Once Upon a Time, When Truths Ran Deep

In “Simon Magus,” his atmospheric feature film debut, British writer-director Ben Hopkins offers a stylized twist on the film depiction of pre-Holocaust Eastern European Jews. Hopkins describes the film as “a magical story in the tradition of the Yiddish fairy tale.”

“I always felt that if you want to say a truth, you don’t hold up a mirror to it,” Hopkins says. “Symbolism and imagination go deeper than the surface of things and often find the real truth. I live in everyday life, and when I go to the cinema I want to leave the everyday life.”

This philosophy is on display in “Simon Magus,” which opens in Los Angeles on March 9 in limited release. The film was actually shot two years ago, with Welsh farmland standing in for Hopkins’ impressionistic turn-of-the-century Polish village. It was released last year in England and elsewhere in Europe, and was shown at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, after which it was picked up by IDP Distribution, the company that’s releasing it in the U.S. The film also screened last fall at the Jewish Film Festival in Los Angeles.

The title character, played by Noah Taylor (the band manager in “Almost Famous” and the pianist David Helfgott as a young man in “Shine”), is an outcast among his fellow Jews in an insular shtetl (a small Jewish community in Eastern Europe). Simple-minded Simon hears voices and has strange, sometimes demonic visions. If Simon Magus were a contemporary character, he’d most likely be labeled schizophrenic. As it is, some in the village think Simon is possessed by the devil, while others believe he has magical fortunetelling powers.

Manipulated by local Gentiles into converting to Christianity and working against the Jews on an important land deal, Simon turns the tables on everyone, revealing that perhaps he’s not quite the village idiot many take him to be. In addition to Taylor, the film’s international cast features Ian Holm, Rutger Hauer, Embeth Davidtz and Stuart Townsend.

The building of a railway line plays a central role in “Simon Magus.” A Jew (Townsend) trying to prove himself a worthy suitor to the woman he loves competes with a wealthy Gentile merchant for the land rights to run the station, expecting new business opportunities and much-needed capital to arrive with the train. This story runs on a parallel track to Simon’s more fable-like existence, in which the lines between reality and fantasy are blurred, but the two merge dramatically at the film’s climax.

In some ways, the story is a classic root-for-the-underdog tale. But everyone here is unaware of the painful irony underlying the enterprise: The same railroad that the shtetl Jews are championing will eventually transport them to their deaths in Nazi extermination camps.

This was not part of a deliberate dramatic plan for the film, Hopkins points out. “Originally, the railway wasn’t there. The story was about owning a bit of land to make a hotel or something boring like that. But as I wrote it, it kept becoming more like a western,” he continues during a recent interview. “Oddly enough, to me it was sort of like ‘Once Upon a Time in the West,’ which is one of my favorite films, the way the Jews and the Christians were fighting for the railway land.

“Then it just struck me one day that 50 years later these Jews would be taken on that railway to be killed. It worked out that way without my intending to do it, which is one of the nice things about writing, the way things creep up on you without you actually realizing.”

This amalgam of inspiration--part fantasy, part romance, part good guys versus bad guys--is not altogether surprising, considering Hopkins’ background. The 31-year-old London native didn’t become interested in film until his teens, when he started attending reduced-price afternoon screenings at a local art-house cinema.

After soaking up the works of artists such as Werner Herzog and Federico Fellini--no strangers to cinematic flights of fancy themselves--Hopkins decided he too wanted to become a filmmaker. But first he attended Oxford University, where he studied the German and Italian languages and literature.

“It doesn’t specifically inform the film,” Hopkins says of his time in Oxford’s hallowed halls, “but all that book learning does add up to some kind of wealth of intellectual riches. It’s a rich flower bed, so to speak, and all kinds of stuff grows on it--flowers and weeds.”

Jokes Taylor, “Ben’s appallingly intelligent. He speaks about eight languages fluently. I’ve done foreign press junkets and film festivals with him, and he’ll be doing one interview in Polish and one in Italian and be fielding questions in Slovakian or whatever. It’s pretty impressive,” the actor says during a phone interview from London.

Taylor, whose next film is the big-budget action flick “Tomb Raider” this summer, observes of his disparate acting assignments, “They’re very different kettles of fish to work on. I imagine ‘Magus’ was probably the instant-coffee budget on ‘Tomb Raider.’ ” (The budget for “Simon Magus” was about $4.5 million; “Tomb Raiders’ ” budget was just under $100 million.)

“There was a very literary quality [to the script] and the sort of dialogue that you don’t really get a chance to do in film,” Taylor notes. “It was unlike anything I’d worked on before, but it reminded me of some classic piece of theater or a folkloric tale that might have been around for a long time.”

Indeed, the literary roots of “Simon Magus” run deep and branch out in several directions. The character appears in the New Testament, “a walk-on part,” Hopkins says wryly. “He offers Peter money to become one of the Disciples, but Peter turns him down, saying it’s not about money.”

Simon Magus is also depicted as a hapless magician in a number of early Christian folk tales, illustrating the biblical point that Christian magic is better than pagan trickery. “I felt sorry for this loser,” Hopkins says, “so in the script Simon became this slightly persecuted person whom everyone made fun of but who turned out in the end to have a kind of true spiritual power.”

After completing “Simon Magus,” Hopkins directed another original script, “The Nine Lives of Thomas Katz,” which opened recently in Germany. “It’s a black-and-white avant-garde film about the end of the world, and it’s never going to break box office records,” the filmmaker says. “But it opened with 14 prints in Germany and has done quite well over there.”

Film distributors in England turned down “Thomas Katz,” and Hopkins has few expectations about it being widely seen. He is outspoken about what he views as the shortcomings of independent film distribution, especially in his homeland.

“Sometimes there seems to me to be a lack of energy on the distribution side of the industry to try and get more interesting product to the public, probably because they don’t have to--there’s enough film out there, and enough people are making money out of those movies. ‘Simon Magus’ I think probably plays best with a middle-aged audience, but no one can be [bothered] to try and market for them.”

There’s a “flexibility built into the American market that we don’t really have in Britain. When your film is released with one print in one cinema in your country, you feel a bit frustrated,” he laments about the way “Simon Magus” was handled in England last year. “So you think, maybe I could somehow do this myself. Or maybe a group of us could get together and put our films together as a package.

“I would certainly give up a few years of making films if I felt this could make a difference and help filmmakers who are a bit more interesting to get their stuff out there to more people.”

In the meantime, as Hopkins awaits release of “Simon Magus” in the U.S., he’s focusing on a number of writing projects. “They all move ahead slowly,” he says a bit ruefully. “It’s like a very slow horse race where one horse briefly moves ahead of the other, and then it’s overtaken by the next.”

Left to his own devices, he may weave fanciful tales like “Simon Magus,” but Hopkins also recognizes the more down-to-earth reality of the motion picture business. “I love the idea of directors choosing what they do, but it’s not up to me which film gets made,” he says. “I write many scripts, and whichever one is made next has nothing to do with me. It’s to do with the men with the checkbooks.”