Vision quest

Don McKellar talks about adapting the dystopian novel Blindness for the big screen

Last Updated: Friday, September 5, 2008 | 3:52 PM ET

By Katrina Onstad, CBC News

Actor, writer and director Don McKellar, who wrote the screenplay for the film Blindness, based on the novel by Nobel Prize-winning writer Jose Saramago. (Steve Carty/CBC)

This feature originally ran during the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival.

When Blindness opened the Cannes Film Festival this spring, Canadian media outlets ran many a proud image of our most famous hyphenate, Don McKellar — actor-writer-director-of-stage-and-screens — walking the red carpet, typically befuddled, atypically bearded.

“[The film] is not at all speculative, so it’s not science fiction. It’s very contemporary. It’s what’s happening right now. It just happened [with Hurricane Katrina], in fact. If anything, it’s almost historical.”

—Don McKellar

But the critical response to the Canadian co-production, scripted by McKellar, was mixed. Now, four months later, a new, altered cut of Blindness screens at the Toronto International Film Festival. For McKellar, who also co-stars, the film’s latest incarnation is but another diversion in the long journey that commenced nine years ago when he acquired the rights to Nobel Prize-winning author Jose Saramago’s novel.

“The fact of the matter is there were a number of things that weren’t fully resolved by the time we got to Cannes. It’s not to say I didn’t like the version that was shown there,” says McKellar delicately, sipping a beer on a restaurant patio in the Little Portugal neighbourhood of Toronto, where he lives. “People kind of rush to get to festivals. It’s certainly understandable, but you have to ask whether it’s helpful.”

The Armageddon-like subject matter was never a great fit for opening night at Cannes; that slot is usually reserved for something a tad more crowd-pleasing. Blindness is set in an unnamed city where a sudden epidemic shutters the eyes of all but one woman, the pampered wife (Julianne Moore) of an optometrist (Mark Ruffalo). The government deploys the “infected” to a makeshift camp that quickly gives way to squalor and violence. Though an optimistic final act hints at the potential for human camaraderie — an idea in keeping with Saramago’s communist sympathies — the film hits hardest as horror, a snapshot of a fragile civilization teetering on the very edge of chaos. But McKellar is wary of the label “science fiction.”

“To me, it’s not at all speculative, so it’s not science fiction,” he says. “It’s very contemporary. It’s what’s happening right now. It just happened [with Hurricane Katrina], in fact. If anything, it’s almost historical.”

McKellar first read the book almost a decade ago. He was in London to promote his 1999 film Last Night, about the last hours before the end of the world. Immediately, he recognized a connection between the two works. “I was obsessed with the book. Last Night was sort of about the denial of the apocalypse, and Blindness was about jumping into it. I asked my producer [Niv Fichman] about getting the rights, and he was cautious. He asked me, ‘Are you sure you want to be Mr. Apocalypse?’”

Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo in a scene from Blindness. (TIFF)

McKellar did, but it took years to secure permissions. Far bigger names in film were approaching Saramago, including Gael Garcia Bernal (who appears in the film), Fernando Meirelles (who directs) and Whoopi Goldberg (who will hopefully go see it). Saramago turned down everyone. And then, in the summer of 1999, McKellar and his producer received a call to come out to the author’s home on the Canary Islands.

“We were a little intimidated. He lives in this house of his own design on top of a volcano with no vegetation. He’s got this olive tree he planted in his courtyard. He’s got this office overlooking the ocean and that’s all you can see,” says McKellar. “It’s the fantasy Ian Fleming would write if he had to come up with the character of a Nobel Prize-winning author.”

McKellar believes the fact that he was Canadian — and persistent — helped land the deal. Like the characters in the book, the city is unnamed, and Saramago was adamant that the film mirror the book’s universalism and not turn into a polemic about Portugal, or worse, another disaster movie set in New York. It didn’t happen. Blindness on-screen features an international cast including Japanese, Brazilian, Canadian and American actors, and was shot partly in Sao Paulo, Brazil and partly in a decaying institution for the criminally insane in Guelph, Ont.

