After transitioning from music videos to international auteur status with his 1987 breakout hit My Life As A Dog, Swedish director Lasse Hallstrom came to America and slowly established himself as a maker of prestige dramas like What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, The Cider House Rules, Chocolat, The Shipping News and the Heath Ledger version of Casanova.
After stumbling with the Richard Gere projects The Hoax and Hachiko: A Dog’s Story, the director rebounded with the Nicholas Sparks romance Dear John, starring Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried.
His newest feature, Salmon Fishing In The Yemen, goes a little lighter, pairing Ewan McGregor and Emily Blunt as a mismatched couple on a project to stock a Yemeni sheik’s private river with Atlantic salmon. We sat down the day after the film’s world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival.
At the premiere last night, your producer spoke of a disaster during the shoot when a flash flood washed away the set in Morocco. How does a filmmaker cope with something like that?
There’s no problem. [laughing] No problem, because you have the producers and the assistant directors solving it for you. So I’m thankfully not involved in dealing with a crisis like sets being swept away in floods, and the extra cost of that. In the end, I get the additional pressure of having to cut a day off the schedule to make the budget fit the project.
It sounded fairly daunting when the producer described it.
Yes, it was daunting. But to me, I was watching from the sidelines as I was trying to get [the film] finished on time. The set was rebuilt in three days or something. So it was more of an adventure for the producers. I just had the joy of shooting in Morocco, England and Scotland.
What drew you to this project in the first place?
I look for any story that has an interesting character – if the story’s character-driven, I get interested. If it’s plot-driven to a point where it almost sacrifices character, I get bored. [laughing] Because my interest is mostly performance – observing life and relationships. Human behaviour.
It’s funny you should say that. I was thinking that a number of your films – specifically of What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Chocolat and The Shipping News – treat plot almost incidentally, using it as an excuse to spend time with the characters.
Yes. In a weird way, yes.
Your films also tend to mix comedy and drama – or at least to use the latter as a contrast to the former.
I love the challenge of those tonal shifts. I love the challenge of crossing genres, the crossover of the drama and comedy. To me, it portrays life more realistically than the outright drama. But there is a struggle – even if I tell a bizarre story, I want to bring [the actors’] performances down as far as I can. That may help to unify those two tones. I’ve been drawn to this wild mix of almost cartoonish characters who meet more realistically portrayed characters. For some reason, I’ve found scripts that have these clashes, and when I see that clash happening, I’ll really just try to tone everything down, bring everything down.
In Gilbert Grape there was a really bizarre story about this overweight woman. But making her real, and making those bizarre elements as toned-down as possible, seemed to work, in some strange way.
Ewan McGregor said he had a lot of fun coming up with his character on Salmon Fishing – the accent, the personality tics.
He’s got wonderful instincts, and it’s quite an interesting character, very different from anything he’s done before. I think he makes pitch-perfect choices.
And speaking of instinctual actors, you’ve worked with Johnny Depp a couple of times …
He has, also, these very personal and impeccable instincts of how to approach a part. But then he does Pirates Of The Caribbean and he goes off. You know, I’m fascinated by the range of what he does – to me, he seemed to be almost hiding behind these eccentric characters, and when he did a realistic character [in Gilbert Grape], he’s very subtle. He’s fascinating he’s very thoughtful in the process of how he approaches a part – wardrobe and makeup. He creates his character very thoroughly.
I’m hoping to work with him a year from now. We have a script – it’s called American Lover, and he’s on board and his wife [Vanessa Paradis] as well to do it. It’s about Simone de Beauvoir and her American lover, Nelson Algren. Hopefully we’ll do that next – in a year and half from now, I think. When he gets available.
