I had the opportunity to speak with Jeremy Podeswa, the writer and director of the upcoming film, Fugitive Pieces. The film is based on the 1996 prize-winning book of the same name by Canadian poet and author, Anne Michaels. The story is a lyrical redemptive tale of a man who must deal with the legacy of his traumatic childhood experiences during World War II.
Toronto native Podeswa has two other feature films to his credit, Eclipse (1994) and The Five Senses (1999), but for the last ten years, he’s been more active in television, with directing credits for The Tudors, Dexter, Six Feet Under, and Rome, among others. He is currently working on The Pacific in Australia, where I spoke with him on the phone. Here is an edited transcript of our conversation.
Fugitive Pieces is your third feature film, and lately you’ve been more active in
television. How do you compare working in both areas?
All the TV work has been directing, and TV has been great for me. I really started directing a lot of television with Six Feet Under and then that led to a lot of other work with HBO. I directed Rome and now I’m directing a show called The Pacific which Stephen Spielberg and Tom Hanks are producing. It’s sort of a companion show to Band of Brothers -- that’s what I’m doing in Australia.
I think [working in television] gives you a versatility that’s really valuable and a wide range of practical work experience and working with different tones, which is really exciting for me. When I came around to doing Fugitive Pieces, which is a much more ambitious film in many ways than my last couple of features, having directed Rome and a couple of other things that were big and complex and challenging, I felt equipped in a way that I might not have felt otherwise. At the same time, although I really loved doing all those other things, I hadn’t written them. It was really nice for me to take a little break from that and go back to work on something I had actually written and invested a lot of my own time and energy, personality, and preoccupations into and then film that.
Anne Michaels said she waited a long time to allow Fugitive Pieces to be made because she wanted whoever did it to have a deep understanding of it. How did you land the job?
I approached the company that had the rights to the novel. I had a very strong emotional response to the novel. I really felt an affinity for the things that she was saying and a strong connection to the quality of her writing and the themes she was dealing with. I think I was just extremely passionate about it. I made a very strong case. I also have a personal connection in that my father is a Holocaust survivor and I identified very strongly with the things that she was writing about, but I think that alone would never have been enough.
Article comments
1 - Barbara Barnett
Nice interview, Gerry. The timing of the film's release to coincide with Holocaust Rememberance Day is also good, particularly since now that 60 years have passed since the Shoah, the older generation--people who were adults (even young adults) are dying and it is to the younger generations (and the people who were only children at the time) to uphold memory and history in the face of so many who would now deny that it, indeed, ever happened.
2 - Gerry
Thank you Barbara. That is a wonderful point about the date, which fits in so well with the movie's (and book's) theme about the relationship between memory and history.