Getting Norwegian Wood, a story of first love, loss and desire, before the camera was a passion project for its French-Vietnamese-director Tran Anh Hung.
The Oscar-nominated filmmaker (1994 Best Foreign Language Film nominee for The Scent of Green Papaya) first read Haruki Murakami’s bestselling novel in 1994 and became convinced it would make a great film.
“I liked the idea of first love and that Watanabe, as soon as he encounters first love, loses it,” he says.
“It was a strong idea because there is an element of danger when you fall in love for the first time.”
The tricky part was getting permission from the notoriously prickly author.
“Every time I went to Japan I tried to talk to someone about adapting it,” Tran said, “but no one would talk to me. It turned out that Murakami wouldn’t allow adaptations of his books.”
Years later Tran discovered the author had given permission for a film to be made from Tony Takitani, one of his short stories. Emboldened by the news Tran wrote a letter to the author asking for a meeting.
His request was granted, but he first had to meet with Murakami’s advisors in Tokyo. All 12of them.
After two days of grilling — “They asked all kinds of questions,” he says — an audience with the author was granted and the permission he sought was also given, with a few conditions.
“It was clear he was giving it to me, not the producers,” Trans says, adding, “He also wanted to read and approve the script and asked for the budget amount.”
Next came the painstaking adaptation process.
“We communicated in English. I wrote the script in French, translated it into English for Murakami and Japanese for the producer.”
Going back and forth they formed the Japanese language script into the film playing in theatres this week, a loose adaptation that maintains the integrity of the novel but is painted with the director’s personal touches.
“A good adaptation is not just about adapting the story,” he says. “I couldn’t do that. For me it’s about adapting the feelings, complications and emotions. If someone else had adapted this book they would make it differently.
“Normally,” says Daniel Radcliffe, “I hate watching my movies and hate watching myself.”
Why, then, did he sit through his new film, The Woman in Black, during its Canadian premier last week in Toronto?
“The last time I will watch it was last night,” the former Harry Potter told me the next day.
“I’ve picked this apart enough now. I don’t need to watch it any more.
“The line between self-critical and self-hating is blurred.
“Normally when I watch my stuff, I say, ‘I don’t like that but I don’t know what to do about it,’ but last night I was watching and thinking, ‘Oh, this is how that could be improved.’”
Despite being one of the most beloved actors on the planet and the star of some of the highest grossing films of all time, Radcliffe isn’t content to rest on his laurels.
“I know I have a long way to go as an actor,” he says.
“I’m 22 and at the stage when most actors would be coming out of drama school but because I’ve got 10 years of experience on a film set I think people expect me to be more complete, perhaps, than I am.
“I think that there are some things I do really well and some things I see and go, ‘OK, I know how to fix that now.’”
One thing he can’t change is the way his fans respond to him.
“It’s kind of part of my life,” he says of the fandamonium that follows wherever he goes.
“The thing you have to remind yourself is that it is not about me.
“It’s about the fact that I played this character, which became beloved and anyone who took on that character would be getting this reaction.
“The fact that I’m now getting it on my own away from the series is very gratifying, although it is still kind of residual from Potter, unless they are fans of that and of me.
“You just have to laugh at it and have a sense of humour about it.
“As I said to you, when I’m at home, smoking a cigarette and it’s cold and I’m in my Canada Goose jacket eating half a pizza, those are the moments you have to take a picture of yourself and play it to yourself when you are on the red carpet and go, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re not all that, really.’”
Actress Andrea Riseborough has no time to be intimidated by co-workers, even when they are world-famous icons.
“Making a movie is no small feat,” she says, “and there is so little time and you can enter into something being paralyzed by fear or you can just experience it.”
She’s referring to being directed by Madonna in W.E., a film that mixes-and-matches a modern day New York tale with the scandalous 1930s love affair between Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII. “I didn’t know her personally,” she says of the singer-turned-director.
“I went to meet her and was taken aback at her ultimate passion for wanting to tell the story. That was really what ignited me.”
“When she sent me the script I read it and thought it was totally unique in the sense that it existed in the surreal. There are two time frames intertwined with one another and I found that really unique.”
