Marion Bridge's sisterly bond
Movie takes a dark journey into the heart of Cape Breton
By Elissa Barnard / Arts Reporter
DIRECTOR WIEBKE von Carolsfeld was amazed to see two posters for her movie as she biked around Toronto last Sunday.
"It wasn't easy to get the funding for it and to convince people that a movie about three sisters is actually something people want to see," says the director of Marion Bridge, opening in six Canadian cities Friday.
Cape Breton writer Daniel MacIvor's story is subtle. It's set in Sydney and it has no men. Hardly a commercial draw.
However, both the New York weekly Village Voice and the Chicago Tribune gave Marion Bridge a thumbs up when the movie opened last week in the U.S. The Toronto / Halifax co-production won Best First Canadian Feature at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival and Best Screenplay at the 2002 Atlantic Film Festival.
"The reaction is pretty much the same everywhere," says von Carolsfeld. "I've screened it in places ranging from Owen Sound, Ont. to Los Angeles to Rotterdam. People just seem to be genuinely touched and moved by the film."
The emotion in the story and the power of MacIvor's writing grabbed von Carolsfeld, when she was looking to leap from a successful career as a film editor to directing her first feature film.
"I thought the writing was beautiful. It's about women who we are in the world and how we define ourselves. I thought it was done in a funny and intelligent way."
MacIvor knows the sister dynamic inside out. He grew up in Sydney surrounded by sisters, his own, his mother's and his grandmother's.
"My mother, who is turning 80 in June, to this day she and her sister still talk on the phone every day," says MacIvor, who lives in Toronto.
"I understood really early how that worked. It's like when 'shut up' is a term of endearment. It seemed to me the most solid relationship as I was growing up."
Known in Canada and the U.S. for groundbreaking alternative theatre, MacIvor wrote Marion Bridge, first as a play commissioned by Nova Scotia's Mulgrave Road Theatre, for his mother, who will see the movie in Cape Breton tonight, and his sisters, even borrowing the name, Agnes, but not the character, from his sister, Agnes Anne.
"My mother was wondering if I was ever going to write something that she would like. My stuff tends to be a little on the dark side."
The movie Marion Bridge, however, is on the dark side, much more so than the play.
All three sisters, the alcoholic, outgoing youngest (Molly Parker), the repressed, religious, recently separated eldest (Rebecca Jenkins) and the shut-down, possibly lesbian, middle sister (Stacy Smith), wrestle with a tragic, destructive family secret as their mother (Marguerite McNeil) lies dying. Agnes has come home from Toronto to both see her mother and a teenage child Joanie she gave up for adoption.
For the movie, "I had to up the stakes a bit," says MacIvor.
"I had to go deeper and farther and to darker places. It made the situation more dramatic."
He thinks Cape Bretoners, with their harsh history, aren't afraid to look at darkness in the human soul.
"For me you can only see the light in the darkness and the last scene of the movie only has the effect it has because we've been to the dark places.
"I put my characters through dark journeys so they can feel the light at the end of it."
The three actors playing the sisters met every weekend during the film's shoot with von Carolsfeld to talk about their characters.
"By the time we got to the scene," says Rebecca Jenkins, "we'd already jelled on our history and all of our positions in the family.
"The hardest part was two days before: 'Oh my God, are my choices right?' Once you got in there was a lovely communication."
Halifax actor Stacy Smith feels the three actors were able to find a sisterly bond.
"I felt we all got close, we all started to trust each other and so that formed a bond. We're lucky we had that kind of chemistry."
She found it hard to play an austere, silent character, always eating and watching TV.
"I had to cut my hair which was a huge challenge for me as vain as that sounds and I wore a lot of baggy clothes. I had to find the uncomfortable in me on camera."
"If you look closely," says von Carolsfeld, of the three actors, "you realize they really don't look that much alike. It was a bit scary."
She was nervous about casting. She knew she wanted Molly Parker, with whom she'd worked before, because of her ability to express both vulnerabilty and strength. MacIvor hadn't thought of Parker, but rewrote the script to fit her age. "Molly's brilliant," says MacIvor. "All three of them are fantastic. Molly brings to it a certain attention it wouldn't have had without her. She is a star and known in the U.S."
Apart from Parker and Jenkins, who starred in TV's Black Harbour and currently stars opposite MacIvor in his movie Past Perfect, all of the cast is from Halifax and Cape Breton. "I was blessed with the wonderful talent in Nova Scotia," says von Carolsfeld.
"No matter where I go with the film, I get comments on how fantastic the acting is and how fantastic the acting pool is in Halifax."
