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Film

Interview: Robert Lantos

'Why making Barney's Version was my mission'

January 20, 2011 10:45
Paul Giamatti and Dustin Hoffman in Barney’s Version

By

Stephen Applebaum,

Stephen Applebaum

4 min read

The glitz and glamour of events like the Oscars make the film industry look like a one-way street to fame and fortune. But do not be fooled, warns Canada's most successful movie producer, Robert Lantos. "I think anybody who chooses to make films for money is out of his mind," says the man behind award-winning films such as David Cronenberg's Crash and Eastern Promises, Istvan Szabo's Sunshine, and Jeremy Podewsa's Fugitive Pieces. "It's so hard to make a movie - it takes such a long time, so much effort - that to make a film, for me, for any reason than my own passion, makes no sense."

It is almost certain that without that passion driving him he would not have spent 10 years - and a great deal of his own money - shepherding his latest offering, a lovingly-crafted adaptation of Barney's Version, the last novel by the esteemed Jewish Canadian author Mordecai Richler, to the screen.

This was more than just another film to Lantos, though. After Richler died in 2001, leaving him with a half-finished screenplay, the producer says he found himself "the custodian of his greatest novel. I saw it really as my mission, in the absence of the author who I had counted upon to write the screenplay, to make a movie worthy of this book."

Lantos had first become aware of Richler's work when his parents - Holocaust survivors who had uprooted to Uruguay after the Soviet invasion of their native Hungary - moved the family to Montreal in 1963. Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz was compulsory reading in high school, and for the 14-year-old newcomer was "like a guidebook through the environment I had arrived into, because I knew nothing about the world he described. But it was a world I immediately took to." He says he was "swept away by the author's picaresque tone, his fearless, scathing send up of all that is powerful and untouchable and sacred".