Thursday, 5/29/97 Peploe weaves ‘Magic’ in Mexican period piece
FILM: Director waves wand in mixed-genre adaptation starring
Bridget Fonda
By Brandon Wilson Daily Bruin Staff As Quentin Tarantino and
Robert Rodriguez showed us when their film "From Dusk ‘Til Dawn"
was unleashed upon the public, mixing genres can be difficult. The
resounding failure of that film underlines what many believe to be
an inviolable rule of thumb: genres weren’t meant to be mixed.
Filmmaker Clare Peploe is undaunted by this widely embraced law of
storytelling. With her latest film "Rough Magic" (opening tomorrow)
Peploe weaves a tale utilizing elements and tropes from film noir,
magic realism and the screwball comedy. In fact, the story’s
postmodern quality was precisely what attracted the director to the
material. "The novel is set in Mexico, in 1949 – that period which
is very interesting being just after the Spanish Civil War, and
many interesting characters were in Mexico at the time," says
Peploe. "What I thought was great was that the film enabled me to
work with so many things from that period without doing a remake
from that period, which would be boring. The humor in a way
upstages the genre, and I thought that was a fantastic way of doing
it. The idea of doing this fantastic woman character, a magician’s
assistant; a magician who performs Western, illusionist magic which
then becomes real magic and magic realism was just a beautiful way
of showing different cultures intermingling. I’ve always traveled,
ever since I was a child, and I think going to places with a really
different culture is a lot like mixing genres: you come with your
own codes of behavior, and different ones, and different ideas of
what is shocking. It’s something I’ve always enjoyed, so anything
involving that kind of mixing is of interest to me. That’s why I
took to the book." The story follows the journey of Myra Shumway
(played by Bridget Fonda), a spunky magician’s assistant who finds
herself on the lam when things go sour with her uranium-rich
fiance. Myra goes to Mexico, and burnt out gumshoe Alex Ross
(played by Russell Crowe) is hired to find the magical Miss Shumway
and bring her back alive. The film is based on the novel "Miss
Shumway Waves a Wand" by James Hadley Chase, a book given to Peploe
by her younger sister Chloe. Peploe loved the book, and found
herself among the growing cult of Chase’s admirers. "The novelist
is dead; he died in the ’70s," says the director. "He wrote many
books, some under different names; a few have been made into
movies. He’s one of those authors that’s been rediscovered in
France – as the French often do, they adopt a writer. In fact, one
of the reasons I have French financing is that the book is
well-known there; it’s out of print in England, out of print in the
States. But there it’s a book that they know and love." Peploe
herself is familiar with France, England, and much of the world
thanks to her unusual upbringing by her art-loving, globe-trotting
aesthete parents (her father is English, her mother an
Italian-American expatriate). Born in Tanzania in 1942, Peploe
spoke Swahili before she learned English, French or Italian (all of
which she now speaks fluently). She is the oldest of three,
including her brother Mark (a writer) and the aforementioned sister
Chloe (a researcher). She’s described her mother as a lover of the
arts, allowing nothing in her domain that came later than Proust.
While she is indebted to her rather bohemian/classical upbringing,
Clare was drawn to film in part because it was one medium her
parents would have none of, since film had yet to distinguish
itself as a viable form of high art during Clare’s formative years.
