When we met with Russell Banks to talk about The Sweet Hereafter, many of our questions were rooted in the setting of the novel in the Adirondacks and the role that place has in his writing. Reading the novel in the neighborhood it takes place in affected my experience of reading it: seeing the streets and neighborhoods in my head made the scenes in the novel vivid in an entirely new way. Especially after talking with the author, it is impossible to imagine the story any place else. In light of that, the choice of the filmmakers to set the film version in British Columbia seems bizarre to me. Granted, my perspective of living in Keene while reading the novel makes me a little biased. I also have not seen the film yet, just the trailer with a very cheesy voiceover, and Russell Banks did say that he was very happy with the way the film turned out. It earned fantastic reviews and I don't doubt that the movie was very well done, but I do wonder why the filmmakers decided to change the setting of the story. Was the change for financial or logistical reasons (it is often cheaper to film in Canada than the United States), or was the Adirondacks not a desirable setting for another reason?
This train of thought made me wonder what films have been set in the Adirondacks. Obviously there are many documentaries about the Park, but in terms of Hollywood stories, the only three that I can think of are The Last of the Mohicans, Miracle, and the horror film Lake Placid featuring Betty White and killer alligators. Out of those three, I have only seen Miracle which is tangentially related to the Adirondacks, and only takes place in Lake Placid for the last thirty minutes of the film. Besides The Last of the Mohicans which is takes place in the 18th century, none of these films are representations of people who actually live in the area. Perhaps there are some major movies that I am missing, but it seems odd that such a large, visually appealing, and well known place is rarely featured in film.
This post raises so many interesting questions! I think there is not a lot of literature set in the Adirondacks either, really, relatively speaking, but in thinking about this and your question about film, I started wondering about how we would measure what an appropriate number of films and novels would be for a particular region. What might we compare it to? Other parks? Are there films set in Yellowstone or Yosemite? Most films are set in cities. It's interesting, isn't it, that although films are visual media, the actual setting of most movies doesn't matter that much--matters so little that films are regularly shot in different places than they are supposed to be set in (with Toronto or Vancouver--relatively cheap places to film--often standing in for New York or Los Angeles or Seattle). One reason that The Sweet Hereafter was filmed in Canada is that it is cheaper to film there, and BC has a thriving film industry, so the expensive things you need to make a big budget film (camera crews, catering, transportation, etc) were already there. Plus, Atom Egoyan, who made the film, is Canadian, and the film was in part financed by the Canadian government, and they presumably also wanted Canadian bang for their bucks.
ReplyDelete