Felicia’s Journey marks the fifth feature collaboration between Atom Egoyan and Paul Sarossy, Canada’s highest profile director-dop duo. Although based on another’s source material – a novel by Irishman William Trevor – the film remains true to the visual and dramatic themes prevalent in their other work.

Egoyan achieved international recognition for The Sweet Hereafter and attracted the interest of Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions, which sent him a copy of Trevor’s 1994 Whitbread Award-winning book.

Egoyan was immediately taken with the story of Felicia (Elaine Cassidy), a pregnant small-town Irish girl who sails to Birmingham in search of her beloved and meets up with an ostensibly helpful middle-aged catering manager, Hilditch (Bob Hoskins), who has a troubling fixation for his dead mother and who harbors a horrible secret.

‘Kid in a candy store’

With both Icon and Alliance Atlantis behind him, Egoyan had a much larger budget at his disposal than ever before (approximately $15 million), yet in the first weeks of shooting it felt like business as usual. The director recalls, ‘When we were on location in Ireland and Birmingham, I was thinking, ‘You know, this is the same as shooting in the interior of British Columbia [for The Sweet Hereafter] – same number of trucks, same number of crew.’ ‘

The difference soon became evident, however, after they moved to London’s historic Shepperton Studios to shoot interiors. Although Sarossy had previously worked in big studio environments, it was a new experience for his director, whom he describes as reacting like ‘a kid in a candy store.’

For the films they have shot together in their hometown of Toronto, the closest they have come to a studio has been converted warehouses, since the local soundstages were always booked by deep-pocketed, Hollywood-driven projects. Egoyan considers this new access ‘an incredible reward for many years of incredibly seat-of-your-pants filmmaking.’

Shooting in a top-rank studio allowed Egoyan and Sarossy to control the details of the production to a luxurious degree. The film’s main set piece is Hilditch’s house, where he has retreated since boyhood, and which becomes a deceptive haven for the transient Felicia.

Gaffer Chuck Finch prelit the set for every possible day and night scenario, thereby minimizing setup time and allowing the filmmakers to shoot for whatever time of day whenever they wished. It was a welcome change from past productions, where, shooting on location, the team’s schedule would be dictated by the quality of daylight coming through windows.

Bookend dolly shot

As well, the time freed up had a positive effect on the director-cinematographer dynamic, which has traditionally seen Egoyan composing the shots while Sarossy attended to the lighting. This time there was more of an opportunity to discuss a visual philosophy.

If Hilditch is the most nuanced character in the Egoyan-Sarossy filmography, it is due largely to the options the studio had to offer. Viewers get a sense of Hilditch before he even appears. The opening credits sequence consists of a long dolly shot through his home, revealing the bric-a-brac he has kept over the years, much of which is from his childhood, which establishes his collecting nature as well his inexorable attachment to the past.

The complicated shot could only have been achieved with the help of the Shepperton crew, which, as Sarossy recounts, ‘prepared the floors to be dolly-able, which is quite an expensive procedure, but which afforded some very exciting moments.’

Egoyan explains that the shot which comes to rest on Hilditch in the kitchen engaged in his culinary pursuits, is ‘from the angle of a little boy walking through the house, looking at it, and then confronting this image of himself as a grown man.’ The camera move is repeated in Hilditch’s final scene in the film, providing a visual bookend to the story.

Location shoots

Away from the studio, the filmmakers’ primary stylistic goal was to play up the contrast between Felicia’s rural hometown and the industrial surroundings she finds in Birmingham. However, they were confounded after setting down on the British Isles. Anticipating an idyllic postcard Ireland, they instead found a highly developed country geared in large part to the tourist trade. It took a while, but with Irish location manager Naoise Barry assisting main location manager Nick Daubeny, an appropriate town was found.

The background of rolling green hills – perfectly suited to the film’s anamorphic wide-screen frame – is viewed chiefly in scenes between Felicia and her staunchly anti-English widower father, who ultimately casts her out for ‘carrying the enemy’ inside her.

One senses in these sequences a director to whom the Irish countryside is both foreign and bewitching. As Sarossy recollects, ‘We were shooting scenes where afterwards I would say to Atom, ‘The film can only be so long – should the camera be lingering so much on the landscape?’ ‘

In England’s Midlands, the filmmakers sought a menacing industrial park that would heighten innocent Felicia’s sense of disorientation. What they actually found surprised them. ‘Birmingham was a victim of the second world war,’ Sarossy learned. ‘It must have been one of the prime strategic targets, and much of the industrial periphery must have been flattened. Its current architecture [consists of] these dreary factory buildings that were reinstated in the 1950s and ’60s. It’s very unimpressive if you go in there expecting a Dickensian environment.’

Egoyan and Sarossy found what manufacturing structures they could which broke the horizon line, and then framed them in such a way as to give them an ominous character. To that end they used wider lenses and shot from low angles. (Throughout filming they employed mostly Primo prime lenses, and occasionally an 11-1 zoom.)

‘It was incredible the perspective [we got] going low on gasometers and water coolers, which makes them more threatening than they really are,’ Egoyan offers. ‘In North America we see those water coolers as so threatening, because we associate them with nuclear reactors. Well, they’re just water coolers, but you can frame them to make them seem more than what they are.’

Although production values on Felicia’s Journey bring Egoyan and Sarossy closer to the mainstream, in no way have their experimental instincts been dulled. In fact, the film has perhaps a more varied texture than any of their previous work.

For example, they shot a flashback scene with a young Hilditch and his mother in a garden on Kodak 5239 reversal stock, which they then had cross-processed, resulting in intensely saturated colors, like an old home movie. The stock has a green bias to it which they gladly exploited, as greenish hues, born of Felicia’s Irish heritage, permeate the entire film.

Sarossy is very happy with the sequence, professing, ‘When that material comes on screen, that first cut is such a shocking contrast to the outgoing shot – it almost slaps you in the face.’

It is all part of a meticulous visual plan Egoyan and Sarossy mapped out. Yet despite having more time and resources at hand, they remained judicious about using techniques that were either too attention-getting or that would telegraph too much of their plot. According to Sarossy, they were diligent about photographing Ireland and Birmingham in a realistic manner, because ‘we wanted to save the unusual [stylistic] material for Hilditch, and yet we didn’t want to give away what’s obviously the drama – what’s slowly revealed in terms of who he is and what his actual nature is.’

(Felicia’s Journey is scheduled to open its Canadian run Nov. 12 in Toronto.)