On Monday, November 3, 2014 Richard, along with lawyer Edward Greenspan and Olympic champion Adam van Koeverden, will read from the Giller shortlisted books at Koerner Hall (273 Bloor Street West in Toronto)! Buy tickets HERE!
As with the inaugural Between the Pages presentation offered last year, readers will get a chance to peer inside the minds and creative lives of the writers who have made it onto the 2014 shortlist. The event will feature special guest appearances and entertainment.
2014 Shortlist:
The Betrayers, David Bezmozgis, HaperCollins Publishers Ltd.
Tell, Frances Itani, Haper Collins Publishers Ltd.
Us Conductors, Sean Michaels, Random House Canada
The Girl WHo Was Saturday Night, Heather O’Neill, HaperCollins Publishers Ltd.
All My Puny Sorrows, Miriam Toews, Alfred A. Knopf Canada
The Ever After of Ashwin Rao, Random House Canada
When Roger Larry was considering a subject for his new documentary he wondered, “How do I make a documentary about a character so interesting so I won’t be bored even when I’m doing press five years later?”
Five years after beginning Citizen Marc, his look at outspoken cannabis policy reform activist and Prince of Pot Marc Emery, he remains fascinated by the topic.
“What really what drew me into Marc were the contradictions,” he says. “I was looking for a subject who was facing crisis in the present tense and had a very complicated personality so there were contradictions to wrestle with.
“As we got into the subject more, certainly I was struck by the contrast between what I considered to be truly impressive acts of civil disobedience, a willingness to put his ass on the line and this tremendous ego. I began to suspect the two were very much connected because Marc is one of the most successful Canadian activists ever and I just don’t think it is a coincidence he has this ego.”
Larry and his partner Sandra Tomc agreed Emery was a compelling subject, but also a divisive one. “Is he just an egomaniac or is he a great activist? We ourselves had different points of views on Marc. We tried to assemble the most cogent arguments on both sides of that question.
“What you are seeing is the fruits of five years of arguments.”
Emery and his wife Jodie, however, aren’t happy with the way the activist is portrayed. “Marc has read the transcript but has not seen the film,” says Larry. “Jodie has seen the film. They’ve gone nuts on twitter and facebook attacking the film.”
On October 16 @JodieEmery tweeted: “The “Citizen Marc” movie: sloppy amateur film that manipulates & edits interviews & omits important facts because director hates Marc Emery.”
“In response to that I would say that I have a great deal of respect for Marc Emery,” says Larry, “that I think he has made a great contribution to Canadian society. I’m interested in how his dark side, his ego, had helped him to achieve that. A lot of public figures don’t enjoy the way they are portrayed in the media because we are not just giving the spin. We’re trying to look behind the curtain as it were. I would also say this is a documentary where we shot over a thousand hours of footage, which is very unusual, and so, yes, we edited it! It is true. I will concede that point. We did edit the film. I would have had trouble with that thousand hour running time.”
Exclusive Q&A with David Cronenberg following opening night
Halloween screening of MAPS TO THE STARS
Q&A to follow 7:10 p.m. screening at Varsity Cinemas, to be moderated by Richard Crouse
Opening Night Screening
Friday, October 31
7:10 p.m.
Varsity Cinemas (55 Bloor St. W.)
This is a public event. Tickets available via Cineplex.com.
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Maps to the Stars
Directed by David Cronenberg
Starring Julianne Moore, John Cusack, Mia Wasikowska, Robert Pattinson, Olivia Williams
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With this tale of a secret-filled Hollywood family on the verge of implosion, award-winning director David Cronenberg forges both a wicked social satire and a very human ghost story from our celebrity-obsessed culture. From a screenplay by acclaimed author, screenwriter and West Coast chronicler Bruce Wagner, and featuring an ensemble cast that includes Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, John Cusack, Robert Pattinson, Olivia Williams and Sarah Gadon, MAPS TO THE STARS tours the seductive allure and the tender, darkly comic underbelly of contemporary success.
Proud and pleased to be part of the ECW Press 40th anniversary anthology alongside other authors Tony Burgess, Corey Redekop, Robert Priest and even Neil Peart!
