‘Barney’s Version’ director Richard J. Lewis goes from evidence to existence
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It’s unusual enough these days to make a movie about the broad canvas of a life. It’s even more atypical if you just spent a decade on a prime-time hit about the specific details of a death.
That’s the transition Richard J. Lewis, a former Canadian tennis prodigy who spent years as the executive producer on ‘CSI,’ undertook in adapting Mordecai Richler’s sprawling first-person novel ‘Barney’s Version,’ which is having an Oscar-qualifying run in Los Angeles.
‘I hear people say, ‘You’re not supposed to have a heart; you’re from ‘CSI.’’ I think directors should able to jump about, not just in mediums but in genre,’ Lewis said in a recent interview with 24 Frames.
Despite their manifest differences, Lewis says his hallmark show, which he began working on as a director and writer nine years ago, and his new movie aren’t really that far apart. ‘When you’re telling a story in television, it’s really important you pare away all the useless crap, strip everything away to its essentials,’ he said. ‘That’s pretty helpful when you’re trying to pack a 470-page novel into a two-hour movie.’
That novel already packs in a lot itself: Richler’s phenomenon (in Canada) is a verbally deft, morally complicated story about an oily television producer named Barney Panofsky (played in the film by Paul Giamatti) who’s also a Renaissance man, romantic, wiseguy and a possible murderer. As he nears old age and a possible case of Alzheimer’s, he flashes back on his rich and complicated life.
‘I love the idea of understanding a life in two hours. It’s a quick ticket to a fast emotional experience,’ Lewis said. ‘It’s cinema speaking to us, asking, ‘How’s your life going?’’ Those kinds of humanist studies aren’t something movies do much of these days, and even in this season of character-driven dramas, Lewis said he believes his new film is an anomaly. Auteur-oriented directors, he said, now look less at big lives and more at specific moments.
‘I think people like David Fincher and Tom Hooper [directors of ‘The Social Network’ and ‘The King’s Speech’] are working with character, but they still have the high-concept event that sits in the middle of their movies,’ Lewis said. ‘If you look back at films of the ‘70’s and movies I grew up with from people like Marty Ritt [director of films such as ‘Norma Rae’ and ‘The Great White Hope’], you see movies about characters’ entire lives.’
Lewis hopes to take on more of that scope with his upcoming work. The filmmaker said he hopes for another shot at the Philip Roth novel ‘Portnoy’s Complaint,’ which was first made into a movie by Ernest Lehman in 1972. (Lewis does not yet have rights to the book, but he feels the coming-of-age tale is ripe to be told again. ‘The comedy has always been there. The challenge is the other side, the poignancy and the emotional depth of the character.’)
He’s also developing a movie about a group of Midwestern farm boys and the rupture that develops when one of them comes back from a tour of duty in Iraq. And he’s drawing from his own past as a competitive tennis player with a script that he describes as ‘’My Life as a Dog’ with tennis at the center, and some magical realism.’’
‘We generally have a very simplistic and pedestrian idea of how characters work,’ Lewis said in a thought that might make Nick Stokes proud. ‘There are no single moments in time that define the entirety of the person. It’s a collection of incidents and accidents that drive our internal selves.’
-- Steven Zeitchik
