The real festival stars

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, September 23, 2011 at 3:35 PM - 0 Comments

George Pimentel/WireImage/Getty Images; Courtesy of TIFF

It was celebrity gridlock. Each year the juggernaut of the Toronto International Film Festival seems bigger than ever, but with its 36th edition (Sept. 8-18), it turned a corner. Anchored by its grand new headquarters, the TIFF Bell Lightbox, the festival finally moved fully downtown. As black SUV limos lined the streets, disgorging stars into the red-carpet blaze of cameras, the city’s entertainment district turned into a glass-and-concrete answer to Cannes—with some surreal moments worthy of Fellini.

Counter-spinning tabloid gossip, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie wrapped their arms around each other in a regal show of marital bliss at the premiere of Moneyball—for which Pitt earned up to $15 million as a hero who reinvents baseball by casting low-rent players instead of high-priced stars. Fresh from her hydrangea-bashing faux pas with a fan in Venice, Madonna ran a gauntlet of critical scorn for W.E., her risible take on Wallis Simpson and King Edward VIII, then denied reports that her goons told festival volunteers to avert their eyes when the Queen Mother of Pop came into view. Impresario Garth Drabinsky, on the eve of going to prison for fraud, took a hubris-heavy perp walk down the red carpet with Christopher Plummer for the premiere of Barrymore. Bono introduced a U2 documentary by comparing songwriting to sausage-making. And Neil Young did a double take when a grey-haired lady introduced herself at the premiere of his concert film—he confessed he had a crush on her in the fourth grade.

Now that the stardust has settled, and the circus has left town, all that remains of the festival are the movies. Some of them we’ll still be talking about in February. Each year TIFF launches the fall season of Oscar-pedigree films, and as the buzz merchants tried to sniff out the next King’s Speech or Slumdog Millionaire from 268 feature titles, there was no obvious champ. But some clear contenders stood out. It was above all a festival of stellar male performances—Clooney, Pitt, Gosling, Fassbender, Harrelson—even if the audience prize went to Nadine Labaki’s Where Do We Go Now?, a feel-good fable of female liberation from Lebanon.

Continue…

Snapshots from the red carpet

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, September 13, 2011 at 3:14 PM - 0 Comments

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Snapshots from the red carpet

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September 10, 2011: Robert De Niro poses for photographers at the premiere Killer Elite at Roy Thompson Hall during the Toronto International Film Festival. (Kara Dillon/Maclean's)

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TIFF gridlock and Norman Jewison’s next act

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, September 11, 2011 at 8:25 PM - 1 Comment

I ran into Norman Jewison at a rooftop cocktail atop the TIFF Bell Lightbox Friday evening. The 85-year-old Canadian director, looking nowhere near his age, showed up along with such luminaries as Robert Lantos, Atom Egoyan and Sony CEO Howard Stringer to pay tribute to Tom Bernard and Michael Barker, the exemplary indie distributors who being feted on their 20th anniversary at the helm of Sony Pictures Classics. Eventually I got around to asking Norman what he was up to these days, and he said he had a couple of movies in development—one with Moonstruck writer John Patrick Shanley and another pitched to him by a pair of Saturday Night Live writers—a farce called The Iranians Are Coming, which would update Jewison’s satirical hit, The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming (1966). That Norman would even consider making more movies at 85 is inspiring, but hey, Tony Bennett is the same age and he’s still performing. And last time I checked, Jewison was still taking ski vacations. He’s fond of quoting William Wyler, who once told him he’d direct “until the legs give out.”

But before I steered Jewison onto the subject of film, all he wanted to talk about was the insane downtown traffic, the city’s crumbling infrastructure, and his nightmarish ordeal in trying to get to the Lightbox. He’s not alone. Everyone at TIFF is apoplectic about the traffic, both inside and outside the building. (If you don’t frequent downtown Toronto, or live in a less stupid part of the country, you may want to tune out at this point.) Swollen by unchecked growth of condos, the downtown gridlock is bad at the best of times— Mayor Rob Ford can forget about defending drivers from the alleged “war against the car”; the car is at war with itself. But during the 11 days of  TIFF, a bad situation becomes untenable. Continue…

Buttonholing Brad Pitt 2.0

By Brian D. Johnson - Saturday, September 10, 2011 at 6:01 PM - 0 Comments

Kara Dillon/Maclean's

A few hours before my colleague, Jessica Allen threw that question to Brad Pitt on front lines of the red carpet—”What’s you’re favorite sports movie”—I asked the same damn question in TIFF’s Moneyball press conference yesterday. I was the first to get a word with Mr. Pitt, and, of course, like a polite Canadian, I didn’t ask about Angelina or the kids or those recent tabloid headlines about her being pissed that he’s allegedly smoking reefer—reefer!— in some obscure “drug den” on their estate. No, like Jessica, I lobbed him a softball query about his favorite sports movie. As on the red carpet, he mentioned his childhood affection for Bad News Bears. Then he talked about how North Dallas Forty, starring Nick Nolte, has a special place in his heart because he snuck into it. But I also asked Brad if the Moneyball strategy—trying to score hits with the right combo of utility players rather than high-priced stars—should be tried, or has been tried by Hollywood.”Well, not if they hired me,” he quipped. He went on to says that, “with digital video on the rise, we’re going to see more of this talent that wouldn’t have had a shot before.” (I can only think that he’s referring, with uncanny prescience, to our rising red carpet star, Jessica Allen).

