Interview: Don McKellar of “The Grand Seduction”

Posted on June 10, 2014 at 11:06 am

Before we talked about his charming new film, “The Grand Seduction,” I just had to ask Don McKellar about the plans to make the sensational Broadway musical he co-wrote, “The Drowsy Chaperone,” into a film. He assured me that while he wasn’t allowed to give me any details, I would be very happy with the casting. I can’t wait.

“The Grand Seduction” is an English remake of a French Canadian film about a small harbor (that is their term for a fishing village) trying to break out of its severe economic decline after the collapse of the fishing industry. Their best hope is to persuade a recycling factory to come to their community. But they will not come unless there is a doctor. So the harbor conspires, using some blackmail and some “Truman Show”-style legerdemain, to bring a handsome young doctor (played by Taylor Kitsch) and make him think that they have everything he loves and needs — including cricket players and jazz music — in their remote location.

McKellar is a lot of fun to talk to and we discussed the challenges of making a location vivid enough to be a character in the film and taking actors from the US (Kitsch) and England (Brendan Gleeson) and making them sound like rural Canadians.

How did you do that incredible job of creating that sense of place?

That was a big, big goal of mine. I really feel that for a movie like this to be successful–and you don’t see a lot of movies like this–a social comedy set in a specific locale like that, I really felt you had to convince the audience that it was real. It was real but you really had to show the people there, show the real landscape, show the real beauty. That’s a big part of the seduction. So it was all shot on location. There is no sort of CGI-ed landscapes. There is this night shot of them running from the bar to the church and it is illuminated by the moon and reflected on the water and I remember shooting it with my Director of Photography thinking, “No one would even believe that this is possible; to illuminate the scene by the moon.” We actually lit it with the moon. That’s how clear and bright it was. Yeah, I am really proud of that. I really feel that the place is the signpost of the people.

We waited for the sunsets sometimes and panicked to get them in time but it was all real. You really can’t fake that. You can never second-guess natural beauty like that and it’s so unpredictable out there. Yeah, I’m really proud of that. And it is not hard, it is a beautiful place but still I’m glad we captured it.

You have actors from all over the world pretending to be from a very specific place and the accents are as important as the setting. How did you work on that?

You are right. It’s very distinctive. And it’s actually really hard to do and certainly out there, they are really sensitive about that and they feel that it has been butchered by some very fine actors in other films. So it was really important to me and certainly to Brendan Gleeson because it really rested on his shoulders to go for that and make it as authentic as possible.

And I am happy to say that when we screened it, the first response was, “Sir, I have never seen it done by an outsider before but you pulled it off.” Brendan as an actor was actually a plus; a lot of people would just be scared away by that but some of those actors out there in the UK love that kind of challenge; they love working on accents and getting it down. He worked really hard and hung out with the locals. Almost everyone in the cast was from there so that helped a lot but that’s pretty much the way they sound.

Often when you make a film, you have a dialect coach who sort of dictates the sound and people start imitating that and everyone sounds homogenous. One of the things that gave us a little bit of freedom is that from Harbor to Harbor people sound different. The accent has a certain constants across the province but also there is this wide variety. I kept saying to Brandon, “Sometimes a brother does not sound like a sister out here.” People are distinctive.

The music was also very well chosen.

I have to admit at first, I tried to resist it. My producer and I said, “Oh maybe we should just go with the same old Celtic thing.” You can’t fight that in a way and its part of the culture, it’s so deep. Everyone out there plays a musical instrument. It is really astonishing. There is a guy in the film, the accordion player, I found him by just saying to the cast, “Does anyone here play an accordion?” And then the locals put up their hands: “Oh, he’s good, he’s better, he is the best one.” “Okay, we’ll go with him.” It was really like that. And I remember there was sort of an amusing scene in that bar scene where Brendan is playing the fiddle. At one point my assistant director was trying to tell people how to react. Maybe this one would be interested, another would be drinking, another would get up and dance. It was sort of absurd because we were outside telling the people how to respond and then they started playing and the place came alive in a second. We don’t have to tell these people how to respond to music. It’s a big deep part of the culture so I’m really happy that we evote some of that.

How did you choose Taylor Kitsch for the role of the doctor?

