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Delivering Cather's Vision on Film
An Interview with Marian Rees and Anne Hopkins
There are many challenges to translating prose into celluloid images. Marian Rees and Anne Hopkins, principals of ALT Films, the nonprofit production company responsible for making the majority of titles in the AMERICAN COLLECTION, were asked to discuss the challenges and process of capturing the
themes of The Song of the Lark on film. This interview was conducted February 23, 1999.
Q: Where are we in the production process?
Marian Rees: We're in pre-pre-production. We've brought in the director, the unit production
manager, and the location scout.
Q: The second phase seems to be introducing Cather's vision to the realities of making a film and starting to solve practical problems.
Anne Hopkins:
This story needs some visual expansiveness because it is partially the environment that transforms Thea. The challenge to the next draft of the script will be heightening the drama of the exchanges between the people.
Q: Give us an overview of working with the writer to develop the script. How many drafts are usual?
A: Three drafts and a polish. We started with a scope that was out of proportion to a
two-hour movie. There are scenes that progress the plot, but they don't enrich the relationship or create challenges. That's the work where we have to succeed in the next draft.
Q: What are the things that a good scene should do?
A: The
first goal of a successful scene is to develop the story line. The second important goal is to create the encounter or the surprise between people. We may know what's going to happen, but we would be enriched if we
didn't know how it's going to happen. At the same time, we have to define more completely the nature of the characters themselves. In this story, Thea's three teachers should each have a distinct persona. If
they were interchangeable, we could cast the same actor in all three roles.
Q: What happens between now and the time the cameras roll on May 3?
M: There is the panoply of things that have to occur concurrently. Casting will
go on while we set the locations. The budget has to be defined to meet our finite dollars; we have to set the rest of the crew. In this case, the composer will be most essential since there is a great deal of
music that has to be prerecorded. Our perspective of the music has to be appropriate to Cather's sense of a burgeoning opera singer, and at the same time, the music must not be so obscure that people won't relate to it.
Q:
What's harder, the vocal syncing or the keyboards?
M: The vocal is the harder because that's generally on camera. You can cheat a camera angle for a pianist, but a vocalist has to be full in the
face.
A: The vocal also requires body language. The body becomes its own instrument and so the demeanor and the whole expression of the body is an acting challenge.
Q: How does the lack of an antagonist in this film help you create tension,
dramatic confrontation, and conflict?
A: The antagonist in this story is Thea in the context of her talent. If we can convey for the audience what Thea's journey is, they should identify with her
more than if there were an artificial traditional antagonist.
M: Drama is conflict. The conflict in Thea begins to progress through having to make decisions, and this provides the traditional antagonist.
It's the conflict that comes from within her and as she seeks out those resolutions.
Q: It's all very internal. Does it pose special difficulties for you to externalize it?
A: We're trying to reach for at least one key line of dialogue
that's the insight to each scene. For instance, Harsanyi tells Thea her piano playing will never be good enough but that she has a voice; that's a way to externalize an inner conflict.
M: Cather has
provided an abundance of characters who allow for Thea's exchange, so her own point of view begins to have definition through these characters.
Q: Literary critics often believe that a writer's earliest books are closest to herself. That is a strength because in
The Song of the Lark there is a young woman writing about her life as a young woman.
A: This is a portrait of what life is as Cather's experiencing it, without editorializing or censoring. |
