Richard Lewis: ‘Before Whale Music I was so cocky that I thought I was going to reinvent Canadian cinema. Either that, or I was going to save it. I can’t remember which.’
Before last week, I hadn't visited a movie set since the filming of Whale Music , for which my band contributed the soundtrack and main score. Sixteen years later, I found myself on the set of Barney's Version , in Montreal, a film for which we were not asked to contribute music. But never mind. Both films were directed by Toronto-born Richard J. Lewis. For him, it had been 16 years between visits to Canadian movie sets, too.
After Whale Music, the Maury Chaykin vehicle based on the Paul Quarrington novel about a rock-star recluse who is coaxed back into the world by a teenage runaway, Lewis moved from Toronto to Los Angeles (considering the disappointment of his first film, perhaps "fled" is a better word). Every now and then, he'd call with a progress report, saying how he'd started directing episodes of CSI . Then he was producing them. Then he was named co-executive producer, with the likes of Jerry Bruckheimer, William Petersen, all of that. He'd gone to a party and met Ellen Barkin ("She's so beautiful that when I met her, I started speaking Swedish," he told me) and, before long, he'd bought a home in Santa Monica. CSI became the biggest show in television and Lewis, who'd lived the modest life of a Canadian filmmaker for much of his creative life, became rich, popular and established.
Considering Lewis's pedigree as a student filmmaker- his short Mardi Gras , which he made while a graduate at USC, won him a student Oscar - it might have seemed as if his success was fated, but there are very few straight lines to the top. "Before Whale Music ," Lewis remembers, "I was so cocky that I thought I was going to reinvent Canadian cinema. Either that, or I was going to save it. I can't remember which," he joked. If Whale Music was Chaykin's tour de force, it wasn't the commercial or artistic success that the filmmaker had hoped for. Still, without Lewis's self-imposed exile, it's unlikely that he would have sought success in Los Angeles, where he proved himself enough to warrant a return to moviemaking in the country where he was born.
When Lewis first discovered six years ago that producer Robert Lantos was planning a cinematic version of Barney's Version , he sat down and wrote a script on spec.
He wrote two or three more drafts after that. Lantos - who also produced Whale Music - also had Richler's own treatment of the novel in hand, but ended up choosing a script from young Montrealer Michael Konyves. He did, however, offer Lewis the opportunity to direct.
Konyves remembers that, a few weeks after finding out that his script had carried the day, he received a phone call from Lewis. "He told me, 'Congratulations. Robert made the right decision. Your script is way better than mine, anyway.' I was flabbergasted," Konyves said. "This sort of stuff just doesn't happen in Hollywood." The moment that Lewis first told me that he'd got the directing gig, we talked about how even a few missteps in the production might result in an avalanche of public outrage. But the cast, at least on paper, appeared failsafe: Paul Giamatti ( American Splendor , Sideways ) signed on to play the lead and Dustin Hoffman - as well as Hoffman's son, Jake - was added to the cast. Minnie Driver and Rosamund Pike were the female leads, and filming would occur in two cities: Rome and Montreal.
If Lewis felt any pressure assuming the heralded work of one of Canada's greatest writers, he wasn't showing it. "I might have felt pressure in the past," he said, "but there's too much work and not a lot of time for pressure or nerves. You're always sort of out on the edge when you're creating anything, but it's a great script and a great cast. All of us, we want to be true to the spirit of the book, and it's about seeing through the vision of the film more than whatever demands we have individually."
The day that I visited the set, Lewis was shooting two important scenes: Barney hitting his son, and Barney confessing infidelity to his wife (Rosamund Pike). Even though the film is a dramatic comedy, in these instances Barney's irascibility gives way to sadness, vulnerability and regret. Before shooting the latter scene, I found Giamatti smoking outside his trailer while the skies turned grey and the wind began thrashing as day gave way to early evening. Eventually, Giamatti strolled into the studio where Lewis and the other actors had gathered in the prefab living room built under the heavy lights of the airplane hanger studio. Despite the fact that I'd arrived on day 48 of a 53-day shoot, the mood on set wasn't one of fatigue or ennui. Instead, people were thrilled that they were about to witness two great actors in the throes of real dramatic gravity.
After the framework of the scene had been established, Lewis faded into the false wallpaper of the room and let the actors perform. With the cameras rolling, they lost themselves in emotion. Each take was different and equally remarkable in depth and intensity, and each time the actors finished by sobbing inconsolably, especially Pike, who was so absorbed that she sat for minutes unmoving on the edge of a bed. It wasn't until Lewis returned to the set that she emerged from this fog of emotion. He kneeled in front of her, put his mouth to her ear and a hand on her lap and coached her back down. The sobbing stopped and she stood to gather herself before attempting another take. "I'm filming in the classical tradition, letting the actors do most of the work," Lewis said. "Before, I might have felt the need to get fancy with the camera or overdirect the actors. But with age comes confidence. And confidence gives one enough security to allow you to let go."
"[Before] everything I did in film or television defined my sense of self and self-worth," he told me between takes. "It wasn't a healthy way of existing. I was wound very tight and my energy wasn't what it should have been on and off the set. But I went through a process and I learned. It might have taken me 16 years before I got to direct another feature, but maybe that's what I needed: 16 years. I'm a different person now and a different filmmaker."
Dave Bidini is the author of eight books, including the upcoming Home and Away: Adventures at the Homeless World Cup of Soccer. His new BidiniBand album, The Land Is Wild, was released on Pheromone Recordings last June.
Special to The Globe and Mail