As the press conference wore on, the issue of disparity between marquee players and hired hands in Hollywood became the prevailing theme. On a podium that included Pitt, Jonah Hill and Philip Seymour Hoffman, the least known actor was Chris Pratt, who plays Scott Hatteberg, the struggling first baseman in Moneyball. And as soon as he opened his mouth, this rather dull affair known as “the Brad Pitt press conference” suddenly perked up. When fielding a group question about what inspired the actors, he compared himself to his character and gushed with genuine passion, “I’ve never done anything like this before. I’m inspired right now! I don’t get paid a shitload of money. You guys got me for really cheap. I’m kinda like Scott Hatteberg.” He went on to rave about the baseball skills of the cast. “Every bit of baseball you see is real. I would put this team against any baseball team in any movie.”

Jonah Hill also weighed in with his underdog credentials. With Superbad, the film that launched his career, he said “I was a very unlikely person to be the star of a big motion picture. And I continually get that underdog opportunity.” In fact, the novelty of his nerdy character in Moneyball is the secret to the movie’s odd couple chemistry. You wonder: what is this guy doing sharing power in the clubhouse with Brad Pitt? Later, when director Bennett Miller launched into a long and lofty dissertation about the beauty of baseball—talking about its “bicameral existence” as romance and science, its attachment to superstition, its timeless, clockless nature, its “long periods of boredom and monotony punctuated by moments of excitement and extreme terror. . . “—Jonah Hill cut him off with a verbal line drive: “He’s trying to say that it looks really cool.”

On the underdog issue, meanwhile, Philip Seymour Hoffman finally put the all this celebrity relativism in perspective by pointing out that no one on the podium was really an underdog actor. “Most actors don’t work,” he reminded us. “Everyone at this table is in the top five per cent.”

‘What’s your favourite sports movie?’

By Jessica Allen - Saturday, September 10, 2011 at 10:27 AM - 7 Comments

Let’s get this party started

By Jessica Allen - Friday, September 9, 2011 at 1:09 PM - 0 Comments

On Wednesday morning, the eve before the TIFF storm, I rode my bike past Roy Thompson Hall–the site of all the festival’s galas–and saw several metal stands lined up like soldiers in the lobby.

By tonight they’ll have strands of rope attached to them (golden? velvet?) to separate the common folk and media types from the stars walking down red carpets, which, by the by, I also saw—stuffed unceremoniously into big clear plastic bags. They’ll be rolled out any hour now and the first people to walk down them will be some of Hollywood’s heaviest hitters, including Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, the stars of Moneyball (6:30 pm), and George Clooney, the director, writer and star of Ides of March (9:30 pm). Clooney will be accompanied by some of his co-stars, including Ryan Gosling, Evan Rachel Wood, Marisa Tomei, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti.  And it’ll be just as exciting Saturday night, when two homegrown Canadian directors debut their films to Toronto: Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz (9:30pm), starring Michelle Williams, Seth Rogan and Sarah Silverman, plus David Cronenberg’s fictional film about Carl Yung (Michael Fassbinder) and Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), A Dangerous Method (6:30 pm).

It’s going to be mayhem. And Maclean’s will be there.

TIFF sports: Brad Pitt hits a homer; ex-Hab hits doc rehab

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, September 9, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill in 'Moneyball'

The front half of U2, Bono & the Edge, launched The Toronto International Rock Festival, er, Film Festival last night with From the Sky Down, the first documentary to open TIFF—and one of three rock docs at the festival. Introducing the premiere onstage at Roy Thompson Hall, Bono admitted the band was anxious about letting director David Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) spy on their creative process. “Not because we’re precious—which we are!” he said, but because songwriting “is not that pretty.” He cited the adage that “if you knew what you went into the sausage, you wouldn’t eat it.” When it comes to U2, I’m not much of carnivore anyway, but that’s another story. On TIFF’s opening day, my highlights were two sausage-making stories about the other stuff that goes on in stadiums and arenas when rock stars aren’t performing—namely Moneyball, a terrifically entertaining baseball movie starring Brad Pitt, and The Last Gladiators, a timely documentary about hockey enforcers by Oscar-winning U.S. director Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room)

