Montreal: Canada’s foremost film director, Norman Jewison, will be discussing the art and business of adapting stage and literary properties to the screen at this year’s Banff Master Class on directing. The director says he’ll also take a look at original screenplays, but his keenest interest at this point is the transference of theatre to film.

Clips from various Jewison films including Fiddler on the Roof (1971), Agnes of God (1985) and A Soldier’s Story (1984) will be used to address transition or adaptation issues, likely approaches and pitfalls as well. The presentation will also include screening scenes and a discussion of his TV movie adaptation of Donald Margulies’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play Dinner With Friends. The film was shot for HBO and will premier in late July in Los Angeles and New York.

‘It’s my first cable movie,’ says Jewison. ‘We’re starting to become attracted to companies like HBO simply because they’re dealing with material the studios aren’t dealing with. This is really a very smart, sophisticated play about marriage and divorce where the dialogue is all important.’

In adapting from a stage property, Jewison says creators can easily find themselves swept away by trying too hard to visualize imagery invoked by the actors on stage.

A case in point, the Academy Award-nominated film A Soldier’s Story. There is a scene in the film when a hard-ass sergeant major recalls his experiences in WWI when black soldiers were obliged to don ‘French’ uniforms. Jewison says there was pressure during the production to fully visualize the sergeant major’s extensive reminiscences in the form of a flashback. In this instance, he says, the pitfall (relying on the standard cinematic flashback) was avoided by using a rather theatrical device – as the officer is talking at the bar everything else starts to disappear, leading to a sequence where only the face is lit.

‘I also liked the way the film [A Soldier’s Story] opened with a murder, which is different from the play and something we can do in film in a much more exciting way. It turned it more into a strong mystery.’

Jewison says entirely new characters were added to the story, including a white colonel, which played well against the black chief investigating officer.

‘I think there’s a lot of work by playwrights and work in theatre in Canada that has not been used and exploited by filmmakers,’ says Jewison. ‘When you start talking about story, [one] has to impress on these young directors that it is the story that counts. In films of social content or ‘entertainment versus the message,’ these issues have to be brought up. People are always concerned about ‘what to make’ and ‘how to make it,’ but the [important] decision is ‘what to make,’ because everything is tied up with the story.

‘When people talk about a film the first thing they say is ‘What’s it about?’ And they think if you continue to make films, nobody cares about that story, nobody cares what it’s about. I know it is often said, ‘Well, who’s in it?’ That’s part of cinema – but it’s not the main thing. The story is the main thing. You can’t just say, ‘Well, we don’t have the money.’ There has never been any equation between money and art, ever. The biggest budget film is not necessarily the best film.’

Jewison works with new and emerging directing talent at the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto, and regardless of an individual’s particular craft specialty, he says efforts are made to introduce filmmakers to other aspects of filmmaking.

‘What we try to do is introduce them to the other disciplines so they know something about acting and know something about [picture] composition and the power of the visual image. The technical skill that is available in Los Angeles is some of the best in the world.’

Jewison’s remarkable filmography includes The Cincinnati Kid (1965), The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming (1966) and three movies for which he received Academy Award nominations: In the Heat of the Night (1967), Fiddler on the Roof (1971) and Moonstruck (1987). (He also received the Academy’s Irving Thalberg Award.) More recent films include Other People’s Money (1991) and The Hurricane (1999).

Jewison received a lifetime achievement award earlier this month at the Lake Placid Film Forum. *