Wally Lamb novel makes it to HBO
BUT WALLY LAMB ADAPTATION WAS SHOT IN POUGHKEEPSIE “WE WERE BOTH HUGE FANS OF (LAMB’S), OF THE BOOK, AND WE WANTED TO DO IT JUSTICE, BUT WE ALSO WANTED TO BE ABLE TO EXPLORE AND CREATE, AS ARTISTS, OUR OWN INTERPRETATION OF IT AND, WALLY, HE ALLOWED US TO
Wally Lamb’s big doorstop of a novel, “I Know This Much is True,” like many of his works, is set in the hardscrabble towns of eastern Connecticut.
But when it came time to film a six-part HBO adaptation of the story of a working class man and his schizophrenic brother starring Mark Ruffalo, they shot it instead in and around Poughkeepsie, N.Y., says director Derek Cianfrance, the producer, writer and director.
“It’s on the same like latitudinal lines as Norwich, Connecticut,” he told reporters at the TV Critics Association winter press tour in Pasadena, Calif., in January.
Lamb had shown Cianfrance all around eastern Connecticut and many of the unique places that shaped the fictional town of Three Rivers, he says. But in the end, New York State had favorable tax credits for filmmakers.
“It still takes place in Three Rivers,” he says, but paraphrasing the director Jean Luc Goddard, “It takes place between the viewer’s eyes and the screen.”
Lamb himself got a small part in the series that ultimately had to be cut.
“He played the gym teacher out of focus in the deep background of a scene that’s no longer in the movie,” the director says. “I haven’t told him that yet. But Wally was so incredibly supportive to both Mark and myself and wasn’t precious about his material. We were both huge fans of his, of the book, and we wanted to do it justice, but we also wanted to be able to explore and create, as artists, our own interpretation of it and, Wally, he allowed us to do that.”
And while the series has a wealth of award-winning actors, it will be Ruffalo’s performance that will predominate, as he plays both troubled twins Dominick and Thomas, who nonetheless still look so different some viewers may not immediately be aware of it.
As twins, “they look exactly the same when they’re born, but they have 40 years of completely different life experiences,” Cianfrance says. “It was really important, we both felt, that Dominick and Thomas, that their bodies, that their physicality express that.”
So Ruffalo spent 15 weeks portraying Dominick, went away for five weeks, and returned 30 pounds heavier to play Thomas.
“I remember when Mark came back to set as Thomas,” the director says, “The crew was in like a state of awe and shock, because he was a completely different guy, and it felt weird talking to him.”
“It was an astounding performance to watch, and a commitment from one of the great actors,” Cianfrance says.
“We didn’t want it to be, like, I run and put a wig on, and then run and do the same scene on the same day,” Ruffalo says.
The weight was in part to show a reaction to the mood stabilizers and antipsychotic drugs Thomas would have been taking. And it was no fun for the actor to gain weight, he says. “When you’re force-feeding yourself, some of the romance of food sort of leaves.”
But he was intent in accurately portraying the character and his world. “That aspect of it was challenging,” Ruffalo says. “I was really afraid to play it, to be honest with you. I think it’s really an important issue, and I want to tell it as honestly as possible.”
“I wasn’t trying to be different than Dominick, but I was trying to allow Thomas’s experiences and his reality feed the development of that character,” Ruffalo says. “Spending time in institutions, what these kinds of medicines actually do to you physically and mentally, how the obsessive nature of it manifests itself.”
Part of the success came from playing opposite the stand-in actor Gabe Fazio, “who, basically, played both characters as well,” Ruffalo says. The cast also includes Archie Panjabi, Melissa LeoRosie O’Donnell, Juliette Lewis, Kathryn Hahn and Rob Huebel.
It didn’t take much to for Ruffalo to deeply relate to the story of a brother and a tragedy. His brother Scott, a hairdresser, died of a single gunshot to the head in 2008 in Beverly Hills.
“Listen, I mean, I’m the type of actor that I do like to draw on my experiences, and I’ve had a lot of them. And my brother will always be a big part of that,” Ruffalo says. “A lot of us have siblings here. We know how complicated that is and how deep that goes and how powerful it is and how messy it is. And so, yeah, Scott’s in all this and in all of my work in some way or another.”