Robert Lepage |
“The thing is that my theatre background is very filmic,” remarks Robert Lepage (Le Confessional) who along with co-director Pedro Pires (Yo-Yo Ma Inspired by Bach) adapted his 9 hour stage play Lypsynch into a 90 minute film called Triptych. “They’re all screaming to become a movie. Once you want to bring them to film it’s a radically different evolution; that’s where Pedro comes in and is very useful because he does everything.” In regards to the creative collaboration with his colleague who handled the editing and cinematography, Lepage states, “I’m the restaurant owner and he’s the cook.” Pedro Pires quickly points out, “I am the cook but I also have a couple of recipes of my own.” When it comes to multi-tasking, Pires observes, “Steven Spielberg [Lincoln] and Stanley Kubrick [Paths of Glory] said that the better way to learn to make a movie is to make one and to do everything. You will learn faster than if a hire a lot of people. It will be rough and maybe it won’t be a masterpiece but you will learn.”
Pedro Pires |
Triptych which screened at the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival tells the interconnecting stories of two sisters, a schizophrenic bookseller, and a jazz singer who loses her voice because of brain surgery, and the discontented German surgeon who performed the operation. Some clever transitions involve a MIR scan dissolving to the image of the brain on the computer screen and an operatic song which becomes the voice of a young girl taking singing lessons. “That’s part of Robert’s work in theatre and film which is to have those sophisticated transitions,” believes Pedro Pires. “A lot of stuff was unplanned,” admits Robert Lepage. “What I found to be interesting is that you shoot all of this material and have all of these great transition ideas and you do them. ‘They’re cool and nice.’ But then there are these extraordinary things in the material that you don’t expect and suddenly they’re close cousins. You say, ‘This goes here.’ Usually, they contain the essence of the film.”