Pitt is having a remarkable year. First he plays the dark side of the American Dream in Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes; and now he switch-hits to the sunny side in Moneyball‘s amazing-but-true story of Billy Beane, a general manager who changed the face of major league baseball. Continue…

Opening Weekend: boyhood wonder in Tree of Life, Super 8 and Submarine

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 9:54 AM - 0 Comments

What a strange cosmic convergence we have in the Hollywood heavens this weekend: two wildly different period films set in small-town America that pit boyhood innocence against the mystery of the universe. From the cathedral ceiling of the art house comes Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, which conjures nostalgia for a Paradise Lost of growing up in early 60s while contemplating all of Creation with such ambition it could be dubbed 2011: A Space Odyssey. From Hollywood’s sci-fi clubhouse comes J.J. Abrams Super 8, set in the late 1970s, about a gang of young boys who have a close encounter with an alien monster in their own backyard while shooting a homemade zombie movie. Oh, then there’s Submarine, about a teenage boy grappling with the mysteries of sex in ’80s England. It’s a batty Brit Rushmore, an idiosyncratic tonic to all this American heaviosity—but (spooky coincidence!) it, too, has super 8 footage, a home movie the precocious hero imagines he would shoot of his love affair with a classmate.

Submarine is a tiny perfect gem, and utterly charming. Vastly more ambitious, The Tree of Life and Super 8 revel in different kinds of rhapsodic excess. Super 8, which plays like an explosive homage to early Spielberg (its producer), bombards us with the heavy metal thunder of old-time alien invasion. In the Tree of Life, which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes, Malick transcends his usual transcendentalism and gets positively religious, revealing himself as a kind of spiritual pornographer (but in a good way) panning for raw divinity in rays of sunlight. Addicted to magic hour, the man never met a dust mote he didn’t like. Continue…

What keeps Brad Pitt awake at night?

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, June 3, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 0 Comments

The most complex role of his career: ‘This is a man who feels he can’t get ahead and everyone is doing better than him,' says Pitt

In a recent tweet, Steve Martin announced that he was “starting a massive new media campaign to promote the idea that I am ‘famously shy.’ ” Was Martin making a Terrence Malick joke? Hard to say. But that oxymoronic phrase “famously shy” has been attached to Malick’s name a lot lately, ever since the legendary American director shunned the red carpet in Cannes, snuck into his own premiere unnoticed, and didn’t show up to accept the Palme d’Or for The Tree of Life. The movie’s famously famous star, Brad Pitt, along with almost-famous co-star Jessica Chastain, were left to defend and explain their Oz-like wizard to the press, protecting the 67-year-old director as if he were an ultra-sensitive, strangely gifted child. “He’s one of the most humble men you’ll ever come across,” said Pitt, holding court for a group of journalists in a penthouse suite of the Carlton Hotel in Cannes. “He’s a very special man, very sweet—until you get a ball or bat in his hand, and then he’s very competitive.”

Although he’s made just four other movies in four decades (Badlands, Days of Heaven, The Thin Red Line, The New World), Malick has carved out a singular mystique as the epic poet of American cinema. His films have always doted on nature, with an eye for transcendental wonder. But The Tree of Life goes further. Set mostly in a ’50s Texas suburb, it’s a nostalgic reverie about three boys being raised by a strict father (Pitt) and an angelic mother (Chastain). But its narrative is submerged by wave upon wave of rapturous images. With just traces of dialogue, it unfolds almost entirely as montage.

The film is like a marathon trailer for itself—a symphony of images set to inspirational music and prayerlike voice-over. Midway through, Malick pauses to enact the creation of the universe with a spectacle that plays like a beatific antidote to the cosmic chill of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Malick is the anti-Kubrick. Instead of playing God, he fishes for divinity in glimmers of sunlight, wind and emotion, building a grand canvas from tiny, random moments.

Continue…

'The Tree of Life', aka 2011: A Space Odyssey

By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, May 16, 2011 at 8:27 PM - 0 Comments

Brad Pitt at 'The Tree of Life' press conference in Cannes / photo by Brian D. Johnson

I hardly know where to begin to talk about The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick’s epic trip into spiritual rapture and boyhood nostalgia. Saw the film yesterday morning, felt duly blown away, then attended the press conference immediately after. The notoriously reclusive director was absent. His excuse: shyness. Which even the moderator found preposterous. This is Cannes, after all, the auteur festival; directors rank higher here than stars. Sean Penn was also absent, on his way back from Haiti and trying to hit the red carpet for the premiere. But his role is a minor one, just a framing device for the story.

Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, plus some of the production team, were left to hold the fort, struggling to explain the mystery of Malick. Pitt and Chastain co-star as an overbearing dad and a beatific mom in this tale of three sons growing up in a ’50s suburb of Waco, Texas. We know it’s Waco, because we see the sign on a DDT truck spraying white clouds of insecticide that the boys scamper through as if it’s just another lawn sprinkler.

