Beyond the Multiplex

Talk about the Alice Munro story, and how you decided to make it into a film.

I read the story when it first came out, five or six years ago. It was originally called "The Bear Came Over the Mountain." I thought it was the most interesting portrait of a marriage, of memory and guilt, that I'd ever seen. First and foremost, I thought it was a love story. Maybe because I was at the beginning of a relationship, it was really interesting to me to look at what a marriage looks like after 44 years, what you do with everything you've done with each other, and to each other.

Well, and it's not a sentimental portrait of old age, or a long marriage. We're not talking about "On Golden Pond" here.

We're not. In a strange way, we really do people a disservice when we show anybody over 45 or 50 as somehow having lost all sense of their sexuality, as if they suddenly have no darkness and no edges and no sexuality. I thought what was so amazing about the story was the portrait of these two incredibly vibrant people with a lot of chemistry and a lot of undealt-with threads, a lot of things that have become tangled up.

I don't know how much you want to explain what happens. Julie Christie's character decides to go into this facility, and surprising things happen.

I'm comfortable saying that she falls in love with another man in the retirement home, and her husband is forced to witness this abandonment and betrayal of him, in the same way that she was forced to live through that in their younger years, when he was sleeping with younger women.

Talk about the look of the film, the visual sensibility. It's very distinctive.

For me the overriding visual palette that we were working with was the idea of this very strong, sometimes blinding winter sunlight that should infuse every frame. I didn't want the visual style to draw too much focus to itself. I felt like this needed to be an elegant and simple film, and that it had to have a certain grace.

Did you learn anything specific from the directors you've worked with that helped you make this film?

You absorb a lot from people you work with. Certainly people like Atom Egoyan or Wim Wenders, people whom I've really looked up to, have greatly informed the way I approached this film. At the same time, what I've learned from being an actor is that every director has to reinvent the wheel a bit, invent their own process and make that a reflection of who they are and how they communicate. So I was also very conscious of the idea that I had to figure out who I was as a filmmaker, and not be too imitative.

A Canadian friend of mine asked me if "Away From Her" seemed like a Canadian film. My answer was yes, but I wasn't really sure what I meant. What's your answer to that?

Yeah, I think it is a very Canadian film, and very identifiable as such. I don't think I went out of my way to make a statement about that, but I think that in Canada we're so used to hiding the fact that our films are Canadian that simply not hiding it seems like a political statement. But yes, absolutely. It very much has that sense of place in it.

David Cronenberg once told me that he thinks part of the reason his films seem strange to Americans is the Canadian setting. It seems very familiar to us, yet subtly different.

That's really interesting. But you know what -- his films are pretty strange anyway. Let's face it! I mean, come on! People don't turn into flies just because they're Canadian.

For a long time, when people talked about important Canadian directors, there was him and Atom Egoyan. This is such an impressive film, I don't know -- are you ready to be the third one on the list?

I'm not sure about that. I'm not quite in that realm yet. Let's see how I'm doing in 10 years or so.

Certainly casting Julie Christie in your first film was a way of getting noticed. She doesn't act much these days, and has said that the part of her that used to be a movie star seems like a different person. How did you convince her to take the role?

I had worked with her as an actor [in "No Such Thing" and "The Secret Life of Words"] and she was a good friend by the time I had finished this script. And I did write it for her; I immediately saw her face in my mind when I read this character. But I also knew that I would get a few nos before I got a yes. She's a reluctant actor. It was a long process; it took about six or eight months. We had a lot of phone calls and meetings and e-mails. Thank God she agreed to do it, because she was a huge factor in my wanting to make it in the first place.

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