She says as the project started she had only a peripheral idea about Wallis Simpson, the American socialite whose husband, Prince Edward, abdicated his throne to marry her. Wallis was, says the actress, “a still image, unmoving.”
That picture soon started coming to life, but it took some time for both director and actress to flesh a real character out of Wallis’s life. “We were really quite complicit from the outset in terms of who we might discover this woman to be,” Riseborough says.
“Neither of us really knew yet. We knew what we had researched but that really is the suit that you then have to unzip and forget about. (Madonna) talks about trusting the DNA being within you but not being a slave to it.”
The result sheds some light on why the story of the divorcee and the king still resonates with people almost 80 years after the event.
“It’s interesting for us all to question why we find it such a fascination that the king might give up his throne for someone who’s not terribly beautiful,” she says.
The new drama Pariah isn’t exactly a laugh-a-minute. A gritty look at a dysfunctional family and a daughter’s desire to be accepted, it’s a heavy, timely story. But one of its stars wants you to know it’s not without its lighter moments.
And Kim Wayans knows funny. She starred alongside her brothers Keenen, Ivory and Damon on the legendary In Living Color television show and once played a character named Ms. Dontwannabebothered in Dance Flick.
“To me, this movie is really truthful,” she says, “and in life in your darkest hour sometimes something funny happens. Have you ever been to a funeral and something funny happens and you find yourself laughing and grandma’s in the coffin? It’s just life, but to me, that was part of the brilliance of bringing real truth to this story. Yes, there is humour, there’s all kinds of stuff.”
In person, Wayans smiles and punctuates her sentences with a laugh, a far cry from the person she plays in the film. Her character, Audrey, has rejected her daughter because of her sexuality, is alienated from her husband and has no friends.
“She has everything every parent could dream of right in front of her, and yet…” her voice trails off.
The tough, uncompromising character is a far cry from the woman sitting in front of me today, and I tell her so. “You have to put Kim on ice someplace,” she says. “The work is to go over the script with a fine-toothed comb and find Audrey. Find how she sees the world. Find out what her value system is. Find out what her family dynamics were in her background, not what Kim’s are. That is the work. Basically you put ‘you’ somewhere else and step into these shoes.”
But can she kick those shoes off at the end of the day and go back to her normal life?
“I personally can clock out at the end of the day and go back to being Kim,” she says. “When I’m there I’m in it. I’m in the story. I’m in Audrey. But when the day is done I can go home and take off that jacket, put it aside and put it back on the next day. I know a lot of actors can’t do that and they have to say in character but I am thankful that isn’t my story.”
Margaret Thatcher, the longest reigning British Prime Minister of the 20th Century, remains a polarizing figure even though she hasn’t held office since 1990.
She’s a hero to some: Gloucester City Council leader Paul James calls her “the best prime minister there’s been.” But a villain to others: “She made all manner of cuts society is still recovering from,” says Steve Lydon, branch secretary of Stroud Labour Party.
She is now the subject of The Iron Lady — a nickname Thatcher picked up from Soviet newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda — a biography starring Meryl Streep, written by Shame playwright Abi Morgan.
The film has already ruffled the feathers of Thatcher devotees. Tim Bell, a longtime associate of the former PM, called the movie a “non-event” and Tory loyalist Norman Tebbit commented that Thatcher was “never, in my experience, the half-hysterical, over-emotional, over-acting woman portrayed by Meryl Streep.”
“It’s not a documentary, it’s not a social history, it’s a drama,” says Morgan on the controversy.
“I think if you see yourself as an artist, part of being an artist is to comment on your times. I feel it is a comment but it is a creative comment.
“I hope it’s a humane and dignified portrayal. I think anybody can see it’s not an attempt to sabotage.
“I feel it is as much the study of power, the study of loss and the study of the isolation of office and [because] Margaret Thatcher is an icon, a recognizable public figure, she was a way to filter those very powerful themes.”
Morgan says those “themes and the ideas and the human story are bigger than the individual.”
As written, the character of Thatcher is complex. The film first shows her long after her glory days and works backwards through her career highlights.
Meryl Streep plays her in various stages of her career.
“She is absolutely dream casting,” says Morgan.
