò), one of the biggest-selling singles of all time. He can smell, touch, feel, above all he can hear. And of course his other senses are absolutely developed. He’ll kick a chair with his foot, to figure out where it is. He added: “There are all these tricks that he uses. Last time I went to see him, he greeted me on an Andalucían stallion which was walking only on its hind legs and he was controlling it. He rides horses and does all sorts of things that you wouldn’t imagine that someone who is blind would do with the degree of skill that he achieves. He’s also physically extremely courageous. Radford explained: “This is about a guy who’s determined – he’s a forceful character. In working on the script with Bocelli, Radford got to know him and began to understand exactly why the singer “doesn’t consider himself to be handicapped in any way”. “Then, when he was 12, he was playing football in his blind school and somebody kicked a ball that hit his other eye and blinded him.” He was categorised as blind, but with a limited amount of sight,” he said. He was in hospital most of his early childhood until they managed to save about 10% of the sight in one eye.
The director was initially wary of making a film about a living person, but he said he found Bocelli’s story so inspirational. He said that Bocelli tries to avoid embarrassing people, believing that “nobody wants to see me reaching for a chair like a desperate man with my arms stretched out and feeling about”. Radford told the Observer that Bocelli asked that Sebastian did not attempt to portray a blind person “because I spend most of my life trying to pretend that I can actually see”. He is portrayed in the film by Toby Sebastian, the British actor known for Game of Thrones, who speaks with an Italian accent and mimes to tracks of Bocelli’s voice that are synchronised in a complex technical process. Having made ends meet as a bar singer, Bocelli went on to perform to sold-out audiences all over the world, sang to presidents and popes, and was awarded a star on the Hollywood walk of fame. Bocelli went blind as a child, struggled to teach himself to read music in Braille, and competed in talent shows until his potential was recognised by Luciano Pavarotti, who declared that “there is no finer voice than Bocelli”. This new film, based on Bocelli’s autobiographical novel of the same name, explores the relationship between blindness and hearing, as well as other senses heightened by the loss of sight.
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