It took 12 years to make the film version of the final book of Canadian novelist Mordecai Richler. Martin Knelman visits the set of Barney's Version, an international co-production starring Paul Giamatti and filmed in Italy, where the book found a surprise following. In her role as Miriam Panofsky, Rosamund Pike seems full of aristocratic confidence at a dinner in an upscale apartment - especially when she silently signals her husband, played by Paul Giamatti, not to light a cigar at the table, because their friend has asthma. But the British actress, known for her work in Pride And Prejudice and Die Another Day, breaks out laughing twice while shooting the scene, possibly because Bruce Greenwood, as the asthmatic friend Blair, keeps stumbling on the word "consciousness", and quips that he has to find a way of uttering the word "without sounding like a stroke victim".
These are the final days of shooting a $30 million (Dh110 million) film adaptation of Barney's Version - the late Mordecai Richler's brilliant final novel about the life and times of a politically incorrect Jewish-Canadian curmudgeon who finds himself losing his memory while charging towards the end of a tumultuous life featuring three high-maintenance wives. The book, which won the prestigious Giller Prize in 1997, was a bestseller whose appeal went beyond the English-speaking world. Indeed, it sold a phenomenal 200,000 copies in Italy - which is one reason why the film's producer, Robert Lantos, changed the locale of Barney's European bohemian days from Paris to Rome. Officially a Canadian/Italian co-production, the film began shooting there in mid-August before moving to Montreal.
Currently in post-production in Toronto and Los Angeles, Barney's Version is set to reach cinemas later this year after a world premiere at either the Venice or Toronto film festival. Expectations are feverishly high that this will be that elusive entity, the great Canadian movie and an international hit, reminding people all over the world what was special about the hilariously outspoken Mordecai Richler, who took huge delight in being irreverent, sarcastic and iconoclastic. Visiting the set in both cities, I was struck by how the among cast and crew sustained momentum throughout a shoot that lasted almost three months.
For Lantos, the closest thing Canada has had to a film tycoon, making this film is the ultimate opportunity of his 40-year career. For him, it's not just another movie: it's the one he sees as his legacy. It's rare for any Canadian film to have a such a big budget and a cast full of international stars, but when such films are made, it's usually Lantos who produces them, most notably Eastern Promises and Being Julia. "I know I shouldn't count my chickens before they hatch," says Lantos, watching closely on a monitor while the endearingly rumpled Giamatti plays a scene, "but this guy is just so incredibly great. Look at the expression on his face. Even the way he moves across the room, he's just like Mordecai."
Lantos, whose family moved to Montreal after he spent his early years in Hungary and Uruguay, has assembled a dream cast. Giamatti, who won an Emmy for playing the title role in the HBO mini-series John Adams, may not be king of the multiplex, but he is one of the most respected actors in Hollywood, based on his work in such film as Sideways, Cinderella Man and (most recently) Cold Soul.
The role of Barney requires Giamatti, 42, to age 35 years and ramble about looking more dishevelled and perplexed than usual. At the end of the story, back in Montreal, he is in his mid-60s. But in the early scenes in Rome, he's only 30. "I've been drafted into playing Jewish characters before," says Giamatti, "and as soon as I saw the script, I knew I wanted to play this part. I realise that Barney is an iconic Canadian book by an iconic Canadian writer, and I'm an American. So I hope I don't blow it."
(In fact, this marks the third time a US actor has played a Richler hero in a Canadian movie. Richard Dreyfuss played the title role in Ted Kotcheff's 1974 movie The Apprenticeship Of Duddy Kravitz. And James Woods starred in Joshua Then And Now, the 1985 movie produced by Lantos and directed by Kotcheff.) For Barney's three wives, Lantos snared Rachelle Lefevre (the bad-girl vampire Victoria in the two Twilight films) to play the mysterious and more than slightly neurotic Clara; Minnie Driver (an Oscar nominee for Good Will Hunting) for the role of the shopaholic Second Mrs Panofsky; and Pike (currently on view in An Education) for the crucial role of Miriam - the love of Barney's life. Among Barney's friends over a stretch of three decades are Scott Speedman as the creative Boogie and Greenwood as Blair - who turns out to be a rival for the ultimate prize of Miriam.
