Take a celebrated French-language play by a well known Quebecois
playwright. Add an English director noted for his outrageously creative
blending of fact, fiction, high melodrama and low comedy. Mix in an
anglophone production company with a largely francophone crew, and
you have a recipe for a disastrous mishmash of clashing cultural symbols, what, in European co-productions, has sometimes been referred to as “Euro-puddings.”
That Lilies, director John Greyson’s adaptation of Michel Marc Bouchard’s play Les fleurettes, is coherent at all, let alone lushly romantic and flamboyantly theatrical, is a testament to the desire of the filmmakers to stay true to the play in the process of adapting it for film.
“Given the fact that she [Anna Stratton, one of three producers on the film] had a lengthy prior knowledge of Lilies as a play and a long-standing career in theatre, her interest was seeing Lilies adapted for film in a particular way so that [it had] the qualities she wanted to see borne out in the adaptation process,” explained Robin Cass, another of the producers.
Lilies is about a Bishop who is called to a prison to hear the confession of a dying prisoner. As it turns out, however, it is a trick, and the Bishop is forced to watch the prisoners reenact events which took place 40 years earlier in which the prisoner and the Bishop were involved in a homosexual love triangle.
Central to the construction of the narrative, Cass stated, was the doubling of the time period, with the male prisoners playing women’s
roles: “There were other producers who were interested in Lilies, but they had all wanted to do 1912 dramas with men and women cast in the roles. They weren’t interested in the double period piece, back and forth, the whole layering aspect [of the play]. One of the things that was really important to Anna when she initially sought the rights was to find the cinematic language to maintain that.”
According to Cass, Stratton, one of the partners in Triptych Media (see Sidebar), had lengthy discussions with Bouchard, and “made a
commitment to him in terms of how the adaptation would take place.”
When they were convinced that they shared a similar vision, Stratton
asked Greyson, for whom she produced Zero Patience if he would be
interested in directing.
Greyson had seen and really enjoyed the play. “What intrigued
me,” he said, “was that it felt like a contemporary Quebecois response to the work of people like Genet — very romantic, very much invoking…a sense of the pagan and the divine. At the same time, it was very much about a Quebec response to those…esthetic and social agendas.”
The filmmaker agreed to meet the playwright. They “really liked
each other a lot,” according to Greyson, and found that “our sensibilities were different enough to make it an interesting collaboration but similar enough so it wouldn’t be impossible.”
Greyson, Bouchard and his English translator, Linda Gaboriau, as
well as the two producers from Triptych, began working on the screenplay
in 1992. Greyson wrote a treatment (which initially was supposed to be
five pages long, although it ended up being closer to 20), which, as he put it, “was the departure point for Michel Marc. He started writing the script — that gave him the cinematic language to start from.” From there, “John, Michel Marc, Linda, Anna and I worked very much as a team,” Cass added. “Michel-Marc would write, Linda would translate and John, Anna and I would all provide very extensive notes” which would be translated for Bouchard, who would then go off and write another draft.
Early in the writing, Arnie Gelbart, a principal at Montreal’s
GaloFilm, was selected as a third producer. “Arnie came on board after
the first draft and decided he very much wanted to be a part of Lilies,” Cass explained. “It was very apparent to us — and had always been desired by us — that we shoot it in Quebec and do it as an Ontario and Quebec co-production. Arnie agreed to represent the project in Quebec to help raise financing, but also to represent the project to the crews and to the craftspeople there because we were, in effect, strangers to them coming in from outside… He was able to bring contacts and familiarity and knowledge of the Quebec production scene that we just didn’t have.”
Cass hasn’t perceived any disadvantages to having multiple
producers on a film, except, he said with a laugh, “perhaps, that you make a little less money…” because the budget line for producer has to be divided. But he did see advantages to having more than one producer on a project: “You get more feedback and you get different points of view. Not everybody has every skill required, and when you get more than one person doing it, hopefully…the various combinations of skills are a nice fit. And you can have that many more tools to work with.”
Casting the film took place over the better part of a year, according to Stratton, starting with Brent Carver and Matthew Ferguson, who were cast at an English language reading of the script in 1994. Then, “Michel Marc Bouchard had a number of ideas of people he wanted to work with. The idea of Remy Girard as the Baroness developed fairly early,” she stated. (Girard, a well known Quebec actor, left the set to perform in a play of Bouchard’s during the evening.)
