TORONTO — For roughly a decade, it was considered Canada’s great unfilmable novel.
Mordecai Richler’s sprawling masterpiece, Barney’s Version, is filled with romantic heroes, murderous passion and razor-sharp wit and yet attempts to adapt it as a film script failed miserably, again and again.
It would take an unknown Montreal writer to bring a fresh take to the dense material, and though Michael Konyves succeeded in carving a film out of the 1997 book, he insists he had no knowledge of the project’s protracted history before offering up his version.
“I didn’t necessarily know the whole sort of history behind trying to make it right from the beginning. So the pressure was more like just, ‘Can I do this? Can I get the job and can I actually do the script?”’ Konyves, 38, said when he and the cast brought the film to the Toronto International Film Festival in September.
Producer Robert Lantos said development stretched over 12 years because of the immense responsibility he felt to “the person who I believe is this country’s greatest writer and his magnum opus.”
“I have felt his voice talking to me through the years, from some ’psycho-babble land’ saying, ‘Don’t you dare screw this up. If you do, we will meet on the day of reckoning and you’ll pay for it.”’
Several of the hallmarks that make the Giller Prize-winning Barney’s Version such an adored book are precisely what stymied scribes attempting a movie version — it’s written in the first person, contains a staggering number of characters, jumps back and forth in time, splits into multiple tangents and subplots and is littered with footnotes to correct the narrator’s factual errors.
“It was a tall order . . . to try and capture a book that would be a 10-hour movie if you filmed everything in it,” notes Lantos.
Even Richler, who died in 2001 attempted a script. Another screenplay came from director Richard J. Lewis, whose successful adaptation of Paul Quarrington’s Whale Music resulted in the 1994 film.
“It was clunkier,” Lewis says of his attempt, written in 2006.
“The good thing about my version and what got Robert excited was that it sort of began to show how the structure could work, how to sort of crystallize this sprawling story into a movie, into a two-hour movie. But it still had its problems. I think the largest problem was the voice — that voiceover narration. I wanted to preserve the Richler narrative, which ultimately would have been a mistake and Michael figured out a way to tell the story without it. And that was good.”
Konyves, an English lit grad from Concordia University, arrived on the scene three years ago by way of a friend who suggested Lantos meet with the Richler fan and budding screenwriter. Konyves was given five minutes for the pitch. At the end of the meeting, Lantos asked him to make notes on a previous draft. He came back a month later with an entire treatment.
“It was certainly daunting, but it was also a really exhilarating experience,” Konyves said.