How novice’s screenplay became Oscar and Genie nominee
‘I’m a late bloomer. At age 25 I had nothing to say. Now I have plenty’
Toronto writer David F. Shamoon is living proof of ground-changing shifts in the movie business that have rendered the ancient axiom, “To play ball, you must go to the ball park,” spectacularly redundant. Unknown in Hollywood, unknown in the milieu of Canadian movies until last year, the 64-yearold former adman is, in every sense, an outsider, a novice, a neophyte in those worlds, and one fabulously lucky dude.
Shamoon’s very first produced screenplay, In Darkness, was the foundation of one of two movies with Canadian origins that scored best-foreign-language feature nominations in this year’s Oscars, and best adapted screenplay nominations in the Canadian movie industry equivalent, the Genie Awards, taking place Thursday night.
Born in India, raised in Iran, educated in the U.S. and a resident Canadian for the larger part of his life, Shamoon quietly nurtured a passion for making movies while he churned out ad copy and TV commercials in Toronto for a good 30 years.
“When my brother used to take me to the movies, they frightened me until he told me it was all make believe,” the Genie-nominated screenwriter told the Star in a recent interview.
“After that I just wanted to know how they make you believe.”
As to why he left it so long to make his mark, he added, “I’m a late bloomer. At age 25 I had nothing to say. Now I have plenty.” Shamoon’s script — unfunded, self-financed and nine years in the works before it eventually fell under the reluctant gaze of Oscarnominated Polish director Agnieszka Holland ( Europa, Europa) — is based on In the Sewers of Lvov, British writer Robert Marshall’s 1990 collection of survivors’ memoirs about non-jewish municipal workers in Nazi-occupied Poland who risked their lives to hide a group of Jews in Lvov’s putrid underground sewers for 14 months during World War II. The other movie in the running for the same major movie industry awards — both lost the Oscar two weeks ago to Iranian director Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation — is Quebec writer/director Philippe Falardeau’s Monsieur Lazhar, based on the stage play Bashir Lazhar by award-winning Canadian playwright Évelyne de la Chernelière. Shamoon’s progress towards this personal and professional pinnacle began with a 2002 article in the Star about famed British historian Sir Martin Gilbert’s book The Righteous: The Unsung Heroes of the Holocaust, the writer said in a recent interview. “Gilbert mentioned another book, written by a man named Robert Marshall, that dealt specifically with the sewer workers who had hidden Jews in Lvov,” Shamoon said. “It was out of print, but I managed to find a copy on Amazon, and when I read it, I knew it was a movie.” Shamoon tracked Marshall down in London, where he was a producer of TV documentaries at BBC, including one, shot in 1988, that told the Lvov sewer survivors’ stories, and even featured some of them reminiscing on camera. Unlike a great number of screenplays adapted from novels, short stories or biographies, Shamoon’s had no input from the writer of the source material. “I just started writing, without a producer, without a director or actors attached. I interviewed some of the survivors, and I researched every detail of the story. The first draft took a year to write.” The first challenge, he said, was staying true to what happened in the sewers, resisting the urge to sentimentalize or mythologize already widely circulated accounts of the Lvov “miracle.” “I never saw it as a Holocaust sto- ry, only as a compelling human drama,” he said.
“I feared the screenplay would be compromised, Hollywoodized. Filmmaking has become a global business. You can make a good film anywhere these days if you retain cultural specificity and authenticity.” How Shamoon found and courted Holland, his director of choice, is a story in itself, and she presented a unique and powerful challenge, Shamoon said. She would take the movie on only if the dialogue was translated from English into Polish and German.
“She said it was too important and specific a story to be made by English actors faking accents, and she was 1,000 per cent correct.” That meant Shamoon had to check every single line of translated dialogue against re-translated English subtitles to make sure that the actors were saying what he had written.
“Unlike a novel, a screenplay is a very limited medium. All you have to tell your story is action and dialogue. And it’s not easy.
“But as ( Breaking Bad creator) Vince Gilligan said to me in Los Angeles last week, ‘If it was easy, everyone would be doing it.’ ”