The Nova Scotians include: Smith, nominated for a best supporting actress Genie in New Waterford Girl; Ellen Page (Joanie), first cast as Maggie MacLean in Pit Pony, and now working out of Toronto; Cape Breton's Marguerite McNeil, for whom MacIvor wrote the part of the mother; Emmy Alcorn, Mulgrave Road's artistic director and originally Louise in the stage production of Marion Bridge, as Louise's friend Dory; Nicola Lipman; Joseph Rutten; Jackie Torrens; Kevin Curran; fiddler Ashley MacIsaac as a partier and Heather Rankin.
MacIvor's script is so true to Cape Breton that people don't enter their houses by their front doors.
"You don't use the front door," says MacIvor, born and bred in Sydney. "You use the side door. That was specific to my experience."
All the exteriors were shot in Sydney, and the movie had to be set there, he says. "To me Sydney is a place that has this incredible beauty and this incredible roughness at the same time due to the steel plant.
"Cape Breton was built on the mines. That's about as deep and dark as you can go. You get out of the mine and drive to Margaree and stand on a cliff and it's the most beautiful thing you can imagine."
Those extremes fuel Cape Breton's literature and in Marion Bridge MacIvor reflects those extremes in terms of the landscape and the emotional drama among the sisters.
"I think the story can happen anywhere," says Smith. "I love the fact Wiebke didn't do a stereotype.
"The props guys did get a Lick a Chick box but we never went overboard with the accents," she says. "These three sisters could live anywhere; it just happened to take place in Cape Breton."
Marion Bridge is spare in its dialogue, and subtle in its action.
"I'm an editor," says von Carolsfeld. "I try to get away with as little as possible. I'm very interested in how little you can say and the audience will still get it."
This suits MacIvor who, in both his plays and films, tends to only slowly reveal exactly what is going on. "I'm more interested in movies where you're not sure what's going to happen next," he says.
"So often we see movies where we know Jennifer Lopez is going to get together with Ralph Fiennes. You know it from the poster."
He'll be back in Nova Scotia this summer to direct his movie Wilby Wonderful in Shelburne with a cast including Jenkins, Page, Halifax's Kathryn MacLellan, also in Past Perfect, and Jim Allodi (Men With Brooms).
MacIvor is coming to Sydney for the film's Canadian commercial premiere tonight, 7 p.m., Empire Theatres Studio 10 in Sydney. The screening and following party are benefits for the Kids Help Phone.
Also coming are Bill Niven (Idlewild Films), co-producer with Jennifer Kawaja and Julia Sereny of Toronto's Sienna Films, Jenkins, Smith and von Carolsfeld, who belies her German background when she says, "It's like bringing the movie home, eh?"
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Movie takes a dark journey into the heart of Cape Breton
By Elissa Barnard / Arts Reporter
DIRECTOR WIEBKE von Carolsfeld was amazed to see two posters for her movie as she biked around Toronto last Sunday.
"It wasn't easy to get the funding for it and to convince people that a movie about three sisters is actually something people want to see," says the director of Marion Bridge, opening in six Canadian cities Friday.
Cape Breton writer Daniel MacIvor's story is subtle. It's set in Sydney and it has no men. Hardly a commercial draw.
However, both the New York weekly Village Voice and the Chicago Tribune gave Marion Bridge a thumbs up when the movie opened last week in the U.S. The Toronto / Halifax co-production won Best First Canadian Feature at the 2002 Toronto International Film Festival and Best Screenplay at the 2002 Atlantic Film Festival.
"The reaction is pretty much the same everywhere," says von Carolsfeld. "I've screened it in places ranging from Owen Sound, Ont. to Los Angeles to Rotterdam. People just seem to be genuinely touched and moved by the film."
The emotion in the story and the power of MacIvor's writing grabbed von Carolsfeld, when she was looking to leap from a successful career as a film editor to directing her first feature film.
"I thought the writing was beautiful. It's about women who we are in the world and how we define ourselves. I thought it was done in a funny and intelligent way."
MacIvor knows the sister dynamic inside out. He grew up in Sydney surrounded by sisters, his own, his mother's and his grandmother's.
"My mother, who is turning 80 in June, to this day she and her sister still talk on the phone every day," says MacIvor, who lives in Toronto.
"I understood really early how that worked. It's like when 'shut up' is a term of endearment. It seemed to me the most solid relationship as I was growing up."
Known in Canada and the U.S. for groundbreaking alternative theatre, MacIvor wrote Marion Bridge, first as a play commissioned by Nova Scotia's Mulgrave Road Theatre, for his mother, who will see the movie in Cape Breton tonight, and his sisters, even borrowing the name, Agnes, but not the character, from his sister, Agnes Anne.
"My mother was wondering if I was ever going to write something that she would like. My stuff tends to be a little on the dark side."
The movie Marion Bridge, however, is on the dark side, much more so than the play.
All three sisters, the alcoholic, outgoing youngest (Molly Parker), the repressed, religious, recently separated eldest (Rebecca Jenkins) and the shut-down, possibly lesbian, middle sister (Stacy Smith), wrestle with a tragic, destructive family secret as their mother (Marguerite McNeil) lies dying. Agnes has come home from Toronto to both see her mother and a teenage child Joanie she gave up for adoption.
