GG: In film, a follow-up

[Kristen Immoor <kimmoor@mindspring.com>]

Hi gang,
   All this recent interest in "Gould in Cinema" and especially the
postings re: 32 SF@GG has reminded me what a wonderful interview Colm Feore
gave to Gerald Pratley during the press push for the film. For anyone who
missed it I've included it here; it gives some priceless insight into the
production of the film from the actor's point of view. For example, it was
deemed gravely insulting for the Colm to play Gould's piano for the film,
but not insulting (or even a bit creepy, evidently,) for him to dress up in
Gould's clothes and wander around Toronto in preparation for the part!
Bleah!  Spooky!
Enjoy... maybe it will start a new thread.
Regards,
Kristen

______________________________________

(2) COLM FEORE portrays pianist Glenn Gould in Thirty-Two Short Films About
Glenn Gould, written by Don McKellar and François Girard, and directed by
Girard. This is not a biography resembling in any way the usual screen
biography of individuals, artistic or otherwise. Instead, realising from the
beginning that the life and character of the idiosyncratic pianist would be
almost impossible to portray in an inexpensive documentary-like study, the
writer, director, producer and actor have created on film a work which is
entirely in keeping with what Gould did with music.

Pratley: I know you've had a great many interviews about the film ...

Feore: Not many; you'd be surprised, because it's come out in so many
festival settings before general release, and my schedule has been horrific,
I wasn't looking forward to doing much until we're actually at the time of
general release, which won't be for a while. So I haven't exhausted all the
possibilities or bored myself with repetition yet.

How were you chosen for this role? Did you know Glenn Gould?

No, only through his music. Ironically it turns out that he was, in fact,
music director of the Stratford Festival for three years during its early
stages, but that was as close as we got. How the film came to me? The
producer had been searching for some time for someone to play it, and had,
understandably, grave reservations about casting the role because once
they'd done that, as you've seen, they were stuck. So François Girard,
producer Niv Fichman, and the casting director Deirdre Bowen came to
Stratford and they saw half a play -- I was playing Mercutio in Romeo and
Juliet. They waited until I died and then we all went to dinner. And at that
point we discussed the possibility of my doing it, but only in very vague
terms, and I think it was up to me to audition, however eccentrically, for
it over dinner. Which I did, and then we went on and auditioned again and
after weeks of this, François was satisfied I could do what he required of
me. So, we went ahead.

As an actor, what did you think about the shape of the film?

Well, I thought it allowed for an enormous flexibility. I think that
François' vision of it was one of evocation and impressions rather than
imitation and a strict chronological biography. And indeed, one wouldn't
have had enough time for that; it would have been double the length, and you
still wouldn't have been any closer to the man, I don't think. They scripted
many more films than we put in to give them options, and I think they chose
the best of what they were left with.

I felt the very structure allowed us a scope imaginatively, where even the
almost documentary interview of individuals took on -- because of the nature
of what they say -- a narrative element. It's more than just a "talking
head," it has something -- the little kernel of experience that they offer
is much more than simple "And then he did this, and he went there." They had
some insight -- knowing him reasonably well -- into him and so the
distillation of their experience into one brief moment carried, I believed,
a great deal more weight. And I rather liked the way it was then structured
because you can't pin him down -- one of the pieces is "Questions with No
Answers" -- and I think the whole film falls in that realm. There are
indications, there are impressions, there are suggestions, and as Gould
himself wrote, "Fiction would be the best biography." And we took him at his
word. Everything that's represented in the film has a basis in factual
reality, but the scenario that supports it is fictionalized. Seeing it now,
I don't see any other way to do it.

Several sequences where people are asking you questions -- I thought I'd
like to hear some answers.

But that's the point, there really aren't any. We pored over all the
materials, in print and in film and television, and in the music looking for
these kinds of answers, and the closest we got to anything like that was in
the National Archives, where a letter to "Dell" -- an anonymous person
really, or an obviously made-up name for someone -- was found, as well as an
unfinished personal ad. It then became a question of going backwards from
that and trying to surround it with a dramatic structure, you know, "Well,
when did this get created, when did he do this?" As for putting a period to
these questions and actually getting a serious answer, anything we could
have done would have been speculative, and I felt that it was not up to us
to lead the audience in any particular direction but rather that they should
be left with a clarified, but no less unanswered view of what the questions
are about him.

