Ruling the stage, serving the screen
Michel Marc Bouchard’s plays have been garnering critical raves and awards for over 30 years. But the Alma, Que.-born playwright and screenwriter also has a long history with the big screen. Five of his plays have been adapted into films, including director John Greyson’s feature Lilies, an English adaptation of Les Feluettes that won the Genie Award for best film in 1996, and Xavier Dolan’s Tom à la ferme.
Bouchard’s latest film project is his first that isn’t based on one of his plays. In an unusual twist, he wrote the original screenplay for The Girl King, a Finnish/ Canadian/German/Swedish co-production that opens Sept. 2. While in the midst of the project, he decided to transform it into a play, Christine, la reine-garçon, which premièred at Montreal’s Théâtre du Nouveau Monde in 2012 with Céline Bonnier in the title role.
The film and play are inspired by the life of Queen Christina of Sweden, though the two works have little in common beyond the subject. The play takes place on two nights, separated by 10 days. The film, in contrast, stretches over decades.
Christina was named queen at the age of six in 1632, and began ruling the country when she was 18. She was queen for only 22 years, but remains a figure that many are fascinated with — she refused to behave like women were supposed to back then, was keenly interested in new philosophical and scientific ideas, and fought to end the wars that were ravaging Europe.
The Girl King is directed by Finnish filmmaker Mika Kaurismäki and stars Malin Buska in the title role. The cast also includes Sarah Gadon, Michael Nyqvist and François Arnaud. It won two prizes at last year’s Festival des films du monde, for most popular Canadian film and best actress (Buska).
Bouchard spoke to the Montreal Gazette at a Mile End café this week.
Q You’ve said you became a screenwriter kind of by accident.
A I call it an accident because I write first and foremost for the theatre and then they eventually become films. And in this process, there are lots and lots of false friends.
Q What are your thoughts on the process of taking plays and turning them into films?
A Each film is the product of a filmmaker, and the filmmaker has his or her point of view on the play. Tom à la ferme might be the one project where there were the fewest false friends, in the sense that the DNA of the play is in the film but the film is not the play. It was a good experience.
Q Do you like writing screenplays?
A One plus is I get to keep alive a universe that I’ve created. But the second thing is I’m a bit of a control freak. In theatre, the author is, in a way, king. In film, it doesn’t work like that. When they made Les Muses orphelines (with a screenplay by Gilles Desjardins), I said I felt like someone was in my house and he was changing the furniture around the way he felt like. I felt a real shock.
Q When you sit down to write a screenplay for a film, how is that writing different from when you write for the theatre?
A In theatre, you have a set space. In cinema, it’s something else altogether. The environment speaks. The difficulty for a screenwriter is we’re asked to see the film while we’re writing, and then when it comes to the director directing, it’s not necessarily the same film that we saw while writing it.
Q I’m thinking of the film Barton Fink, about a playwright who goes to Hollywood in the early ’40s to write a screenplay and runs into all kinds of difficulty. Just this idea that the writer is the last person the filmmakers want to see on the set.
A On a film set, a screenwriter is like the mother-in-law. The filmmakers aren’t necessarily happy to see him or her hanging around on the set. For screenwriters, we have to live through a sort of period of mourning, and sometimes it can be brutal. We’ve been asked to imagine something, and finally the film is not the same thing.
Q Is it always a disappointment?
A No, because if there’s a real collaboration, which I found in Tom à la ferme with Xavier, it can be great.
Q Cinema is a big business. Much more so than theatre.
A With The Girl King, we’re talking about 21 different sources of financing.
Q How was that experience for you?
A Like I said, sometimes the point of view of the director and the screenwriter are quite different.
Q Where did the idea come from?
A Kaurismäki. He wanted to make a film about Queen Christina. He was fascinated by this woman who was so modern and tried to change her country. The producer of Lilies talked to Kaurismäki about me, and that’s when they offered me the film. I didn’t know anything about Christina of Sweden, and so I went and read a dozen biographies.
Q That must be hard, to capture a life like that in an hour-and-ahalf film.
A You could make a whole TV series. You have all that material. The only thing you’re missing is a few murders.
Q What did you like about the character?
A Well, first, it’s strange to ask a Québécois author to write about royalty, because we have an unusual relationship with the monarchy. We have one monarch who abandoned us and another who dominated us. But as I read about her, her paradoxes began to please me.
Q What do you think of the finished film?
A That’s a touchy question. Let’s just say that Mika wanted to make a popular film, and he wanted to make a film that showed affection for the character. I have a vision of the character, and my vision is different than Mika’s. I very quickly realized that when I was on set, but I have enough humility to understand it’s his film. He took a very conservative approach.