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So you realize you need a narrator, and you decide you have to have two narrators: one from the past, the reader of the Tarot cards, and one from the future, Charles Morritz, who is examining the instrument for an auction. The idea of auctioning off the violin came quite early in the process, as a gathering point where all the stories would meet and come together -- along with the idea of repeating the auction over and over again, to establish the multiple heroes. You have a number of people bidding for it, and they all want it for different reasons: some for greed, some to study its scientific characteristics, and others as a piece of their heritage. Charles Morritz is the one who connects with the deeper truth and beauty of the instrument, when he discovers the secret of how it was made. Of course, the film is talking about us -- how we look at things and what are the values we bring to things. In that way, the violin has a mirror effect.

All these choices come as answers to problems -- they're part of an organic system, they're not made because you think they are going to look good. You say you're going to tell the life of a violin, and for the next five years you are enslaved to that idea. When you plant a seed in the ground, you don't just sit back and watch it grow and have its DNA code unfold before your eyes -- you have to provide time and whatever else it needs for the meaning of that DNA code to emerge. I don't like the notion of the artist creating things out of the air. I think artists are facilitating ideas that have their own codes. When people ask me "Why did you go to China?" the real answer is "I went to China because the violin was there." The making of "The Red Violin" could easily be compared to a documentary process, where you have the feeling that this violin existed and you are just finding where it was.

Even though you talk of having a structure that announces itself to the audience -- and employ the scientific metaphor of the DNA code -- the end result is anything but dry or detached. Aren't you actually using what in the theater we would call "distancing effects" to bring the audience closer?

I think if you want to get really close to something, at some point you have to step away a little; if you are always close, the closeness loses its meaning. "The Red Violin" eventually builds a view of history. To me, that was necessary for the most important connection -- the emotional connection -- to happen.

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

In both "Glenn Gould" and this film, don't you also rely on traditional techniques of building up identification with the characters and generating suspense?

After I made "Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould," I had tremendous fun traveling around to film schools, where the students would always assume that this was an unusual film, done in an unusual form and style. I would demonstrate that it was the most conventional movie, done in three acts with turning points, according to a linear chronology. I thought of it as a game we were playing to unbalance the audience, to have them think we were doing something unconventional and then have that impression drop away. Gould was a very rich, very good subject. I was fascinated by the mystery around his work and life, and that fascination only grew. And I believe that the film protects that mystery -- I hope, nourishes that mystery -- more than explaining it. I didn't want it to be explicative or reductive. If it works, it's as a further resonance of who he was and what he did.

"Glenn Gould" was supposedly a "biopic," based on facts and the reality of somebody who lived, but there is no such thing -- it was an interpretation, there were a number of things I made up or invented. "The Red Violin" is the opposite: you assume that the whole thing is fictitious, but it's not. It draws on characters who existed, and on history -- the French Revolution in the background there, the Cultural Revolution in the background here. I think you need to have a global view of the violin's story -- to see how it connects or doesn't connect with the big picture, or to see how it is located within the big picture.

Still, it seems to me that what finally unifies "The Red Violin" is an almost mystical belief -- not just in the art of the violin, but in its soul.

Today, someone reminded me of a Tibetan story of a woman searching for her sister, and calling for her with her drum, and realizing that the drum is made of her sister's skin. This is a beautiful story -- it's about a soul traveling between individuals. And that is what happens in "The Red Violin."

I have never done the things some of my characters do, like spit on bones. I don't necessarily share or have to share their beliefs. But I think the bottom line of the film is that it's about the traces we leave in the world after we leave. In a way, there is a notion of afterlife in that, but it's taken from a zero-degree angle, when we look at what's left of a person's life after he or she is gone. This notion of an afterlife is basic to the film. In Asia, people definitely take it further, and see a reincarnation theme in it. I am happy for them to see it that way. But I am not saying this is a film that depicts reincarnation -- this is what they're saying. If you listen to Beethoven on your car radio, you know he is dead, but here is this expression of his soul remaining.
salon.com | July 1, 1999

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