I have always thought Taylor was a good actor. I thought he was really very strong in “Friday Night Lights” and I have seen him on a couple of things that showed his range, like a film called the, “Bang Bang Club” where he played a South African and I thought he was a serious actor. He is certainly capable of doing those action films but I thought they never fully exploited his skills. And one of them is his charm; which is which you know is a real rare asset in a movie star these days; they don’t make them like that anymore. I really feel he has classic movie star appeal and it was really important to me that that character had an authenticity and a heart because it sort of flips around and he ends up seducing them as much as they are seducing him and they realize they have genuine empathy for him. Somehow he’s played naïve without seeming gullible. So I think it is a really skillful performance from him actually.

This is a remake of a French language film. Did you ever see the original?

I had seen it and I admired it. I admired it sort of for its classic comedy structure but I hadn’t thought of remaking it to tell you the truth. It was the producer who asked me to do it and I was skeptical just because it is always dangerous to be remaking a successful film, it was very successful in French territories. But then the idea of Newfoundland came in and I thought, “Oh, this is about something.” This is about a real problem out there in these fishing villages that are dying and I also thought it is a beautiful place and the actors out there are brilliant so all of a sudden it came to life for me and so I was on board.

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Argo: The Real Story of the Crazy CIA Caper to Rescue Six Americans in Iran

Posted on October 8, 2012 at 8:00 am

The employees of the US embassy in Iran were taken hostage in 1979, but six escaped and were hidden by the Canadian ambassador and his wife. A CIA “exfiltration” expert worked with the Canadian government and some Hollywood talent to create fake identities as members of a Canadian film crew scouting locations for the six Americans. The story was classified for many years (the CIA agent even had to give back his medal), but it is now public. This week, Ben Affleck directs and stars in “Argo,” based on the rescue mission. Affleck and the real-life former spook, Tony Mendez, were interviewed by Entertainment Weekly.

“I’ve spent my whole life trying to be boring,” Mendez said. “As an operative, you don’t want to be caught on camera. And here I am watching Ben on a big screen saying, ‘My name is Tony Mendez.’ That really is weird….The movie is so well-done that I felt exactly like I was back there.” You can catch the “boring” Mendez in the movie if you look carefully.

The story first came to light in a Wired Magazine article in 2007. As the movie acknowledges in its conclusion, there were some dramatic liberties taken with the facts. But the most outlandish aspects of the story really happened. Mendez had worked with Hollywood experts before on make-up and disguises, so he had some contacts. Mendez, using the name Kevin Harkin, really did set up a film production company that could credibly be scouting locations for a wild sci-fi/fantasy film.

In just four days, Mendez, Chambers, and Sidell created a fake Hollywood production company. They designed business cards and concocted identities for the six members of the location-scouting party, including all their former credits. The production company’s offices would be set up in a suite at Sunset Gower Studios on what was formerly the Columbia lot, in a space vacated by Michael Douglas after he finished The China Syndrome.

All they needed now was a film — and Chambers had the perfect script. Months before, he had received a call from a would-be producer named Barry Geller. Geller had purchased the rights to Roger Zelazny’s science fiction novel, Lord of Light, written his own treatment, raised a few million dollars in starting capital from wealthy investors, and hired Jack Kirby, the famous comic book artist who cocreated X-Men, to do concept drawings. Along the way, Geller imagined a Colorado theme park based on Kirby’s set designs that would be called Science Fiction Land; it would include a 300-foot-tall Ferris wheel, voice-operated mag-lev cars, a “planetary control room” staffed by robots, and a heated dome almost twice as tall as the Empire State Building. Geller had announced his grand plan in November at a press conference attended by Jack Kirby, former football star and prospective cast member Rosey Grier, and several people dressed like visitors from the future. Shortly thereafter, Geller’s second-in-command was arrested for embezzling production funds, and the Lord of Light film project evaporated.

Since Chambers had been hired by Geller to do makeup for the film, he still had the script and drawings at his house. The story, a tale of Hindu-inspired mystical science fiction, took place on a colonized planet. Iran’s landscape could provide many of the rugged settings required by the script. A famous underground bazaar in Tehran even matched one of the necessary locations. “This is perfect,” Mendez said. He removed the cover and gave the script a new name, Argo — like the vessel used by Jason on his daring voyage across the world to retrieve the Golden Fleece.

