For all his reputation as a worldly wise media titan—one of the few we have in this country, at least in the Hollywood sense—Robert Lantos has taken on film projects that are generally more connected with his heart than with his head. As a founder of Alliance Communications, when it was a picture-making outfit, and as the producer of features by Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg, and Patricia Rozema, he helped shepherd in a period of unprecedented creativity in the Canadian film scene.

Lantos, who was born in Budapest 59 years ago, launched his career in the 1970s with mild exploitation films such as In Praise of Older Women. Once he broke away from Alliance and started his own imprint, Serendipity Point Films, he concentrated on titles that can only be seen as labours of love. Certainly, this was proven by his initial release, 1999’s Sunshine, a three-hour epic directed by István Szabó. The century-spanning tale, culminating with Nazi occupation and communist tyranny, harked back to his clouded Hungarian childhood, and Lantos returned to similar territory when he bought the rights to Fugitive Pieces, a novel also covering long passages of harsh historical time.

This time, he contracted Jeremy Podeswa—a Toronto writer-director who initially seemed to be in the Egoyan mode after his The Five Senses—to help reshape poet Anne Michaels’s highly literary book about memory and loss, with its fragmented and largely internal narrative, for the big screen. And he needed to do it in less than two hours.

To explain this process, the filmmakers met with the Georgia Straight last fall, around the time Fugitive Pieces premiered locally at the Vancouver International Film Festival. Naturally, the producer was aware that his new film would face inevitable comparisons with the heavily shadowed Sunshine.

“I responded to different things in each,” Lantos asserted quietly, over a cup of tea in a downtown hotel restaurant. “My reasons for wanting to do Sunshine had a lot to do with my own story and with my parents’ story. The central tragedy for Hungarian Jews was the notion that assimilation would save you—a misconceived and ultimately suicidal thought for about a million people.”

Pieces, on the other hand, is less about losing life than keeping the past alive. He read the book upon publication, about 12 years ago.

“I was tremendously moved but was also convinced that there would be no cinematic language to help translate it into a movie. For me, this was the only Holocaust-related material that had not had enough light shed upon it—that is, the act of human kindness that stares evil down. Both my parents survived the Holocaust, and that was because of acts of kindness. My father was tipped off by a member of the Hungarian army who told him they would be executing Jews starting that day. My mother was hidden by a Christian family.

“At the heart of this story is just such an act. At great personal risk, a gentile rescues a Jewish boy and raises him. I grew up surrounded by Holocaust stories, and I drew great solace from tales of what we call the Righteous of Nations: people who rise above whatever strife is currently plaguing humanity.”

It took the producer years to bring this project into enough focus to cast it. And he and Podeswa were fortunate to get versatile British actor Stephen Dillane to play the adult version of a frightened Polish boy saved during the darkest days of the Second World War by a life-loving Greek archaeologist played by Croatian-born Rade Serbedzija. England’s Rosamund Pike is the lad’s first girlfriend, in post-war Toronto, and Israel’s Ayelet Zurer is the soulmate he later encounters while travelling between Canada and Greece.

Together, the actors (and filmmakers) create a kind of dark chamber work, filled with the threads and rediscovered fragments that the music-minded title suggests.

“It’s a tough title, one many people thought should be changed. It’s not exactly a commercial title, but you can’t drop it, because that’s what the film is really about. You know, my father never liked to talk about these things, but my mother, when she turned 80, sat down with a tape recorder and told 50 hours’ worth of stories about everything that happened to her and all the people around her. So I feel very fortunate to have recovered those pieces.”

Certainly, some sense of that archaeology went into the making of Pieces, although it was finally up to Podeswa to make the heavily layered tale more universal.

“The thing about a book,” says the director in another corner of the café, “is that it’s proven in one medium but you don’t know how it’s going to go in another. The trick is to emulate its best qualities, artistically speaking, but to find a cinematic equivalent to what worked on the page.”

Since debuting with his own feature in 1999, Podeswa has been doing a lot of episodic TV, directing numerous episodes of such high-end cable series as The L Word, Queer as Folk, Nip/Tuck, and Six Feet Under. The 44-year-old Ontarian figures this résumé helped prepare him to get back into features on a larger scale.

“I’ve almost been working on Fugitive Pieces longer than I’ve been working on TV. But I think the most beneficial thing about getting this experience before actually shooting the movie was having covered a rather wide range of material, interpreting a lot of different kinds of scripts. You start gaining more confidence dealing with material as complex and rich as this one, which covers three different countries and is set in a number of time periods.

“My appreciation for this story really deepened the more time I spent with it. Just when I thought I had plumbed everything I could out of it, I would read some passage and be moved as if seeing it for the first time. What you end up doing, eventually, is just taking the essence of the material. In a book you might have, say, 10 scenes built around a certain idea, but you need to do that just once in the movie. Distillation is important, but you also have to capture certain tones, deal with all the thematic substance, and—most importantly—you have to show and not tell, as much as is possible.”

Still, the finished movie is highly faithful to the language of its source, lifting whole swatches of lyrical language off the page. When it came to the film’s ending, however, the filmmakers struggled to keep the tragic framing device that Michaels chose for her book. In the event, however, the film’s downbeat ending didn’t sit well with viewers or critics on the festival circuit last year. And it did less well in test screenings since then.

Finally, the duo went back into the master print and recut the finale in a couple of significant ways, ending the tale on a much more uplifting note.

“We really only touched the last 10 minutes,” the director declared, when we reached him recently in Melbourne, Australia. The director’s relationship with cable titan HBO is particularly strong, and he is down under wrapping several months of shooting on the last four episodes of The Pacific—a companion to Band of Brothers, again exec-produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg.

“The original ending was true to the author’s intentions, but I ultimately felt that we didn’t earn it in strictly cinematic terms, that we didn’t prepare the audience for that particular development.”

The goal, then, was to go out on a grace note without turning some of the most hellish moments in history into Hallmark Moments.

“Some people may think that commercial considerations forced us to change the ending. But, honestly, we just wanted to make it a better movie.”

In this, they succeeded. Sometimes head and heart have to work together.