Pitt, who was unusually articulate, defended Malick’s absence. “He sees himself as building a house. I don’t know why people who make things are expected to sell them.” (Though Pitt seems to have accepted that’s part of his job description as a superstar.) The actor went on to explain the logistics of the shoot. For his main location, Malick “started by renting the entire block and dressing it as the 60s.” The cast could roam around and let things happen, while the crew shot with natural light. Pitt said Malick would get up every morning and write for an hour, delivering several pages of script, single spaced to the actors. The child never saw any script. Sometimes Malick would just be “torpedoed” into a scene.

Jessica Chastain / photo by BDJ

Describing the director’s method, Pitt said, “he was like the guy standing there with a butterfly net, ready for that moment of truth to go by. The best moments were not preconceived. They were happy accidents.” In fact, there’s a moment when a large monarch butterfly lands on Chastain’s hand. Usually when that occurs in a movie, there’s a butterfly wrangler. Chastain said it was just one those things that happened.

The Tree of Life‘s narrative is minimal. It’s another Malick landscape movie that goes where no Malick movie has gone before, from a suburban backyard to the outer limits of the cosmos. There are rhapsodic images of boyhood nostalgia and of Creation— stellar cataclysms, erupting volcanoes, churning seas, even dinosaurs.

These are some of Malick’s favorite things: sparklers, sprinklers, rocks thrown through windows, fireflies, a frog tied to a firecracker, curtains billowing over a heating vent, bedtime stories, climbing trees, rolling through tall grass, transparent jellyfish. . . I could go on.

For the record, I loved the movie as an rhapsodic experience, though I’m not sure what  it amounts to. The ending is layered with so many wedding-caked amens that I thought we’d never reach the heavenly afterlife of the closing credits. But if the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, Terence Malick is trafficking in some serious enlightenment. His unfashionable lack of irony and cynicism is astounding, along with his apparent faith that it’s actually possible to achieve a cinematic state of grace—to glimpse the eye of God on camera. Whether or not you’re a believer, it’s a staggering vision.

Brad works the room / photo by BDJ

A new national forest

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, November 11, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

Native Trees of Canada: Leanne Shapton

Leanne Shapton’s The Native Trees of Canada will likely make forest rangers shake their heads in disbelief. “Why is that basswood leaf turquoise?” they will ask. Or, “What’s with the fuscia alpine lark branch?” Devotees of the New York City-based artist and author’s work, on the other hand, will nod theirs in delight as they peruse the 84 renderings of deciduous and coniferous life in the replica sketchbook. “Why didn’t I notice the papaw’s Fauvist hues before?” they will ask.

Continue…

Opening Weekend: Due Date, Megamind, Fair Game

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, November 5, 2010 at 10:24 AM - 0 Comments

It’s hard to come to a movie without preconceptions. I saw Zach Galifianakis spark up a joint on Real Time With Bill Maher last week, thinking I was watching history being made, but then Maher tells Wolf Blitzer on CNN that it wasn’t weed after all, just cloves—”otherwise I would have smoked it.” Now I’m wondering if, instead of getting an on-air buzz, Galifianakis was just creating buzz for Due Date, in which plays an addled stoner opposite Robert Downey Jr.. A few nights ago, Letterman had Robert Downey Jr. on and Dave went into full-bore flattery mode, raving about Due Date as if it were the greatest movie ever made. At he prattled on, Downey kept rolling his eyes, as if to say, “Dave, what were you smoking?” Due Date is a formula comedy, a buddy road movie that plays like a highball mix of The Hangover and Trains, Planes and Automobiles, with Downey cast against type as the sober straightman and Galifianakis acting typically off-kilter as his shambolic travelling companion. So how is it? Well, I could have done without the masturbating dog. Really. But Due Date pretty funny. . . in places. While the story just goes through the motions, an acerbic Downey turns the movie into a meta acting class, with wild child Galifianakis serving as his puppy-dog apprentice.

Despite a brief, blousy appearance by Juliette Lewis as a dope dealer, Due Date is a very much a boy’s movie. So is the other big studio picture opening this weekend—Megamind, a thin but surprisingly witty 3-D animated feature from DreamWorks. It’s a smart, sparky send-up of the super-antihero, or anti-superhero, with a post-modern finesse that reminded me of Ghostbusters. You know that there’s something screwy about Hollywood when a blockbuster cartoon presents a more profound and nuanced view of good and evil than a high-pedigree political drama. I’m referring to Fair Game, which dramatizes the real-life scandal involving unmasked CIA spy Valerie Plame Wilson, who was stripped of her secret identity after her husband, Joseph Wilson, blew the whistle on the mythical weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Powered by a strong performance from Naomi Watts, Fair Game tells a compelling and necessary tale. But in the interests of political clarity, righteous moral drama is allowed upstage human intrigue.

