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THE NORMAN INVASION

Will 2004 be Norman Jewison’s golden year?

Text: DON GILLMOR

1 | 2 | 3 | DEC

On Bloor Street during the Toronto International Film Festival, there is a sea of black clothes, a dark cloud of cinematic angst. The stars, handlers, audience and deal makers are barking into cellphones, demanding gross points, schmoozing, lying, faking, pleading, never eating lunch in this town again.

A few blocks south of this annual parade, Norman Jewison is in his spacious office, doing post-production work on his new film, The Statement. He is 77, fit looking, with a trimmed beard, wearing a polo shirt, cargo pants and sunglasses, eating a banana. He has the Hollywood standard-issue black baseball cap that makes film people look like malevolent softball players. The festival has intruded on his already nervously tight deadline for the film’s December release. He has friends coming in who he has to entertain. "Nic Cage is in town," he says casually. There are others, old friends from a dozen different films. And he hosts the annual barbecue at the Canadian Film Centre, the facility he founded that has become the spawning ground for English Canadian cinema. The barbecue is the festival’s hot ticket, a Woodstock of ambition, gossip and gratuitously cruel observations under the late summer sun.

The looming spectre of Oscar is another added pressure. "There’s no point in beating around the bush," says Robert Lantos, whose company, Serendipity Point Films, is producing The Statement in conjunction with Company Pictures in Britain and Odessa Films in France. "When a film is released in December, it’s because we believe that it has a chance to get an Academy Award nomination." Sony Pictures Classics, the distributor, shares Lantos’ view that The Statement is Oscar worthy, and the marketing campaign will try to position the film as a contender.

Jewison’s relationship with Oscar has been a regular if slightly frustrating one: His films have been frequently nominated and have won a dozen Oscars, but he has never won for best director, despite three nominations (see page 44). His understated style has rarely been in vogue, and in an age when the kinetic narratives of Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino are celebrated, his linear, meticulous storytelling is often overlooked. The Statement could be his last kick at Oscar’s elusive can and a fitting (if slightly pat, Hollywood-style) end to a distinguished career.

I consider myself a storyteller," Jewison says, pacing in front of an antique leather couch. "And film is the medium in which I work." As a child growing up in east-end Toronto, he used to solicit two cents from friends until he had the 10 cents needed to get into a movie. Afterwards, he gathered his five investors and related what he had seen on the screen. He has a storyteller’s rhythms and a knack for accents. "If I can tell a film’s story in about eight minutes and hold someone," he says, "and I can see they’re really locked, then I know I’ve got a pretty good story."

Based on the 1995 Brian Moore novel, The Statement offers a pretty good story. Pierre Brossard is a devout Catholic who was complicit in the execution of seven Jews in Vichy France in 1944. For the next 40 years, he is sheltered by the Church and aided by the government. Based on a real incident, Moore’s fictional exploration revives his familiar themes of betrayal and faith. Like many of his books, it has a serious subject presented in the form of a thriller – a powerful genre, Moore once noted, that had been left to second-rate writers for too long. His books are a natural match for Jewison, whose films tend to tackle large, sometimes unmarketable issues within the context of an entertaining story (In the Heat of the Night, A Soldier’s Story, ...And Justice for All).

Lantos bought the rights to The Statement in 1996, but it remained on the back burner until recently. He showed the book to Jewison, who was immediately interested. "I’m old enough to remember what was going on in 1944," Jewison says, laughing his frequent high-pitched laugh. "I was young, but I remember." The story was riveting, but the hero was a monster, a handicap in the film world, both in terms of potential box office and in attracting an actor to play him.

"We needed a movie star," Lantos says flatly, sitting in his tasteful office, sipping a cappuccino made from the monstrous brass espresso machine in his lobby. "It’s not a small film." The Statement cost $28-million, and its difficult theme would need star power to sell. "We knew there were very few stars who could play this part," he says.

Before you can get a star, you need a script. They hired Ronald Harwood, a British playwright (The Dresser) to write one. This was before Harwood adapted The Pianist for Roman Polanski, winning an Oscar earlier this year for best adapted screenplay (and for which Polanski earned a late-career Oscar for best directing). Jewison laughs at the coincidence. "Everybody automatically said, ‘Weren’t Jewison and Lantos smart to hire Harwood to adapt Moore’s novel.’ We had no idea."

1 | 2 | 3 | DEC