AVC: Is it fair to say that you’ve been thinking about this book as a filmmaker since you read it?
MN: Not at all. I read it as a reader twice, I loved it so much. It inspired me, but I never even thought at that time that I would make it into a film. This was 1993. TV streaming series and long-form cinema were not in the vocabulary. I’m an independent feature filmmaker, and I never thought to make it a series.
AVC: It’s really visually stunning, right from the beginning.
MN: It is also, I have to say, an embrace of decay to show aristocracy, but to show it warts and all, in a sense, and to embrace it. I actually love the aesthetic of peeling walls and crumbling palaces and plaster not being there. I’m working with Stephanie Carroll here, my production designer for 25 years, so this whole team knows this country, this landscape. So it’s not about doing justice to its ornateness, for instance. It’s anti-ornate for me. It’s about actually using color in a modern way.
Monday, December 14, 2020
Trailer
Celebrate the critically-acclaimed, cult Canadian comedy Slings & Arrows series with a virtual reunion taped in October 2020, by ATX TV. The participants include cast and creators Bob Martin, Susan Coyne, Mark McKinney, Martha Burns, Luke Kirby and Paul Gross. Called the single best TV show about theater ever made by New Yorker s Emily Nussbaum (who moderated the panel), absolutely addictive (New York Times) and outrageously entertaining (NPR), Slings & Arrows mines dramatic and comic gold from the personal and professional crises of a dysfunctional theatre troupe. The backstage bedlam mirrors the onstage angst as each season transports us to one of three Shakespeare masterpieces - Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear. All three seasons of Slings & Arrows are streaming now on Acorn TV. (TV special, 2020)