Interview: Jonny Campbell, Director of J.K. Rowling’s “The Casual Vacancy”

Posted on May 7, 2015 at 12:53 pm

J.K. Rowling’s first book for adults was the dark, sometimes savage story of small town politics, The Casual Vacancy. The title refers to an elected office that is vacated before the term is up, which in this story occurs in Pagford, a small, cozy-looking English village. But its inhabitants are miserable. The town is filled with deceit, selfishness, betrayal, cruelty, and a government that alternates between negligence and incompetence for the poor and highly effective protection for the privileged.

I spoke to director Jonny Campbell about the two-part miniseries adaptation now appearing on HBO, which Slate’s Kay Waldman calls “infinitely better than the book.” At times melodramatic, at time satiric, at times comic, at times tragic, the story follows characters who are often desperate and always trying to protect themselves from hurt and loss.

J. K. Rowling called this story a comic tragedy or a tragic comedy. So how do you as a director signal to the audience what it is that they are seeing, especially since everyone is familiar with her very different Harry Potter books?

The screenplay and the story tell me what I’m supposed to convey to the audience and quite honestly I take great pleasure in the fact that sometimes the tone can be inconsistent, different. Tragic comedy — you don’t get much more extreme than that. People write articles and pieces and analyses of the show, criticisms, features, whatever, and you start to get a picture of how people receive it. I read one earlier today which said it was totally inconsistent and I was left not quite knowing what to feel at the end… Isn’t that brilliant?

For me the tone is the way I like to tell the story. but based on the script. I don’t try and spoon feed it to people. You need to leave people to make up their own mind about the character, rather than dictating and telling people. Now I’m not trying to claim that this is perfect or this is an in-depth insight into the myriad of characters. It just wouldn’t be possible to do that in three hours. What we did try and do is let each character be there on a need to get to know basis. So you kind of stir in the characters as and when you want to turn a new chapter or when the story develops and you feel the audience can withstand yet another new face and we are talking about not less than 30 characters here, you add them in. If people think it’s inconsistent I see that as a strength. Life is full of variation and equally at the end you hope people are moved. If some people are left floundering going, “I’m not quite sure what I’m supposed to feel,” that’s fine too.

You’ve got a community of people in Pagford that are living cheek by jowl. The danger is it can become a bit soapy. It’s very much my intention to try and not let it do that because while these people’s lives at the end of the book will still keep going, like the end of the movie you know you want to make people aware that they have stopped, the end of the story is here. And the other thing to say is one of J. K. Rowlings’ intentions in writing this was she wanted to write a contemporary novel which had the sensibilities of the 19th century novels. I didn’t realize this at first when I read the screenplay. And I hadn’t read the book at that point, so the penny dropped for me it when it sort of dawned on me that this was very much in the sort of vein of Charles Dickens in terms of shining a light on every aspect of every strata within society within the confines of the story. I’m a huge Dickens fan. In his books you you have a vulnerable teenage character whether it’s David Copperfield or Oliver Twist or Pip you have this central character who is being sort of bashed around like in a pinball machine through the sort of the straits of life by various eccentric characters who even in the Dickens context has to be sort of slightly heightened and caricature in their nature. But here people often see that as a weakness, saying “that character is stereotypical and caricature.” And yet if they were wearing wigs and bonnets then we never would level that criticism at all Because it is a contemporary setting it just shows what people’s expectations are and why I felt this was really original piece. If you watch it with an open mind you totally get it. If you don’t to be prejudiced by your sort of preconceptions about… I am being introduce to this character, I want to know everything about their story, everything about their journey it is like “hang on a second”, they are playing a part in this machine of telling the story about society, about the family in particular but to be patient and just watch it unfold. Don’t be impatient and let yourself go a bit.

As a director, you had a real challenge in managing so many characters and stories.

