About that fog . . .

A talk with Scott Hicks

Scott Hicks, multi-Oscar nominee in 1997 for Shine (Geoffrey Rush won for Best Actor), nods appreciatively when his adaptation of David Guterson's bestseller Snow Falling on Cedars is compared to Terence Malick's Thin Red Line -- without the voiceovers.

"My first job on working on the screenplay [by Ron Bass] was to eliminate all the voiceover," he says. "There was voiceover from beginning to end, Ishmael's interior monologue. I thought this was distancing us from engagement, so let's remove this. That created some very specific challenges, because Ishmael is a very closed-off, internalized character with little contact or interaction with people. But I felt I had to do that because there are other points of view in the story. The point of view of the Japanese people."

That Japanese point of view was crucial. Set during World War II, Cedars is about Ishmael, a white man in love with Hatsue, a Japanese woman, But he is more an observer than a participant in the central dramas -- the trial of Hatsue's husband Kazuo, for murder, and the forced relocation of the community's Japanese population. "I wanted to be careful not to turn it into a history lesson," says Hicks. "But I did feel it was necessary to bear witness to these events. Not to feel guilty, but in order that we will never let this happen again."

To avoid preachiness and reflect the depth and immediacy of the story, Hicks felt he had to challenge his audience. "In truth, it's not really courtroom drama. It's less about the details of the trial than it is about confronting the past. In a number of ways. There are people taking the witness stand forced literally to remember the past. So one by one we are taken into their memories and have to share with them the process of unraveling the deeper mysteries of the story. It's an intimate love story played out against this epic canvas of events, all of which is resolved in a courtroom. That's how I would characterize it. It doesn't lend itself to a neat, one-sentence storyline."

Not even the film's central sequence, a five-minute montage operating on a number of different levels and from different points of view, can be neatly summarized. It all starts with a Dear John letter from Hatsue that Ishmael recovers years later from a box of memorabilia. Or does it?

"In structuring the screenplay, I pushed that letter as far downstream as I could. I sensed it was the emotional climax and at the same time the point where we discover what happened to Ishmael in the war. It's also the climax of the way memory works in the film, because by the time you get to that episode, you've got five different time frames all co-existing. She's reading the letter to her mother in Manzanar. He's reading the letter in the ship traveling to battle. He's also reading the letter in time present. He's also remembering the battle and the war during which he has this vision/dream or memory of him and Hatsue on the beach as if they were there during the war on the day they found the dead fish on the beach. So this is all happening at once.

"In my brief to the editor at the time I wrote, `This is not about conventional flashback. This is about co-existence of time. I want to be flown back and forth through all these time frames using the medium of the letter as the bonding factor.' "

Will Hicks be dismayed if some people come away from the film, which opens in the fog, feeling as if they'd never left it?

"You are immersed in it. The opening scene is emblematic of the whole film. In a sense the movie is a search for the truth. And nothing is quite what it first appears to be."

-- P.K.

---

Back to Snow Falling On Cedars

---