WONDERSTRUCK IN CANNES
Deaf actress tugs at movie director’s heartstrings
Director Todd Haynes had to wipe a tear from his eye during the news conference for his new film, Wonderstruck, after its world première at the Cannes Film Festival.
It wasn’t the movie that did it, although at least one critic said the film, about two children, Rose and Ben, searching for their identities in twin stories set 50 years apart, brought him to tears. What so affected the director were words of praise from Millicent Simmonds, the 14-year-old first-time actress who stars in the film.
“I just got lost in the story every day,” she said through a sign-language interpreter. (Simmonds, like the character she plays, is deaf.) “And it was such an honour to work with Todd as a director. I can’t even find the words to explain what it was like to work with you, Todd.
I never dreamt that my life would come here, to this. I can’t thank you enough. This is a moment I will never, never forget.”
The film also stars young actors Oakes Fegley (Pete’s Dragon) and Jaden Michael, as well as Michelle Williams and Julianne Moore in smaller, but pivotal roles. Williams also plays a deaf character, an experience she found both humbling and enlightening.
“How do you understand another culture?” she said. “People who understand culture are the ones who’ve been in both rooms. Sometimes you’re born in one culture and you live in another. I think for people who are in deaf families but they’re hearing, they’re in both cultures.
“For me as a hearing person, this is my first experience with deaf culture. I felt like I didn’t get to be in both rooms, but I was allowed to stand in the doorway and what that gave to me as an individual ... it completely changed the way that I saw it.”
The film is based on a juvenile fiction book by Brian Selznick, whose earlier work, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, was adapted into the 2011 film Hugo by Martin Scorsese. In Wonderstruck, a 1927 story is told entirely in images while a 1977 narrative unfolds in words until they meet at the end. Haynes decided to shoot the 1927 scenes in black and white as a silent picture, although backed by an astonishing score by Carter Burwell, whose work on Haynes’ film Carol earned him an Oscar nomination. The 1977 scenes are in eye-popping colour and sound, although even here the dialogue is sometimes minimal.
“Nothing in the film was particularly easy,” he said of the shoot. “Because we had two kids, and you have limited hours per day with kids, we literally had to shoot a little bit of 1927 and a little bit of 1977 every day, which you can imagine is a logistical challenge for a film like this.”
The 56-year-old director called Wonderstruck “a tribute to what you do with your hands, with your fingers; everything from sign language to building miniature buildings that Rose loves to do as a kid, to little Ben’s fascination with natural history shelves that he creates in his room. It’s really a tribute to the tactile and the glue and the ink on your fingertips that I remember having on mine as a kid.”
Williams, picking up on the theme of young people, said she enjoyed working with children, but also working for them.
“I love making movies that are expressly for children to see, because I remember being that age when you’re so porous ... you absorb things on so many levels. And I watch it happen to my daughter and so I’ve wanted very much to make things that figure into an early imagination, that then you grow up a certain kind of adult.”
Wonderstruck will open in limited release in North America on Oct. 20.