Cinema Scholars interviews Michael McGowan, writer/director of the new drama All My Puny Sorrows starring Alison Pill, Sarah Gadon, and Mare Winningham. Momentum Pictures will release All My Puny Sorrows on demand and digital on May 3, 2022.
Introduction
Not just any filmmaker can take on heavy material and make it work. At the pitch-black end of that spectrum, stories regarding suicide are especially tricky to pull off. In order to make that kind of narrative accessible to audiences, it’s helpful when the story is based on authentic first-hand experience. In the new family drama All My Puny Sorrows, writer/director Michael McGowan adapts Miriam Toews’ deeply personal novel that grapples with the generational trauma of suicide.
Yolandi (Alison Pill) is a freshly divorced writer and mother of a teenage daughter. Her sister Elfreida (Sarah Gadon) is a celebrated concert pianist who suffers from chronic mental health issues. Their trajectories are forever skewed when their father takes his own life. Together with their devoted mother (Mare Winningham), the family recognizes the severity of Elf’s condition while learning to come to terms with such incredible loss.
Despite the morose subject matter, McGowan leans on the surprisingly humorous elements of the story for balance. It also doesn’t hurt that Alison Pill’s brilliantly pithy delivery as Yoli meshes perfectly with Gadon’s icy sarcasm. Sisterly antics combined with Mare Winningham’s tender yet stoic matriarch help to temper the overriding sadness of All My Puny Sorrows.
While there is no getting around the discomfort inherent to a story like All My Puny Sorrows, the film ends up feeling much more cathartic than crestfallen. Curious sub narratives about relationship woes plus a toe-dip into the family’s past in the Mennonite community keep the story as surprising as it is contemplative.
Cinema Scholars’ Rebecca Elliott recently chatted with All My Puny Sorrows writer and director Michael McGowan. The filmmaker discusses the challenges of adapting Miriam Loew’s novel, working with a trio of incredible actresses, and helming a hockey musical with Olivia Newton-John.
Interview
Elliott:
Okay. Great. Thank you so much. Hi, Michael, how are you today?
McGowan:
I’m good. How are you doing?
Elliott:
I’m doing very well, very well. First of all, I want to thank you so much for taking some time today to talk to me about your film, All My Puny Sorrows. How did this project come to be? Did you find the book? Did the book find you? How did the process of adapting a novel differ from your work writing original screenplays?
McGowan:
I had just read the book, just because I was interested in it. Then my wife, who also read it, thought it would make a good film. And there were three really castable roles that Miriam had written that allow hopefully a small film to punch above its weight in casting. I decided that I hadn’t seen the discussion around suicide the way that Miriam had written about it and that it came from her lived experience. Even though it was a novel, it was largely true. These were all factors that made me try to option and then adapt. Then the process of adapting, I thought it would be fairly easy and straightforward. And it really kind of stumped me for a long time, so much so I almost let the option run out and then sort of figured out a way through it.
Elliott:
It’s such heavy subject matter. Did you have any reservations about diving into such serious material? And how do you balance the lighter moments without losing the gravity of the situation?
McGowan:
Yeah, I didn’t really have reservations because the blueprint was there in the novel. As I say, the humor was also there and that was one of the things that were really appealing. It wasn’t meant to be bleak through the whole thing. I think there are real moments of hope and there are obviously moments of humor and heart in there. So I like playing with that palette of different emotions and seeing what kind of journey you can take the audience on with those.
Elliott:
Right. I really just want to be, “And how awesome is Alison Pill and Sarah Gadon and Mare Winningham…” and pull a total Chris Farley, but they are so incredible. Also, what’s your perspective as a male director in tackling these incredible female dynamics between sisters and two separate mother-daughter narratives. Can you talk a little bit about working with these incredible performers and your collaboration? And then also what you brought as a male to these female dynamics?
McGowan:
Sure. Yeah. I was more interested in the story in the sense that…Obviously, it’s very strong, it’s a female-centric story. I have a mother. A wife. I have daughters. I’ve never really worried about the female aspect of it. And then working with them, they were great collaborators. Like Alison said, “We’re not going to do this unless we rehearse.” I was, “I don’t really feel like doing that.” And it was such a smart idea because we were really able to shoot the hospital scenes to really make sure everything was drilled down before we got on set. So you could take time. We were all quarantining anyway up there.
And so we had lots of time and you could get into the particulars. I mean, you would be on set too, but I remember Sarah saying, “Well, it says here in the screen directions that I’m asleep. I was asleep the last time. Should I be asleep or awake? What does that mean?” You can have a really fairly nuanced discussion about something that seems sort of not really important but becomes really important when you really dive into it. And just making sure that each one of those hospital scenes was tracked in a way that we knew how they were tracking. There were a couple of overlaps when they first read the script that we cleaned up.