“There are, obviously, amazing British actors and one would have been lucky to work with any of them, but what was exciting to me about working with Meryl is that she’s a complete shape shifter.
“I think she is an absolutely fascinating actress and I felt incredibly reassured when I learned Meryl was going to play the part because I knew she would imbue that character with such humanity and such complexity.
“She has such integrity, she just elevates the work.”
Since her 2002 breakout performance in Bend it Like Beckham, Keira Knightley has starred in 18 films, but it was only recently she realized something about her acting process.
“I suffer very badly from stage fright,” she says.
“I didn’t find it out until I had actually been on stage that that’s what the feeling was.
“It’s literally like having a wall in front of you. You know you have the ability to break through but for some reason you can’t on that day.
“It’s very strange that you can work as much as I do and still have a problem with that.”
She has found a way to circumvent her fears, a method that came in handy while making her newest film A Dangerous Method, the story of the fathers of psychoanalysis, Carl Jung (played by Michael Fassbender) and Sigmund Freud (played by Viggo Mortensen), and Sabina Spielrein, the intelligent but troubled patient who causes a falling out between the men.
“I found only in the last few years that research helps,” she says.
“As far as getting over that fear of stage fright I find that preparation is the key.”
To play Spielrein, a woman wracked by tics and repression, Knightley threw herself into the exploration of the character.
“There was nothing that linked me to her,” she says.
“I had no idea about it. So I phoned Christopher Hampton because he did the adaptation of Atonement, which I did a few years ago, and said, ‘I’m going to do this, so help. Just help.’
“I went round to his house and thought he was going to give me a talk for a couple of hours and give me all the answers but he just handed me a pile of books and said, ‘Start reading. It’s all in there.’”
She eased her nerves with the research and further support was supplied during shooting by the film’s director, David Cronenberg.
“Sets… are very difficult creative spaces,” she says, “and trying to get the space so you can use your imagination and get yourself so you are not frightened by however many hundreds of people are on the set is quite a difficult thing.
“What David does is entirely creative. As much as it is technical it is also creative, collaborative and everybody is incredibly respectful of each other.
“He’s a magician. He’s absolutely extraordinary.”
Viggo Mortensen on research
“With David (Cronenberg) I know I’m going to have a good time shooting and the movie is probably going to be really interesting and original. As is the case this time again. A lot of cases with other directors the shoot is maybe fraught with tension and disorder but the research period can always be interesting. I love that.”
Now that Santa’s naughty and nice list has been put away for another year, it’s time to have a look at another list, Canada’s Top 10, the Toronto International Film Festival’s annual tally of the best Canadian features. In alphabetical order, here are the winners as chosen by a panel of industry experts.
Café de flore
The main pleasure in this story about the uncompromising power of true love is watching Vanessa Paradis throw glamour out the window and deliver a gritty, but lovingly rendered performance as a protective mother.
A Dangerous Method
Here two pioneering psychoanalysts, played by Michael Fassbender and Viggo Mortensen, have a falling out over an intelligent, beautiful but troubled patient (Keira Knightley). The movie is an enticing stew of psycho-sexuality and repression that challenges commonly held beliefs about what is normal and what is not.
Edwin Boyd
The story of Canada’s John Dillinger is an entertaining romp through three decades in the life of a notorious homegrown folk hero.
Hobo With a Shotgun
This is like what would have happened if Roger Corman made Death Wish with a fake blood budget the size of a James Cameron movie.
Keyhole
Guy Maddin’s homage to 1930’s gangster melodramas is exactly what we expect from the eccentric director. It’s an expressionistic, beautifully grotesque story that demands multiple viewings.
Marécages
This lush looking story of the hardships of rural life and keeping a family together is slow moving but rewarding.
Monsieur Lazhar
Canada’s official entry to the Oscar race, this schoolroom drama — think To Sir with Love, with a suicide subplot — is one of the best films of the year, Canadian or otherwise.
Starbuck
A charming movie about a man — winningly played by Patrick Huard —who discovers his sperm bank donations unwittingly made him the father of 533 children, 142 of whom have filed a class action lawsuit to learn their biological father’s real identity.
Take This Waltz
This second feature from director Sarah Polley is a bittersweet Canadian kitchen sink drama about being trapped in a marriage with someone who can’t speak his mind.