For the movie, "I had to up the stakes a bit," says MacIvor.
"I had to go deeper and farther and to darker places. It made the situation more dramatic."
He thinks Cape Bretoners, with their harsh history, aren't afraid to look at darkness in the human soul.
"For me you can only see the light in the darkness and the last scene of the movie only has the effect it has because we've been to the dark places.
"I put my characters through dark journeys so they can feel the light at the end of it."
The three actors playing the sisters met every weekend during the film's shoot with von Carolsfeld to talk about their characters.
"By the time we got to the scene," says Rebecca Jenkins, "we'd already jelled on our history and all of our positions in the family.
"The hardest part was two days before: 'Oh my God, are my choices right?' Once you got in there was a lovely communication."
Halifax actor Stacy Smith feels the three actors were able to find a sisterly bond.
"I felt we all got close, we all started to trust each other and so that formed a bond. We're lucky we had that kind of chemistry."
She found it hard to play an austere, silent character, always eating and watching TV.
"I had to cut my hair which was a huge challenge for me as vain as that sounds and I wore a lot of baggy clothes. I had to find the uncomfortable in me on camera."
"If you look closely," says von Carolsfeld, of the three actors, "you realize they really don't look that much alike. It was a bit scary."
She was nervous about casting. She knew she wanted Molly Parker, with whom she'd worked before, because of her ability to express both vulnerabilty and strength. MacIvor hadn't thought of Parker, but rewrote the script to fit her age. "Molly's brilliant," says MacIvor. "All three of them are fantastic. Molly brings to it a certain attention it wouldn't have had without her. She is a star and known in the U.S."
Apart from Parker and Jenkins, who starred in TV's Black Harbour and currently stars opposite MacIvor in his movie Past Perfect, all of the cast is from Halifax and Cape Breton. "I was blessed with the wonderful talent in Nova Scotia," says von Carolsfeld.
"No matter where I go with the film, I get comments on how fantastic the acting is and how fantastic the acting pool is in Halifax."
The Nova Scotians include: Smith, nominated for a best supporting actress Genie in New Waterford Girl; Ellen Page (Joanie), first cast as Maggie MacLean in Pit Pony, and now working out of Toronto; Cape Breton's Marguerite McNeil, for whom MacIvor wrote the part of the mother; Emmy Alcorn, Mulgrave Road's artistic director and originally Louise in the stage production of Marion Bridge, as Louise's friend Dory; Nicola Lipman; Joseph Rutten; Jackie Torrens; Kevin Curran; fiddler Ashley MacIsaac as a partier and Heather Rankin.
MacIvor's script is so true to Cape Breton that people don't enter their houses by their front doors.
"You don't use the front door," says MacIvor, born and bred in Sydney. "You use the side door. That was specific to my experience."
All the exteriors were shot in Sydney, and the movie had to be set there, he says. "To me Sydney is a place that has this incredible beauty and this incredible roughness at the same time due to the steel plant.
"Cape Breton was built on the mines. That's about as deep and dark as you can go. You get out of the mine and drive to Margaree and stand on a cliff and it's the most beautiful thing you can imagine."
Those extremes fuel Cape Breton's literature and in Marion Bridge MacIvor reflects those extremes in terms of the landscape and the emotional drama among the sisters.
"I think the story can happen anywhere," says Smith. "I love the fact Wiebke didn't do a stereotype.
"The props guys did get a Lick a Chick box but we never went overboard with the accents," she says. "These three sisters could live anywhere; it just happened to take place in Cape Breton."
Marion Bridge is spare in its dialogue, and subtle in its action.
"I'm an editor," says von Carolsfeld. "I try to get away with as little as possible. I'm very interested in how little you can say and the audience will still get it."
This suits MacIvor who, in both his plays and films, tends to only slowly reveal exactly what is going on. "I'm more interested in movies where you're not sure what's going to happen next," he says.
"So often we see movies where we know Jennifer Lopez is going to get together with Ralph Fiennes. You know it from the poster."
He'll be back in Nova Scotia this summer to direct his movie Wilby Wonderful in Shelburne with a cast including Jenkins, Page, Halifax's Kathryn MacLellan, also in Past Perfect, and Jim Allodi (Men With Brooms).
MacIvor is coming to Sydney for the film's Canadian commercial premiere tonight, 7 p.m., Empire Theatres Studio 10 in Sydney. The screening and following party are benefits for the Kids Help Phone.
Also coming are Bill Niven (Idlewild Films), co-producer with Jennifer Kawaja and Julia Sereny of Toronto's Sienna Films, Jenkins, Smith and von Carolsfeld, who belies her German background when she says, "It's like bringing the movie home, eh?"
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