is the director and co-producer of A Death in the Family, the film adaptation of James Agee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel scheduled to air on ExxonMobil Masterpiece Theatre's American Collection
in the Spring of 2002. Cates has directed many major films, including Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams with Joanne Woodward and I Never Sang for My Father
with Gene Hackman and Melvyn Douglas. His television credits include Arthur Miller's After the Fall with Faye Dunaway, Hobson's Choice, and eleven editions of The world's most widely viewed TV show,
the Academy Awards. Dennis Doty, the co-producer of A Death in the Family, was responsible at ABC Television for developing both Three's Company
and the initial ABC foray into morning television, which ultimately became Good Morning America. As a film producer he has been responsible for three motion pictures based on the books of Dick Francis,
including Blood Sport, and the Tom Clancy miniseries Netforce, in addition to numerous other films.
Q. Why did you decide to film A Death in the Family?
Gil Cates:
Well, I always loved the book. I read James Agee's film criticism when I was in college and I remember reading A Death in the Family
and being deeply moved by the way in which he described essentially his own father's death because he really was telling the story from his point of view as a little boy. There are very few books that deal with the aftermath of a death -- the beginning, the actual death and the aftermath of it. It's an extraordinary work.
Dennis Doty: In its way it's an American classic, a piece of literature about a special time and a special place with a special set of values that are largely forgotten now. It's really
a rich time in America to revisit. Most importantly, I think it's about an experience that happens in everybody's life. Every family has either have gone through it or will go through it. And people come out of
that experience different -- for better or for worse -- and to share that experience in this film was a rich road to be able to walk.
Gil Cates: The thing that's wonderful about the book is the
way in which Agee dramatized the way the family came together to fill the vacuum caused when the father dies. It's really a story of hope; we all face the deaths in our family, but the issue is how we go on in spite of
that, and how this little boy finds the pieces of his life -- how his aunt fills one part of him, and his uncle fills another part of him, his mother takes over another part, and eventually he's moved to the head of the
table, he becomes a man himself.
Q: Even though the story takes place on a very small stage, there's a huge amount of material in the book. I'm interested in the choices that were made in the screenplay.
Gil Cates: Well, you know, it's a deep book rather than a wide book, and I think its most extraordinary merit is that it goes deeply into how this child's core is affected by this death.
Robert Lenski, who wrote the screenplay, did an amazing job, and [executive producers] Marian Rees and Anne Hopkins developed the script to a very high degree of excellence. What I did as the director was to do a
little more shaping on the story with Dennis, and also deal with turning it into a real shooting script.
We shot it on location in Nashville, not far from Knoxville, where Agee set the novel. It takes place in
1914/15, which was an extraordinary period of time, right in the middle if the transition from horses to the horseless carriage -- the car. It gave us a wonderful opportunity to set the stage. To the
grandfather -- the role that's played by James Cromwell -- the car really represents the perils of the future. So on the one hand there's that reluctance to move forward into the twentieth century, and on the
other hand there's the excitement that both Jay, the father, and his son, Rufus, felt about cars. It captures a great point of change for America.
Another thing both of us responded to in the book
and the screenplay is the way in which people related to one another. It is almost like Kabuki drama -- it's very stylized, very formal. People didn't spill their guts to each other all the time, as they do
today. People in Agee's time were in their individual universes and when they spoke to one another, they spoke with care and with gentility and thoughtfulness. And people really thought
a great deal before television, before radio. The entertainment in this home was a piano, and the mother or father play or the kids play and they sing around the piano. They read to one another. We all just decided we were really going to trust this material, really trust the story, and weren't going to try to jazz it up, so there are silences in the movie.
Dennis Doty: Silence is almost one of the characters. These people actually took time to enjoy silence. So there are moments in the picture when we have silence, which is kind of a
surprise in movie-making today, and you can actually hear sounds which are quite wonderful, whether it's a bird or an owl or a distant train or a horse or car way down the way. It gives a different kind of
dimension to the characters' lives.
The other thing I wanted to mention that Bob Lenski's adaptation is extremely faithful to the book, to the nature of the language, and the spirit of the characters.
That's something we all wanted to honor. Adaptations sometimes go astray for the sake of movie making magic.
Q: What is interesting to me is that the one exception to all this gentility and reserve is
[Jay's brother] Ralph. And he stands out like a sore thumb.