When you read the novel, it is one of the difficulties is trying to put a face to a name almost. In a way that makes it easier with an adaptation because at least you have an actor being that character. When you are reading it in a novel you kind of just have to close your eyes and keep reminding yourself as part of the joy of reading a book who is who, but here equally it was about not trying to introduce everybody at the same level one after the other but as and when they become necessary for the storytelling. You might not know their name at first. That might come a bit later.

So we wanted a sort of contrast in, both in terms of Sarah Phelps writing the screenplay and bring the characters in like a mixture of a recipe. You say, “Well, hang on, we are able to take another character at this point and if so is this the best time to name check them, is this the best time to have a visual cue?” When we first see Colin Wall you just see the back of his head. You’re forcing the audience a little bit to sort of go, “I guess that must be her husband and that’s her son” instead of telling them everything. I find that more interesting. One of the thrills of doing it is setting out all the chess pieces before you could really go to town on cranking up the story, hopefully ratcheting up the stakes.

I noticed several different times where you used images of reflections. What did that convey?

You get an extra mark for spotting that. Whether it’s a reflection in the mirror, or in the water, or in the river that goes around Pagford like a noose sort of tying itself, constricting the village, there’s a visual metaphor. In terms of the reflections that was deliberate in terms of distorting things, showing that things aren’t always what they seem and that it’s a way of holding the mirror up to ourselves. That’s what J. K. Rowling does in the novel very astutely. She has this uncanny ability within one sentence to sum up absolutely the motivation of a character to make a particular decision and that whole process. And I think what they ended up doing thought and action and that’s one of the fascinating joys of reading the book.

When you try to adopt that into a screenplay, it would be foolhardy to try and just verbatim transpose that into a screenplay, it just can’t do it. You would not be successful anyway so we had to make some decisions not everyone was going to agree with what but we did want to try and do was visually to be constantly challenging the viewer to think about those characters their own locations, their environment become a part of the storytelling part of them, sort of an echo of their own characters and there’s a lot of detail in the set design to visualize thoughts. We had to sort of use anything we could to sort of try and get that across. But the mirror itself was about in a very simplistic level about those in society, with a mottled old antique mirror indicating a timeless story and hopefully implicated by the typeface of the Casual Vacancy itself. This is a classic story in a temporary setting.

I was very struck in particular by the performance of Julia McKenzie, as this kindly-looking lady who is shockingly vicious.

She’s a grand dame of the British acting establishment, a huge musical and operatic star and she’s been in lots of comedies over the years and more recently she was Ms. Marple. So she’s a perfect choice to play Shirley because she starts off as this of doddery, smiling, respected sort of harmless cardigan-wearing granny and then as the story progresses you see the Machiavellicome out and you realize that she’s pulling the strings and her husband is pretty much her puppet. And she’s Lady Macbeth by the end. I think she turns in an astonishing performance.

She says to her daughter-in-law, “You are not a victim. You are a failure.” It is devastating.

Yes, it all goes pear-shaped for her from that moment. It is like by speaking what she feels to be the truth, by seeing the inner workings of her mind, we know she is despicable in that moment. So it makes the scene where she’s forgiven all the more touching or at least more meaningful because because part of the story is having not a happy ending but just a sense of “hang on, some kind of change has to come through this village.” That moment of forgiveness is almost like a blessing. It is for me one of the really key moments.

Puss in Boots “Hosts” a Jeopardy Category

Posted on April 29, 2015 at 4:18 pm

Tonight on Jeopardy Puss in Boots becomes the first CG-animated character to host an entire category of answers. Puss “recorded” clues for an entire category called “Not as Great as Puss In Boots.”

On May 8, The Adventures of Puss in Boots returns to Netflix. In these new episodes, Puss and Dulcinea embark on an adventure to find the Fountain of Youth to save Puss’ old mentor, El Guante Blanco. When Dulcinea becomes enchanted with new powers, Puss helps her learn how to control her newfound strength.

