'The critics don't like my movie? Big deal'
There are three types of movie director: the embarrassing ones who send you to sleep; the controlled ones who trot out the same speech to anyone who questions them; and the interesting ones who actually think before they talk. Fortunately, Scott Hicks falls into the last camp: he is warm, engaging, open and honest. How on earth does he survive in Hollywood?
Hicks visited London last month to talk about his new movie, Snow Falling on Cedars, based on David Guterson’s best-selling novel. He was planning to buy a few first editions and pay a visit to explorer Sir Wilfred Thesiger, one of his heroes. Hicks is a director with a hinterland – and a large and exotic one at that.
Hicks is the Australian documentary film-maker who sprang to international prominence in 1995 with Shine, which told the story of pianist David Helfgott. It was nominated for seven Oscars, with Geoffrey Rush winning best actor. Hicks is still in touch with Helfgott and his wife, Gillian, and they met up again recently in Australia. “They realise that the film transformed their lives,” says Hicks, “and I’m aware that they allowed me to do the film and that it’s transformed my life.”
Transformed, indeed. Hicks spent a decade developing Shine. He had seen Helfgott at a concert in Adelaide – rocking, talking incessantly to himself but “transporting the room”, and immediately wanted to know more. “It took 10 years to get the movie made, but it was simply an idea that would never let go. I was making documentaries to earn a living, but in between them my passion was to make that movie.”
Raising the money – all $4m of it – was tricky, but the movie was an instant hit at the Sundance film festival, eventually grossed more than $100m and made Hicks a hot property in Hollywood. “Suddenly I was bombarded with scripts and ideas. I said I’d read this wonderful book, Snow Falling on Cedars, and started to have discussions with Universal, who had optioned it. Ron Bass was slated to write it, but he’s a very busy writer and it took more than a year before the screenplay came in. During that year I got hundreds of offers but nothing quite measured up to this. Finally, about a week after the Oscars in 1997 – which was the end of that glorious ride with Shine – in came an offer from Universal to direct.”
Hicks is 46, long-haired, a Hollywood outsider who chose not to relocate to the US after Shine’s success. (He lives in Adelaide with his wife and two children.) Moving from that carefully nurtured, small-budget movie to the world of big studios and megabucks could have been a nightmare. So? “I took a decision very early on that I was not going to let the size of the juggernaut intimidate me. It was there to help me make a better film.
“One of the first choices I made was the producers – Kathy Kennedy and Frank Marshall. I wanted producers who not only had an extraordinary track record but who would allow me to make the film I wanted to make, knew how to communicate with the studio and would keep people out of my way. I knew I was making an unusual film for a big- studio picture.”
Snow Falling on Cedars is unusual because it tells a complicated, multi-layered story largely through flashbacks. The setting is a courtroom where a Japanese-American man is on trial for murder, but there is no attempt – in book or film – at a plot-driven courtroom drama. The film aims to capture the poetry of Guterson’s novel and let the story unfold through the interconnecting memories of the people who come to the witness stand. “It’s more tone poem than thriller,” wrote one American critic. It’s a fair point: the 127-minute span feels long; the film, shot over 70 days on islands off America’s north-western coast, is too self-consciously beautiful; the soaring cellos that underscore the movie’s emotional high spots too plangent. There is bags of atmosphere but a lack of narrative tension; the relaxed storytelling of a book is difficult – in this case, perhaps, dangerous – to reproduce in a film.
Hicks answers these charges fluently and with no hint of rancour. He is so articulate and reasonable – “What you see is what you get, for good or ill; that’s what I wanted to make” – that I feel guilty for not liking the movie more. “This book has a readership that is extremely possessive about it,” he says, “and I felt that it was important to try and cleave as close as possible to the feeling of the novel. The atmosphere, which is so densely detailed and descriptive, seemed important to me, and an enormous amount of effort went into trying to create that feeling for the film.
“To me, the novel is a kind of discourse on memory and I thought this is something cinema is really well equipped to do. I felt there was a way to deal with these three or four different stories that are happening simultaneously by working them through people’s memories. It’s not a courtroom drama: there is a trial, yes, but the courtroom is, in a sense, a springboard into people’s memories. In court, you get into the witness box and you’re asked to remember.
“It seemed important it was not just one point of view. I felt there were passages in the film that demanded to be told from the point of view of the participants, particularly the Japanese-American scenes. I reject the notion that you can only tell a story by following one individual’s journey.”
But isn’t it just a little slow? “It depends on the willingness of an audience to allow themselves to be enveloped in a world. As a film-maker, if you draw the audience in, allow them to be enveloped in another world where they forget they are in the cinema, then you’ve succeeded.
“The response I’ve got from people who really love the film is that it is like being in a trance, and you will find out everything you need to know by the end. If you’re impatient and you go, ‘OK give it up – what’s the plot, what’s the story?’, then you’re challenging the movie and you probably won’t get it.”
The movie didn’t, I suggest, please many US critics. “We had a mixture from the absolute rave to the reverse. It’s a shame they can’t see films with real audiences so they could see the emotional response ordinary people have for this film. It’s working in Kansas, in regional towns in Illinois.
“If the critics in New York find it doesn’t meet certain intellectual criteria for them, well, big deal. It’s ironic that, in a world where critics have been bemoaning Hollywood’s lack of content and attacking the obsession with trivial, blow-‘em-up movies, in the past year you’ve had this rich array [of thoughtful films] and some of those same critics have attacked them.”
With some directors, you would file such comments under sour grapes, but not Hicks. This may not be a great movie but it is a heartfelt one. Hicks has survived round one in Hollywood, is working on treatments of Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and plans to mix smaller-budget, Aussie-based projects with further Hollywood jousts. Best of all, he doesn’t see Snow as a test of his ability to make the transition. Shine was the test, the seven Oscar nominations the calling card, buying him the time to shape a Hollywood career.
← Home is the hunter: David Mamet
House proud →
