Caroline Lea's "The Metal Heart," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Metal Heart: A Novel of Love and Valor in World War II by Caroline Lea.

The entry begins:

I love the idea of writers imagining movie versions of their books and the gorgeous real-life inspiration and beautiful landscape behind The Metal Heart mean that it translates really easily into something richly cinematic. Set on the remote Scottish Orkney Islands during World War Two, the novel is inspired by the true story of Italian prisoners of war who were imprisoned on the islands and built the most stunning chapel out of scrap and war debris. A love story, the novel’s central female characters are twins who are outcasts from Orcadian society and find themselves entranced by the beauty and romance of the chapel that the prisoners create. I’d love the team behind The Crown to direct an adaptation – they’re so brilliant at capturing sweeping landscapes and framing beautiful shots, which would give viewers a wonderful insight into the breathtaking Orcadian landscape.

While Dorothy and Constance are physically identical, their characters are very different. I would love to see Eleanor Tomlinson bringing out Con’s impetuousness and vulnerability, while showing the compelling romance between Dot and the Italian prisoner, Cesare. Eleanor is incredibly beautiful and I loved the complexity and vulnerability she brought to the character of Demelza in Poldark.

Although he is a soldier, Cesare is also an artist caught up in the machinery of war and I think...[read on]

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--Marshal Zeringue