Tackling Barney's Version was daunting for filmmaker Richard J. Lewis

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      Toronto-based filmmaker Richard J. Lewis knew he was in for trouble adapting the popular last novel by Mordecai Richler, one of Canada's top writers. For one thing, Barney's Version was an overstuffed book, covering four decades and two continents in the life of the titular rapscallion. Even more dauntingly, it was written in the first person, from the point of view of someone in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease.


      Watch the trailer for Barney's Version.

      “Talk about your unreliable narrator,” Lewis declared during a break from screenings at last fall's Vancouver International Film Festival. “On the other hand, I had Paul Giamatti to play Barney, and people like Dustin Hoffman and Minnie Driver to help put it over.”

      The director, whose finished Version opens in Vancouver on Friday (January 14), said he's been disappointed with many book-to-movie adaptations and that he was wary of offending the novel's many fans.

      “Of course, I've had some experience taking on a difficult book, since I made Whale Music, based on my very good friend Paul Quarrington's book and starring Maury Chaykin—both of whom passed this year [2010], sadly.”

      After his early success with Whale Music, in 1994, Lewis devoted himself to television, directing episodes of shows like North of 60, Due South, and the long-running CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, for which he was also a writer and executive producer. But he always wanted to get back to the big screen, and he was happy when super-producer Robert Lantos—who also launched such literary sagas as Felicia's Journey and Fugitive Pieces—tapped him to direct a new take on Barney's Version, which Lewis had read and loved when it was published, in 1998.

      “Actually, I approached him, since he had the rights, and he was initially talking to other directors. But I eventually wore him down, I guess.”

      Lewis spent much of 2006 writing a spec script for the project, and that moved things along, although Lantos ended up using a composite screenplay credited to television veteran Michael Konyves, which concentrated on the ragged affairs between Giamatti's Barney Panofsky—a roguish Montreal TV producer and full-time alcoholic—and his three wives, played by Driver, Rosamund Pike, and Rachelle Lefevre.

      “Of course, I'd like to do a director's cut, but I really enjoy the way the film moves now, at about 127 minutes before credits. I think it owes a lot to Susan Shipton—an editor you would know mostly from Atom Egoyan's work—and the way she tightened up the story and made it less sprawling.”

      Still, there's considerable time travelling on-screen, and the director admitted that it was challenging to figure out just how much aging makeup his cast could take.

      “The first tests that came back were from a horror show. Believe me, the last thing you want is for your movie to look like Back to the Future. Adrien Morot was the makeup supervisor and, apart from his amazing skill, I was particularly impressed by his ability to listen to me and try new things to make this work. But a lot of that was really done by the actors in their voices, their body language, and the decisions they made about hairstyle and wardrobe.”

      There were other felicitous aspects of the casting, such as having Hoffman, as Barney's retired-cop dad, play grandfather to his own son, newcomer Jake Hoffman.

      “It was kind of a risk,” Lewis said with a laugh, “but in the end it just felt right. It connects them all, genealogically, and no one was uncomfortable with it. I really wanted to take you into that world—Mordecai Richler's world—and make it as real as possible.”

      It helps that this veteran of the film trenches has learned to dance the wavy line between sincerity and the absurd.

      “I have to add that a few years back, Paul Quarrington created a character just for me in one of his plays, so I actually got to play a director on-stage! I mean, it's my craft and I respect it, but it's fun to send yourself up. Because we live, we work, and then we die. So who gives a shit, right?”

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