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In Manners of Dying, Dupuis plays Kevin Barlow, an inmate on death row whose dying wish is to have the surveillance tapes of his lethal injection sent to his mother. As the director of the execution factory, Harry Parlington (played with unnerving perfection by Serge Houde) has discretional power over the matter. The pared-down, character-driven film is made up of eight vignettes, each a different version of Barlow's final hours. In every episode, Dupuis puts a completely different, yet equally powerful, spin on Barlow. (by Sarah Barlow, Montreal Mirror, February 2005) |
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La Presse The best way to kill a man << Journalist Marie-Christine Blais conducts 4 interviews (“Manners of Interviewing”) with the key figures connected with Manners of Dying. In each case, the victim’s ‘last meal’ is described. >> Interview No. 1 YANN MARTEL, author (Self (1996) and Life of Pi (2001), Booker Prize winner (2002).) The interviewee is eating buffet snacks, one of which contains meat, which he swallows with distaste as he’s a vegetarian. He drinks bottled water. The interviewee wrote the short story Manners of Dying, published in 1994 in the collection called The Facts behind the Helsinki Roccomatios and other stories (Paul en Finlande in French). “I don’t know why, but even before the adaptation for Jeremy’s film, this little story had already been staged twice and I myself had adapted a screenplay for a TV film for CBC (which wasn’t made). When Jeremy came to me asking if he could base a film on it I was in the middle of writing Life of Pi, that was in 1998; CBC still owned the rights, but as soon as they reverted to me I accepted Jeremy’s offer. I love the cinema. But I didn’t go near the screenplay. Jeremy showed me the drafts of his script on several occasions and I gave him a few little bits of advice, that’s all. I knew that he had to clarify certain things in transposing the prose to the screen. In my story, the death is by hanging, which was a deliberate anachronism on my part; on the screen this anachronism isn’t possible, so the gallows become a fatal injection, which identifies the era – ours, while in the book both the place and the time remain vague. Also, the letters from the prison governor to the condemned man’s mother become videos, which is also more topical…. The collection containing Manners of Dying was reprinted for the USA and I was able to rework the text a bit, correcting some legal terms … And I renumbered the director’s letters differently: of the hundred or so in the original version of the story, there are now more than 1,000. There are six billion people on Earth, there are six billion ways of dying. …” << Trivia note: the original letters are nos. 8, 13, 19, 34, 41, 60, 85, 91 and 96. – viv >> Interview No. 2 SERGE HOUDE, actor (Pierre Laporte in Octobre, roles in Le Dernier Souffle, List noire, The Score, and also on TV in Largo Winch, The Dead Zone …) The interviewee has a plate of buffet snacks at his feet, which he doesn’t touch once the interview begins. The interviewee plays the character of Harry Parlington, the prison governor. He read Yann Martell’s short story after the filming. “In this film Roy, who plays the condemned man, is in his cell, locked away behind blue metal bars. My prison is my steel-blue suit, the suit that represents protocol, the law, and ultimately society. My character is locked into procedure and has to make a decision, according to how the condemned man meets his death. We shot the film in four weeks, the first three with Roy, who had to shoot another film (Mémoires affectives). A week before the shoot, during a read-through of the script, I suddenly looked up and saw Roy fixing me with an expressionless gaze. I thought, ‘Look, are you trying to annoy me?’, and just then the expression, ‘I’m not playing your game, son’ occurred to me; I’d found the key to my character. I’m not playing your game, son, that’s Parlington. It was there, with Roy, that it clicked. The death penalty touches everyone who comes into contact with it. In the film, but also during the filming; at one point one of the technicians who was always working in the death chamber said over his radio, ‘Get me out of here, I can’t take any more.’ And when I tried to show the film to my mother, she couldn’t watch it; she kept saying to me, ‘Let him go, the poor man …’ ” Interview No. 3 JEREMY PETER ALLEN, scriptwriter, director and editor of the film (involved in about 50 films since 1995, including production manager on La Face cachée de la lune and director of the short film Requiem contre un plafond, which was shown at several festivals). The interviewee quickly ate some snacks, but tiredness and the beginnings of a cold had spoiled his appetite. “I film in English or French according to the project; my short film Requiem contre un plafond was based on the work of Benacquista, so by necessity it was in French; Manners of Dying had been written in English, so naturally I filmed in English. I’d been talking with Yann Martell about an adaptation since 1998, and let’s say that his winning the Booker Prize helped when we were looking for financing for the film! But it’s still a small budget. How did we persuade Roy Dupuis? He was looking for projects to break his image of a pretty boy in a checked shirt in a barn, and he agreed to do it just on reading the script. For the Serge Houde character I was looking for an actor able to work in English, so I went to Vancouver to audition and stumbled across a Quebec guy who lived over there; it was Serge. There was, between the two of them, but also between all the other actors, a really special connection. It’s not primarily a militant film, but if someone in the audience wants to abolish the death penalty after watching it, so much the better. I did a lot of research on the subject, and included words spoken by real condemned prisoners or wardens – that seemed to be important. Do you know that the lethal injection, currently considered to be the cleanest method, is the one that works least well? Because the Hippocratic Oath forbids medical workers to give such an injection, it’s done by all sorts of people, sometimes with terrible results. And I discovered that several executions have really been videotaped like in the film, and shown in Guatemala; two death sentences have even been shown on television, real public executions, but in your own home. Yann said a little while ago that he found a parallel in bullfighting. You know that the bull is going to die. What interests us is how it will die and what will happen to the matador. That’s Manners of Dying …” Interview No. 4 ROY DUPUIS, actor (in lots of films, too many to mention here) The interviewee isn’t eating but has, near at hand, two packets of Gauloises next to two empty packets. The interviewee plays the role of Kevin Barlow, who is condemned to death. He hasn’t read Yann Martell’s short story. “We filmed in Quebec City – I was there for 12 out of the 19 days of shooting. So I didn’t have the time – nor the desire – to separate myself from my character. Let’s say quite simply that it was quicker to do it than to talk about it. You can’t really rely on technique, you have to react to the other actors, to the bars, to the orders, to the environment. So I just dived in. So if you dive in and land up in the right place you’re happy to serve the film, to go with the flow. That’s what happened to me. It was intense, yes, but not draining; on the contrary … The character is everyman, more or less ready to die, that’s all. I agreed to do this film because of the way it was structured, I thought it made good cinema. And the subject. My character’s very last line had been said by a man condemned to death. The guy was mentally retarded, but just at the end, all in one breath and with great clarity, he said these words …. I don’t know what will become of the film. But I do know that it’s for this kind of project that I do what I do.” |
