Ishmael (Ethan Hawke) and Hatsue (Youki Kudoh), for whom memories of their childhood lover affair are stirred by the trial of Hatsue’s husband, Kazuo.

Australian director Scott Hicks fell in love with David Guterson’s PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel, Snow Falling on Cedars, round about the time his life changed for ever with the worldwide success of Shine.

“I was captivated by a combination of the story’s intricacy and the dense atmosphere of its setting,” says the director, recalling the time, four years ago, when he used to retreat from the pressures of a world publicity junket into the novel. He was, of course, far from alone: Snow Falling on Cedars has sold over four million copies and been translated into 30 languages - including Japanese, a process which must have presented problems, given Guterson’s focus on the effect of World War II xenophobia on a small Japanese American community living on a remote island off the coast of America’s Pacific Northwest. Indeed, one of the book’s most memorable features was its depiction of the co-existence, then clash, between East and Northwest.

“What an amazing, closed world David Guterson created... the cold of the blizzard, the over-heated atmosphere of the courtroom,” notes Hicks now, his movie version of the novel in the can and ready to be premiered at the Toronto Film Festival, North America’s prime launch-pad for upmarket films. “It was the kind of thing cinema is well-equipped to express.”

Less easy to capture on film, though, were the story’s delicate time-shifts - between the relative innocence of life in the small community on San Piedro Island in the thirties, via the trauma of World War II, through to the period in which the novel is essentially set: 1951, when a murder trial finally lifts the lid on the resentments and tensions that have been simmering for over a quarter of a century.

“What fascinated me about the book,” says veteran screenwriter Ron Bass who did the initial adaptation, “was the way it presents the interplay of past and present in our lives... their interconnectedness; how everything that has gone before, all the elements that seemed so accidental, are present in defining who we are and what we’ll do at any given moment.”

Bass, a former entertainment lawyer who turned to screenwriting and won an Oscar for Rain Man in 1988, is no stranger to best-selling novels, having adapted Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale for the screen. Also a producer on Snow, he readily accepted Hicks’ extra input into the script of the new movie.