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When the Oscar nominees were announced earlier this week, you had probably heard of a few little movies like Avatar, The Blind Side, and District 9, but it’s pretty safe to say that one of the more unheralded nominees came from a little film called The Last Station. Both lead actress Helen Mirren and supporting actor Christopher Plummer were nominated, the latter for the first time in his remarkable career (which is just amazing when one considers what he has done in his fifty-plus years in Hollywood).
In the film, which also stars Paul Giamatti and James McAvoy, Mirren plays Sofya Tolstoy, the long-suffering wife of Plummer’s Leo Tolstoy, the beloved writer of Anna Karenina and War and Peace. Near the end of his life, Tolstoy had become a cultural icon, a social leader who renounced the fame brought him by his writing and preached a life without material possessions. Everyone wanted a piece of Tolstoy and this led to some pretty serious marital problems between Leo and Sofya. My conversation with writer/director Michael Hoffman (Soapdish, The Emperors’s Club) began with some polite chit chat about screenings and Q&As and then Hoffman dove right into reaction to the film (this was all post-Independent Spirit Award nominations, where the film picked up a leading six, and pre-Oscar nods).
MICHAEL HOFFMAN: I don't know what the appetite is for the Tolstoy biopic. It can feel like medicine. The first time I read Jay's novel, it certainly didn't feel like medicine to me but that's because I'm interested in Russian literature and I was interested in Tolstoy. And it actually encouraged me to read a lot more about Tolstoy but I didn't see a film in it. It took being married for twelve years and reading the book for a second time to really kind of see the way in which I could make a film about the tragic comedy of marriage. That really intrigued me. When I first met my wife I had a love at first sight experience. What ran through my head were two things: The party is over and this is the work of the rest of my life. That line where Sofya says to Tolstoy, "Why did you expect it to be easy? You're the work of my life and I'm the work of yours." I sort of see marriage as being a kind of work that re-forms who we are.
MovieRetriever: Let's talk about the personal elements of the film. You use political and social ideals as a backdrop, but how do you maintain the human story within the larger context?
HOFFMAN: I think the novel certainly helped with that because it integrates ... it's about a lot of things. There's less pressure on a novel [than film] because there's more space. There's less pressure to integrate them completely. Also, I think that it's sort of about text and subtext. When I look at all the diaries that these people kept during the period of the last year of Tolstoy's life, they're talking about politics, right & wrong, morals, what the family deserves as opposed to the disciples or what the movement deserves – I felt strongly that this is the text but the subtext is always "I want Tolstoy to love me more than he loves you." You can pretend it's about other things, but it's really about that. The thing we say we need and what we actually need – there’s a gap between those two things. Sofya had this long period where she was his muse and his lover, gave him thirteen children, and wrote out War and Peace by hand six times and was at his side during the writing of Anna Karenina. And she finds herself with him waking up from this fever dream and deciding, "I'm no long interested in being Leo Tolstoy the Great Russian Writer, I'm Leo Tolstoy the Socialist Utopian Prophet. I'm renouncing my property, my family, my title." She all of a sudden becomes invisible. Every argument, no matter what it's about, is "How do I get my life back? How do I get the love of my life back?" Chertkov [Giamatti’s character], on the other side, is saying ... there's now all this speculation that he was probably the bastard son of the czar Alexander II. Here he was this father-less son and sees the super-father in the form of Tolstoy and throws everything at his feet and gives up his life of privilege because he believes in him, but again, "If you agree to love me MOST."
MovieRetriever: I'm also struck by the idea that your personal experience with marriage impacted the film.
HOFFMAN: Hugely.
MovieRetriever: Do you think you could have made it twenty years ago?
HOFFMAN: No. Well, I couldn't have made THIS film. I didn't know anything about what marriage was. And I couldn't have made it if I didn't marry the right person. I really did marry the right person. I literally looked in her eyes at ten in the morning in a coffee shop that she walked into with a mutual friend and that was it. It's over. This is the work of the rest of my life. And it has been. And it's been great work to do and a fantastic relationship. But, you know, full of conflict. Which is … all her fault. (Laughs.)
MovieRetriever: I'm struck by the through line on marriage and following a prophet in that, in both cases, just as you want to impress and get affection from your spouse, so do you with the people you idolize.
HOFFMAN: Yeah. Of course. That's the great difficulty of truly being married. Rilke has this thing where he says truly loving another person is the most difficult task that a human being has. The reason that he gives is that it's almost impossible to believe that another person's priorities are of equal value to our own. That's really basically where most problems come from. I'm convinced that the things I need to get done are what need to get done and my wife is convinced of the same thing. And those things can come into conflict and the first instinct is not to say, "Oh, you're right, let me step aside."
MovieRetriever: I think that's true with our leaders or prophets as well in the sense that you want to think what you deem important is what your leader deems important.
HOFFMAN: Absolutely. Absolutely. With Chertkov, I think it's particularly complicated. He thinks something slightly different. He thinks even though Tolstoy is rethinking and shifting and changing and calling into question his own precepts and ideas, they need to agree on certain things to keep control. There are a lot of issues. Milan Kundera writes about the personal and the political and the political and the personal and I tried to emulate that as well.
