But I had a lot of interests. I was interested in movies, in television, in writing. I knew I was going to have to find a form of artistic expression because there was so much in my family, but I didn’t know what mine was actually going to be. Filmmaking seemed to be a great way to combine all those creative interests that I have in a way that’s very interesting to me.
Some of the early reviews of your film remarked that the scenes seem like tableaux. There’s an accuracy of detail and very specific look with the colour and the light. Did you have a specific look in mind or is that something that evolved?
I had worked with this cinematographer before and we have a very good dialogue about these kinds of things. We talked a lot about what the film should feel like and look like and a lot of it comes from the novel as well. It’s very poetic and rich in detail. A big thing for me was finding a cinematic equivalent to the poetry of the novel. The novel has a kind of literary luscious quality and I wanted the movie to have a luscious quality as well.
I knew the attention to detail in the book should also be in the movie. The book is a lot about archeology. Athos is an archeologist. A big metaphor in the book is that everything has meaning, everything has value, everything retains history. That’s a very beautiful idea for me, so we did pay a lot of attention to details.
The film is a joint Canadian/Greek production and was shot in both countries. It sounds like the logistics of production were very complex. Do you have any stories that particularly sum up for you what that was like?
The most dramatic one is that we were shooting on an island in Greece called Hydra, which is an incredibly beautiful island but not really one suitable for filmmaking. There’re no roads, so there’re no cars, no trucks, no vehicles of any kind and because everything is up on hillsides, you can’t even roll things anywhere; you have to climb.
We had Panavision cameras strapped to donkeys, people carrying furniture on their backs and climbing thousands of stairs, and that’s how we made the movie. Because it was so crazy an endeavour, it was also fantastic. It was such a bonding experience for everyone making the movie. We were shooting in a place that hasn’t really been shot before that way. It is singularly beautiful and for the story works incredibly well. Jacob is a writer who goes to Greece to heal, and this is exactly the kind of place that Jacob would go to. He wouldn’t go to a place where there are scooters buzzing around; he would go to a place that is remote and beautiful and quiet and has an unbelievable beauty and that’s what Hydra has.
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.