Also playing in limited release this weekend in Toronto are two top-notch documentaries. Marwencol , playing at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, is a stranger-than-fiction portrait of an outsider artist working with dolls in the no man’s land between art and delusion; and A Drummer’s Dream, a wonderful music documentary from Canadian filmmaker John Walker, is essential viewing for percussion fans—playing at Toronto’s Royal Cinema, it deserves to be seen on the big screen with full theatrical sound.

More details . . .

Due Date

Any resemblance to The Hangover is not coincidental. Due Date was produced, written and directed by The Hangover‘s Todd Phillips. Instead of a gang, we have an odd couple: Peter Highman (Downey Jr.), expectant  father, and Ethan Tremblay (Galifiankis), aspiring actor and disaster magnet. In The Hangover, the boys were trying to make it home for a wedding; in this case, the deadline is the birth of Peter’s first child. Ethan literally bumps into him at the Atlanta airport, where his shenanigans get both of them kicked off a flight to L.A. and placed on the no-fly list. Which sets the stage for a cross-country road trip in a rental car, with Ethan bringing along his dog plus his father’s ashes in a coffee can. But the story seems secondary to the casting, which involves twofold role reversals. First there’s the drug thing—with Downey, notorious ex-drug addict, cast as a sober control freak in a crisp suit opposite a stoner. Then there’s the thespian thing—with Downey, genius actor, playing the foil for a character who is heading to L.A. with delusions of Hollywood grandeur. At one point, Downey’s character actually starts giving Ethan a method acting lesson, and some sense the whole movie is kind of acting showdown between the hyper-controlled veteran and the reckless upstart. Along the way, there are some wild tonal shifts—the movie’s lunges into sentiment feel contrived. And, like some of Judd Apatow’s comedies, this is a buddy movie that pushes the homoerotic envelope. Between his much-talked-about perm and his fey mannerisms, Galafianakis offers ample suggestion his character could be gay without spelling it out. And Downey, whose character has a violent temper, acts so straight he could be in the closet. As for the masturbating dog . . . don’t ask, don’t tell. Continue…

Brad Pitt as Barney!! Was Richler joshing Jewison?

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, November 2, 2010 at 11:54 AM - 0 Comments

Brad Pitt as Barney? The role eventually went to Paul Giamatti

In September I reported a conversation with director Norman Jewison, who told me he was once slated to adapt Barney’s Version for the big screen, and that the novel’s author, Mordecai Richler, wanted him to cast Brad Pitt as Barney. Sounds like a joke, but Jewison swore he was serious. I posted his story online (Brad Pitt as Barney? It was Mordecai Richler’s Pipe Dream). That prompted a perplexed response from producer Robert Lantos, who dismissed Jewison’s claim as nonsense. Lantos should know: he has always owned the rights to the novel, and finally made the movie with Paul Giamatti in the title role. (It opens Dec. 24). Well, today I heard from Noah Richler, Mordecai’s son, who had discovered my post and offered to shed some light on these absurdly mixed-up memories, which would not be out of place in his late father’s novel. Here is Noah’s comment:

“No, no, Norman.

“Such was my Dad’s demeanour and sense of the ridiculous that not even acquaintances such as Jewison really understood him. My Dad never wanted Pitt to play Barney, he was joshing Jewison and, I’d wager, saying something implicit but wicked about the inability of Canadian films, at that time, to garner any stars. No offence to Pitt, but I doubt he really knew much about him other than that he was famous and others were talking about him.

“To wit: when I was at The Ivy in London having dinner with him once, Michael Palin, whom I’d met once or twice, was at the next table, very close. We nodded. Palin’s guest was Johnny Depp and I whispered as much to Dad.

” ‘Who?’ he said. He had no idea.”

Lantos scoffs at Jewison's claim that Richler saw Brad Pitt as Barney

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, September 14, 2010 at 10:03 AM - 0 Comments

In yesterday’s blog, I reported a conversation I had with veteran director Norman Jewison, who told me that about decade ago he was involved with producer Robert Lantos in an attempt to adapt Barney’s Version, and that the book’s author, Mordecai Richler, wanted Brad Pitt to play Barney—the role eventually performed by Paul Giamatti in the movie that premiered at TIFF on Sunday. Brad as Barney? It sounds preposterous, but Jewison swore that was Richler’s dream.

Well, last night I ran into Lantos, who dismissed the director’s claim as pure nonsense. Not only that, the producer insisted that Jewison was never even involved as a candidate to direct Barney’s Version. And Lantos should know: he was the only producer who ever owned the screen rights to the book. “Someone is not remembering things correctly,”  he said. Jewison told me he had tried to persuade Dustin Hoffman to play Barney, while Richler imagined Pitt in the role. But Lantos says he and Richler had talked about casting Hoffman, and that Pitt’s name never came up. (By the time the movie got made, Hoffman ended up playing Barney’s father.)

