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By Gerald Jonas
The first movie adaptation of "Long Day's Journey Into Night" was by director Sidney Lumet, whose 1962 version starred Katherine Hepburn and Ralph Richardson as the tortured Tyrones, and Jason Robards Jr. and Dean Stockwell as Jamie and Edmund, their doomed sons. The director's cut came in at just under three hours; most audiences saw a shorter "Day" that ran 136 minutes and was judged "stagy" by some critics.
When Canadian film director and writer David Wellington saw the acclaimed stage production of O'Neill's autobiographical masterpiece at the Stratford (Ontario) Festival in 1994, he was "deeply impressed" by the play and convinced that the time was right to make a new movie of the work. A year later, he and the Stratford cast agreed to work together, along with Toronto-based producers Daniel Iron and Niv Fichman, to bring a full-length film version of "Long Day's Journey Into Night" to the screen -- on a budget of only $2 million.
Wellington is best known to international audiences for the feature film I LOVE A MAN IN UNIFORM (1993), which he directed from his own script and which was honored at the Cannes and Sundance film festivals. He talked recently about the challenges and rewards of adapting an American classic to film.
Before tackling the adaptation, you copied out the entire play by hand. Why?
Because this play is so big and so dense, the only way I could even get close to having it all in my head was to write it out. Writing out a text in order to learn it is something I picked up from actors. I didn't use a typewriter because I type fairly quickly and it would have ended up more of a typing exercise. Actually, I made a kind of romantic thing out of it; I got my nice old fountain pen and sat down and did it over the course of a couple of nights.
Did it help?
It really did, because I'd never directed anything on stage, and the theater is much more text-based. If you're making a movie and the actors are not comfortable with a line, you simply change it. It becomes a kind of reflex: rather than try to figure out the writer's intention, it's just too easy to change. But of course this wasn't possible with O'Neill. So this was good discipline for me.
Even Shakespeare's plays are often staged with lines or entire scenes left out. Were there times when you itched to make cuts?
I'm a Canadian, and "Long Day's Journey" is an American institution. It's not something you mess with. I suppose if you set out in a completely mercenary way to make the most engaging, fascinating, jolt-filled movie you could, you could probably trim it to about two hours. But you wouldn't be doing the play a service. As for Shakespeare, well, he doesn't have living heirs who are protective of the text.
So the text was sacrosanct and you were working with the cast of a long-running, award-winning stage production. What did you do to get it ready for the screen?
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At Stratford, it was beautifully done on a very large thrust stage, with a table, four chairs, and a couple of benches. In approaching the story visually, my first thought was to ground it in real things, to make it look like a real family in a real oceanside house in 1912. We spent a lot of time and money trying to make a set that looked like a house and not like a nice set.
How did you do that?
I went to see the original O'Neill house in New London, CT, where it's been preserved, and with the production designer John Dondertman, we built a pretty faithful replica of the house as it stands, and then we dressed the house accordingly. We were very true to the time; everything in that house, right down to the doorknobs and the hinges on the doors, is accurate to the period. There's no cheating at all; we had to make wallpaper based on pictures we'd seen in books, and all that glass is hand-rolled, so it's got that characteristic wrinkle in it. It's all late 19th century actually, since we figured James O'Neill was not the kind of guy who'd spend money renovating his summer house, so everything in it would be 15 or 20 years out of date.
You had a cast that had been performing this play to popular and critical applause night after night for years. What was there left for you as director to do?
My responsibility was to make it fresh again for the camera. When the set was ready, we rehearsed for six days, adapting the blocking and the staging to that space. The result was faithful to the tone and spirit of the Stratford production but quite different in significant ways.
How did you achieve that?
As a director, my approach is really a kind of Socratic method -- the actors work and I ask questions about the choices they are making and why they might want to think about something else. Acting on stage tends to be about showing because you need to show people what is happening. But film acting is more about hiding; you make a choice about what your character is, and then you absolutely hide that with every ounce of your energy, and the thrill for the audience is to see what a character is not showing you, to see through the obfuscations and the lies to the truth behind the mask. That is what's exhilarating for me about watching a movie.
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You shot the film in sequence, straight through from the first scene to the last, which is very unusual for a movie. How important was that to realizing your vision?
We shot it that way mostly because we could; we didn't have to change locations and the actors were pretty much available when we needed them over the 30 days of shooting. The great advantage was that the cast and I and the entire crew had a sense every day when we came to work of how the story was evolving and where this family was going. It's a wonderful way to shoot.
Eugene O'Neill is famous for his voluminous stage directions, where he spells out in great detail what a character is feeling or thinking. Did you find these useful during the filming?
I'll be absolutely honest: once I wrote out the play, I never looked at the text again. I had rough videotapes of all the rehearsals and that's what I referred to. As a film writer, I try to keep these instructions to actors to a minimum. In my experience, actors can't stand them. And if they do take them literally and try to use them, the result is quite inferior, because they're working from the outside in rather than from the inside out.
When some directors adapt a play for film, they try to "open it up" with outdoor scenes. Your movie takes place entirely inside the house. What was your reasoning behind this?
The truth is, I couldn't picture these people outside at all; I just didn't think that what these people are talking about is the kind of conversation that happens on a lawn. The hard thing, because there's so much dialogue, was to keep it from looking like television, where basically the camera tends to chase the dialogue around from speaker to speaker. In order to avoid doing that, I tried to look at it from the point of view of the family as whole. There's a great deal of film time devoted to people listening, which I think is what it's all about. Not just family members spilling their guts, but other family members hearing their stories and reacting.
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At the same time, I didn't want to have a lot of noisy, conspicuous camera work, quick cuts and odd angles and so forth, the kind of "style" that would distract from the material while ostensibly making it more engaging and entertaining. The film is shot and edited in such a way that we get closer and closer to the characters over the three hours. One of the reasons I shot the movie in wide-screen is that you can include more people in the frame. So you start off with the family in one frame and then little by little, they isolate themselves, the family fragments, and they are no longer together in the frame. As the story progresses, there are more close-ups, the characters are seen more and more in separate shots, until at the end there's actually a series of four distinct close-ups where each character is entirely alone.
We are in the era of Prozac and lithium and 12-step programs and a hundred kinds of psychotherapy. Do you think the sense of inescapable doom that hangs over the Tyrone family is still relevant?
I would say that the reality of people struggling with their destinies has not really changed that much in the last few thousand years. I see people who wrestle with drugs and alcohol all their lives, and people who have bitter struggles with family members that continue year after year after year. When I showed the film to people after I finished it, it was fascinating how different people thought that a different family member was at the center of the story. Which I think said more about those people's positions in their own families than it did about the movie itself.
"Long Day's Journey Into Night" is a story of people who are trying so hard. There's so much love in the middle of it, and for that love to work, we need to have all these family members at the four corners of an even-sided square with love at the center of that square. All the pain and acrimony takes care of itself, that's certainly in the text -- it's finding the love in it that's the challenge, I think.
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