MovieRetriever: Do you buy into any of Tolstoy's beliefs in the film? Do you think wealth corrupts us all?
HOFFMAN: I think that there are a lot of things that distract us from a more spiritual life. Yeah, I do think that his belief in passive resistance is a really powerful technique and idea. He pioneered that idea and sent it on in a letter to Gandhi. So, that's a really powerful idea. His focus on love and getting out of your own way in being able to love and being less obsessed with attachment ... the Buddhist parts of what he was interested in ... I think that they're true. It's very difficult to do. I notice it in really crude ways. We go to live in London for a year and leave all of our s**t at home in Idaho and life just feels way easier without all this stuff that you have to deal with. I think on some elemental level…. But how do you live that every day in the world? It's not that they're bad ideas, they're just hard.
MovieRetriever: I'm also struck by the idea that no author could possibly have the same kind of transformative power over a nation like Tolstoy did now.
HOFFMAN: They couldn't. And no celebrity could have the kind of experience of adulation that he had. You can just imagine, especially in this case, the National Enquirer would make a decision to take Sofya Tolstoy's confessions of her painful life. And someone would write a big essay about how this latter day Jesus has feet of clay. JFK and Martin Luther King wouldn't be who they were in this day and age. I think King is maybe the closest to what Tolstoy was in recent memory. He had this kind of visionary power that really inspired people and moved them and part of that was because he happened at the right moment, but that was true in spades of Tolstoy. You're only seven years away from the Russian Revolution. The fact that he could somehow access all that energy.
MovieRetriever: But King set out to move people and Tolstoy was someone who got there through his creative passion.
HOFFMAN: He didn't. I actually don't think that he did. He never would have ... okay, well, he would have never had the fame if he hadn't written the novels...
MovieRetriever: Right. That's what I'm saying.
HOFFMAN: ... but if he continued to be a novelist? It's one of those weird things where he would say that his writing didn't matter and the more he would say that he didn't matter, the more he would matter. That was kind of what happened. He said I'm just like you and the more he did that the more elevated he became. I don't suggest that this was his goal.
MovieRetriever: But one kind of led to the other.
HOFFMAN: Definitely. But also the price he paid for having deserted one version of himself and try and reformulate was pretty extreme. That's really what led to all this domestic crisis.
MovieRetriever: How was Russia involved in the production?
HOFFMAN: The Tolstoys were involved in that I went seeking their blessing and found in the great-great-great grandson of Tolstoy that he kind of became our Ambassador and took us to his ancestral home and introduced us to the head of the family. On the part of the Russians in general, there's a lot of suspicion about taking on a story that's so important to Russian history. So, there was some discomfort with that. Plus, the Tolstoys are extremely protective of his legacy. They're marketing him to the world in lots of ways. I think that Russians are very good at discerning sincerity. Obviously, we were sincere about wanting to make a legitimate film about Tolstoy and having a vision. We went out and ate and drank a ton of vodka and cried at dinner – somehow, at the end of that process, they were on our side but were withholding full blessing. Then they read the screenplay and really didn't like it. Well, there were things in it that made him feel uncomfortable. It was like I don't know if I want them running around acting like a rooster and a hen. I went back and said look, "I want to make the film and maybe we won't get your blessing but I'll show it to you when we can still make changes and absolutely take seriously what you have to say. I want to make a film that you care about and you like." We showed them the film and they liked it. What Helen and Chris did – they came back and said, "This is closer to how we tell the story in our own family than any biography that's ever been written." That felt about as good as anything in the process.
MovieRetriever: I’m always curious. At what point does a director know they have an Oscar nominee? Do you know it when you see Helen and Chris on set? Or in editing? Or do you not let yourself think about those possibilities until it happens?
HOFFMAN: This was a weird one. I felt really excited while we were shooting it. But I often have. Everyone’s always telling you it’s great. So, you know that it may not be true. You can have tons of good dailies and still not tell a good story. Then we had one early test screening which was kind of weird. We didn’t have the balance of the end right, but then we solved that. Then we didn’t even have money to test. Then we started showing it to people who responded strongly but it was like my friends and people … I’ve had so many times in my life where I thought something would play through the roof and then it doesn’t . So, it’s a little bit baffling because you get so much input. And the producers … we were haunted by a really specific situation. We had a lot of offers for pre-sales but the credit crunch caused actual offers to come in much lower. A few distributors passed on it. September 1st of last year I thought this movie was never going to get distributed in North America. The one thing we had was that it had been selected for Telluride. So we went and the movie just played through the roof. From there, whether it’s a critic’s movie or not, it’s really an audience movie. From that point … we didn’t have a distribution deal until the second week of October. I said, “I don’t want to get involved this season unless we’re going to go for it.” I didn’t think we could maintain the momentum for the year. All the reviews out of Telluride were good. So let’s go for it. And they were completely on-board.
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