Safe Harbor at Last

Newfoundland is a tough place. The weather is harsh and unpredictable, travel and communication are difficult. It’s wind-whipped, fog-bound, and home to moose, caribou, black spruce and not much else. To make a movie here, you have to embrace these conditions, even if it means embracing a garbage can, a toilet bowl or a ship’s railing--and then losing your lunch.

Aboard a pitching ferryboat off the Newfoundland coast one fine May day, the cast and crew of “The Shipping News”--including the first assistant director, the soundman, the unit photographer, the dialect coach, stand-ins and this reporter--did just that. Faces ashen, many of them retired to the ship’s lounge and died. To make the death a lingering one, the catering crew thoughtfully served seafood chowder and beef stew. As one wag put it, they might as well have thrown the stuff on the floor and eliminated the middleman.

Meanwhile, on the deck above, where the rocking was greatest, stars Kevin Spacey, Julianne Moore and Judi Dench, and director Lasse Hallstrom soldiered on. Spacey, who seemed unaffected, slept between scenes down below. Dench tossed aside her London Times crossword puzzle and sat bolt upright with her eyes closed, at one point opening them and exclaiming, “Jesus!” Moore, staggering across the heaving deck like a drunk, said, “Lasse, can’t we shoot it there?” (She meant dockside.)

“Lasse just laughed,” Moore says, then mimics him: “‘This is not bad. We have this all the time in Sweden, the big waves.’” The scene they were filming was the arrival of Spacey’s character, Quoyle, to his ancestral homeland. He’s supposed to be seasick, so the ferry’s captain deliberately courted motion, bringing an inherently unstable vessel--it had a flat bottom and no ballast--abreast of the ground swells. The film’s crew members didn’t know this beforehand. Now they do.

“I didn’t expect it to be that rough,” Hallstrom understates later, bemused. “There was no wind. That’s the nature of the ocean, I guess. It was an interesting effect.” Some in the crew were still feeling this interesting effect the following day, although at least they were on dry land, a remote, spectacular piece of oceanfront property with a cove, cliffs and a dramatic point that formerly served as a potato farm.

This is known in the film as Quoyle’s Point. On the point itself is a weathered green house cabled to the ground at the corners. As the film would have it, the house was dragged across sea ice from a neighboring island and lashed to the ground so it wouldn’t blow away. It looks like something out of Charles Addams. In its simplicity and severity it is every bit as gothic as the Norman Bates house in “Psycho.” Hallstrom, approaching it on foot, gazes at it affectionately, as if he’d like to move in.

The Quoyle house is a sort of snapshot of “The Shipping News,” which is based on E. Annie Proulx’s 1994 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a widower (Spacey) who, with children in tow, follows his aunt (Dench) to the place where she was born to sort out his life, shed some baggage and start anew (which is where Moore comes in). Quoyle is an unlikely hero. He’s fat, physically and socially awkward, uncomfortable in his own skin. His wife (Cate Blanchett) cheated on him repeatedly, then kidnapped his kids and sold them to a child pornography ring before dying in a car crash. When he gets to Newfoundland, he finds a job at a third-rate newspaper called the Gammy Bird, and discovers that his ancestors, including his father, were renegades and degenerates. Quoyle has a lot to overcome.

“What I liked about Quoyle, and I think the challenge of playing him, is that he’s a man with virtually no confidence,” Spacey says, sitting on a log above the beach. “It’s a more difficult character to track because he’s not trying to do anything. You can usually see in a character that he’s trying to achieve this, he’s trying to get through that. Quoyle’s life just happens to him, so he’s a very reactive character.”

Spacey is not exactly known for playing reactive characters. Often they are quick-witted, verbose, sardonic. Think of his pot-smoking dad in “American Beauty” (1999) or his wolf in sheep’s clothing in “The Usual Suspects” (1995) or his prophet of doom Hickey in a 1999 Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh.” Quoyle is the antithesis of these characters. To play him, Spacey has adopted a whining, self-pitying tone. It’ll be interesting to see if audiences will sympathize with a character like that, although as he grows stronger, maybe that tone will moderate.

Spacey doesn’t necessarily look the part either. Someone like John Goodman does, but Goodman is not going to carry a film. Asked if he was concerned about his physical appearance, Spacey says, “It was a concern of mine at first, but ultimately there wasn’t enough time [to put on weight]. What Lasse and I decided was that the sort of lumbering, out-of-shape quality of Quoyle would have to be one that I would act. There’s a couple of people I know from these districts who are gigantic, and I’m thinking in that sort of head.”

Fans of Proulx’s book may have a similar problem with Dench, although Agnis’ physical presence takes a back seat to her personality, which Dench can easily master: hard-bitten, flinty, almost, but not quite, humorless.

Dench speaks with a Newfoundland accent that seems authentic but is mercifully intelligible. And she makes it all seem so effortless. Between takes, she does the puzzle and works on needlepoint that reads “The Shipping News.” She collects rocks from the beach to add to her film locations collection. Although she needs help up the grassy hill above the beach, she’s not frail. Crew members say she likes to zip around the set on the back of a four-wheeler.

“My husband used to say you play under the line all the time,” Dench, 67, says about playing Agnis and characters in general. (Her husband, Michael Williams, died about two months before “The Shipping News” began shooting.) “Don’t play the line, ever. It’s like layers. The line is the top. The one you’re playing might be the 14th down. You don’t play anything on the button, as it were.”

This is very much in keeping with Proulx’s book. The characters don’t exactly give themselves away. The harshness of the conditions has bred in Newfoundlanders, at least in Proulx’s conception of them, a tendency to keep their own counsel. While the script tries to be faithful to this spirit in the book, it inevitably deviates in some of the details.

