A Film With A Personal Connection

Jeremy Podeswa: Book on which the film was based “touched me very personally.”

Jeremy Podeswa: Book on which the film was based “touched me very personally.”

by George Robinson
Special To The Jewish Week

Jeremy Podeswa remembers vividly the first time he read Anne Michaels’ best-selling novel “Fugitive Pieces.” He was a young aspiring filmmaker when the book was published to great acclaim in 1996 in Canada, home to both Michaels and Podeswa. And he was entranced by the book, a story of a boy who survives the Shoah thanks to a Greek geologist who hides and then adopts him, told from the point of view of the poet-writer that the boy becomes.

“I was completely knocked out,” Podeswa said in a telephone interview last week. “It was a purely emotional experience, not overly aestheticized; it’s like tapping into somebody’s emotions in a profound way. I cried when I read the book.”

But he knew he

had no chance at all of securing the film rights.

“When I read it I still hadn’t made my second film,” he said. “I thought, ‘I’ll never be able to make this film.’ I hadn’t done enough to contemplate making a movie like that. I didn’t have a huge body of work behind me.”

The novel’s opening sentence, however, should have clued Podeswa in: “Time is a blind guide.”

You just never know what’s in store, as Podeswa will gladly acknowledge. A dozen years since he read “Fugitive Pieces,” and his film version of the best-selling Holocaust tale is opening on May 2.

A lot can happen in 12 years. Podeswa went from being a well-regarded but little-known indie filmmaker to one of the most acclaimed and sought-after television directors in the business. His work on “Six Feet Under” most prominently, but also on “Rome,” “The Tudors,” “The L Word” and numerous other cable series, has given him a clout in the film and television business that he couldn’t have imagined when he first read “Fugitive Pieces.” And the vagaries of the film business gave him the opportunity he craved.
“After I came back from Cannes with my second film, ‘The Five Senses,’ I learned that the book rights have been sold to a company,” Podeswa said from Melbourne, where he is directing HBO’s World War II series “The Pacific.”

“I approached the company; I needed to find out what was happening with it,” he continued. “They were looking for a writer-director at that point. I was able to show them ‘The Five Senses,’ I screened it for the producers and Anne Michaels and they liked it. [Michaels and I] had interesting meetings, I loved her immediately, we really got on well.”

Perhaps the poet-turned-novelist recognized Podeswa’s unusual affinity with the material. His father Julius, a prominent painter, was a Holocaust survivor and Podeswa readily acknowledges that the book “touched me very personally.”

Podeswa’s father, the only member of his family to survive the camps, was not one of those survivors who was unable to speak of his experiences.

“He wasn’t one of those people who wouldn’t talk, but there was something in reserve,” the filmmaker recalls. “We never sat down and went through the whole story, but I think he communicated many things to me over time. It would come up in a conversational way, and over the years he built up a picture of what that was like.”

Podeswa, in turn, offers that picture to his audience in subtle, carefully calibrated ways. Like its source material, the film “Fugitive Pieces” is a complex journey through several levels of historical and personal time, as much concerned with the after-effects of terrible trauma as with the immediate events.
The transition from page to screen is a notoriously difficult one, particularly with a novel like “Fugitive Pieces,” which clearly owes much of its power to a poet’s love of language itself as much as Michaels’s storytelling skills.

“A book is a book, and you can’t put it on screen in the same form,” Podeswa said. “It’s a very complex novel. The book is non-linear, very interior, very poetic in
the language. It has enormous scope and covers the entire life of Jakob, the central character.”

The writing process was, he confesses, particularly arduous. It was rumored that Podeswa wrote 25 or 26 drafts of the script before the filming began. He demurred.
“I don’t know how many drafts there were,” he said. “There weren’t numbers on them, they’re just dated. I continued to work and do other things at the same time. I directed a lot of television while I worked on the screenplay.”

Inevitably, you lose some of the book in the adaptation. “It’s a process of selection; there’s so many fragments in the book, you can’t have them all in the movie,” Podewsa explained. “You want to create the same impact and effect as the book.”

At least two important viewers are satisfied with the results.

Anne Michaels, who Podeswa involved in the entire process of filmmaking, even consulting her about casting, is very supportive of the film.

And Podeswa said his father Julius “was very moved by the film.”

He undoubtedly spotted one of the most personal touches his son inserted into the film. “In Jacob’s house, in the scenes that take place before the outbreak of war, there are paintings by my father’s father, who was a painter like my father,” Podeswa revealed. “Before the war he had sent some paintings to Canada, and I put them in the house that gets invaded. In my mind that was my father’s house. In my mind we were creating that world.” n

“Fugitive Pieces,” written and directed by Jeremy Podeswa from the novel by Anne Michaels, opens on Friday, May 2 at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas (Broadway and 62nd St.).

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