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Television

Trailer: Disney’s Descendants With the Next Generation of Villains

Posted on April 27, 2015 at 3:47 pm

Coming to the Disney Channel this summer:

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Television

Men in Suits: Costume Designers Talk about “Scandal,” “Mad Men,” and More Suit-Wearing Characters on TV

Posted on April 27, 2015 at 3:27 pm

The women’s clothes get all the attention, but for a costume designer — and for the actor — a suit is just as important. Indiewire spoke to costume designers about what the suits worn on “Mad Men,” “Scandal,” “Better Call Saul,” “Ray Donovan,” “The Good Wife,” “Black-ish,” “Revenge,” and, of course, “Suits” tell us about the characters and the story.

Bryant communicates Don’s point of view by relying on her own impression of the character. She “envisioned him a character of secrecy, mystery, and seduction” (which is a pretty succinct characterization, if you know Don) and translated that vision “into a minimal, masculine palette of grays, blacks, deep burgundy and navy,” which underscores her ethos of “evoking emotion and telling the story of the characters.”

Andre’s style may not be as traditional as the other guys of this list, but he’s as dapper as they come. The fashion choices Dre makes, according to Beverly Stacy, designer for “Black-ish,” “are dictated by his background and experience.” He has a laid-back, West Coast aesthetic that marries an upscale tone with modern lines, defining what Stacy calls, “Hip Hop Couture.”

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Behind the Scenes Television

Interview: Barak Goodman of “Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies”

Posted on April 26, 2015 at 3:55 pm

Director Barak Goodman talked to me about his superb series for PBS, Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies, now available on DVD. The series is produced by Ken Burns, based on the book by book by Siddhartha Mukherjee.

Everybody who worked on the show had some direct or very close experience with cancer. How does that affect the way the show is made?

It certainly made it very personal for all of us. In my case it was my grandmother. When she died when I was in my early 20’s. I didn’t even know what she had died of. My parents thought it was better not to actually tell me. Even then, which wasn’t that long ago, it shows how much stigma there was still around this word “cancer” and this whole set of diseases. And I think that’s persisted to some degree up to today. When we started this project we did so knowing that somebody in the own production team was going to be diagnosed or have someone very close to them diagnosed with cancer during the project. Sure enough there were three separate episodes during the two years we were working on this film. Edward Herman, our narrator, received a diagnosis and or died from the disease so it was very personal from the very beginning.

The series really comes at cancer in several different ways. There is a historical part, there are the individual stories, there is a science story. How do you keep that presented in an accessible way?

This is a bold experiment in filmmaking. We were not sure at all if these three strands that you just identified would work together. I’m not aware of it ever having being really tried on this scale before. Essentially we have been working in historical film which Ken Burns and I are very familiar with doing. We have pieces following patients through their journeys, being with them every day, letting the cameras roll. Then we have a very heavily scientific story in which the we are trying to explain to people and what we found to our delight was that each strand kind of resonated with the other and sort of vibrated with the other and you have almost a kind of music coming out as a result.

And when you see for example a contemporary story of Terrence deciding whether or not to roll their child in a clinical trial agonizing over the pluses and minuses and all the unknowns, we get a deep insight into what the parents must have been going through the 1950s when the first multidrug clinical trials were happening at the National Cancer Institute and children were literally being almost sacrificed for science, for the knowledge that was coming out of these trials to with very little benefits to them. Those parents must have faced an even more intense decision to make about whether to go forward with this. So the only way to understand that historical time is to see it with your own eyes, happening right now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDsqTGJ9lYo

What were some of the challenges that you had to convey the scientific material and did you use animation? Did you do microscopic photography?

All of the above and many more things. That was in some way the most challenging part of the film itself. In the first place we had to satisfy ourselves that we understood it. So my litmus test is always, if I can understand it simply and clearly I can get it across to our viewers. So it was really about not pretending that we understood something that we didn’t understand, really asking these world-class researchers and Nobel prize-winning scientists to try to talk as if they were talking to their grandchildren. And they were remarkably successful at that.

