CAUGHT ON FILM
Actors, directors tell Chris Knight about movies that had a profound effect on their lives.
Imagine a 10-year-old John C. Reilly entranced by the image of Willy Wonka doing a somersault on the big screen. Or young Maria Bello watching Indiana Jones outrunning the boulder and thinking, “That could be me.” Or a future Indigenous filmmaker seeing a movie that reflects his culture.
Movies change us. And this year, I asked each person I interviewed at the Toronto International Film Festival what movie had the biggest effect on her or him.
Reilly, starring in and producing The Sisters Brothers, an existential western based on the novel by Patrick deWitt, seemed unwilling to answer. Then he drew a deep breath. “I will say this,” he began. “Gene Wilder as an actor really changed my perception of what a man could be. I saw all his films as a kid, but particularly in Willy Wonka. That movie gave me a template for how to be a man. You could be sensitive and you could be whimsical and you could be into romantic things.”
He continued: “There’s a sort of duality to my personality. And I feel like when I saw that movie as a kid I was like, well I’m half Charlie Bucket — you know, the little kid who gets the ticket — and I’m half Willy Wonka. I really do relate to that: ‘We are the music makers and we are the dreamers of dreams,’ you know that wonderful poem that he says.
“So that made a big impact on me because at the time, in the 1970s, when that movie came out we were still holding on to these ideas of macho virility ... people like Gene Hackman, Robert Duvall, these intense, very virile tough guys. But somehow I felt like I was never going to be quite that tough. I had all these other things going on inside me. And then I saw Gene Wilder and I was like: Oh, you can be like that.”
Bello, who plays the mother of a sexually confused teenager in the Canadian coming-of-age story Giant Little Ones, also saw in the movies a version of herself that she hadn’t previously thought possible. “When Indiana Jones came out, I remember thinking: I’m an adventurer. I want to see the world. I’m that guy. But I wasn’t. I was a girl. So I feel like one of the reasons I became an actor is because I wanted to be that.
“And when I look at it now — and now there are female action heroes; back then when I was growing up there weren’t — but now I live it. I was just in Ethiopia, visiting a tribe who only five people meet a year ... and for me that was so exciting, to live in a tent by a river filled with crocodiles, and to jump out of helicopters into sulphur pools in the middle of nowhere. To me that was true adventure and excitement.”
For Gwaai Edenshaw, co-director of the first feature filmed entirely in the endangered Haida language of the West Coast, the movie that hit him hardest was Once Were Warriors, a 1994 Australian drama about a Maori family. Though the Indigenous group hailed from half a world away, said Edenshaw, “it was one of those movies where it felt like somebody was talking about us.”
He also mentioned Zacharias Kunuk’s 2001 films Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner. “For everybody who’s an Indigenous filmmaker ... that was the movie that made people think that it was possible.”
For Tina Keeper, Indigenous actor, politician and producer of the movie Through Black Spruce, it was a film about a strong female artist that most affected her. “It was when I was in theatre school, when I was in university. I remember seeing the film Camille Claudel. I thought, even if I just live and die as an artist, a female artist! Because she was a great artist.”
Keeper didn’t think there were many avenues for an Indigenous actor — it would be a few more years before she shot to fame with TV’s North of 60 — but Camille Claudel helped keep her going. “It really spoke to me and helped me make that decision to do theatre despite whatever. I loved acting.”
That feeling of seeing yourself, or an idealized version of yourself, came through in many of the answers. Olivia Vieweg, whose graphic novel formed the template for the German zombie movie Endzeit — Ever After, said 2001’s Ghost World changed her. “I saw it when I was 18, and it felt like it was about me and my feelings. I thought it was super cool that it was a comic adaptation — like our film!”
Her director, Carolina Hellsgård, recalled: “One of the earliest key moments, when I was 10, I remember is watching Hitchcock’s The Birds. I remember hiding behind the couch, watching at my grandma’s place. I couldn’t go outside for a while afterwards. When I think back, I remember how transformative the experience was.”
For directors, the movie that most affected them was sometimes the one that made them want to make movies themselves.
Don McKellar, director of Through Black Spruce, saw Modern Times as a kid. “I remember my parents took me to this Charlie Chaplin retrospective at the Eglinton Cinema when I was quite young. I didn’t even know what was going on — it was black and white, they weren’t talking — and it was amazing.”
Said Eva Husson, the French director of Girls of the Sun, which also played Cannes: “One of them might be Chungking Express by Wong Kar Wai. The fact that he dared to be extremely subjective and poetic. But I will add another: Jane Campion, The Piano. She was a woman director and she won the Palme d’Or. It was possible! I was 16 and I thought, I can do that — it’s possible to put a strong woman on the screen.”
Ever the contrarian, Werner Herzog said he had no answer to the question. “It doesn’t exist for me. It’s more literature. I read. I do not see many films. I had the feeling that I was the inventor of cinema, in a way. And I still behave as if I was the inventor of cinema.” Perhaps sensing that this seemed a little over the top he added: “I’m speaking about a general climate in my soul.”
Reilly, clearly affected by watching Wilder, went on to a career as a comedian, singer, theatre actor and big-screen star. “And I can only hope through my work that I’m touching someone who’s 10 years old right now in the same way. That I’m showing them there’s a million ways to be a man.”