It was such a great process because like I said, by the time we got on set, it was really more of a blocking issue. We weren’t going, “Oh, this doesn’t feel right, can we change this?” Or, “Why is my character saying this?” That had already been dealt with. And again, those guys were all three of them, really great about being specific and making sure it was the best version that it could be. They’d all read the book. They’d all spoken to Miriam. We had long conversations. So when you’re working with people that are A, really good, and B, really smart, it just makes the whole process for me more seamless and also elevates everything. And that’s always what you hope for when you’re working on something like this.
Elliott:
You mentioned Miriam’s input with the actors but what kind of input did she have from your perspective? Was it a collaboration or did she just let you take the reins? How did that work?
McGowan:
So I had asked her, I said, “Did you want to co-write?” And she didn’t. She was working on other stuff, and she’s, “I’ve done what I want for myself with this story.” But she was fantastic in the sense that if I had a question about something, I could easily ask her. And then it was interesting. I specifically didn’t want her to see it until it was completely done. Because she’s, “I want you to make the film you want to make.” And as I said, she was really generous with our art department, with our actors, with anybody that had a question for her. She was great. Even Mare, the eulogy scene, Mare Winningham was, “I like it, but I think it could be better.”
And I knew that Miriam’s mom Elvira was the eulogizer in the family. So I just sent her an email, prep, and said, “Hey, can you just give me a couple more bullet points, maybe, that I could use in this speech?” Three hours later a brand-new eulogy from her mother arrived. So there’s a total generosity that way. And then she, her mom, and her daughter came to see it when it premiered at TIFF. She was blown away. She was, “I don’t understand how you got it so perfectly.” And even her daughter had said to Alison, “How did you get that? How did you know how to capture that so perfectly?” So we were all, that was the highest compliment. That’s all we could have hoped for, that we didn’t do a disservice to such a beautiful and personal novel.
Elliott:
Yeah. What a trip that must have been for her too, to see this thing that she’s envisioned for so long actually unfold before her eyes. It must have been really surreal.
McGowan:
Well, yeah, and also incredibly emotional because those events happened in her life. It was based on it. Even though she made it fictional, it was true. So you never know how people are going to react to it. And I was nervous about it. I really would be depressed if I felt that we hadn’t done it justice, or we hadn’t pleased her in doing it, but she’s an incredibly generous person.
Elliott:
Oh. That’s so cool. In a situation where somebody could completely micromanage if given the opportunity, she wanted to let you do your thing and tell her story. That really is generous. I know the film touches on some of the family history in the Mennonite community, but it doesn’t really dive into it. It just sort of skirts around it. Can you talk about how you choose which elements from the novel make it into the screenplay?
McGowan:
Yeah, sure. There was, I would say, considerably more Mennonite stuff in the novel. It’s almost like a math equation, in some ways. We only have so much real estate in a film. I thought it was important thematically to get that “stain of religion” in there, without leaving it open-ended. And saying, “Okay, well clearly it’s something,” and hopefully giving enough of a flavor, but not… The past doesn’t explain the future but as Yoli said, “Suffering is passed through generations.” So what effects of all that stuff played out in the present, especially with what her sister is going through and what her father went through. And I think the idea of the Mennonite influence and the small-mindedness and the rigidness of it was interesting to explore.
But I think if I had gone too much more into that, everything would’ve collapsed in terms of the momentum of the present story. We wrestled with the edit on how much to leave in, how much to… You know, “Do we need it? Do we not need it?” I also thought the flashback where she’s playing the Rachmaninoff really was a nice shorthand to explain how much of a virtuoso she was as a pianist, and also in opposition to the negative reaction of the elders of the community. And also then plays into how it reduced the father so much. So I think the best scenes do multiple things. And for me, it was like, okay, there’s a lot of stuff going on in that particular scene, say. And It’s worth it to keep those things in without going too far down the road.”
Elliott:
Yeah, absolutely.
McGowan:
What does it all mean?
Elliott:
Right. That scene, I agree, does perfectly distill a lot of the feelings of the family of the community and sort of ties it all together. And it’s kind of nice sometimes when it does only scratch the surface when it leaves me as the audience wanting a little bit more. Now I’m kind of motivated to go read Miriam’s book so it’s a good thing.
McGowan:
Well, that’s a big theme in her work, so yes, you’ll be richly rewarded going down that path.
Elliott:
Have you met with any controversy regarding some of the sensitive and controversial subjects, namely the Right to Die movement? I guess you mentioned that you already had this beautiful blueprint to follow, but as a person yourself, and of course, as a director trying to hone a story, how do you tackle such a heavy subject and try to make it approachable from all directions?
McGowan:
Well, I think it just started with the novel. Because it was Miriam’s lived experience, I think that sort of prevented any huge criticism. Do you know what I mean? It was her truth that I was adapting rather than some wholesale fictionalization of things. Even how the medical profession, how her sister was treated, and all that kind of stuff came from her. And Miriam and I had conversations about that. And so you could always sort of default back to, “Well, this is what she felt and felt compelled to write about,” rather than “How dare me just starting from a blank page, do it.” And it’s an interesting thing that out of this terrible experience came great art. In the novel, there’s that aspect to it that was interesting to explore.