The new production company outfitted its office with phone lines, typewriters, film posters and canisters, and a sign on the door: studio six productions, named for the six Americans awaiting rescue. Sidell read the script and sketched out a schedule for a month’s worth of shooting. Mendez and Chambers designed a full-page ad for the film and bought space in Variety and The Hollywood Reporter. The night before Mendez returned to Washington, Studio Six threw a small party at the Brown Derby, where they toasted their “production” and Mendez grabbed some matchbooks as additional props to boost his Hollywood bona fides. Shortly thereafter, the Argo ads appeared, announcing that principal photography would commence in March. The film’s title was rendered in distressed lettering against a black background. Next to it was a bullet hole. Below it was the tagline “A Cosmic Conflagration.”

New Yorkers can see some of the actual artifacts from what was called “The Canadian Caper” on display at Discovery Times Square, including the script for the fake movie. One of the State Department officials who was rescued wrote about what the movie gets right and wrong in Slate. My favorite footnote: in an interview with Joshuah Bearman, the reporter who wrote the first story about the declassified details, he says that the fake “Studio 6” production company set up by Mendez and named for the six Americans they were trying to rescue actually received 26 scripts, including one from Steven Spielberg!

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Interview: Philippe Falardeau of “Monsieur Lazhar”

Posted on April 25, 2012 at 3:32 pm

“Monsieur Lazhar” is an Oscar-nominated Canadian film about an Algerian immigrant who takes a job as a substitute teacher even though he is not qualified and ends up learning a great deal from his students and teaching them more than either they or the school expected. I spoke to writer/director Phillippe Falardeau about his remarkable, if almost accidental, start in film-making, how he worked with children to create such sensitive performances, and the challenges of adapting a one-man play to tell a story on film.

How do you work with children on such a sensitive and difficult subject? The film opens with two of the children finding that their teacher has committed suicide. Ho do you take children to whom nothing bad has happened and help them create that performance?

There are some important things in what you’re saying. First of all, how do you work with children to craft a film that’s saying that and the fact that you’re saying we want to protect the children from that. I think the school wants to do the same thing. The school has all kinds of protocols and rules and regulations trying to figure out all kinds of possible situations, but the film is saying no matter how many protocols we have and how many rules, we won’t be able to prevent stuff from happening, because life happens, period.

And some of those rules have the opposite impact, like saying that a teacher cannot touch a child for any reason.

Exactly. So, working with the children—it’s interesting, because, we see the film and we see the stuff happening through the children’s characters. But you have to remember that when you’re crafting the film, these things happen over a period of three to four months so they see the stuff coming. There’s an audition, and then you talk about the subject with the parents and with the children, and so it’s slow in happening. It’s never a traumatic experience for the young actors, because it’s an abstract idea on paper, first, and when we’re on the set, we’re at three months later and we’ve talked about it a lot. And I found out that at that age, ten eleven, twelve, they’re often dismissed as too young to talk about it, but that is not true. Even though none of these events happened to me when I was a young kid—I hated it when adults were saying, “It’s not a subject for you. We can’t talk about it. You’re too young for that. You’re too young for that.” Especially when I had a question about something. So, I wanted a film that would say, “No, they’re not too young for that, actually,’ and Bachir Lazhar is not treating them like that—he’s treating them like equals.

Even when he makes a mistake in thinking they’re capable of more than they are.

Exactly, and I think life finds a way—or the children will find a way—of saying, well, this is just a little over our heads. Because there is the issue of competence: are they able to do a dictation taken from Balzac? And there’s the issue of life and the questions that are raised by some events; you cannot hide them from children, even if they’re ten years old. So for me, it’s just a long process of audition, taking your time, not just throwing them in front of a camera and saying, “OK, read your lines,” and then, “Bye.” It’s meeting the person, giving them 15, 20 minutes—and if I like them, I invite them back for another audition that’s more complex, and then I work with a coach—she’s an actress also—but she’s good with kids, so, she rehearsed with me and she knows where I want to go in terms of tone, so when I’m off on other tasks, she keeps working with the children. We never leave the children alone. And the third part which is probably the most important, I tried to make the set a summer camp. They know it’s work—but if they have fun, I believe that they trust you, and if they trust you they can reach into their own emotions to give you some personal stuff, like the cathartic scene with the boy. I wish I could say I have a director’s trick I can use on children. I don’t. It’s just life happening there, because I think the children feel comfortable. With the young girl, it’s a little bit different because she’s a very good actress, and she could snap out of the emotion and just look at me and say, “Do you want another one? Do you want another take?” and she could get back into it. The boy was a slow process and difficult process. But in any case, I think trust is the key to work.