Possibly the ultimate casting coup was getting the Hollywood legend Dustin Hoffman as Barney's rough-edged father. And though they had no scenes together, the famous actor's son, Jake Hoffman, makes an appearance as Barney's son. But even more crucial than casting choices were the veteran producer's decision to gamble on a virtually unknown screenwriter, Michael Konyves, after working with four other writers over more than a decade, and a director, Richard J Lewis, who had spent the past decade working in TV as the executive producer of the blockbuster action show CSI: Crime Scene Investigation.
Few will remember this, but before CSI came along, Lewis directed a movie produced by Lantos. Whale Music, starring Maury Chaykin as a showbiz recluse resembling Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, came and went quickly after opening the 1994 Toronto International Film Festival. Lewis seems energised by the opportunity to return to the big screen, relishing the chance to work with Giamatti and to depict the life of a character over a period of more than 30 years. "The fact that Barney is such a beloved book raises the stakes a lot," Lewis says. "It's a huge responsibility to do justice to the novel. But I think we have."
The dinner scene that cracked up Pike was filmed in a cavernous film studio in a remote part of Montreal, a few kilometres from the well-heeled area of the city where Richler lived with his wife, Florence, after returning from a long stint in London to the city of his birth. Decades earlier, he'd escaped from the immigrant ghetto of St Urbain Street prominently featured in his work, most notably The Apprenticeship Of Duddy Kravitz.
The apartment built at the film studio is based on the one where Mordecai and Florence Richler lived on Sherbrooke Street ,near the frightfully haute Ritz Carlton Hotel - now closed and under renovation, but pressed into service for the key sequence in the movie when Barney marries his ill-fated second wife but on the same night meets the woman who will one day be his third. And that's a major turning point, because, according to Konyves, the heart of the 417-page novel lies in his obsession with Miriam. That insight enabled Konyves to get a workable screenplay out of a sprawling novel that had proved so difficult to adapt. Lantos took 12 years to bring the book to the screen, spending a fortune along the way and going through many writers, including Richler, whose scripts didn't do the trick.
The book is about a man writing his memoirs while at the same time losing his memory - trying to come to terms with ruptured friendships, failed marriages and a false rumour that he murdered a dear friend. But faced with a complex novel that takes place mainly in someone's mind, perhaps the greatest challenge is deciding what elements to eliminate. In order to make the story work on the big screen, Konyves dropped several key features of the novel. In the film, Barney is no longer the narrator, and he is no longer writing his memoirs. And his horrible behaviour is slightly toned down.
He is still a hard-drinking, grumpy yet loveable old guy, but not quite as offensively rude and misanthropic. The essence of the movie is Miriam - by far the most important of Barney's three colourful wives. It's the story of how he finds her, wins her and then loses her. Of course, it is widely assumed that just as there is a lot of Mordecai in the character of Barney, there is great deal of Florence, who visited the set, in Miriam.
"I actually auditioned for the part of Clara," Pike confides, "but Richard Lewis said 'I don't think you're a Clara.'" It came as a surprise when he said he could see her as Miriam. The challenge then became the age range of the character and showing how she develops over the years. "I met Florence Richler, but I didn't get to know her," Pike says. "Even so, I could sense her graciousness, and that was definitely an element of the character."
Those who think a movie should be totally true to the book it's based on may object to the shift of the early part of the story from Paris in the 1950s to Rome in the 1970s. But there are good reasons for the change - and it seems to work. When the Italian translation of the novel was published, all of Italy embraced it. "In Italy, we love curmudgeons," says Christian Rocca, a correspondent for the provocative daily paper Il Foglio, which has a small circulation but great influence among the elite. "This novel is a manifesto of political incorrectness. By temperament, Italians enjoy being politically incorrect. That's why we loved the book."
Rocca's paper gave huge promotion to the novel, and other media followed. The result: Italy was swept up in Barney-mania. "Barney's Version was such a success that it became part of the country's popular culture," Lantos says. "We didn't just like the book," Rocca confirms. "We adopted it." Shrewdly, Lantos realised it would pay to relocate part of the story in Italy. He needed a European co-production partner, and he found one in that country. "I was a bit sceptical about moving the story from Paris to Rome," admits Domenico Procacci, the Italian co-producer. "But when I read the script, I was surprised to discover it works perfectly."