I think François managed to handle this in a very delicate and rather
touching way in that they're questions that People magazine might ask, and
indeed the interview with a particularly horrible woman is taken from People
magazine transcripts. So he did have to endure these things, but never
really came up with any answers that were sufficiently clear and distinct
that could be plastered up on the fridge, and say "This is what Glenn Gould
is" and "that is what he is." One of the real advantages to this ambiguity
is that it forces us to look at what is extant: well, the music, his
writings, and some brief biographical information. But we really have to
deal with him the way he wanted us to deal with him, which was through the
electronic media he left behind. I think he's hovering in the ether very
closely above us chuckling away, thinking Ha! That's all they've got left
isn't it? They'll have to mine that now, and see what they can come up
with." He might say, "It doesn't matter about me; I don't matter." I'm
getting like him again! But, I'm not important -- what was produced -- the
music -- is important, but how you respond to the music in an individual way
in the privacy of your own home, where you can adjust all the knobs, the
bells and the whistles and create your own concert environment, is far more
important than whether or not I had turnips for breakfast -- and who I had
breakfast with.

You seemed to spend far more timed finding out about Glenn Gould than you
did playing him.

Oh, yes, there's no question. François and I did an enormous amount of
research -- some of it very straightforward, a lot of it very odd, from
simply poring over videos and his writings, to wandering around the lake at
Stratford dressed as him, and lying under pianos at the Conservatory in
downtown Toronto, kicking them, and sort of saying, "What sound does that
make?" and "What happens when the actor moves here?" and "Why don't we just
look at this Baldwin grand or Steinway grand for a moment and just get the
smell of it."

And we did an enormous amount of work before we shot a single foot of film,
partly because we didn't have a lot of film; we didn't have a lot of money.
It was imperative that we get the most out of the little we had, so we
rehearsed and rehearsed given the ridiculous schedules I had. François would
drive to Stratford and he'd stay with me a day or so; I'd come into Toronto
if I had a day off and we'd do the same kind of work there. At the end, we
developed a palette of possibilities that he could draw from for any given
film: "Would you like the movement this extreme?" "Where is your camera?"
"What's the lens?" "If we don't do enough of this, then when we get closer
we won't have that." "What about the diction -- his rather over, self-aware
way of speaking. We should have a real range of possibilities so that you as
director can pick up what suits this particular scene. So we went at it that
way."

Did you film all your sequences at one time?

No. I was very delighted to find that they were agreeable to working around
my schedule which meant Mondays -- it's the only day we get off at Stratford
-- and whatever days came free by happenstance, because of the scheduling.
Then we did about seven or eight days straight after the season had
finished; it was all over the place -- it was the only way to do it.

It's remarkable that you didn't lose the feel for the part.

Well, I must confess that I was at the end of the Stratford season, so I was
bidding it farewell in one way or another anyway. The danger was that
occasionally Glenn made an appearance as Mercutio which wasn't very good,
and it was difficult to get rid of him because I spent most of my free time
trying to inhabit him. As you see, I never touch a piano, because we felt it
was just gravely insulting; that was his piano -- 318. One of the fellows
who was interviewed later on said he felt this way too, getting that piano
back from Ottawa where it was on display at the National, tuning it up and
getting it working again. Everything was his, the gloves, certain bits of
costumery were his -- it was really quite a remarkable thing, trying to
become him. We felt that if we did sit down and do pretend piano playing --
there's nothing worse really, you've seen those old Hollywood biographies
about the great piano players and composers, and you see these actors
bobbing their heads slightly out of time -- and they cut to some hands --
and they're somebody else's hands, and it's all disagreeable. No, we thought
that would be an insult to the great man's memory. Neither could we say,
"let's get somebody who can actually play the stuff," because no pianist who
could play as well as Glenn Gould would want to be involved in a film about
Gould rather than one about themselves, it seemed to us.