It’s been a fun ride and I’d like to thank Jack David, David Caron, Jen Hale, Crissy Calhoun, Jen Knoch, Sarah Dunn, Jenna Illies, Athmika Punja, Erin Creasey and everyone at ECW. Here’s hoping we’re still making books 40 years from now!
On Saturday October 25 Richard hosted a panel at the International Festival of Authors with Helle V. Goldman, Kari Hesthamar and Marianne Ihlen. They are, respectively, the translator, author and subject of So Long, Marianne.
Here’s a bit of the story: At 22, Marianne Ihlen travelled to the Greek island of Hydra with Norwegian writer Axel Jensen. While Axel wrote, Marianne kept house. One day while Marianne was shopping in a grocery store, a man asked her to join him and some friends at their table. He introduced himself as Leonard Cohen, then a little-known Canadian poet. When the erratic and explosive Axel abandoned Marianne and their newborn son for another woman, Leonard stepped in and a new, tender love affair began. So Long, Marianne by Kari Hesthamar, documents her story.
“This wasn’t a difficult panel to host,” said Richard about the event, “they told great stories while I sat and listened.” Thanks to IFOA and ECW Press for asking Richard to sit in with these incredible women.
Movie expert Richard Crouse gets transformed into a werewolf in preparation for Cinbeplex’s Classic Film Series’ double feature of horror classics The Mummy and The Wolf Man! More info HERE!
Courtesy Lionsgate Daniel Radcliffe’s character discovers he has acquired dark new powers in “Horns.”
“The book is a really unhappy, paranoid novel by a really unhappy, paranoid man,” says author Joe Hill of his thriller Horns, now a movie starring Daniel Radcliffe as a man who grows devil horns after he’s accused of murdering his girlfriend.
“I wasn’t in a great place mentally when I wrote it, (but) I’m very proud of Horns. I think it’s a really fun novel.
“I had tremendous success with Heart Shaped Box and I fell into that cliché, the second novel trap. I wrote 400 pages of a novel I threw away. It was called The Surrealist Glass and it didn’t work. It was no good. Although in some ways the Surrealist Glass was the first draft of Horns because there were ideas and elements and even one or two chapters that were almost lifted wholesale and slotted into Horns.”
The book finally came into focus when Hill, the son of none other than Stephen King, remembered a line he once read in a review of a sci-fi movie: ‘This movie doesn’t quite succeed because it isn’t about anything except itself.”
“The science-fiction film (that the critic) was talking about was a prequel to a well-known franchise about trade federations and robots blowing each other up,” says Hill, the eldest son of horror legend Stephen King, “and it wasn’t about anything except lasers, guns and robots. It didn’t ask any of the great, almost unanswerable questions that people turn to fiction to explore.
“The one thing I always look for in a story is for it to have some sort of internal life.
“To be about something more than just a ghost or a vampire or a devil; to ask some kind of interesting question so it is about something bigger than itself. That’s very possible to do in fantasy.
“I think any story about the devil is the same way. What happens when all the dirty secrets come out? What would it be like to be tempted by the things you fear most?”
The resulting book earned critical praise — Publisher’s Weekly called it a “compulsively readable supernatural thriller” — and snagged him a Bram Stoker Award nomination for best novel. “Now when he’s asked what he thinks of Alexandre Aja’s film adaptation of his “unhappy, paranoid novel” he is effusive.“I think the film is wonderful,” he says.
“It has a lot of cross-genre elements. It’s funny. It has romance. It has a tragic aspect. It has a horror movie aspect to it.
“Someone asked me when I was in Toronto for the premiere, ‘What genre is it?’, and I said, ‘It’s a tragecomehorredy.’ I have no idea what the rest of the world will make of it, but I think it’s a lot of fun.”
In the new David Cronenberg film Maps to the Stars, Julianne Moore plays actress Havana Segrand.
A child of Hollywood, she’s the daughter of a movie star who became a star herself but is now, as Moore says, “monstrous and childlike.”
Havana is a bundle of exposed ego and neurosis, a Hollywood stereotype, but Moore promises she’s not based on anyone in particular.
“I swear to you she sprung to life from the page,” she says.
