Red violinists

DIRECTOR FRANCOIS GIRARD AND screenwriter Don McKellar accompanied their recent collaboration, The Red Violin, to the 1999 Seattle International Film Festival, talking to audiences and journalists alike in their weekend visits. With a little cajoling, I managed to find a time to sit down with the collaborators together. Their first joint effort was 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, and they worked in The Red Violin on and off for over five years. The interview was as much a conversation between the two of them as with me, as if they couldnt wait to compare insights.

Sean Axmaker: How did The Red Violin get started as an idea?

Francois Girard: After Glenn Gould, the three of us[producer] Niv Fichman, Don and mewe were looking for something else to do together, so for a long while weve been discussing many ideas and trying to find something. One day I was in London and I had this idea of telling a story of a violin and a few days after I was in Berlin with Don and Niv where we were presenting 32 Short Films and we talked about this idea and it became alive very quickly. A few days after, we were already building the shape of the story and we got caught up in the idea, for years. That was five years and a half ago and were still talking about it.

Don McKellar: Francois is brilliant with coming up with these ideas. I remember when Niv and Francois first approached me about doing 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, or rather doing a biography about Glenn Gould, I was very skeptical because I knew Glenn Goulds life a little and I knew that it was very undramatic, but when I realized the implication of this 32 Short Films idea was very provocative and I got excited by it. I think the same is true about The Red Violin. I didnt want to do another biography film but when Francois suggested we do a biography of an instrument it was an exciting challenge and it was such a challenge to the idea that it would cross so much time and so many languages that I couldnt resist.

SA: Where did you get the idea of suturing the stories together with the fortune teller of the first episode and the auction of the last episode? Its like its bookended by these two events, one which predicts whats going to happen and one which draws back the history from what already happened and ties it all together.

FG: That came very early. I guess that the biggest challenge of The Red Violin is to give life to an inanimate object, and I would say that the other big challenge is to turn those five stories into one, make them feel like one story, so almost every structural idea, including the double narrator idea, is totally in response to that problem. We have two narrators bridging the whole thing and tying things together and then you have the convergence at the auction at the end where all the stories are represented, and you have the progression through age. The whole film is based on the lifetime progression thematically. You have the unborn child and then the child and the young adult and then maturity and then eventually youre back to the age of the master, so all those things are there in an effort to tie the stories together and build one story, the life of the violin, and escape from the five episodes as much as you can.

SA: How did you handle all those different languages in all those different countries?

FG: If were talking about the shoot or working with actors, I came to the conclusion that its actually an advantage. (Laughs.) Truly, I have this whole theory. It has to do with distance. If you work in Mandarin with Sylvia Chang and she reads the text in Mandarin, first of all you know exactly what shes talking about because youve been living the text for so long, so you know exactly where we are, youre never lost in what shes saying. And when youre not caught in the word-by-word and the wording, the accenting, it sort of forces you out

DM: You cant do line readings.

FG: Yes, exactly. Youre forced to talk to the actors in essential terms like energy, emotion, musicality, all of that transpires really clearly, even more clearly if youre working in a different language. So I really thought it was not a handicap at all. But the writing part (both laugh), like when we came work with all the writers, it was very complicated.

DM: I found it really fascinating because as Ive said before, we realized at one point that we were just writing the subtitles for the film, we had written the text and slaved over the exact wording and realized that thats not what they were going to be speaking, so we went to these different countries and chose writers, real writers, from each country. Not just translators, but writers that we trusted and who knew the period, who could write dialogue that was convincing. Actually it was really exciting for me to be able to meet these different writers and hand it over and discuss nuances. It was really complicated and was probably hellish for Francois because a lot of it was happening during the shooting.