As well as casting directors in the two principal cities, Stratton claimed that casting ideas were taken from the film’s Assistant Director, Bouchard’s interpreter Gaboriau and Alliance, the film’s distributor. “There was a collective, on-going discussion about potential cast members,” she said.
Lilies was shot in and around Montreal over a five week period in the summer of 1995. The cast rehearsed on and off for two and half weeks before shooting started. “We did a lot of improvs that, of course, aren’t on the screen at all,” Greyson said, “about who those prisoners were, what was their reason for agreeing to be part of this obsession… It was lots of fun, from an acting point of view.”
Rehearsal is an important part of the production process for the
director: “It’s not cheap, but you save so much time and money, ultimately, because you’re arriving on set with a real understanding of what the scene is about.” This preparation makes the work of the director and crew much easier, Greyson believes.
Stratton said the hardest part of the production was accurately
portraying the two time periods in which it was set. “Trying to give the
film the lushness that we wanted it to have within that budget was really, really hard,” Stratton commented. She credits the art department with being able to find good props and costumes at reasonable prices (and making deals to keep the costs down).
One major problem with the script was that a couple of scenes
called for an air balloon. One character made a spectacular entrance in it, a scene which helped define her character; it also symbolized the
possibility of freedom from the small town for the two lovers.
Unfortunately, Stratton claimed, we didn’t have the money to have a full-scale hot-air balloon flying.” They had to resort to a model and cheat the scenes with the balloon.
Other than that, “things that had to be rescheduled due to the weather, and we had equipment breakdown and all those kinds of things,” Stratton said. “But they happen to everybody.”
Lilies was originally supposed to have been shot in 1994 in Lac St. Jean, a small Quebec community, but a shortfall in the budget caused a delay just as preproduction was gearing up. Ultimately, Triptych had to cut $400,000 from the original budget and rewrite the screenplay to accommodate the smaller amount of money the producers had to work with.
The final budget was approximately C$2.2 million, half of which
was raised in Ontario, half in Quebec. Sources included: TeleFilm
Canada, the Ontario Film Development Corporation (“Lilies was, I believe, the third last film before its demise,” Cass commented); SODEC;
Alliance Distributing (which, according to Cass, had been supportive of
the film from its earliest stages); FUND; the federal tax credit, the
National Arts Centre; and, the Ontario-Quebec Commission for
Cooperation (whose mandate, aside from supporting co-productions, is “to
help artists from Ontario and Quebec present their work in each other’s
provinces,” explained Cass).
Greyson pointed out that film financing is “so project by project,” especially now with government funding cutbacks across Canada. Every producer has a different way of coping with this, he claimed: “You chop your budget, you go to broadcast instead, you do an Arts Council level thing (so your budget is really tiny), you go to Vancouver like [Ontario filmmaker] Bruce McDonald did for Hardcore Logo. [There are] all sorts of different scenarios. Everyone is pretty resourceful.”
Greyson, whose films are often politically charged, marched in
protests against Ontario’s general budgetary cutbacks. “The provincial
government…is essentially saying filmmakers can do it on their own in
this province,” he stated. “Well, that’s just not satisfactory.”
Although he didn’t produce Lilies, Greyson enjoys the fundraising process: “It’s really a lot of fun for me — I like both the responsibility and the control that that entails.” He did allow, however, that not everybody shared this point of view: “I think there’s all sorts of filmmakers who don’t want to go near it. And that’s just as valid. Everyone figures out their own way and their own set of interests… Most people are dying to find a producer who will take that work away from them. Most of us are used to doing that stuff by necessity, and it’s certainly a treat to have that lifted off your shoulders.”
Greyson does believe, however, that filmmakers should promote
their films. “The director always has a big responsibility to help [the film] get out,” he stated. “Canadian films have such a tough time finding an audience everywhere, maybe especially in Canada, and anything the director can do to help get it out there is vital. And it’s fun work, too. I love going to festivals, I love meeting people and talking.”
Lilies has, in fact, met with a lot of critical success at film festivals. Greyson won the award for Best Young Director at Locarno; the film won the audience prize for best film at the Montreal film festival, as well as best Quebec film at the Festival of Quebec Cinema in Blois, France, and was chosen for the New York Film Festival.
Oddly, for a gay-themed film by a well known gay filmmaker, the
film hasn’t been screened at any gay film festivals. Greyson pointed out
that it was more a matter of timing than anything else: the gay film festival season starts in February in Berlin and works its way through the spring and early summer, culminating in San Francisco in June. “We finished in June, so we were sort of out of step with the circuit,” he said.
