Talked to Ewan McGregor about his first time behind the camera as a director
heroin-addled Mark Renton from Trainspotting, and of McGregor’s Highland ancestry, have been obliterated.
The Scotsman’s directorial debut is set in the 1960s and based on the 1997 Pulitzer-Prizewinning novel by Philip Roth, a writer of notorious density and complexity. The first question therefore has to be: why choose such a difficult book to adapt for your first time as director?
McGregor gives a barking Scottish laugh. “I suppose I don’t make things easy for myself, do I?” He has always been a fan of Roth’s, he says, but did not start out with the intention of directing this film.
“I had agreed to play the father in the story some years ago, but for various reasons the film never got off the ground and we did not have a director attached. I didn’t want to let it go because I loved the story and really wanted to play Swede. I have wanted to direct a film for about 20 years and here was this one, that I wanted to be in, and that was needing a director, and so that’s how it happened.”
McGregor plays Seymour “Swede” Levov, an American Jew who gets his nickname because of his blue eyes and blond hair. violent act to protest against the Vietnam War, after which the whole fragile edifice of the Levovs’ life begins to crumble.
McGregor says being a father (he has four daughters) informed the way he approached scenes with his screen daughter.
“Being a father changes you,” he says. “My eldest, Clara, is about the same age as Merry is in the film. When Clara went to college there was a sense of loss, of having to let her go — it’s nothing like when Merry disappears and becomes a radical, but I felt I could identify in a small way with the loss that father is feeling.”
His aim was not to make the film current, even though there are many parallels with race riots in modern-day America and terrorism on a broader scale, but to stay as true to the text as possible.
“It’s not really about what is happening in the world now,” he says, “although it is sad that so many of the same things, and worse, are still going on. But at heart it is the story of a family.”
He read the novel obsessively and worked closely with screenwriter John Romano on the narrative. The resulting film has not been universally acclaimed, with many critics feeling that even its excellent cast cannot lift it above a somewhat static period piece, but you can’t fault the bravery of the Scot who took on this arduous task. Despite the notentirely-ecstatic reception, McGregor will remain the irrepressible Jedi knight who lets nothing stand in his way. And hopefully he will always keep that charming accent. LS
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