“People’s cynical response is that we had to have this multicultural cast in order to get funding, but in fact it was the opposite. It was so hard to find financing to justify all these actors from around the world,” says McKellar. “But when I wrote it that way, it wasn’t unrealistic at all. I realized in Cannes that’s the result of my Canadian experience. The multi-language thing is just the norm here. If I take all my neighbours from the six, seven, eight houses around mine, I’ll have almost exactly the ethnic demographic of that movie.”

McKellar worked at the script for six years — on and off. “This idea that it took six years always makes me sound like some kind of half-wit,” he laughs. In between, he earned strong notices for directing his second feature, Childstar, and became the toast of Broadway with his Tony-award winning musical The Drowsy Chaperone. For years, Blindness was supposed to be McKellar’s next outing as a director, but it went to Oscar-nominated Brazil’s Fernando Mereilles instead, who had scored hits with City of God and The Constant Gardener. Did McKellar feel like he lost control of his hard-won project?

“I never felt like I was separated from my child or anything like that,” he says. “In a weird way, I never felt like I particularly owned it, because it’s not my book. I was sort of involved as it evolved.” He pauses. “It’s not the film I would have directed, but then again, I was excited by Fernando’s involvement, because it was easy to see how his visual language and voice would be in sync with the storytelling.”

Mereilles made the film a star vehicle for Julianne Moore – Oscar talk is already circulating – who plays a wealthy doctor’s wife who gradually realigns her moral compass. Moore is at first semi-unrecognizable as a blonde in a (slight) fat suit.

The film revolves around an epidemic of blindness that sweeps through a city, pushing society to the edge of breakdown. (TIFF)

“I wanted to look like someone who was somewhat insulated from life, so there’s a little bit of padding, a separation between her and the world,” says Moore. (I spoke to her and Meirelles earlier this year.) She gets both thinner and filthier, playing the part with no makeup, and no apparent vanity. “I liked not having the responsibility of looking pretty in a movie. I liked the idea that [the character’s] physicality was going to melt away.”

For Moore, the complexity lay in trying to pull a concrete person from a story that’s largely abstract. “It’s a fable. The challenge in performing it is that there’s something not quite realistic about it. It was about how to inhabit that, how to make it emotional, and both universal and personal.”

In the film’s most violent sequence, the women are forced to exchange sex for food. Eventually, Moore uses her sight to upend that powerlessness. Without giving too much away, her revolt — the oh-so-satisfying climax of the film — articulates a feminist undercurrent in the story.

“In the film, the women do everything. They feed the men, and they organize things. The men, they create problems,” says Meirelles, laughing. “I read an interview with Saramago in which he said that the world will be a better world if the women start running it. Women are more constructive, and men are more destructive. I was thinking about that.”

Meirelles was so struck by the writing in the book that he added voiceover to McKellar’s script to include some of Saramago’s passages. Delivered by Danny Glover, who plays a soft-spoken, sage leader among the blind, the voiceover was one of the most critically slammed aspects of the film at Cannes. In the new version premiering at TIFF, it is gone entirely. Critics milling around early screenings could be heard commenting on how much improved the film is without it. McKellar says it’s a change he’s happy with.

“I didn’t write it with voiceover, and to tell you the truth, this new version is in many ways almost closer to [my] script, which is interesting. A lot of the little changes that happened in this new version make it more like the original, too. Not because of me, by the way — it’s not like I demanded it. It’s not that uncommon after Cannes for films to change.”

If the new Blindness does find an audience, it will be a vindicating moment for McKellar after all these years. For him, it needs to be seen.

“Saramago asked me, ‘Why would you make a film — which, I’ll remind you, is a visual medium — about blindness?’ It’s a valid question, but of course a film about blindness is also about seeing. The Moore character comes to sense that there is a morality involved with her unique privilege of sight. Not to get too preachy, but I sort of feel that’s something missing from a lot of audiences’ experiences: the idea that there are consequences to seeing things.”

Blindness opens Oct. 3.

Katrina Onstad is the film columnist for CBCNews.ca.