Denys Arcand Tackles Stardom

by Monique Beaudin

When Denys Arcand was a teenager going to movies in Montreal, he says there was no such thing as a Canadian feature film. He used to pay 33 cents to see three movies at a downtown cinema, never thinking he would one day be writing and directing films that would be shown on screens around the world.

After more than a decade making documentaries for the National Film Board and small feature films, he burst onto the world stage in 1986 with his film Decline of the American Empire, a chatty, dark account of the sex lives of a group of Quebec intellectuals.

Decline, and its follow-up, Jesus of Montreal, captured Genie awards, bagged Oscar nominations and were box-office hits around the world.

His latest film, Stardom, was chosen the closing-night film at Cannes this year, and was picked to open the Toronto International Film Festival. Stardom, a fast-paced satire of the fashion industry, tells the story of Tina Menzhal, a hockey player from Cornwall, Ont., who rises from the rink to the top fashion runways around the world.

How did you start making movies?
Being a filmmaker was something really strange in Canada in the 1950s, I mean it was almost impossible. We knew there was a National Film Board and we knew about Norman McLaren and a few of these guys, but to get in there was almost impossible. Everybody wanted to get there and basically they weren't hiring anybody ever... I did a little summer job for them reviewing the films that they had already done about history. I came in with my history diploma, and at the end of the summer, they hired me for good. So my first few films were about the history of Canada for schools, and they were half-hour documentary films.

How do you approach writing?
I don't know. I'm the worst possible writer. I have no method. I've never learned it. I never attended one course in scriptwriting. I'm the worst possible example that you could give aspiring young writers.

I slowly get interested in an area. Stardom, for example, the last one. This goes back 10 years. I get interested in an area, the area of beauty and the image of beauty and the power of beauty and the marketing of beauty. Whenever I start getting interested, I cut out articles from the paper or magazines, and I file them, or I have an idea, and I write it on a little 8 by 10 card, and I file it in the same file. And then I read a book, and I'll photocopy a couple of pages from that book and it goes into that file that gets bigger and bigger and bigger over the years. Not everything goes in the file. Sometimes it's a conversation, I'm talking to people and they say, 'Well, you should check this out,' or I remember this or that and that's the relationship to my subject. It stays there until there's some click that's a producing click, for instance.

With Stardom, Robert Lantos wanted to make a film with me, and he said, 'Do you have anything? What's your subject?' I said, 'Well, I have this subject, but I'll need a fairly large budget because it will be larger than my other films.' He said, 'Don't worry, we can provide you with a bigger budget.' I said, 'I've got this idea about beauty.'

And then I open my file and check everything I've picked up over the last 10 years and try to find a sort of order and then write a first draft which is usually 300 or 350 pages. It's like a huge novel. When Lantos saw it, he was horrified.

I refine this over the course of six, seven, eight, nine, 12 drafts and it gets smaller and smaller and more compact and things get lost, others get added. Eventually I get down to something that's manageable, something that's about two hours long, about 130 pages, something like that.

And I never think about structure. Very often I will start a script without knowing how it will end, without knowing who my characters are. I start with the first scene which is the last thing you're supposed to do, that's what they teach, I think, in good writing schools. I don't know where I'm going. I have this idea for a script and I see the first scene in my mind, and it's going to be that scene and then we'll see where we go from there. And scenes keep adding on and then it's that big and then you constrict it. That's how it works.

Stardom is so different from your other films. Everything is seen through the eye of somebody, through one camera lens or another. What was it like to write that kind of a film?
It was really strange and it's very, very constraining. You can't just say, 'Well, you need to know more about Tina (the main character), so why don't we set up a scene between her and her mother?' But no, because the television has to be there. So how can we imagine a scene and how would that happen?

It was real incredible gymnastics to try and justify somehow the presence of a camera. To me, that was the challenge and what was fun about this subject. Because this subject is so much about appearances. It's just about that. When I started writing about supermodels, I asked myself, why do I know about these girls? Why do I even care? And after analyzing this, I realized it was television. It was only television. It's because they're always there. They're on talk shows, they're on the E! channel. It's more and more of that all the time. Then I realized, 'Aha, this is my subject.' My subject is not the model. The model, I really don't care [about], it's not a very interesting subject. I mean, these are nice girls, they're having a ball, it's great, but there's nothing else. The subject is, 'Why are we seeing girls on our screens, in our living rooms, in our bedrooms every night, what does it do to us?' So then the script had to obey these rules. It was complicated and very tough.

How was the process of co-writing this script? [Montreal writer Jacob Potashnik co-wrote the script with Arcand.]
It was a very, very nice collaboration. We actually really co-wrote in the sense that I came in with the story and I came in with the idea, and everything. He got involved and wrote lots of actual lines that are his lines, so it was a real collaboration. I didn't write alone and then he wrote his version of it. We worked face-to-face and we were suggesting lines and he was coming up with lines, and I'd say, 'No, let's change it to that.' It was a true co-writing venture.

The reviews for Stardom were mixed, coming out of Cannes. Do you usually read reviews of your work?
Not really. I don't especially look for them. If they're there, I will obviously read them, but I don't go especially asking around and trying to collect them. Sometimes I will read them a year or two later. When it's all over, I'll read them because you don't learn a lot by reading reviews unless it's somebody who actually looked at the film several times, thought about it and wrote a long piece very thoughtfully and then yes, sometimes it's really interesting. If it's just somebody who looks at it once and says, 'I didn't really like it, or I liked his other films better,' what can I gain? I spent four years working on this, I know what the weak points are, what the strong points are. I think I know better than anybody, so why would I have my insides all churned out because somebody didn't like it? )