Finding Kari Skogland’s The Stone Angel in Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel
By Vern Smith
It took 43 years to get Margaret Laurence’s novel, The Stone Angel, from publication in 1964 to its theatrical debut at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. On her end, screenwriter and director Kari Skogland can account for four and a half years of it, but she’s finally made it happen. And as if the thought of re-writing and directing a classic piece of Canadian literature wasn’t intimidating enough, Skogland would spend much of that time begging a company in the midst of abandoning its film production program to give away a project that no longer fit into its plans.
The kicker was that Alliance Atlantis owned, in perpetuity, the rights to bring The Stone Angel to the big screen. And, in fairness, as Skogland is quick to point out, Alliance had tried to get it done. But suffice it to say that the whole notion had more or less been dropped until Skogland re-read this novel from her youth.
“I had read it as a kid,” says Skogland, “and had never thought of old people as having a life. As a teenager, you always look forward. The concept of reflecting back on your life seems very foreign when you’re 14. You’re so self-centred that you can’t conceive that life will one day be sort of the sum of your choices, and that you’re going to reflect on that path.”
Cut to 30 years later, Skogland’s turn to reflect. At the time, she was looking for a project. Everything she read failed to resonate and she felt it was time to evolve as a filmmaker. So she re-read this book that had stayed with her and, this time, it was a very different experience–an adult experience.
“It’s an adult book and, as a kid, you can’t possibly get all the layers that Laurence was operating with,” says Skogland, whose other films include The Size of Watermelons, Men with Guns, White Lies, Liberty Stands Still, and Chicks with Sticks. “I found it to be a totally different experience, and I knew the story I wanted to tell. I felt I knew how to tell it. It was just one of those moments when you have a kind of divine intervention.”
Now, reflecting on the past four and a half years on the day after her $8.5-million take on The Stone Angel debuted, the project might have seemed like a beast too big to tame. For starters, Skogland had enough to deal with simply adapting for film this story of a woman who reluctantly comes to her place of introspection–the life and death of Laurence’s renowned matriarch, Hagar Shipley.
It’s cerebral subject matter, not something easily made visual, and then the history of Hagar’s family relationships also had to be accounted for in less than two hours of reel-time. As an early feminist brainchild of the 60s, the whole concept, Skogland says, required some updating to make it relevant for contemporary audiences. And she knew the experts would come out, thumping the novel, once they realized that she’d added four sex scenes and a skinny dip. And most intimidating of all, Skogland would be re-writing Margaret Laurence.
For the complete article, please see Canadian Screenwriter magazine.
