Melissa Martin, Director/Writer, talks about the making of The Bread, My Sweet aka A Wedding For Bella

Four years ago my friend, Gemma, died. She was a little energy burst who had emigrated from Italy and then lived for forty years in the same three rooms over my husband’s bakery in Pittsburgh which he started while working in the corporate rat race. Gemma never learned to drive a car, she spoke broken English. I don’t know if she even completed high school, but she touched so many lives that when she died her funeral procession, which was four or five miles long, closed down one of Pittsburgh’s main thoroughfares.

It was one of those rare appropriate events, she had friends who were ditch diggers and congressmen, plumbers and neurosurgeons, and they turned out in force to honor her. The Bread, My Sweet is a monument to her. And because with her passing I was losing my link to it, I wanted to capture this part of America that most people never see, they think they know it, they think they’ve seen it -the Italian thing. The Italians in The Bread, My Sweet, speak broken English, make wine in the basement and sausage too; they create the feast of the seven fishes, have undying faith in a contradictory, mysterious religion, but they also send their children to college. It’s a part of America that’s going away. It’s dying. When it’s gone it’s gone. We lose collectively. We’re left with popular culture images of Italians who are uneducated, predictably violent or vulgar, or swaggering mob members. I wanted to remember that other Italian American world, on film.

Then we cast. I had imagined Scott Baio in the role of Dominic so we sent a script and miraculously he called. And then the New York theatre/movie contingent appeared on the casting agent’s video - Rosemary Prinz, Shuler Hensley and John Seitz. And then it was two weeks before we were to shoot and Adrienne had three cell phones but we still had no "Lucca". Then Kristin Minter appeared late one night when I was scouring reels for that perfect girlie.

There was only the little problem that I had never made a film. I had worked for years in theatre but really didn’t know the business end of a camera. Not the business end of film (which I didn’t know either). I didn’t know which end of the camera to look through. So I’m in Toronto touring a theatre piece with Adrienne Wehr, whom I had vaguely known for some years, and I recognized in her an amazing work ethic. She is an empathetic, giving, control freak, maniac and she had produced the Emmy Award-winning Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood for many years. Clearly, I needed her. Begging didn’t work. She said she was finished with producing. I didn’t have money. I wrote a role for her (she’s also an actress) and she read the script and thankfully agreed to join in as producer. Together we tricked Bill Hulley, our venture capitalist, control freak, executive producer, into joining the dog and pony show that would become our fundraising campaign. The fundraising nearly killed us all.

And then we turned on the camera. We had no trailers, it was hot as hell, and we were shooting summer for winter in 23 days. It should have been a nightmare. But at the end of the first day of principal photography, we were all quietly awed by the actors’ work. Then we drank beer and threw food at one another (mostly cashews) and became the group of gaseous fifth grade morons that we would be for the rest of the shoot. These actors are lovely people and we had a remarkable, precious, time together. We had fun. And we made the movie we all had imagined.

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