Ian Holm (left), who plays a jaded lawyer in Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter, in a scene from the film with Sarah Polley.Johnnie Eisen/Ego Film Arts
Twenty five years ago, writer-director Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter opened the Toronto International Film Festival, after first premiering at Cannes. The deeply poetic, emotional film about a small-town school bus accident that kills 14 children was a “big step forward in Atom’s filmmaking craft, and for us in terms of us platforming Atom,” recalls Piers Handling, then TIFF’s chief executive and executive director.
The Sweet Hereafter went on to earn two Academy Award nominations, a number of significant prizes, and serve as a reminder that Canadian cinema could compete on the global stage. But before the film put Egoyan on the map, the low-budget production had to overcome one obstacle after another to get made.
To mark the film’s 25th anniversary and lasting legacy, The Globe and Mail caught up with Egoyan and key members of his team to discuss one of the best Canadian films that almost never was.
Egoyan’s screenplay adapted the 1991 novel of the same name by American novelist Russell Banks. The film rights were owned by an American studio, but, as luck would have it, the option was about to expire. Egoyan and Banks met at the Hotel Versailles in Montreal.
The Sweet Hereafter author Russell Banks.Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail
Banks: The restaurant was empty of diners, except for a dark-haired young man who looked like a college student applying for a job. It was Atom, of course. Over the next few hours, he convinced me that he could adapt the novel into an appropriately elegiac film that would be an unblinking gaze at what is most frightening to all human beings, especially to parents of children.
Egoyan: I told Russell I didn’t think the movie could be made in the American movie system. I promised him that we did have a system in Canada that would allow me to make the film with more freedom and without any compromises. I convinced him, I guess.
Egoyan’s script moved the setting from upstate New York to fictional Sam Dent, B.C., and thematically incorporated references to the Pied Piper fable.
Banks: Atom sent me draft after draft, asking for comments, notes, suggestions – some of which he incorporated; some of which he ignored, quite properly. For in the end this was to be Atom’s film, not mine.
The film was almost sunk before production had even begun. Donald Sutherland, cast in the lead role as an out-of-town lawyer who convinces the grieving parents to file a class-action suit against the town and the bus company, suddenly dropped out.
Egoyan: The whole thing almost ground to a halt. The investors were worried. I won’t go into the details about why Donald left, but it was sad. I know he regrets it – we’ve talked about it since.
After British actor Ian Holm was hired to replace Sutherland, filming of interior shots began in Ontario. Bruce Greenwood played bereft parent Billy Ansel; Sarah Polley portrayed Nicole Burnell, a teenager paralyzed from the waist down as a result of the accident.
Greenwood: I had a full beard. I said I wanted to chop it off in pieces and land on something we think is appropriate. That’s how I ended up with a big sweeper of a mustache. Then I asked Atom if I should take out my front tooth. I had knocked it out a couple of years before, so I popped out the flipper tooth and grinned at him. He stared at me and said, “Oh, god, no.” But then in a moment you could see his whole face kind of shift into, “Hell, yeah.” So, we went with it.
Atom Egoyan, second right, poses with Sarah Polley and Bruce Greenwood, left, and U.S. actress Caerthan Banks at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival.Remy de la Mauviniere/The Associated Press
Polley: At that point in my life, I was knee-deep in activism. In my mind, this was going to be my last acting role that I ever did. I read the script and felt very connected to the character and the experiences we shared – the point in life when the illusion drops, where the magic show ends and you see people’s motivations and strategies, and you realize the world is not always a rosy place. I had just come through that in my life.
Polley’s character was an aspiring singer-musician. Although the original score by Mychael Danna used Persian and medieval music, the soundtrack also included contemporary music co-written by Danna and Polley.
Danna: We had to work on the songs before the film was shot. It was an unusual band, with a cello, harmonium, guitar, bass and drums. I played the harmonium in the band, sitting there at the town fair. Sarah and I hung out, drank a lot of tea, and wrote four or five songs.
Egoyan on the set of The Sweet Hereafter.Johnnie Eisen
Polley: Writing songs with Mychael was one of the most exciting things I’ve ever been a part of creatively. The record label actually wanted us to tour and record an album. But I had terrible stage fright. I just couldn’t do it. It’s one of my regrets in life that I didn’t have the tools then to overcome my stage fright.
Shooting on a tight schedule and a tighter budget, the wintertime production in B.C. was at the mercy of the weather. The skies co-operated, though, almost miraculously, according to cinematographer Paul Sarossy.
Sarossy: It was a very special place, and the weather we had, with these low-hanging clouds, the gods lit some of the scenes for us.
Greenwood: Paul had made some deal with whatever deities there are, because we would be standing around and it would be overcast, with flat, dull light. But Paul would look at the sky and quietly say, “Just wait 15 minutes, it’s all going to be okay.” And then all of a sudden there would be a shimmer in the cloud cover and this unadulterated sunlight would come beaming through.
The film’s key scene – the school bus crashing through a frozen lake – was the most challenging to shoot.
Sarossy: Where do we find this frozen lake? At what point in the year will it be frozen? And if we actually crash this bus through the ice, the lake is protected environmentally. The engine would have to be removed and all liquids drained from the bus. So how does this bus skid across the ice the lake with no engine?
In the end, it was decided the crash would be created using computer graphics.
Sarossy: We shot the scene wide, and the bus was handled with digital effects. We sat on a hill with a camera, and when Bruce ran down the hill, we made sure he didn’t run in the place where they would later add the bus. After all the weeks of discussing and planning, it was painfully simple.
Egoyan with his Genies for Best Achievement in Direction and Best Motion Picture.John Lehmann/The Canadian Press
Susan Shipton, film’s editor: I thought the crash sequence was going to be my big action scene. But it was just the bus passing by the camera, and then it was in the lake. I told Atom I thought it was a little underwhelming. And he said, “Well, of course it is. I want to do it this way, and it’s terrific.” He was right.
The Sweet Hereafter was Egoyan’s seventh feature, and although he’s made highly acclaimed movies since, the 62-year-old auteur admits that he will never top it.
Egoyan: I’m not going to have a film that’s more critically hailed. It’s just one of those things – you’re never going to match that. I understand that. I’m grateful my best film wasn’t my first film. That does happen. I’m just happy for our team. We’d been working together for a long time, and it was great to have this moment.
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