And they seemed to develop a very nice relationship between the two of them—a trust relationship.

Yes, yes, absolutely. And all these kids became friends for the duration of the shoot. At the end of the shoot, it was really emotional—it was like the end of a full school year–and they had this nice experience. I wish I would’ve been them when I was young, living through that experience. Some of them probably won’t become actors. I think they she will, the young girl named Sophie Nélisse who plays Alice, if she wants to, but she’s a gymnast and she’s a gymnast at a very, very high level—and that’s her goal in life, so I think she’s an accidental actress.

You took quite a challenge to adapt a one-person play into a movie and can you talk a little about that? You worked with the playwright, I think?

A little bit. She was the first person who read my different drafts and we bounced ideas, although I didn’t want her to co-write, and she didn’t want to co-write either. She knew the play had to transform and become something else. On stage, there’s one man interacting with people who are not there and that we don’t see or hear, but by his reaction we can make them out in our minds. As members of an audience, we’re actually making a film in our head while we’re watching the play. so it’s not that difficult for me to make that into a screenplay.

Tell me what is important about making your main character an immigrant.

In Canada, we have so much land, so much space, and so few people. Now we’re up to 32 million. We’re a country of immigrants. First of all, French immigrants and then the British immigrants, but soon after the Confederation in 1867, you need to colonize all the West, the farming land; so Ukrainians, Polish people—they all came from Eastern Europe to the west, there’s Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Alberta, and then the new wave of immigrants, the Chinese immigrants, and the west of to Vancouver. And in Quebec during the 1990’s, there were a lot of immigrants from Algeria because of the civil war there. Because they speak French, it’s more natural for them to go to France, but they have a difficult relationship with France because it was an ancient colony, so it makes sense for them to come to Quebec. America is so good at integrating and assimilating culturally and identity-wise with people because it’s such a strong political melting pot. In Canada, it’s a tapestry. It’s really something that immigrants can continue being immigrants for at least one generation without really embarking on what is Canada. You know, because, I don’t think Canada has a strong identity, except for some political choice we make, like health-insurance, for instance. We have a hard time defining ourselves…we often define ourselves negatively, we are not Americans.

In Quebec it’s different. We don’t have that identity crisis because we speak French, but we have this crisis of “will we exist in still 50 years” because we have linguistic assimilation. So, in the past ten years I’ll have to admit that our policy has been aligned to the U.S. politics in the post 9/11 era—we’ve been closing our doors to immigrants and refugees.

I was interested in having an immigrant character, but for me the most interesting thing that I was able to revisit who we are through his eyes. You have this guy who comes to school, he knows nothing about the rules and protocols, and he’s kind of clumsy, and he’s not a teacher. I like the fact that he’s lying to get his job, and he’s telling the truth to the immigrant officer—so it’s a nice way for us to look at where we’re at and it allows us to ask ourselves, is that a comfortable place? It’s like the Polaroid of where we’re at, and on certain issues like touching or not the children, I think we’ve gone too far…but by using this man who knows nothing about our values here, he’s like candid, in a way—he just does what he does we see ourselves through his eyes.

One thing that I thought was really strong in the film was the look of it. Can you talk a little about what your discussions were with the cinematographer and what you were trying to say? I thought the look of it matched the emotional tenor of it very well.