So the story just gets curiouser and curiouser. Canada’s biggest movie producer is suggesting that its most venerable director is promoting a fictional version of events,  a situation that would not be out of place in Richler’s novel.  At the rate things are going, this blog, like Barney’s Version, will need corrective footnotes.

Meanwhile, for my story on the making of the movie, go to Barney, unbound.

Brad Pitt as Barney? It was Mordecai Richler's pipe dream

By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, September 13, 2010 at 11:03 AM - 0 Comments

Norman Jewison wanted Dustin Hoffman (right) as Barney. The role finally went to Paul Giamatti, and Hoffman plays his dad

Ran into Norman Jewison at Hotel le Germain, at a swish champagne reception for Saturday night’s TIFF premiere of L‘Amour Fou, the Yves St. Laurent documentary. I happened to mention I’d seen Barney’s Version, telling him that after all these years, producer Robert Lantos has finally got it right. Then I remembered that Jewison was one of the original directors Lantos had tapped to make the movie. And Norman, the master raconteur, began to regale me with stories of what happened to his version of the Mordecai Richler novel when he had a run at it about a decade ago.

“Mordecai wanted Brad Pitt to play Barney,” he told me.

“You’ve got to be joking.”

“No, he was serious. Mordecai wanted Brad Pitt!”

The veteran Canadian filmmaker went on to explain that Richler had envisioned a movie that would focus on the young Barney Panofsky, the bohemian libertine in Paris. Jewison says he was more interested in the older Barney, and his final romance with his third wife, Miriam. He says he wanted to cast Dustin Hoffman as Barney—Hoffman ended up playing Barney’s dad in the movie that finally got made years later.

“I always thought Dustin Hoffman was the only actor who could play Barney,” says Jewison, adding that he tried to talk Hoffman into the role but the actor didn’t find the story compelling enough.  (At this point, Jewison goes into a lovely imitation of Dustin Hoffman hemming and hawing).

Back then, the director explained, there wasn’t a script. Before his death, in 2001, Richler was working on a script for Lantos. But Jewison says he tried to persuade him to give it up, telling him he was a novelist, not a screenwriter, and that he should step down and “get a really good technician to write the movie and give it some structure.” But Lantos stood by Richler, says Jewison, who eventually moved on to another project.

Anyway, that’s Norman’s version; I’m sure Lantos has his own. After Richler’s death, the producer burned through a string of screenwriters, including an Oscar winner. Lantos chased the riddle of filming the novel with the persistence of a  detective trying to solve a cold case, and the passion of Barney pursuing the love of his life. In the end, two relatively unknown Canadian talents—Montreal writer Michael Konyves and Toronto-born director Richard J. Lewis—cracked the adaptation and brought it to the screen, with splendid results.

The irony in all of this is that when Lantos met Dustin Hoffman to coax him into playing Barney’s dad, Hoffman’s initial reaction was that he loved the script but he should play Barney, although he knew he was kidding himself, and that by then he was too old. (He’s 73.)

Barney’s Version, which had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, had a gala North American premiere at TIFF last night. For more on the making of the film, read my story in Maclean’s: Barney, unbound. And I’ll get to hear Lantos’s side of the story first hand, when I interview him onstage at an event staged by the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television on the 40th floor of the Royal Bank tower on Thurs. Sept. 16.

UPDATE: For Robert Lantos’ version of these events go here.

Tarantino's Teutonic Brad Pitt

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, September 17, 2009 at 11:42 PM - 1 Comment

Jana Pallaske and Til Schweiger in 'Phantom Pain'

Tonight I had a beer with Germany’s biggest box office star. I was introducded to Til Schweiger at a small, jammed party for TIFF’s gala premiere of Phantom Pain (Phantomschmerz)—a German movie inspired by the true story of a Canadian cyclist Mark Sumner, whose life was traumatically changed by a car accident.  Til Schweiger has been called Germany’s Brad Pitt. And he co-starred with Pitt, speaking English as one of his Nazi-scalping squad in Inglourious Basterds. But when I ask Schweiger about the comparison, after expressing his huge admiration for Pitt as an actor, he says, “I’m not Germany’s Brad Pitt; I’m Germany’s Will Smith.” (Given that Smith is Hollywood’s biggest earner at the box office, the analogy makes sense.) Inglourious Basterds has been a massive hit in Germany,  bigger than Pulp Fiction. But Schweiger told me he was furious that European countries chose to dub the film rather than subtitle it—undermining the multilingual intrigue that serves as its central comic conceit. “Here comes this guy who goes against all odds,” says the actor. “At the risk of alienating all the Americans,  Quentin had everyone speak their own language, so you wouldn’t have Germans speaking English to each other in a phony German accent.” In his role as a German-American soldier, Schweiger naturally spoke English with his comrades. But for Germany’s version of the film, he had to dub his English lines into German. “The German audience knows me as a native German speaker. And when I’m in an international film speaking English it’s a different  timing, a different rhythm. Then I dub it into German, and the German audience wonders, ‘why does he talk like this?’ ”

When Schweiger asked me what I thought of Phantom Pain, I confessed I had to work late and missed the premiere but planned to catch it in a repeat screening. He said he appreciated the honesty, then recalled an incident at a party where he caught someone’s bluff. Once he was schmoozed by a producer who profusely congratulated him on his performance in a film that he didn’t appear in, but was incorrectly listed on his IMDB page.

