Back in 2002, Rob Marshall took the Broadway film Chicago and turned it into a big-budget Hollywood musical with names like Catherine Zeta-Jones and Richard Gere. A few years later, Marshall tried to capture lightning in a bottle again by adapting Maury Yeston’s Nine.

The film was a major critical success, getting nominated for four Academy Awards and five Golden Globes. Rob Marshall had done it once again, with the help of his immense crew and the blessing, as well as the guiding hand of the show’s original creator, Maury Yeston.

We were lucky enough to speak with Yeston about his work on both the original Nine and it’s silver-screen adaptation, as well as possible film work in the future, and an interesting credit on his first published piece of music.

Check out the interview after the jump, and be sure to pick up Marshall’s Nine on DVD and Blu-Ray everywhere today.

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About thirty minutes into Rob Marshall’s musical Nine, I kept getting a nagging sense of déjà vu. It finally dawned on me that the movie reminded me a lot of All That Jazz, the 1979 musical directed by Bob Fosse. That movie starred the late Roy Scheider, who portrayed a brilliant choreographer experiencing an existential crisis in the days leading up to a big Broadway production. He copes with his pathos by popping pills and chasing women, and his self destructive ways ultimately cost him the love and respect of his daughter and those closest to him.

In Nine, Daniel Day Lewis plays a brilliant Italian director who experiences an existential crisis in the days leading up to the first day of filming for his new movie. He is a scoundrel, and has so many entanglements with various women that it ultimately threatens his health, marriage and relationships, not to mention the movie.

As soon as I got home, I started researching and found out that All That Jazz and Nine were both based on Federico Fellini’s 1963 film 8 1/2, which is widely considered a masterpiece in most film circles. While All That Jazz was Bob Fosse’s re-imagining of 8 1/2 with autobiographical components liberally interwoven, Nine is a more faithful adaptation of the story.

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