So why not think of something imaginative that would allow Glenn to speak
for himself, which is what the underscoring of all the music does -- it's
all him. This is very necessary because in terms of narrative structure,
clues about the man are important and his music was an enormous one in terms
of understanding him. As actors, when we're looking at parts and characters
in great plays, you think "How am I going to re-embody and re-invent this
person?" Well, you have the actions that are very clearly delineated on the
page, and you say, "What kind of man is it who does A, B, C and D?" The same
applied here: if you had that string quartet with that music -- that very
melancholy, yearning, stretched-out music -- what kind of a man in what
state of mind would write something like that? Coming as it does at that
moment in the film, tells us then a great deal about who he was, how he
felt, and explains then, from that point, both before and after, some of his
relationships. Some of the women who say he called and then stopped, he was
frustrated and he stopped. Another playwright, I believe, asks him a direct
question: "Weren't you just afraid? Is that why you retreated to this
electronic world?" He then very wisely said, "Often when people make these
kinds of decisions, they have to exaggerate the moral justification for it
by making it a universal point, when in fact it's really quite a personal
one." So I think he was guilty of a little of that.

I'm interested in the backgrounds, for example in the house as a boy -- was
that really the house?

If it wasn't the exact house, it was the one next door that remained more to
period. It was at Lake Simcoe and indeed very much like the original house.
The furnishings were very similar and that was his favourite piano, it had a
quite tinny, harpsichordian touch and sound to it, and that was the one he
practised on most. He demanded much the same kind of response from his
Steinways; he would cause people enormous trouble over that.

And it wasn't actually his car, but it was precisely the same kind of car.
He called it "Longfellow," that great big Lincoln Continental, and would get
into terrible accidents, he was such a very bad driver. He drove around
conducting and listening to Petula Clark and all that kind of stuff.

No, the restaurant where I overheard all the conversation, was not one that
he frequented. This is where we have an imaginative leap given the fact of
the radio documentaries, given the history of the lead up to them and
Gould's writings on the subject, believing that like little musical pieces
with contrapuntal this and that, he believed that as at cocktail parties and
receptions, we could hear far more than just one voice, and that's certainly
how he played. So he simply went a step further; and we went another step
further and said, "Well, if he got that idea, here's a place where it might
have come to him. It's like "my first American dollar; my first five-dollar
bill." But if you notice just prior to that shot, there's the reverse of
them coming up the hill, which says "Toronto 20 miles," so they're within
striking distance. The LA concert? He did sign one or two last programs. And
that was the last concert, so it's simply an imaginative reconstruction of
that last evening where he decided to give it up forever. The scene where he
was listening to the playback of his recording with the three technicians
was filmed in a converted church in Toronto at Pape and Danforth, a
wonderful place remodelled and beautifully designed to resemble almost
exactly the CBS recording studios at 30th Avenue in New York. It could have
been expensive but the church was on loan to a variety of worthy community
events, and as we didn't disrupt that particular stuff much, we were
allowed to go ahead and take it over for a couple of weeks. The ice scene
was done on the St. Lawrence in the middle of January near Trois Rivières du
Lac, which is just an hour or two up the road. In the middle of January --
no, it was horrible. I mean, I had a radio in my pocket, and I was told,
"Start walking." "Carry on." So that's how that was done.

It was a striking beginning because it showed how distant and alone he was
...and indeed, how dead he is. There he is coming back to introduce himself
to us. And for those people who don't know him at all, one has to say,
"Well, gently, gently, gently." François takes a couple of films before he
introduces me, close, and 45 seconds in a chair. People say, "Oh, we've seen
this creature coming in from the white beyond, from nowhere," and indeed
after that voyage we return him, we send him back.

(These interviews took place at the Rouyn-Noranda Film Festival.)

______________________________________________________________________________

"There must be room for mess, for vulgarity. Sometimes, we have to touch
people."

                                  -- Bruce Charlton, writing as Glenn Gould