In the film, Quoyle has one child, Bunny (played by Texas triplets Alyssa, Kaitlyn and Lauren Gainer), not two. Bunny is not sold into sexual enslavement, but to an adoption ring. Nor is she as strange and alienating as in the book. In perhaps the biggest departure, the character of Wavey, Quoyle’s love interest, has been beefed up, in more ways than one. She used to be a female version of Quoyle, a bit of a sad sack who lost her husband at sea and whose son is mentally disabled. Although Wavey’s situation has remained the same, she hasn’t. She’s much stronger. Quoyle has to fight to get her.

“Ah, yeah,” says producer Linda Goldstein Knowlton, who shepherded the film through eight long years of development. “I just want to gather my thoughts about this. I think that we had to [change Wavey], because if a central part of this story is this man coming to trust himself, there had to be a woman whom he could prove to himself again that he could love and that he could love the right person and that he would be loved in return. In the book, Wavey does serve that purpose, but there had to be a little bit different characterization of the love story in order to make it as strong as it needed to be.”

Hallstrom says the book “is almost provokingly undramatic,” which is one of the things about it that appealed to him. At the same time, they had to “fix” that, and one way was through the love story. Certainly the project has had enough directors and screenwriters trying to fix it over the years.

“The Shipping News” is notorious, especially in Newfoundland, for being in development but never being made. Originally, the rights to the book were purchased for Knowlton by Stacey Snider of TriStar Pictures, who later moved on to Columbia, and is currently chairman of Universal Studios.

Hallstrom was actually involved at the beginning, bringing aboard screenwriter Laura Jones to craft a draft. They couldn’t get the script right, and Hallstrom moved on. Then director Fred Schepisi became attached, with John Travolta hovering in the background to star. Schepisi departed over “creative differences,” Travolta because of budgetary issues. Meanwhile, Beth Henley had taken a whack at the script, as had Jones (again) and Ron Bass. Then came Billy Bob Thornton, who was going to direct and star, and he brought along screenwriter Tom Epperson. Thornton departed--creative differences again--and Hallstrom came back in, with Miramax taking over distribution. Hallstrom brought in Robert Jacobs, who received sole screenplay credit.

Development is one thing--one long thing--and preproduction and shooting are another. They started scouting locations in August 2000 and began preproduction in earnest in Halifax during the winter, which was one of the worst. The people in Trinity, a fishing village that serves as a de facto headquarters, say they received 211/2 feet of snow.

Meanwhile, production designer David Gropman and his crew built Quoyle’s house in modules indoors, then shipped them by ferry and truck to Quoyle’s Point, where they were reassembled. The crew built a road to get there and bulldozed 5 feet of snow. The first day of the shoot, the production was greeted by a blizzard. For a party scene in which the revelers sink a ship, an icebreaker was brought in to clear the harbor.

Needless to say, the production is self-sufficient. Crew members are billeted all over the eastern part of the island, because there are few hotels. On weekends, they go to St. John’s, the capital, or a bar called Rocky’s in Trinity. Hallstrom goes back to Sweden to his see his wife, actress Lena Olin, and their children. He says it’s 12 hours door to door.

How remote is Newfoundland? Icebergs calved from Greenland float by. Some villages are accessible only by sea. FedEx is unknown in many parts of the island. Cell phones don’t work. The principal airport, in St. John’s, can be fogged in for days. The only other way off the island is a 24-hour bus, ferry and bus ride to Halifax.

Newfoundland may be remote, but Hollywood is never very far away. Hallstrom says he was concerned about the potential writers’ strike in June, which could have threatened production but was ultimately resolved.

“I think there was a week or two in December or January where we felt awfully close, but when we got to three or four weeks before production, everything came together and made sense,” he says. He’s speaking mostly about the script, not the physical production. He’s aware of how difficult the logistics have been but doesn’t lose sleep over it: “It’s fun [making movies] in America. You can actually focus on story and actors. This is all taken care of by production people.”

Hallstrom says he has been left alone by Miramax. In fact, he says company executives have been hands-off ever since they saw the dailies from “The Cider House Rules,” a policy the studio continued with the most recent film he directed for Miramax, “Chocolat.” The studio is even allowing him to cut the footage in Sweden.

And what kind of film will that be? All involved say they are surprised by how funny the material is, which is a good thing, since humor is a large part of the book’s appeal and makes the horrors endured by the characters tolerable. Apparently a big source of laughs is the Gammy Bird, the newspaper Quoyle works for. It is staffed by a wonderful collection of character actors: Scott Glenn, Pete Postlethwaite, Rhys Ifans and Gordon Pinsent. You can almost see the comic relief in their off-center faces.

Of course, even with all of these elements going for the film--a first-rate cast and crew and a script faithful to a good book--the pieces still have to fall into place. One potential pitfall may be sentimentality. The principals talk about Quoyle’s “journey,” which may be accurate but also suggests an achingly familiar progression from humiliation to triumph. (The book artfully finesses the issue.)

Certainly the film will have lots of atmosphere. “The Shipping News” is not being shot in Newfoundland because of its fried cod cheeks. As night falls on Quoyle’s Point, the crew deploys a long tube where potatoes once grew and starts feeding smoke through it. The smoke billows in scraps across the point, which is dramatically floodlit. When Hallstrom calls action, the figures of Quoyle and daughter Bunny scurry toward the house like phantoms.

The entire crew, though weary, is transfixed, as if watching a dream. In a way, in the usual way, it is a dream. When the smoke clears, it turns out that the figures are stand-ins, but that hardly matters, does it?

John Clark is a regular contributor to Calendar.