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THE BLUE BUTTERFLY
Director Léa Pool
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The Blue Butterfly, which is currently completing its shoot (production begins again, after a hiatus, on May 21) in Montreal is much, much more than an uplifting movie about a boy’s dream. This is demonstrated by three things: the fact that the director, Léa Pool, is one of Canada’s most respected autrices; the stellar cast (which also includes Pascale Bussières as the boy’s mother, Teresa, and actor and choreographer Raoul Trujillo as an elder of the Indian village from which the butterfly-hunting expedition sets out); and the fact that the film, ostensibly about the healing powers of the butterfly for Pete, is also (and perhaps even more) about the redemptive powers that the expedition has for Alan, whose passion for entomology hides an inner emptiness. The expedition changes all their lives for ever - and the production seems, by all accounts, to be having the same effect on cast and crew.
“When I first read the script of The Blue Butterfly,” says Pool, “I was deeply moved. First, because it is based on a true story. Secondly, because of the values it carries: the courage to realise one’s dreams; the fight for one’s beliefs; never losing faith; the quest for meaning… As a parent, these values are important for me. And my wish with this film is to touch as many viewers as possible, the world over.”
Pool is best known for her very personal studies of female identity, including most recently Emporte-moi (1999) and Lost and Delirious (2000). And yet, points out Charlotte Mickie, managing director of international sales at Alliance Atlantis, who has collaborated with Pool in the past, the director has frequently worked with someone else’s script but “always brings her own signature to the films she makes and has brought her usual sophistication to telling the story of The Blue Butterfly”.
“It’s about the courage to realise one’s dreams;
the fight for one’s beliefs; never losing faith;
the quest for meaning… As a parent, these values are important for me” |
Pete McCormack’s script is clearly fictional, although all aspects of the story - including its surprise ending - are founded in fact. The man who is the inspiration for Hurt’s character, Alan Osborne, is a real-life Montreal businessman with a passion for insects and a mission to educate people. Like Osborne, he has made his enormous collection of butterflies and other insects available to natural history museums; has opened a number of study centres around the world; and recently established a centre for the preservation of rare insects in China - a country where, as Mickie points out, “preservation is not always the first instinct when it comes to insects”. The real-life boy on whom Pete is based, meanwhile, visited the Costa Rica set of Blue Butterfly in April.
The decision to shoot on location in the rainforests of Central America was crucial to Pool’s approach to the film. “We took great care making the forest and its inhabitants as authentic as possible,” she says. “We have created a strong relationship with the indigenous tribes, respecting their reality and culture and trying to interweave them into our storyline in a natural fashion. We built a village so faithful to the Bribri Indians’ traditions that they wanted to move into it!”
The story of The Blue Butterfly is a classic quest tale. Pete is confined to a wheelchair and in the terminal stages of brain cancer. His father was killed in a car crash some years before and he lives alone with his mother, who takes him to a lecture given by Alan in the city museum. Pete, whose passion in life is butterflies, has been bombarding Alan with phone messages begging him to take him on an expedition to Central America before the Morpho season ends - and while he is still just well enough to travel.
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