Writers Shine Among the Famous, and Faux Moose, at Movie Fest

At the height of the Toronto Film Festival this past week, it was hard to walk a block in any direction in this city without running into either a film publicist or a moose. The publicists were real, the moose were not.

Part of a civic art project spearheaded by the city’s mayor, the moose were painted bright colors and adorned with clever slogans. A pair near the Varsity Theatre complex, where most of the festival films screen, were dressed as bride and groom. For some, Toronto 2000, which hosted 329 films from 56 countries, will be remembered as the festival’s 25th anniversary event; for others, it will be known as the Year of the Moose.

“This is beginning to happen everywhere,” says Irish novelist and screenwriter Roddy Doyle, who’s in town promoting “When Brendan Met Trudy,” a comic love story that earned a warm reception at its first screening Sunday. “Last summer I was in Chicago and there were cows all over the city. If they ever hear about this in Dublin, we’ll be awash in leprechauns.”

Besides painted moose and publicists, writers like Doyle and those who love good writing, like English director Stephen Frears and actors Ben Kingsley and Philip Seymour Hoffman, are appreciated here by a literate, film-savvy crowd. And Doyle’s new film, directed by first-timer Kieron Walsh, is the kind of picture that seems perfect for this festival. Its hero, an introverted, film-obsessed Irish schoolmaster, played by Peter McDonald, falls for a raucous beauty (Flora Montgomery) who makes her living as a petty thief. As the romance heats up, McDonald’s celluloid fantasies merge with reality; the couple act out scenes from “Breathless” while McDonald does a dead-on John Wayne impersonation from “The Searchers.”

Doyle, best known for writing “The Commitments,” had been writing a novel that began on a rainy night with a man face down in the gutter, imagining that his life had gone wrong. It felt so much like the beginning of “Sunset Boulevard” that Doyle started working more movie references into the story. Soon it was a script, not a novel: “It had to be visual, I wanted to see the rain falling down on this guy.”

Doyle often had to revise his script depending on what film clips were available for use in the picture. When the filmmakers couldn’t use an excerpt from “La Strada,” Doyle wrote a similar scene and Walsh filmed it in a mock Italian neo-realistic black-and-white. “The guy who plays the Italian peasant is actually a friend who teaches Italian in Dublin,” explains Doyle. “Pretty convincing, isn’t he?”

Writers have a thing for Frears. “Grifters” screenwriter Donald Westlake, in town for a Frears tribute at the festival, says 23 of his books have been made into films, but Frears is the only director he’s worked with “that I’d walk across the street to speak to.” Doyle, who’s adapted two of his novels for Frears (“The Van” and “The Snapper”), says the British director is the only person he knows who’s watched “The Searchers” more than he has.

Perhaps Frears is beloved because he has a writer’s contrary personality. He’s here promoting “Liam,” a searing new drama he wrote about poverty and prejudice in 1930s Liverpool. Promoting might be too strong a word. Although Frears’ film doesn’t have a U.S. distributor, he hasn’t been courting any studio acquisition executives. In fact, he’s rebuffed all inquiries for now.

Told that refusing to sell his movie at a film festival is a little like being a virgin in a whorehouse, he responds by crooning a Groucho Marx song from “Horsefeathers”: “I don’t know what they have to say/it makes no difference anyway/whatever it is, I’m against it.”

Frears says the film, financed by the BBC, needs special handling. “It’s probably idiotic to say this, but it’s a very pure film and it should be protected from what we could loosely call capitalism,” he explains, munching on a shrimp cocktail in his hotel room. “I’ve made films where marketing razzmatazz is appropriate, but this film deals with modest people and if someone spends a lot of money buying it, they’ll need to make their money back. That’s when films get turned into something they’re not. Don’t worry--it’s not a matter of principles. It’s just a matter of being sensible.”

Frears says his fondness for writers dates back to his days working in the British theater and for the BBC. “I have a clear sense that I come second. When I make a film I’m entering an imaginative world that someone else has created. I do challenge writers; with every movie, we have a critical conversation where we pull the script to pieces to find out if the writer is robust enough to defend himself while being cross-examined.”

He stabs a shrimp with his fork. “It’s only the bad writers who are nervous. If the script is a house of cards, then you’re in trouble. But the good writers are happy to improve on their work.”