A real underdog Baseball story, Elizabeth May searches for a riding, and Brad Pitt: joint artist

By Lianne George - Friday, August 21, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 1 Comment

League of their own
The Hastings All-Stars swept five games and outscored their opponents 82-15 to win the Canadian Little League Championships in Val-d’Or, Que., on Saturday. The score, however, belies the backstory of this gritty team from blue-collar East Vancouver. The 11 boys and a girl (Katie Reyes, who homered in the final game) share one overbooked ball diamond with 22 teams. Money is so tight, some players’ fees were covered by KidSport, which helps low-income athletes. Now they’re off to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pa. Their first game will be broadcast on ESPN on Aug. 22.

Elizabeth May-be
Green party Leader Elizabeth May is testing the waters, and patience, of party members as she searches the country for a winnable riding. She previously ran unsuccessfully in 2006 in the London North Centre by-election. Then, it was a suicide mission against Tory Peter MacKay in Central Nova. And now, determined to get into the Commons, she has chosen the riding of Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound. At least that’s what she implied last week, when she told local media it was “definitely tempting” to run there. The more likely spot is the left-coast riding of Saanich-Gulf Islands. Local media report she is house hunting in Sidney, B.C. “My heart is here,” she said of the seaside community, “but I just want to make sure.” Continue…

Newsmakers: Breakups

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, August 6, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

Jennifer Anniston & John Mayer
Exactly what caused the sporadic soulmates’ final fade from tabloid covers was the subject of much frenzied speculation. Was it her wanting a baby? His womanizing ways? Her eternal pining for Brad Pitt? The final consensus: the former Friends star became fed up with the schmaltzy singer’s compulsive Twittering.

Prince Harry & Chelsy Davy
Commoners learned of the breakup of the blond Zimbabwe-born law student and the ginger-haired British royal stud after five years of yacht-frolicking via that great equalizer, Facebook: Davy changed her relationship status to “not in one”—accompanied by a symbol of a broken red heart. Continue…

Newsmakers: A is for Atlas

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, August 6, 2009 at 8:30 AM - 1 Comment

Most parents opt for baby names that won’t get their kids teased off the playground, which explains why Ava tops the girls’ list in Canada, while Ethan is No. 1 for boys, according to Today’s Parent. Alas, celebs saddle their offspring with the kind of monikers—Reign Beau or Tu, who has the last name Morrow—that invite no end of mirth and torment.

THE ANCIENTS

Atlas: Anne Heche & James Tupper
Hermès: Actor Kelly Rutherford & Daniel Giersch
Gaia: Emma Thompson & Greg Wise
Homer: Anne Heche & James Tupper
Moses: Gwyneth Paltrow & Chris Martin
Ptolemy: Gretchen Mol & Tod Williams
Sophocles: Actor Jemaine Clement & Miranda Manasiadis

OTHER CELEBS

Dezi: Actor Jaime Pressly & Eric Calvo
Jagger: Soleil Moon Frye & Jason Goldberg
Kal-el: Nicolas Cage & Alice Kim
Tennyson: Russell Crowe & Danielle Spencer
Harlow: Nicole Richie & Joel Madden

ROYALTY

God’Iss Love: Singer Lil’ Mo & Al Stone
Jermajesty: Jermaine Jackson & Alejandra Oaziaza
Marquise: 50 Cent & Shaniqua Tompkins
Prince Michael II: Michael Jackson & surrogate mom

NATURE

Bluebell Madonna: Geri Halliwell
Daisy Boo: Jamie & Jools Oliver
Daisy True: Meg Ryan
Nakoa-Wolf: Lisa Bonet & Jason Momoa
Petal Blossom Rainbow: Jamie & Jools Oliver
Poppy Honey: Jamie & Jools Oliver
Puma: Erykah Badu & The D.O.C.
River: Actor Keri Russell & Shane Deary

GEOGRAPHY

Alabama: Drummer Travis Barker & Shanna Moakler
Bronx Mowgli: Ashlee Simpson & Pete Wentz
Heaven: Actor Brooke Burke & David Charvet
Java: Actor Josh & Yessica Holloway
Kingston: Gwen Stefani & Gavin Rossdale
Mars: Singer Erykah Badu & Jay Electronica
Shiloh: Angelina Jolie & Brad Pitt
Sierra Sky: Brooke Burke & Garth Fisher