“That was what was great about it. (Screenwriter) Bruce Wagner’s language is so precise, so spectacular, so emotional; it was almost like poetry.
“There was a rhythm to it. I could hear her voice in the rhythm of the speech and how things were supposed to be delivered.
“The key to Havana for me was her arrested development. She’s stuck at the age her mother died. She’s so childlike.
“Everything is all about her mother and not being parented. All this childish, even sexpot behaviour — the ‘Look at me!’ — is all about not being parented. That’s all she wants.”
The film is a wonderfully sadistic portrait of Tinsel Town and its citizens, portraying the wild side of Los Angeles where venal and stratospherically self-involved behaviour plays itself out on the public stage. It’s a dark picture of life in Hollywood, but longtime New York City resident Moore says the conduct isn’t exclusive to the movie biz.
“I‘m sure there can be a certain kind of permissiveness in any business,” she says, “on Wall Street and Silicon Valley and in certain socialite circles.
“People try and pin it on Hollywood as the only place it happens, and of course, it’s not.
“I only lived in L.A. for a while in the ’90s. There was a different quality to socializing than I had ever seen before. I’m pretty bourgeois. I’m not a partier. I don’t really go out, but when I moved to L.A. there was a degree of socialization. I was like, ‘Whoa, there’s a lot of parties out here.’
“I was also single and out in a way I hadn’t been before. Very soon after that I met my husband, we had children and I went right back into my hole.”
She does, however, go out from time to time.
“I have a school event later tonight,” she laughs as we end the interview.
The new film Whiplash draws inspiration from the famous story of Jo jones and Charlie Parker. Jones famously threw a cymbal at Parker after a lackluster solo, prompting the sax player to go away in shame, practice for a year and return as one of the greatest musicians of the twentieth century.
Sitting in for Jones is Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons), a teacher at an upscale music college. He’s a perfectionist who uses a toxic mix of fear and intimidation to push Andrew (Miles Teller) toward his dream of becoming the best jazz drummer of all time.
“A lot of musicians had a guy like me in their background,” says Simmons, who is as affable off-screen as his character is tyrannical onscreen. “I get musicians saying that they had a teacher or a conductor who was at least as hard core (as I am in the movie). Either that or coaches. For me it was a football coach. You look back and think, ‘What a psycho. He wouldn’t back off.’”
The actor has yet to meet a teacher who condones Fletcher’s methods, but says people did relate to another of his characters, the sadistic neo-Nazi inmate Vernon Schillinger.
“Oddly I did have that when I was doing Oz which was a little disconcerting,” he says. “I’d have guys come up to me on the street and say, ‘Right on man! I dig what you say!’”
This is the second time Simmons has played Fletcher on film. Writer/director Damien Chazelle couldn’t get the money to turn Whiplash into a feature film, so he started small with some help from Juno director Jason Reitman.
“Jason Reitman handed me the script for both the short and the feature,” says Simmons. “The fact that they came from Jason’s hand to mine was almost enough right there. I knew it was going to be something good. They were both such fully realized and brilliant—and I don’t use that word lightly—stories that it was an absolute no brainer for me to sign on to do the short so we could generate the buzz to make the feature.”
The short film won the 2013 Sundance Film Festival Short Film Jury Award and just one year later the feature version took Sundance’s Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award. Now there’s Oscar buzz surrounding Simmons’s performance.
“I’ve never really thought in those terms or how my work is perceived in the business,” he says. “With varying degrees of success I’ve always gravitated to what I thought were good projects, with good scripts, a good director and good actors to work with. This is one of those incidences when I was fortunate enough to be offered something that had greatness in it and that greatness was realized by the cast, crew and Damien. If there is awards chatter being tossed around that’s great. It’s great for the movie, it’s great for me, it’s great for everybody.”
Simmons laughs when he’s asked if he is as hyper critical of his own work as his character is of Andrew’s drumming.
“Having seen Whiplash three times now,” he says. “I look at things and say, ‘That could have been better.’ Then I blame the editor.”
On Monday, November 3, 2014 Richard, along with lawyer Edward Greenspan and Olympic champion Adam van Koeverden, will read from the Giller shortlisted books at Koerner Hall (273 Bloor Street West in Toronto)! Buy tickets HERE!