Language Barrier Bridged for Script

James Schamus is a founder of Good Machine, a leading film production company that co-financed “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” a dazzling new Ang Lee film that earned unanimous critical raves at its showings here. But Schamus is also a longtime Lee collaborator and one of “Crouching Tiger’s” three screenwriters. That proved quite a challenge, since Schamus, who lives in New York, doesn’t speak Mandarin Chinese, while his script collaborators, Wang Hui Ling and Kuo-Rong Tsai, who reside in China, don’t speak English.

“We just bounced the pingpong ball across the ocean,” explains Schamus. “I’d write in English, they’d translate my pages into Chinese, then they’d write in Chinese and I’d get the rewrite translated back into English.”

The experience gave Schamus a heightened respect for the complexities of Chinese language. “It’s 5,000 years old, so there’s a depth of storytelling that our language simply doesn’t have. It was especially difficult because we wanted a movie that would appeal to both Asian and American audiences at the same time.

“It was humbling. I never for a moment felt that I was not out of my depth. I learned more about my screenplay translating the subtitles back into English after we shot the film than I did actually working on the script.”

Because he didn’t want to leave his family for more than 10 days at a time, Schamus commuted back and forth to the set during filming. “I’d fly from New York to Detroit, where there was a cheap Northwest flight over the North Pole to Beijing,” he explains. “Then I’d fly from Beijing to Urumchi, just south of the Gobi desert, then drive seven hours to the Taklamakan plateau, north of Tibet. Of course it’s only seven hours if you don’t get lost in a sandstorm, which we did several times.”

He laughs. “It’s not like driving the 405. It’s like riding a very old roller coaster without a seat belt.”

Kingsley as Gangster in ‘Sexy Beast’

Ben Kingsley is charming, erudite and can quote Shakespeare and Harold Pinter without batting an eye, which would make him the complete opposite of the malevolent, foul-tongued gangster he plays in “Sexy Beast,” a new British gangster thriller that made quite a splash here. He was so convincing as a vicious East End thug that director Jonathan Glickman says: “On set, no one would go near Ben. They were scared [expletive] of him.”

Just in from Los Angeles, where he’d been secretly working on Steven Spielberg’s upcoming “A.I.” (“don’t ask because I won’t tell”), he explains that he was attracted to playing the gangster role largely because of a sparkling script, courtesy of British writers Louis Mellis and David Scinto.

“It was like jazz, there was this great rhythm on the page,” he says. “For the first 15 years of my career I did Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Gorky and Brecht, so with that grounding in language I’ve gotten pretty good at recognizing good writing. And when I’m reading a script, if the rhythm of the writing isn’t as good as my own, why bother to make the leap? I’d rather putter around in my garden in Oxfordshire than settle for less than challenging writing.”

Kingsley played a gangster once before as the middle-aged Meyer Lansky in “Bugsy.” But his character in “Sexy Beast” is more volatile--he’s always ready to explode. “There’s something tribal about gangsters,” he says. “And this movie is a tribal tale about a man who has dared to exile himself from the tribe and when he refuses to come back and help the tribe, all hell breaks loose.

“I think we’ve always been fascinated by gangsters because they’re not emperors, but they have a code. I’m sure honor among thieves is an ancient phrase. Look at the lower-depths characters who hang around Falstaff in ‘Henry IV.’ They’re not so different from the gangsters of the 20th century.”

Playing a Writer

If any actor should be fascinated with writers right now, it would be Hoffman, who plays a wordsmith in two films here; a hapless playwright-turned-screenwriter in David Mamet’s “State and Main” and rock critic Lester Bangs in Cameron Crowe’s “Almost Famous.” In fact, he spent most of his interview stealing looks at a local newspaper review of “Dream Catcher,” a new memoir about J.D. Salinger by daughter Margaret Salinger.

“For me, the appeal was playing characters created by two great writers,” he says. “David and Cameron are very different guys. When I asked Cameron for research material, he sent me boxes of stuff. With David, he’d just say don’t worry about it. He doesn’t want you to get sidetracked by anything but what he’s written.”

Hoffman would clearly rather be reading about Salinger--a childhood hero--than talking about playing writers himself. He waves the review in the air, pointing to the provocative headline: “Should Writers Have Children?”

“Just that headline alone really makes you realize how complicated writing is,” he says. “It tells you more about what writers go through than anything I could ever say.”