ASSORTED OBJECTS

Banjo: Actor Rachel Griffiths & Andrew Taylor
Denim and Diesel: Singer Toni Braxton & Keri Lewis
Loden: Actor Peter & Kelly Reckell
Peanut: Actor Ingo Rademacher & Ehiku

JOBS

Deacon: Reese Witherspoon & Ryan Phillippe
Moxie CrimeFighter: Magician Penn Jillette & Emily Zolten
Poet: Actor Soleil Moon Frye & Jason Goldberg
Pilot Inspektor: Actor Jason Lee & Beth Riesgraf
Ryder: Kate Hudson & Chris Robinson

Newsmakers of the week

By Lianne George - Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

Phelps gets smoked

At the Santa Clara Grand Prix in California last Sunday, Vancouver’s Brent Hayden finished the men’s 100-freestyle race in 48.44 seconds, a meet record, beating eight-time Olympic gold medallist Michael Phelps by a full half-second. “I was really excited,” Hayden told the Canadian Press. “Michael is such a great competitor and every time I get up and race him, it’s such an honour.” Phelps—newly mustachioed, and recently back after a three-month suspension by USA Swimming for getting caught smoking marijuana on film—won two of his four races at the meet. “I’m ready to go home and sleep in my own bed,” he said.

Here’s your visa, Mr. Rae. You’re not welcome.

Last week, Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae was turned away at a Sri Lankan airport, allegedly for being a Tamil Tigers supporter and a “security risk”—and an Ontario resident may be to blame. According to the Toronto Star, Irangani de Silva, a Sri Lankan expat who lives in London, Ont., wrote an opinion piece in the June 8 issue of The Island, a major Sri Lankan newspaper, in which she counselled Foreign Secretary Palitha Kohona to revoke the visa that had been issued to Rae for a three-day visit. She also denounced Rae for having suggested in the Commons recently that Canada ought to look into human rights violations committed by Sri Lankan officials over the course of the bloody 25-year civil war between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority. “We are sure that [Rae] will return with a damning report on the government of Sri Lanka and push for war crimes investigations, publish media reports that there is discrimination, etc.,” de Silva wrote. Granting a visa to Rae, she said, was an “act of foolishness.” In Sri Lanka’s state-owned Daily News, the anti-Rae vitriol continued after his departure. One columnist argued that Rae is pandering to the large faction of Tamil expats he represents in Canada “who are not just vocal but openly violent in their support for the cause of terrorism in Sri Lanka.” In his statement, Rae called the charges made against him “absurd” and “a lie, pure and simple.” Continue…

Getting in Brad Pitt's face (with a camera) at Cannes

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 12:16 PM - 0 Comments

A CANNES VIDEO PRESENTED BY CANON CANADA

Brad and Quentin, basking 'basterds'

By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, May 25, 2009 at 10:16 AM - 0 Comments

A CANNES VIDEO PRESENTED BY CANON CANADA

At a festival loaded with heavyweight auteurs, and light on Hollywood celebrity, Brad Pitt was the designated superstar. But at the Cannes press conference for the premiere of Inglourious Basterds, he held off his entrance with noblesse oblige, and let his chuffed director, Quentin Tarantino, soak up the spotlight —flanked by leading ladies Diane Kruger and Mélanie Laurent

And you have to wonder, what deal with Brad’s English garden-party get-up—the cream jacket and the ascot-like scarf? All that’s missing is a shooting stick. Did Angelina dress him in the morning as a joke? You’ll notice, by the way, that in Cannes the press turn into fans in the presence of celebrity. Snapping photos I can understand—everyone, myself included, wants visuals for their websites—but the notion of journalists scrambling for autographs is downright embarrassing.

Week in Pictures: May 14th – May 20th, 2009

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 22, 2009 at 12:24 PM - 0 Comments

Brad, Quentin and the Canadian 'basterd'

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, May 21, 2009 at 11:08 AM - 2 Comments

Brad Pitt in motion at the 'Inglourious Basterds' press conference in Cannes (photo: BDJ)

Yesterday was Brad Pitt Day in Cannes—although hard-core cineastes, especially the Gallic variety, perhaps thought of it as Quentin Tarantino Day. And for die-hard Canadians, it was Mike Myers Day. In the biggest blitz of Hollywood talent that we’ve seen during the festival, all three were on hand for the premiere of Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino’s outrageous Second World War epic. It was one of the most anticipated titles among the 20 films in competition here. The 2,300-seat Lumiere theatre was packed for the morning press screening, well before the 8:30 a.m. start time. And at the end of the two-and-half-hour opus, the Palais erupted with some of the strongest applause we’ve seen here. The movie is a hoot, and so was the press conference that immediately followed the morning screening. More on that in minute, but first a few details about the film. Continue…