Because of her parents’ revulsion to film, Peploe gravitated toward
it. "One of the reasons I think I got into film is that it’s such a
modern art. It had nothing to do with my parents; it was one medium
which they knew nothing about. It involves a certain amount of
vulgarity. I like that about it. I couldn’t stand the purity of my
mother’s world, and the classical works she admired. And of course
that’s all still inside me, and I really love the work she loved –
I still go to see old churches – but for a long time I thought I
missed out on all the ordinary things of childhood, like
television. But cinema was a way to make up for that, and of course
the films I make aren’t really mainstream anyway." As a young
woman, Peploe sought out the greats of the medium and plunged
herself into the world of cinema. She was Michelangelo Antonioni’s
assistant on his late ’60s Los Angeles apocalypse film "Zabriskie
Point," and she developed a passion for the works of the French New
Wave, including those of Jean-Luc Godard. Her love for the French
iconoclast proved crucial when she met a protege of the director’s
whom she would become deeply involved with. That fellow Godard
enthusiast was Bernardo Bertolucci, and Peploe went on to become
Bertolucci’s assistant director on his five-hour epic "1900." By
the time the film was released, Peploe and Bertolucci were living
together. By 1980, they were married. Peploe served as co-writer
along with Bertolucci and his brother on his controversial film
"Luna." Of late, Peploe’s brother Mark has co-written with his
brother-in-law on "The Last Emperor" and "The Sheltering Sky." Not
content to just be the wife of a famous director, Peploe first
garnered kudos of her own for her directorial debut "Couples and
Robbers" (1981), for which Peploe received a Best Short Film Oscar
nomination. Her feature film debut came in 1988 with the film "High
Season" (co-written with brother Mark Peploe), which won a Silver
Shell at the San Sebastian Film Festival. Her follow-up effort, an
adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s "Sauce for the Goose," won Prix
du Public at the Festival de Cognac. Screenwriter William
Brookfield wrote the screenplay for "Rough Magic" along with
Peploe. The transformation of the novel into a script required a
lot of scaling down here and expansion there, and Peploe had no
trouble leaving her mark on the material. "It was a long process
actually," says Peploe. "The thing about the novel is it has some
brilliantly funny sequences in it, but the plot had so many loose
threads, as if the writer got drunk every night and forgot what he
had written the night before. The scenes are brilliant but have
little connection to one another. And what changed a great deal for
me was going to Guatemala; I was very moved by the things I saw
there, and by the magic of the country, and the mixing of genres
that has gone on as far as the mingling of Westerners and
indigenous peoples, and the blending of religions. In fact, a lot
of what I saw and experienced there I brought to Mexico where I
shot the film. Originally we were going to shoot in Guatemala, but
then there was an unfortunate incident, a very tragic one actually
– an American woman was almost killed in a village because they
thought she was stealing a child; it caused a kind of hysteria. So
then the American embassy advised all Americans not to travel to
Guatemala, and we couldn’t shoot there. So at the last minute we
had to switch to Mexico, and it actually broke my heart. So the
trips to Guatemala changed the kind of magic in the story, because
that sort of feeling wasn’t in the book at all." Peploe was able to
shift from the rather solitary aspects of screenwriting to the more
collective phase of production, and as director she is careful to
work more collaboratively rather than enforce her will on an
unsuspecting cast and crew. "First of all directing involves so
many people, and it involves using the talents of others and
getting people that you really trust. That’s the key thing. That’s
why casting is so important; if you’ve got an intelligent, good
cast they can bring you so many things. They work out so many
things about their own characters. That’s why it’s crucial to have
people who are intelligent about their parts. Same with a
production designer, or cinematographer. It’s important to get a
common feeling going (amongst the different artists); you have to
start trusting people." To prepare for the period piece, Peploe and
her actors immersed themselves in films from the past, but Peploe’s
key inspiration came from media outside of cinema: "I looked at
films for performances. I thought that Bridget’s character was more
of a ’40s woman in the first half of the film, because I always
think of the ’40s woman as more independent; and later, when she
(quite literally) becomes heartless, she’s become a ’50s woman. And
that’s because I think of the ’50s woman as being forced into a
narrow stereotype. Same for men as well. This was an interesting
time because America had won the war, there was this incredible
self-confidence in America, Europe had been destroyed, and there
was almost this blind faith in science, which is almost like a
belief in magic. Men and women were pushed into these narrow slots,
and of course, people are much messier than that. So the magic
brings out the truth in people, which is why the characters are all
changed by the end. Bridget looked at a lot of films; she has an
immense knowledge of films from that era. She became this Howard
Hawks woman – she’s even called ‘Slim’ like Lauren Bacall in ‘To
Have and Have Not.’ I also looked at a lot of photographs of
Guatemala from the late ’40s and early ’50s. Then of course when
you’re shooting, you find that you constantly give up all these
ideas and go with what you have. But certainly photographs and
paintings are inspirational." Next up Peploe plans to adapt a
trilogy of books and tackle darker subject matter, and she also
hopes to produce the work of other directors in the future. In the
meantime, she continues to look at films and literature for
inspiration, including work that exhibits the skilled hand of an
artist, the way she hopes her own work feels. "I’ve always enjoyed
the films of people like Gus Van Sant and Jane Campion because
they’re very personal; I always like films where you get a sense
(of authorship). Many films are very good, but they could’ve been
made by a number of directors and it’s very nice when you feel that
this could only have been done by this person." FILM: "Rough Magic"
opens tomorrow. Goldwyn Entertainment Company Bridget Fonda (left)
talks with Clare Peploe, co-writer and director, and John J.
Campbell, director of photography, during the production of "Rough
Magic." Goldwyn Entertainment Company Russell Crowe plays gumshoe
Alex Ross and Bridget Fonda is Myra Shumway, a magician’s
assistant, in Clare Peploe’s "Rough Magic." Related Links: Rough
Magic (1995)