Greyson intends to take the film to gay festivals in Johannesburg, South Africa, and Sydney, Australia, although he still has to negotiate this with Alliance, the film’s distributor. “Alliance doesn’t want to overexpose it at various festivals… I’m a big fan of festivals, maybe they’re less so,” he explained. “But so far, they’ve been very sympathetic and really get the idea of doing gay festivals as a way of launching it. I think it’s one of the best ways to get a film like this out there.”
Lilies is having a staggered opening in Canada: it has opened in Montreal in Toronto, and will be opening in various other cities over the next couple of months. Alliance International is the foreign sales agent, “but so far there have been no foreign sales,” Stratton remarked.
Interestingly, Lilies is being marketed differently in the two provinces which co-produced the film. According to Cass, in Ontario Lilies “is obviously being sold as a John Greyson film,” whereas, “In Quebec, it is very heavily being attached to Michel Marc Bouchard as the film adaptation of his celebrated play.” Another contrast Cass noticed was the fact that, “The cast is figuring very prominently in the press in Quebec,” but, “In Ontario it is being sold as a romantic drama which is, in part, gay themed.”
Greyson believes that, unlike 10 or even five years ago, it’s no
longer necessary to market gay-themed films to exclusively gay audiences. “Audiences in general have really changed,” he enthused. “I think the exclusively gay audience is a thing of the past. More and more, people are interested in the new gay cinema, or the new queer cinema, whether they’re straight or they’re gay.”
In the gay community, the response to Greyson’s previous film,
Zero Patience (a musical about AIDS which featured the ghost of so-called “Patient Zero,” whom one studied suggested was the first person to die of the disease in North America, a 150 year-old archeologist and a musical number featuring singing anuses) was mixed. “In general, the PWA community and activists, a real broad spectrum of people, really liked it,” Greyson claimed. “At the same time, there was a whole bunch of folks out there who didn’t. Sometimes it was for very personal, idiosyncratic reasons… It was widely talked about, widely debated, had its champions and its detractors. And that’s the whole point, isn’t it? That, to me, is success: when you’ve made something that isn’t pablum for the pablum eaters, but something sort of juicy to debate.”
“Lilies has, I think, split the room in a different way than Zero…,” Greyson added. “Some people say, ‘Oh, it’s still too esoteric, it’s still too weird,’ and other people say, ‘You know, Greyson’s gone soft. It’s too romantic.”
Either way, Greyson intends to continue making films which force
him to stretch as an artist. As he puts it, “The joy for me is discovering new ways to say things — I sort of want to be an emerging filmmaker for the next 30 years.”
Sidebar
Triptych Media was formed in 1993 by Anna Stratton and Louise Garfield,
the producers of John Greyson’s Zero Patience, and Robin Cass, who had been Associate Producer on the film. Triptych’s first feature production was John Greyson’s Lilies.
According to Cass, after Zero Patience wrapped, the three
principles were looking for a way to pursue their own vision of what film producing could be. “One of the things that is really important to
Tryptych,” Cass explained, “is the producer-writer relationship, aside from the producer-director relationship.” They decided to set up their own company as “an umbrella organization where three producers could
function either independently or in partnership within the corporation.”
Triptych intends to produce material from a wide variety of
sources. “We’re seeking relationships with both established Canadian
filmmakers and up and coming filmmakers,” Cass stated, “as well as
people from other disciplines who, for whatever reason, would like to get involved in film.”
The company has 15 projects currently in development. The
projects furthest along include: Cass working with Barbara Gowdie on an
adaptation of her novel Falling Angels; Susan Swan has just completed the first draft of her adaptation of The Biggest Modern Woman in the World, the story of Nova Scotia giantess Anna Swan and her adventures in New York with P. T. Barnum, with Garfield; novelist Matt Cohen adapting Emotional Arithmetic with Stratton; and, CodCo’s Andy Jones’ television series Nasty Habits, which is set in a 14th Century monestary.
Cass claims that Triptych is open to proposals from anybody.
“Normally what we ask people to do is call us before they send anything
over,” he said. “After a brief phone conversation, we can determine what
the next step is. We prefer not to get stuff unsolicited. It’s better to have a conversation on the phone first.”
This article first appeared in Reel Independence, Volume 4, Number 5, November/December 1996.