Gil Cates: And you know something? In today's world Ralph wouldn't stand out! We've evolved into Ralph! All of us! I find myself
frequently just talking, and I have to stop and say, "What in the world am I saying?"
Q: All of this that we're talking about now – the language and not being afraid of silence -- did that suggest or even
dictate a rhythm in the acting, in the dramatizing?
Gil Cates: It did. It even dictated a rhythm with the horses and the fact, for example, that the grandfather walks to work, doesn't
want to ride home. And the rhythm of this piece, the movie, was really the most important thing to me. It was important that we all stay focused on it while we were shooting it, and I don't doubt that to some people it
may seem a little slow, but I think that's what was called for. It's interesting because most of the young people who the movie at a screening, my kids included, turned out to be sucked into it.
You know,
MTV and video games destroyed time for everybody -- all of a sudden we have synthetic ways of controlling it and it's all screwed up. Our rhythm as Americans was ours, and I don't think it was the airplane that changed
it, I don't think it was the automobile that changed it. I think in my lifetime the three significant things that changed rhythm were the television remote, which enabled us to change channels instantly, MTV and
video games. Between that trinity, time is forever changed and it's really unusual to have a kid sit down for two hours and see something.
Q: One of the things that I liked about the movie was that there
was obviously a conscious decision not to present that soft sepia "memory" thing that so many filmmakers do when they go back to this time. It was very sharp. It was like looking at a picture of people wearing
those clothes and realizing they didn't realize they were wearing quaint clothing -- that was just where they were that day.
Gil Cates: Am I delighted to hear you say that. One of the
conversations we had early on was not to glamorize the picture's memory -- to use the conventional methods of film making to tell that story. So we had a lot of Steadicam, a lot of hand-held stuff, there's a lot
of modern technical storytelling to make it contemporary. It was as if we were looking back at the story with our own sensibility, rather than trying to adopt the sensibility of someone of that age. We didn't want
any of that fog stuff, none of that emotion recollected in tranquility, you know, or that kind of candied, ossified, saccharine music that you think about in those movies.
Q: I was also very impressed by
the fact that the actors seemed to have been wearing those clothes for years. A lot of the time when you see actors in a costume piece you have the feeling men don't quite know where to put their hands and the
women are overdoing the skirts, but these people really seemed completely comfortable.
Dennis Doty: Peggy Farrell was the wardrobe designer out of North Carolina and she has one of the biggest
collections of period costumes on the planet. And she worked with every one of the actors to really educate them about those things. They really knew how to live in those clothes, because she took them back to a
place and time.
Q: How was the movie different than it would have been had you not shot on location?
Gil Cates: Oh, I think it was substantially different. I'll speak to it
simply from the sense of a cohesive emotional point of view; the business of having all the actors living in one place with the set decorator, the art decorator, the costume designer, cameramen, producers, the director,
all living away from home – that creates an atmosphere in which the work that every person puts into the film is more complete, more dedicated, more focused.
When you add to that the fact that the story
actually took place there, thirty miles away, and you start adding to it the physical look of the place, and the fact that people from Knoxville have slightly different accents -- the fact of the matter is that people
all around you are talking the way the actors are going to be talking in the film all day. So within a week of pre-production, everyone was sensitive to the sound.
Dennis Doty: There's
also the architecture. Even within Tennessee, the architecture in Memphis, in the west, is notably different than the architecture in Knoxville in the east. We had to build the interior of the house on a
soundstage, but the great part of it was not only built by "Tennesseans", but even the furniture and the art decorations came from local places. For example, the father's chair was built in the early part of the
twentieth century. It was wood, it was a wooden chair with a cushioned back and a cushioned bottom, and where you put your hand on the arm of the chair, there were notches for the fingers to nestle into. So when
you sat in that chair, you knew you were somewhere else. You were in a different world.
Activity Suggestions
1. While viewing the film, listen for the "silences" that the producers mention in the interview. What do the silences reveal about character, setting, internal struggle, theme?
2. Examine
the setting of the film. How do the objects in the room reveal something about the time and place, and characters in the film?
3. Discuss as a class symbols that present themselves in the film and what
their significance is. For example, students may want to talk about the symbolism behind Rufus' colorful hat. Talk about how this director translates symbols from text to the screen effectively, retaining its
meaning and significance to the character.
