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Excerpt from New York State Writer's Institute 11/19/97: Tom McCamus

The Sweet Hereafter
November 19, 1997 (WEDNESDAY) at 7:00 p.m.

Page Hall, 135 Western Avenue
(Free and Open to the Public)

(Canadian, 1997, 110 minutes, color, 35 mm, Rated R)

Directed by Atom Egoyan

This is a special sneak preview screening of the soon to be released Canadian film. Seating will be limited to 350 attendees.

Russell Banks, on whose novel the film is based, will provide film commentary and answer questions immediately following the screening.
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Winner of the Grand Prize, the International Critics Prize and the Ecumenical Prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, writer/producer/director Atom Egoyan's THE SWEET HEREAFTER is about how a small community deals with the tragedy of a school bus accident. Adapted from the acclaimed novel by Russell Banks, the film fuses a literary sense of detail and scope with richly cinematic storytelling. Filmed in Toronto and the interior of British Columbia, THE SWEET HEREAFTER stars Ian Holm, Sarah Polley, and Bruce Greenwood. The film is scheduled to be released by Fine Line Features in December 1997.
Through the course of seven feature films and numerous related projects, Aton Egoyan has created a distinct and highly praised body of work. Egoyan has been critically admired since his very first feature film, 1984's NEXT OF KIN, for which he was nominated for Canada's Genie Award for Best Director. His subsequent features, FAMILY VIEWING, SPEAKING PARTS, THE ADJUSTER, CALENDAR, and EXOTICA, have continued to win accolades and awards in Canada and abroad. EXOTICA was the first Canadian film in nearly a decade to be invited into competition at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the International Critics Prize for Best Film.

Russell Banks is the celebrated author of THE SWEET HEREAFTER (1991) and eleven other books of fiction include RULE OF THE BONE (1995), CONTINENTAL DRIFT, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1996, and AFFLICTION, which also is being adapted for the screen. He has received the O. Henry and Best American Short Story Awards, the John Dos Passos Prize, and the Literature Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
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Synopsis
On a winter's day, in the small rural community of Sam Dent, British Columbia, a school bus inexplicably crashes into a frozen lake, taking the lives of fourteen children and injuring many others. Shortly thereafter, Mitchell Stephens (Ian Holm), a big city lawyer, comes to the community with promises to compensate its citizens for their loss.

With a view to mounting a class-action lawsuit on behalf of the accident victims, Stephens interviews the survivors of the crash and the families who are mourning the deaths of their children. Through a series of emotionally charged meetings, we are presented with a prismatic view of the accident and its impact on the town. At the same time, through the interviews and through a series of flashbacks, we discover disturbing secrets which reveal that, in some ways, the community was already on the road to losing its children. With his assured presence and promises of retribution, Stephens earns the trust of the community and becomes the conduit for its anger and pain. Ironically, as Stephens builds his lawsuit, we discover that he too is a man in emotional turmoil, dealing with the virtual "loss" of his own daughter Zoe (Caerthan Banks) to drugs. Ultimately, it becomes clear that by trying to help the town through its crisis, Stephens is trying to find a solution to his own. In so doing, the lawyer, like the townspeople, is looking for the answer to the question: "how do you cope and whom do you blame?"

The full story of the town unfolds like a jigsaw puzzle, moving back and forth through time, connected by the words and memories of the townspeople. Among the key figures are Dolores Driscoll (Gabrielle Rose), the middle-aged school bus driver, who shares vivid memories of the children; Wanda and Hartley Otto (Arsinée Khanjian and Earl Pastko), parents to an adopted child lost in the accident; and Billy Ansell (Bruce Greenwood), the widowed father of two children killed in the crash, and the secret lover of Risa Walker (Alberta Watson), the wife of Wendell Walker (Maury Chaykin), and the mother of another boy killed in the accident.

Finally, and most crucial to Stephens' case is the Burnell family: Sam and Mary (Tom McCamus and Brooke Johnson), and their teenage daughter Nicole (Sarah Polley), a beautiful young singer who survived the accident but will never walk again. As the prime witness, Nicole holds the key to the class-action suit, but as we learn more of her personal history and of the disturbing relationships within her own own family, we see that there is more than mystery and more than one sorrow below the thin veneer of what appears to be a tightly-woven community. As the community's secrets threaten to surface, Stephens finds his diligently woven case spiraling out of control. Finally, through an act of extraordinary bravery and moral clarity, Nicole puts a halt to the community's anguish, and her own.
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About the Cast

Tom McCamus (Sam Burnell)
Acclaimed film and stage actor Tom McCamus is known for his often edgy and morally complex characterizations. He won the Genie Award for Best Actor for his work in David Wellington's I Love a Man in Uniform and was nominated again for Wellington's lauded Long Day's Journey Into Night, in which he reprised his role as Edmund Tyrone from the Stratford Festival production. McCmnus' other film credits include Guilty as Sin and Beautiful Dreamers. Among his numerous television credits are the series "Due South" and "Tek Wars."
McCamus is a long-standing member of the acting ensembles of the Shaw Festival and the Stratford Festival. During his eight years at the Shaw Festival, he has played leading roles in productions of "Peter Pan," "Once in a Lifetime," "Holiday," and "Man of Destiny." Over the past four seasons he has appeared in the Stratford Festival's productions of "Sweet Bird of Youth," "Waiting for Godot," "The Merry Wives of Windsor," "Hamlet" and "Long Day's Journey into Night." At this season's Stratford Festival, he is playing King Arthur in "Camelot" and the title role in "Coriolanus." McCamus received the Dora Mavor Moore Award for Best Actor for his performance in Theatre Plus' production of "Abundance."

© New York State Writers

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