Of course, Rome itself reverberates with the magic of film - including Fellini's La Dolce Vita and the Hollywood classic Roman Holiday. On set during Barney's filming, it gets to sparkle, especially in one big scene filmed in the popular Piazza Santa Maria, a huge and historic cobblestone square in the district known as Trastevere, across the Tiber River from the centre of the city.
Actors dressed in 1970s bohemian attire walk across the square, preceded by flamboyant extras. In this scene, Barney is getting ready to marry Clara, despite many signs that she is more than slightly unstable, and that this union is bound to end badly. Shooting in such a location, even after midnight when the cafes have closed, is not an easy feat. The production manager Claude Paré secured 1970s cars, but his biggest problem was getting rid of anything that suggested the 21st century.
When the Barney shoot began in mid-August, Rome had its intoxicating effect on the cast and crew. The magic of the city itself, steeped in film history, fuelled a sense of excitement. But the magic carried over when the production moved back to Montreal and the nearby Eastern Townships (where the Richlers had their country house). "We had two weeks in the townships, and it was heaven," Lantos says. "We had great fall weather. We went swimming in the lake."
The magic spell also prevailed during the scenes shot at the Ritz Carlton Hotel, whose bar was for years a favourite haunt of Richler's. In one of the showcase scenes, Barney marries the Second Mrs Panofsky, played by Driver. By the time the ceremony takes place, Barney already loathes her. That same day he meets Miriam. Not discouraged by the fact that he has just married someone else, he pursues her all the way to Toronto. A scene in the garden of the Ritz, though filmed the next day, occurs many years later in the story, when, after many years together, Miriam tells Barney she never wants to see him again.
Another high was the sequence with Hoffman - especially the scene in which Barney breaks the news to his dad that he plans to divorce his second wife. "To watch Dustin play a scene is like being witness to a masterclass," Lantos says. "Every take he does is different and surprising. You never know what he's going to do." For Lantos, there were many reasons he felt close to the material. It brought him back to Montreal, where he went to university and began his career before moving to Toronto. Partly to amuse himself, he cast several of the famous directors he has worked with in the past - David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan, Denys Arcand and Ted Kotcheff - in cameo roles.
And then there is the fact that Lantos was one of Richler's satirical targets in the book. Barney earns his living running a company called Totally Unnecessary Productions, which cranks out TV series strikingly similar to the ones Lantos produced when he was running Alliance Entertainment. "The raw material seems great," Lantos says proudly, but immediately sounds a cautionary note. "Shaping happens in the editing room. You don't really know what you have until it's all put together, and even then, you can't be sure until you show it to a few hundred people. I'm too close to be a reliable judge."
Richler's breakthrough novel exhibits thrilling comic energy as it hurtles through the terrain of Montreal's crowded immigrant scene of the 1940s. Duddy is a relentless hustler who, driven by a need for success and prestige, seizes on shady schemes. The book has a wonderful group of lively characters that brings to mind the Victorian London depicted a century earlier by Charles Dickens. The 1974 film version, starring Richard Dreyfuss (pictured inset), is a classic.
Jake Hersh - a Jew from Montreal living in London - finds himself at the centre of a sex scandal. But his dreams are dominated by his alter ego, a cousin named Joey, who fought on the side of the good guys in the Spanish Civil War and dared to avenge Jewish suffering by going after Nazi criminals.
The first and best in a series of witty and entertaining children's books with characters based on Richler's own family. The young protagonist says everything twice to avoid being ignored by his two older sisters and two older brothers. One day he hopes he will be old enough to run errands, cross the street alone and ride a two-wheeled bike.
Joshua Shapiro is a writer drawn into a tawdry trial who mentally puts himself on trial. During his reflections he recalls his Montreal upbringing, including a bizarre set of parents - his father a Bible-quoting gambler, his mother a striptease specialist. By marrying the daughter of a senator, Joshua breaks into the social circle he once despised. Joshua was made into a film in 1985 starring James Woods and Gabrielle Lazure.