By Brian D. Johnson
Casting Away
Juliette Lewis has been put through her paces by some of Hollywood's
most exacting directors. As a teenager in Martin Scorsese's Cape
Fear, she let a leering Robert De Niro slide his thumb into her mouth. In
Husbands and Wives, she played teacher's pet to a lusting Woody
Allen. Then, in Natural Born Killers, Oliver Stone sent her on a
mass-murder field trip. But last month in a Toronto recording studio, the
27-year-old American actress faced one of the toughest assignments of
her career. Starring in Canadian director Bruce McDonald's new movie,
Claire's Hat, Lewis plays a Quebecoise vagabond adrift in Toronto who
can't speak English. The problem is, Lewis can't speak French.
"J'ai passe toute ma vie a Montreal," Lewis intones softly into the
microphone, as she reads from a phonetic script. A dialogue coach
from Quebec corrects her, one syllable at a time. She does it again,
over and over until it begins to sound remarkably like French. "Very
good, now listen for the musicality," says the coach, scanning the
phrase as a series of beats. "Now try it in your lower register." After a
dozen takes, Lewis nails the line. Two hours later, the entire 50-word
passage -- a voice-over of her character reading a letter -- is on tape.
Making Canadian movies is a bizarre business at the best of times. But
the idea of Lewis, a Californian, in the role of a unilingual
French-Canadian takes culture-blind casting to new extremes.
"Everybody knows I'm American," she says. "I thought if I could just get it
to a place where people aren't distracted and believe me. The sound
technicians were French-Canadian. And I felt encouraged because they
gave me thumbs-up on the first day of shooting." Luckily, although Lewis
is in almost every scene, she has very little dialogue.
Still, you wonder why the filmmakers didn't just cast a Quebecoise. But
no Quebec actress was deemed bankable. McDonald's previous films,
from Highway 61 to Hard Core Logo, have been critically acclaimed but
commercially marginal. So by casting Lewis, along with American
actors Gina Gershon and Mickey Rourke, Toronto producer Robert
Lantos hopes the director may finally get the audience he deserves.
For Canadian cinema, recruiting star power from outside the country
marks a shift in strategy. Sturla Gunnarsson just wrapped Rare Birds,
starring William Hurt as a Newfoundlander. And Philip Seymour
Hoffman (State and Main) is set to star in Owning Molony, the true story
of a CIBC employee convicted of embezzling $17 million. But during the
1990s, director Atom Egoyan made his breakthrough with Exotica and
The Sweet Hereafter -- two films that had no marquee names yet
launched international careers for Canadian actors Sarah Polley and
Bruce Greenwood.
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The same day I watched Lewis struggle with her French, I saw Thirteen
Days, a taut Hollywood thriller about the Cuban missile crisis starring
Greenwood as John F. Kennedy. This, too, appears to be an unlikely bit
of casting, but it's much less of a stretch. Canadians have been playing
American presidents since Raymond Massey was Abraham Lincoln.
Greenwood -- born in Noranda, Que., raised in Vancouver and now
living in Los Angeles -- didn't have to adopt a foreign language, just an
accent. And with his sandy hair, boyish good looks and intelligent blue
eyes, he bears a more than passing resemblance to Kennedy.
Unlike Lewis, he was cast partly for his anonymity. "If you had a big star
play Kennedy," the 44-year-old actor explained in a recent interview,
"you would have to get past one icon to get to the other, and that might
be difficult." But Thirteen Days, a $120-million studio movie, still needed
a star to secure financing. So producer Kevin Costner took on the
inflated role of JFK aide Kenny O'Donnell, affecting a weird, and
distracting, Bostonian drawl. Greenwood, however, softpedals the JFK
accent to concentrate on the character.
As a Cold War president trying to outwit both the Soviets and a hawkish
Pentagon, he creates a Kennedy whose low-key ambiguity is at odds
with his public image -- a Kennedy who seems almost, well, Canadian.
When I mention this, the actor laughs but does not disagree: "We see
him where we haven't seen him before -- behind closed doors. He's not
performing. The script doesn't rely on Camelot and tousled hair and
wooden sailing boats. And the more I read, the more I realized Camelot
was a 50th of who he was. He was a voracious reader. He could quote
poets and writers forever in profoundly appropriate ways."
While shooting Thirteen Days, adds Greenwood, "I lay awake at night
worrying I was not serving his memory. It's a big vessel. You can't fill
it.
As an actor . . . how can an actor do that?" As if to answer his question,
a violent gust of wind suddenly rattles the window of his Toronto hotel
suite. "A lot of spooky stuff happened like that during the shoot," says
Greenwood. Such as? "I'd rather not say. It's personal."
The final day of shooting Claire's Hat. In a frigid studio on the Toronto
lakeshore, Bruce McDonald, dressed in a ratty black overcoat and
cowboy hat, is filming a scene set in a police station. During a break, he
lights a cigarette and talks about how he first tried to make the movie
with a Montreal producer, but couldn't persuade her to cast a Quebec
actress. "They wanted a star from Paris," he says, "so the money all fell
apart." Next, Lantos moved in. When the Montreal producer was
reluctant to sell the script, Lantos sent McDonald to Montreal with a
leather bag full of cash -- $50,000. As if buying a rug, McDonald started
forking out wads of cash and slapping them on her desk until he closed
the deal for just $10,000. Lantos then told him he could make the film
cheaply with an unknown, or hire a star and do it properly. "I thought,
'Well, if I'm going to make this movie, I've got to play the movie game
and cast a movie star,' " says McDonald. He ended up with a
$12-million budget.
Semi Chellas, the Toronto screenwriter of Claire's Hat, has nothing but
praise for Lewis, but says: "I really do feel strange about [the casting]
because there's so much fine acting in this country." Lantos, meanwhile,
proudly points to the fact that the movie is set explicitly in Toronto. "I
think it's great that we are taking a Hollywood star and getting her to
play a French-Canadian," he says, mentioning a curious precedent -- a
1941 British propaganda movie, Forty-Ninth Parallel, featuring
Laurence Olivier as a French-Canadian trapper who encounters a Nazi
U-boat crew in Quebec. But Lantos bristles when reminded of another
precedent -- his own casting of Gabrielle Lazure, a French-Canadian,
as a WASP princess in 1985's Joshua Then and Now. In the end, he
had an English-Canadian actress dub Lazure's lines.
Actors, of course, are always pretending to be someone they're not,
from a Polish Meryl Streep to a blind Al Pacino. And the question is
always the same: can they pull it off?
