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Fearless adaptation >> Des McAnuff takes on Honoré de Balzac with Cousin Bette by MATTHEW HAYS
But a steady hand in the director's chair might be expected when one scans his impressive CV, which is loaded with credits as a theatre director. Titles include the musical Huckleberry Finn (for which he won a Tony in 1985), a revival of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying and Tommy, which he adapted for the stage with Pete Townshend. The accomplishments manifest themselves in McAnuff's pleasant sense of confidence. He insists he wasn't too daunted at the prospect of adapting Balzac, a famous and exhaustively-read author. Or, in particular, one of the scribe's major works. "Certainly, it was a challenging assignment. But being slavishly faithful to the novel was not an issue for me or the screenwriters. I felt it was more important to be true to the film, rather than slavishly obedient." Cousin Bette has Lange playing a long-suffering fortysomething woman who decides, quite devilishly, to take revenge on her greedy family. Set in the 1840s, the greed depicted in the film--seen as one of the main reasons for the revolution of 1848 in France--also neatly doubles as an analogy for contemporary mammon, the vastly expanding global economic gap between rich and poor McAnuff finds so appalling. Was McAnuff worried audiences might lose his point, considering the distance in time between story and the here and now? "That's a really good question, so let's see how we can evade it... I've accepted that certain people won't be interested in certain nuances in the film. You have to accept that. If people want a dark, funny revenge ride, you can appreciate the film on that level too. And just because an audience may not be conscious of everything happening in the film, it doesn't mean it can't still have an impact." And McAnuff is particularly proud of his work with Lange, who was a moving force behind the film. "I know it sounds like interview talk, but we do have a special relationship. I met her through [her husband] Sam Shepard, and we've known each other for years. That gave us a real advantage when we began this project." The differences between working with actors for the stage and the screen were immediately apparent to McAnuff. "One of the main dangers of coming from the stage is the assumption that you know more than you do. Spontaneity is extremely important in cinema. You're only required to capture the moment once. You don't want to rehearse and rehearse for weeks and then deliver a stillborn moment for the camera." And coming from the more intimate and significantly less expensive medium of theatre, did McAnuff find it hard to work for a big corporate movie studio like Fox? "For the most part, we did really well. There were moments along the journey when I was concerned. But mainly I got support. This film is definitely in keeping with this particular studio's mandate. It's not like they were expecting Godzilla." Cousin Bette opens Friday, June 26
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A $15-million budget backed by Fox Searchlight, 20th Century Fox's answer to Miramax. A cast that features Jessica Lange, Elisabeth Shue and Bob Hoskins. A tasteful, confident adaptation of Honoré de Balzac's novel La Cousine Bette. These certainly don't sound like attributes of a directorial debut, but they are. Cousin Bette contains all these elements, and it's Toronto expatriate Des McAnuff's first feature.