They were able to simplify these concepts so that it really does become comprehensible and then we availed ourselves of some really, really beautiful animation. And we kind of had a worldwide search to find an animator who could do this and we actually ended up working with a woman who lives about three blocks away from me in Brooklyn. And she just happened to be really an artist not so much kind of trying to literally show what is going on but almost create a world that the viewers can kind of sink into and that way really the science became much more accessible to people, much more interesting to people.

One of the things that I think is frustrating to non-medical people is that it seems that every day there is a headline that something either does or does not cause cancer or reversing what we were told last time. What is the reason for that and what is the best way to understand it?

I think that it’s born of frustration. I mean it is still the case that some half of all cancers have no known cause at all and maybe, it’s very possible are the result simply of random copying errors inside our always dividing cells. I think this is partly especially for Americans who want an identifiable cause, something that we can stop and so we won’t ever get this disease in the first place. And while certainly true that there probably are carcinogens that we probably haven’t yet identified certainly many of these so-called causes whether it’s power lines or cell phones or sugar or whatever it is, really there’s no serious scientific evidence showing that these are carcinogenic.

The number of known carcinogens once you get past tobacco, obesity, sunlight, some viruses, there are very few that have been identified solidly. I think that is just tremendously frustrating for people so there’s that vacuum into which is poured all sorts of half-baked theories that I think do a real disservice. People running around not knowing what to eat or what to drink or where to stand on where to live and it is really, really a problem and I think one of the most important and promising areas of cancer research are in kind of honing our understanding of what is preventable and what is not preventable.

You show in the series how just a few decades ago the word “cancer” was spoken in whispers, if at all. Now Angelina Jolie writes about her surgery in the newspaper. How have we changed in the way that we talk about cancer?

I think we have made a lot of progress in that area. Cancer isn’t quite the taboo subject it was even 30 years ago when my grandmother died. And we owe a debt to people like Angelina Jolie or Betty Ford or Nancy Reagan or people who have publicly shared their particular stories. And I think in the case of Angelina Jolie there are some people who criticize her because she has taken these what seems like drastic steps for perhaps very little medical reason but that is a very dangerous thing to do, is to criticize another person’s choices. The service that she’s giving us is that she’s willing to talk about it and she’s willing to say, “I have a gene that may well give rise to cancer and this is what I’m going to do personally to try to prevent that from happening. You don’t have to follow my lead but this is one option.” And I think it is less what she has chosen to do than the fact that she has discussed it at all openly that is a real achievement and service she has given us.

What do you think is the most promising avenue that you have discovered for either prevention or treatment in the course of working on the series?

Just since this book came out five years ago, there is a whole new sort of frontier in how cancer research has developed. Immunotherapy is setting the cancer world on fire. It’s not just us, our decision to focus on it, it’s really universally thought of as being the most exciting new area of cancer research. And the reason for that is that for centuries people wondered why the human immune system couldn’t, didn’t fight cancer the way it fought every other infection. Why can’t our immune system help us? So (a), it does help us we probably have cancer all the time in our bodies and the immune system is part of the defense mechanisms that are fighting the cancer but more importantly even there are very specific reasons that the immune system as it turns out doesn’t fight cancer mostly because it doesn’t see it, it doesn’t recognize it as ‘other’ and that’s partly because cancer is so close to our cells, it really is our cells.

So what’s so exciting about this is that they have devised ways to basically unblind the immune system, to take the restraints off the immune system and that means a possibly non-toxic therapy, a therapy against which the cancer cannot form a resistance. All the defense mechanisms that cancer has are rendered useless when the immune system is unleashed against it. This isn’t even hypothetical, there is a billion-dollar industry already, and there are approved drugs out there that are working remarkably well against certain types of cancer. And every month it seems there is a new clinical trial for a different kind of cancer. You rarely see scientists in this field jumping up and down and getting giddy and childishly giggling but you do see that when you talk to them about immunotherapy. With all the caveats about where we’ve been before and had all these promising sort of moments before it in history cancer research there is still a lot of optimism about this new field.