With The Five Senses, one of the things that was praised was how artfully you did conceal the narrative stitchery. For this film, did you want the juxtapositions to reveal meaning as well, so when you bring two pieces together, one actually illuminates the other?

Absolutely. That was always in my mind. It’s not arbitrary why we go back to a specific thing when we go back. It’s interesting because surprising collisions often occur. You put two things together and you think they mean one thing, but they actually mean something else, or they mean a third thing on top of the two you intended. I love that things inform each other in ways that are not always expected. Certainly, when I wrote the film and edited it, everything had to have a reverberation aspect. The past had to reverberate through the present in a way that was meaningful and moving. What dictated those things most was the emotional impact of one thing against the other.

Given that the book was written by Anne Michaels, did you feel that it was really important to get the poetic language of the book somehow into the movie?

Absolutely. I felt that so much of the appreciation of the novel is in the actual words she uses. The book is a work of sustained poetry, really. There’s a beautiful story being told, and the language is absolutely essential to the experience of reading the novel and a huge part of the pleasure of the novel. Anne managed this crazy trick of being incredibly intellectual and at the same time being purely emotional. I was profoundly moved by the book. I cried when I read the novel a number of times. Largely it’s the use of language which gets right to the heart of something, words that crack feelings open. I knew that if you could harness that in the movie, you would really have something special. I couldn’t imagine accessing that without the actual words.

Anne Michaels said she visited the set a few times — was she a resource in the process of adaptation?

She was, very much. What was great about Anne, for me as a writer/director, was that she completely opened herself up to the process. She was very gracious about it. From the very beginning she said to me, “I know that a book is a book and a movie is a movie, do what you need to do, but I’m available to you if you want me.” I really chose to include her a fair bit because she was a fantastic resource. She knew these characters better than anybody; she’d been living with them for such a long time. She was writing about very complex things and I felt it could only be a good thing for me to consult her. She read some drafts of the script, she looked at some casting tapes of actors we were considering, she came to the departments when we were in preproduction and talked about art direction and sets, and she came to visit the set. She was incredibly supportive and available, but at the same time very respectful of the process. She gave me a lot of space so I didn’t feel tied to her or the novel. I had enough space to create something new.