by SARAH ROWLAND

Flashbacks of creepy priests and unsavoury altar boy confessionals; predator hockey coaches getting swarmed outside media-frenzied trials and jail-cell pariahs on the receiving end of their daily tenderizing—these are a few examples of how pedophiles are traditionally presented in film. Depraved hedonists who should be castrated and left to die.

“Like most people, I used to have that same knee-jerk reaction,” says filmmaker Nicole Kassell. “I wrote them off as evil.”

But this view gave way to a degree of compassion after seeing Steven Fechter’s The Woodsman, a play about a convicted child molester named Walter who is out on parole and trying to get his life back together.

“For me, it was a very transformative experience to see a character, who is so often just described as a monster or one-dimensional evil, as an actual human being struggling with his demons and filled with shame and self-loathing,” she says.

The young New Yorker, who was still a film student at N.Y.U. at the time, was so impressed that she decided to adapt the off-Broadway production into a screenplay. Her version, which she co-wrote with Fechter, takes on new characters and revamps old ones, including vigilante co-workers, a disgusted cop and Candy, a neighbourhood chester with a ferocious appetite for underage boys. The script ended up winning the 2001 Slamdance Screenplay Competition, which attracted the attention of producer Lee Daniels (Monster’s Ball).

Bringing home the Bacon

With Daniels came Kevin Bacon, who was brave enough to sign on as the hostile and tormented Walter, and Kyra Sedgwick who plays Walter’s equally damaged love interest. For the first-time filmmaker, collaborating with the Footloose star was an unexpected thrill.

“I was so shocked,” says Kassell, who was 12 when the Kenny Loggins theme song ruled the airwaves. “I remember how much I loved the dance scenes. I wanted to learn how to dance like that. So directing him [Bacon] was kind of an inner and outer body experience. When I was working with him, he was just Kevin, but then I would just step outside myself and be like, ‘Oh my God.’’’

To keep herself grounded during these star-struck moments, Kassell would stay focused on the material, which she knew inside out after spending months researching, interviewing and sitting in on support groups for both offenders and victims. “It also helped that [Bacon] was very generous and committed to a lot of rehearsal with me beforehand,” she says.

In fact, the two spent weeks in pre-production paring down the dialogue to a bare minimum. Anything Bacon thought was extraneous or inorganic, he would scrap and if she wanted to keep it, then he would politely ask her to justify her reasons. “It wasn’t until about two weeks into the shoot that I really felt like I had won him over,” she says. “He had seen the dailies and felt that the footage was solid and that just kind of sealed his trust in me.”

Perverted perfection

One of the most disturbing scenes in the movie shows Walter on the brink of a relapse, inviting 11-year-old Robin (Hannah Pilkes) to sit on his lap. Pilkes is beautifully understated as a conflicted preteen who doesn’t want to offend her new friend but who definitely has the “no” feeling about the situation. Likewise, Bacon gives a bone-chilling performance as a man who is sick and sickened by himself. For Kassell, capturing this squeamish moment—where the boundaries are so confusing for the child and the inner turmoil so destructive for the adult—was undoubtedly her biggest coup.

“Technically it was brutal,” she says. “We had to do nine pages in one day. The standard is three pages. We were on location with awful noise and on top of that, it was a really, really upsetting scene. It was just a hard place to go and to take these actors. But they were just real troopers.”

The gruelling shooting schedule and emotional upheaval paid off, and Kassell accomplished her mission to present a thought-provoking portrait of a pedophile as a human, rather than a straight-up monster.

“There’s no doubt that they [child molesters] have done terrible things but these people don’t live in vacuums or come out of nowhere,” she says. “They are our brothers, fathers and sons.”

The Woodsman opens at Cinéma du Parc, Friday, Jan. 28

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