ShareThisAt first, the Greeks said thanks but no thanks.
You cannot shoot a movie at our ancient ruins, even if it does star Nia Vardalos from "My Big Fat Greek Wedding."
"They weren't being persnickety; they were just being protective of their national treasures," Vardalos said in a phone call this week to talk about "My Life in Ruins," now opening.
She and the filmmakers had assured government officials "we were not going to break the Parthenon, and that actually wasn't their concern."
Authorities did not want the ruins closed, for even an hour a day. "They said people come from all over the world ... they can't walk up to the original Olympic grounds and see a sign that says 'Closed.' "
That was both eye-opening and touching. "Once someone comes to Greece to see the Acropolis, you must fulfill their dream."
A compromise was struck and, in addition to a ban on smoking, eating or chewing gum near the ancient sites, director Donald Petrie posted signs warning, "If you enter this area, you will be on camera." The crew, remarkably enough, did not have to contend with strangers bouncing or waving in the background.
"People would walk into the ruins, see our camera filming and we were immediately upstaged by the architecture and beauty around us. Their mouths were hanging open at the columns. They didn't care about us."
"My Life in Ruins" features Vardalos as a Greek tour guide named Georgia who has lost her "kefi," or mojo.
She's a history expert consistently disappointed in her batch of bus passengers, whom she stereotypes by sight and ethnicity. A fateful pairing with a hirsute driver (Alexis Georgoulis, the "George Clooney of Greece") and a batch of tourists she actually gets to know changes her life.
When Vardalos first scouted in Greece, she, a tour manager, director Petrie and producers found themselves bonding like a real band of vacationers.
"We would get up at 5 o'clock in the morning, having slept under the thinnest blanket in the world shivering -- I think it was October, November when we went -- then we'd get up, be driven by this guy. At the beginning, we didn't know each other at all. By the end of it, I think we were all sharing underwear."
Mike Reiss, one of the writers behind "The Simpsons Movie," penned the script, which Vardalos enhanced with some personal and female-friendly references, as when a suitor tells Georgia her butt is "too small."
"The stuff I layered into her character, I personally experienced. I lost my mojo for a while. I highly recommend it, actually. I just don't think there's a huge advantage to going through life just being an optimist. I think it's OK to step out once in a while and view things with a different perspective, so I feel particularly refreshed."
She struggled with infertility and recalls, "In 2004, I just thought I can't pretend, I can't grieve this situation while in the public eye, so I quietly withdrew. I wrote scripts for Jonathan Demme and for Tom Hanks." She had, after all, been nominated for an Oscar for writing "Greek Wedding."
Vardalos, 46, called this retreat from the public eye "a quiet period of reflection" and said she and her husband, actor Ian Gomez, immediately pursued adoption. "Each avenue I went down fell through until I discovered America Foster Adopt. It was the easiest thing I've ever done."
She was working with foster care while preparing for the romantic comedy. "They were just so positive and they showed me case after case of this is a match we did through our agency, and this is a match and this is a match."
With 129,000 legally free children, she thought, "Aah, this one's going to work, so I started to get my mojo back, shot the movie and then very soon thereafter, we were matched with our daughter," then 3 and now 4 years old.
"My Life in Ruins" is rated PG-13, in keeping with Vardalos' belief that the f-word doesn't belong in a movie with a family theme.
"I think it sends a horrible message. There's other little messages, too. When the Spanish women come on the scene, you'll notice that we don't compete for the men, we support each other. Rachel Dratch's character (traveling with her husband) doesn't disparage me for being single."
If the promotion budget for "My Life" is a fraction of, say, "Star Trek," Vardalos isn't waving the white flag. She's Twittering, made a video for YouTube called "My Life in Ruins, Really" and another for funnyordie.com titled "My Life in Ruins, and Nia Vardalos is thinking."
"We are the low-budget underdog. I'm not going to cry about it, I'm just going to take to the Internet. It's free."
(Pittsburgh Post-Gazette movie editor Barbara Vancheri can be reached at bvancheri(at)post-gazette.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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