The first decision I had to make was with the format. Was it going to be the normal rectangular format or the cinemascope? Since it’s not an action movie or there’s no landscape, you don’t think of cinemascope. Then my director of photography, said, “I think you should shoot your first cinemascope format,” and I said, “Why? I want a documentary feeling.” He could not tell me why rationally, yet he had this instinct. So I said, “Ok, I’m going to do some tests.” So, we’re testing, and we have children in the classroom, and it’s two weeks before shooting, so I’m testing the different formats and I’m holding the camera at the height of the desk, and I’m realizing that with the cinemascope format, you have a feeling that you have more children, because you’re horizontal. You’re skipping the roof and the bottom. You don’t have more children, but you have the sense that there are more children. So that was the first decision. The second decision, I wanted only natural light from the exterior, I wanted it to be very bright, very luminous, colder at the beginning, just bluish at the beginning, and as the season progressed and as the film progressed, just a little warmer. So the premise of that film is so dramatic that I didn’t want the film to drown and be heavy—so I used the photography to pull the film towards the light. I also used also the music to do that. The music is not dramatic; it’s Mozart, it’s Scarlatti, and the music composer—when I pitched him the film, I said, “There’s going to be Mozart in there, so, bring your A-game on that one!”

I so admire the work of the National Film Board of Canada.

Unfortunately, they’ve been struggling and the conservative government has done some major cuts. It is ironic because we just had three films at the Oscars and the Minister of Culture was proud to announce that Canada had funded a film that was nominated for an Oscar at the same time they were making cuts. The National Film Board is still way up there in terms of animation, but for documentaries they are struggling and they have not financed a feature film since at least 18 years. It was a nice place to do films without engagement from distributors and television for financing a film so they could take risks. But I was influenced by them when I was younger.

Most directors say that they were inspired to make films by the movies they watched as children, but that was not what got you started, was it?

I knew I would make a feature film only at the age of 27. I studied political science and international relations and had the intention of becoming a journalist or work in foreign affairs. I had no intention of making a film. The first person to make me realize there was someone behind the film was Steven Spielberg. I saw his name on “Close Encounters” and “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “E.T.” and said, “I want to see what he does next.” He was my first influence but it is ironic because he is everything our film industry is not — big Hollywood movies. And then I saw “Amadeaus” and what Milos Foreman did and it brought me into another spectrum of what film could do. And then then I participated in a contest from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the French side, a contest called “The Race Around the World.” Every year they would chose eight amateurs and give them cameras. We had to travel alone for six months and do 20 short films in 26 weeks in 20 different countries. The movies were shown before a panel of judges live on television. When I came back from that my life had changed and I wanted to make documentaries. Ken Loach and Mike Leigh became my real inspirations.

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Fly Away Home

Posted on December 13, 2002 at 5:16 am

Amy, a 13-year-old girl from New Zealand (Anna Paquin), wakes up in a hospital bed after an automobile accident to see her father, Tom (Jeff Daniels), whom she barely knows. Her mother was killed in the crash, and she must go back with him to his remote farm in Canada. He is an eccentric sculptor and inventor, preoccupied with his work and unsure of how to try to comfort her. Amy does not want to be comforted, and wanders silently through the marshes. When developers illegally mowing down the marsh kill a goose, Amy finds the eggs she left behind, and begins to resolve her loss by mothering the goslings. Since she is the first thing they see when they hatch, they “imprint” her, and think of her as their mother, following her everywhere, even into the shower. The local authorities insist that their wings be clipped, since without their mother they cannot learn to migrate, and will cause problems for the community when they try to fly. But Amy and her father will not allow the geese to be impaired.

Tom devises a way for Amy to play the role of “Mother Goose” in teaching the geese to migrate, by learning to fly herself, in an ultralight plane, and leading them south. With Tom’s brother (Terry Kinney) and girlfriend (Dana Delany), they plot a course to a wetland preserve that is scheduled to be developed unless geese arrive by November 1. As they work together, Amy finds a way to begin to heal her loss of her mother and her relationship with Tom.

This is a thrilling adventure, exquisitely told, by the same director and photographer who made “The Black Stallion”. Ballard has the patience to let the story tell itself, and the quiet moments are breathtakingly beautiful and heartbreakingly touching. PARENTAL NOTE: There is one profanity in the movie, demanded by the studio, who insisted that the movie must have a PG rating so that it would not scare off school-age kids. Of more concern to many parents will be Amy’s nose ring, inserted with Tom’s approval.