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Putting together a cast of supporting actors who include Max von Sydow and James Cromwell - “actors I’ve grown up with,” says Hicks. “In fact, they were part of my inspiration to become a film-maker” - Hicks cast Ethan Hawke and Youki Kudoh in the crucial roles of Ishmael and Hatsue. Hawke, seen most recently in The Newton Boys, Great Expectations and Gattaca, was an obvious choice: a literate, educated actor (he has directed a PBS film of his own and published his first novel in 1996) with a strong stage background.
Max von Sydow as elderly lawyer Nels Gudmundsson and Rick Yune as Kazuo.
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Kudoh was less obvious. Hicks’ wife, Kerry Heysen, had spotted her in an Australian film called Heaven’s Burning, but who is probably better-known to international audiences for her roles in indie movies Picture Bride and Mystery Train. “She claimed the role,” says Hicks. “She has a unique sensibility, placing herself within the emotions of the characters so accurately and profoundly it’s quite remarkable to watch.”
And it is the relationship between these two that holds Snow Falling on Cedars together, even if the relationship itself is a victim of the story’s circumstances. Nothing better crystallises the idea of time passing, things changing, than what happens to them as a result of the war, its aftermath, and the murder trial. “You have to let go,” Hatsue tells Ishmael simply.
“The human heart is a fragile thing,” comments Bass, “and wounds need to be healed. Snow Falling on Cedars is an intensely romantic story.”
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“To everything, there is a season...”
Summer and winter on San Piedro Island
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“San Piedro had a brand of verdant beauty that inclined its residents towards the poetical. Enormous hills, soft green with cedars, rose and fell in every direction. The island homes were damp and moss covered and lay in solitary fields and vales of alfalfa, feed corn, and strawberries. Haphazard cedar fences lined the careless roads, which slid beneath the shadows of the trees and past the bracken meadows. Cows grazed, stinking of sweet dung and addled by summer blackflies. Here and there an islander tried his hand at milling sawlogs on his own, leaving fragrant heaps of sawdust and mounds of cedar bark at roadside. The beaches glistened with smooth stones and sea foam. Two dozen coves and inlets, each with its pleasant muddle of sailboats and summer homes, ran the circumference of San Piedro, an endless series of pristine anchorages.”
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“Outside the wind blew steadily from the north, driving snow against the courthouse. By noon three inches had settled on the town, a snow so ethereal it could hardly be said to have settled at all; instead it swirled like some icy fog, like the breath of ghosts, up and down Amity Harbor’s streets - powdery dust devils, frosted puffs of ivory cloud, spiraling tendrils of white smoke. By noon the smell of the sea was eviscerated, the sight of it mistily depleted, too: one’s field of vision narrowed in close, went blurry and snowbound, fuzzy and opaque, the sharp scent of frost burned in the nostrils of those who ventured out of doors. The snow flew up from their rubber boots as they struggled, heads down, towards Petersen’s Grocery. When they looked out into the whiteness of the world, the wind flung it sharply at their narrowed eyes and foreshortened their view of everything.”
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From Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
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Universal Pictures presents a Harry J Ufland/ Ron Bass production.
A Kennedy/Marshall production.
Prod: Harry J Ufland, Ron Bass, Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall; Exec prod: Carol Baum, Lloyd Silverman; Co-prod: David Guterson; Dir: Scott Hicks; Scr: Ron Bass, Scott Hicks, based on the novel by David Guterson; Ph: Robert Richardson; Prod des: Jeannine Oppewall; Cost des: Renee Erlich Kalfus; Ed: Hank Corwin; Mus: James Newton Howard.
With Ethan Hawke (Ishmael Chambers), James Cromwell (Judge Fielding), Richard Jenkins (Sheriff Art Moran), James Rebhorn (Alvin Hooks), Sam Shepard (Arthur Chambers), Max von Sydow (Nels Gudmundsson), Youki Kudoh (Hatsue Miyamoto), Rick Yune (Kazuo Miyamoto), Celia Weston (Etta Heine).
International distribution: UIP.
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