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A humanist cinema works with historical context

Director Terry George makes a case for old school emotional cinema
The Promise
Director Terry George discusses a scene from The Promise with actor Oscar Isaac. The film opens today at Cineplex Odeon International Village Cinemas.

“I have a house in Ireland, I grew up there…” Terry George begins.

The writer-director is sitting in a noisy café, taking his time with his words and our interview while PR people and a camera crew scurry around him at double speed.
“… it’s right beside the sea. And there’s a lighthouse on a point a mile or so away I went home two years ago and a foggy night came down and the light was flickering and something was missing. I couldn’t figure it out and then realized the foghorn was missing: the British government had decided that because of GPS they no longer needed foghorns, and removed the foghorns from lighthouses. That sound that defined my childhood is gone.

“If I could’ve found a f#?#ing foghorn I would’ve bought it!”

George’s pastoral lament has a purpose. He finds himself defending things deemed obsolete by technology and the 140-word tweet, things like foghorns and actual books, and historical dramas like his film The Promise, opening today.

The Promise is a love triangle set during the first large-scale ethnic cleansing of the 20th century, when more than 1.5 million Armenians were slaughtered, starved, and led on death marches by Ottoman forces. It was the event that caused lawyer Raphael Lemkin to ultimately coin the term “genocide”.

Mikael (Oscar Isaac) leaves his rural village and the promise of an arranged marriage to study medicine in Istanbul, where he falls for Ana (Charlotte Le Bon) and butts heads with her boyfriend Chris (Christian Bale), an American photojournalist documenting the increasing atrocities being committed as the Ottoman empire falls apart. The rivalry turns into an alliance, however, when Mikael is sentenced to hard labour, Chris finds himself a target of Turkish authorities and entire villages are rounded up for execution.

The strategy to couch a history lesson within an old-fashioned love story is deliberate and nothing new, George says, pointing to the educations offered up by Doctor Zhivago, Ryan’s Daughter, and Hotel Rwanda (which George co-wrote and directed in 2004). “People have to pay money to sit down to watch something, they don’t want to be lectured, they don’t want to be beaten over the head by the horrors of it,” he says. “I have to entertain them, create characters that not only they can identify with, but who can be their eyes and ears as they move through these situations about which we have no context.”

During filming George was careful to shield his actors from some of the setup process in order to have them experience harrowing scenes for the first time: one scene of a riverbed piled with corpses was hidden from Oscar Isaac until the last moment, as was another in which Christian Bale stumbles across the body of a child.

“In those situations you have to get everybody to shut up, stand back, and let him go for it himself. And you’re hoping that they get it in the first take, because it’s an atrociously painful place to go to for them.” But it’s a PG-13 movie by design, partly because filmmakers wanted it to be accessible to schools, and partly because as he did with the carnage in Hotel Rwanda: “I’m not trying to recreate the horror, I’m trying to recreate the emotion of it.”

George grew up in Belfast during the Troubles, and historical drama was a natural progression of a childhood spent in political turmoil. His first films were In The Name of the Father and Some Mother’s Son, both inspired by a brief incarceration at Long Kesh Prison with Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams, and on the experience of George family neighbour Bobby Sands, who would later die in the hunger strike. In the Name of the Father had a big impact: Bill Clinton watched it before the Northern Ireland Peace Process. “I was telling stories about people I really knew,” says George. “It’s a tough task writing and directing a film, so to have a reason to get up in the morning that’s beyond the profit margin or your own glorification is what I kind of need.”

It’s all about the history for George. “I veer away from fiction created out of whole cloth,” he says, “I need the constraint of the facts, otherwise I’m off in a universe of possibility that I can’t narrow down.” He wouldn’t try his hand at science fiction, he says, “unless it was a story about a historical event that I couldn’t get made and I just took it whole and moved it to Mars,” he laughs. I point out that Mars One is in the midst of planning to colonize Mars, so he may get his wish of a historical space drama after all. “Ah, but I don’t like the word ‘colony’, what would the Martians say about that?”

The project was originally centred on Bishop Grigoris Balakian, survivor and key witness to the Armenian genocide, but it then grew in scope. The director did his homework – visiting Yerevan, Istanbul, military museums and the

Armenian cathedral – to get a feel for his subjects. Then he went to Berlin “I stood on the exact spot where Soghomon Tehlirian shot Talaat Pasha (Ottoman interior minister and orchestrator of the genocide)… I’ve been steeped in Armenian history for three years now.”

As always, George’s work has its critics: the morning after the film’s world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival over 6,000 people had taken to popular movie review-aggregation site IMDB and given the film only one star, despite the fact that only a few hundred had seen it. More than a century later Turkey continues to vehemently deny the genocide, so George anticipated the backlash. “So it begins…” he says.

These days only two months of the year are devoted to quality films, he notes, calling “one of the greatest cultural tragedies” happening right now is the loss of dramas in favour of “the financial gain in producing men in spandex,” superhero movies: “We can’t lose historical drama, that collective experience of sitting in a dark room full of empathy, anger, sorrow, tears and joy.

“It can’t just be about big explosions and a dirty joke.”I tell George about a couple who left our screening of the film discussing man’s inhumanity to man, and comparing the century-old genocide to current crises in Syria and the Sudan. “Great!” Is that kind of audience debate as good as a great review? “Yeah, it is,” he enthuses. “This is about humanist cinema: let’s bring love stories back in this historical context and talk it out. Even though people say this is an old-fashioned film in its structure….so what? We’re trying to tell a story without CGI or flashbacks or gimmicks. Let’s just tell the story.”