The fact that I did have a sympathetic connection [was important,] but also that on an aesthetic level I really responded strongly to the material. Anne had seen the last feature I made just before I approached her about doing this adaptation, which was The Five Senses, and she had responded to my creative perspective. Getting a sense of me as a filmmaker, getting a sense of me as a person and of my passion for the material, all together those things made her feel confident that I could do it.

Do you think the fact that you have handled multiple narrative threads in a film before helped? Given the films that you’ve made, it appears that you like narrative complexity.

That’s very true. In fact, I am attracted to narrative complexity. Even the first feature I did, which was called Eclipse, had a very unconventional structure. What interested me from the beginning [with Fugitive Pieces] is that I didn’t really know what form it would take because it is a very complex, dense novel. It takes place over forty years and in many different countries. It was a process of discovery, really, for the structure to emerge. Probably on some intuitive level, even at the beginning, [I knew] it was going to dovetail with my own narrative interests.

Anne Michaels said she felt it was important to understand that the story was not only about the relationship between memory and history, and the relationship between men and women, but also the relationship between men and men. How did you approach weaving all those narrative strands together, especially since you’ve also got the time and place shifts?

It was a very intuitive process. I knew I wanted the film to start with the inciting incident, the traumatic event that haunts Jacob for his whole life. From a cinematic perspective, I thought it would be very interesting to start the movie during wartime in a crisis and have the audience think, “I’m watching a movie about the war.” Then there’s a sudden shift about ten minutes in where it’s the 1970s. Jacob is an adult and we realise that [the war] is not actually what the movie is; it’s one part of what the movie is. I liked the idea of coming into Jacob’s adult life at a point of crisis as well, when his marriage is not going very well.

I play with time further by retroactively dealing with how he met his wife, and having little details of his childhood before and after the traumatic incident being interwoven into the current story. So it’s quite a dense structure, actually, but I had a few anchors. One was how I wanted to start the movie, how I wanted to make that first leap. Once the audience accepts that first big leap, it will accept almost anything in terms of how we play with structure as long as it is organic and fluid and all those connections have a kind of seamlessness to them.