Le Vendeur
This looks at what happens to life in a small town when the largest employer is about to shut down. It is a Main Street drama seen through the eyes of a kindly car salesman.
Legend has it that when Steven Spielberg offered Jamie Bell the lead role in The Adventures of Tintin, the actor looked the Hollywood legend in the eye and said, “I’ll have to think about it.”
“What is true is that he said, ‘If you were to be Tintin it would be about five years of your life. Are you comfortable with that?’
“To me, as a 16-year-old, five years was a really long time. [He’s 24 now.] So I didn’t want to be the naïve actor and say, ‘OK, I’m fine with that. I wanted to really consider it. I don’t even think I said I’d think about it, I just didn’t give a definitive answer.
“For me it was more important to be sitting down at a table with him.
“Just sharing a Hollywood meeting with him was awesome. To me, as a child, he was otherworldly. He was a Houdini character who made dinosaurs live and boys fly on bicycles.”
Bell, who first won hearts as the lead in coming-of-age-dance movie Billy Elliot, says getting to make the movie with Spielberg has “remarkable synergy” because “Tintin was one of his favourite childhood things.”
Originally, he simply enjoyed the characters, he says, but there was something special that set the stories about the young detective apart from other kid’s comics.
“It was different from all the other cartoons. I felt respected, as a kid, by Tintin. That allowed me to gravitate toward him and go on his adventures.
“I was a very inquisitive kid,” he says.
“I used to watch a lot of political satire comedy shows. I’m sure I had no idea what they were talking about, but they were funny to me. Grown-ups making fun of other grown-ups was hilarious.
“So when I read Tintin and he was travelling around the world solving political corruption, I just knew what was going on.”
The film grabs the spirit of the beloved books, bringing some of the intensity — and mild violence — of the original Hergé books to the screen.
“If Tintin wasn’t the beacon of excellence that he is,” says Bell, “if he wasn’t the guy with the correct moral compass, if he wasn’t so innocently earnest all the time, I think that could be an issue.
“But because the character at the front is such a great, natural and instinctual heroic character, I think you kind of get away with it.”
Robert Downey Jr. knows how to work a room. I notice this while at the swank-a-delic Peninsula Hotel in Beverly Hills for a press conference to celebrate the release of Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows.
It’s a packed panel, including co-stars Noomi Rapace (the original Girl With the Dragon Tattoo) and Jared Harris, mega producer Joel Silver and Downey’s business and life partner Susan. Between them there are untold Oscar nominations and hundreds of millions in box office returns, but that doesn’t mean squat when Downey enters and takes centre stage.
All eyes — and 90 per cent of the questions — go to him. Midway he feigns embarrassment at the attention and says, “Why doesn’t someone ask Joel Silver a question?”
Why? Because Downey is the most quotable, funny and memorable person in the room, that’s why.
Here’s a sample of what he had to say.
On making sequels:
“There should be a whole online support team for anyone who has ever been involved in making a second part to a first that worked. There is so much to learn. The greatest disguise was us disguising ourselves as consummate by-the-numbers professionals when, in fact, we’re all incredibly eccentric.”
When asked to talk about performing Sherlock Holmes’s drag scenes:
“I guess we’re not talking about this as one of the most important films of the year. I put on some makeup. How are we going to get nominated with these kinds of questions?”
On improving on set:
“I think the goal is to make a well-written scene seem improvised, or to find things in the room you couldn’t have known until you get in the real situation and just try and improve things as you go along.”
On why his co-star was absent:
“Jude (Law) would have been here, by the by, but his son had a soccer game.”
On keeping the set “green”:
“I just remember that every animal that was harmed was promptly taxidermied and sent as a gift to one of the many ecological companies who have these huge concerns that I validate.”
On working with Jude Law and director Guy Ritchie:
“Jude and I are pretty close, but Guy and I are practically brothers. There have been times I have wanted to lob off his head with a machete.”
On collaborating with his director and fellow actors:
“It was a democracy in the truest and most frustrating and most rewarding sense of the word.”
Getting Norwegian Wood, a story of first love, loss and desire, before the camera was a passion project for its French-Vietnamese-director Tran Anh Hung.
