Kevin Lally on Film

Seven-time Oscar nominee Norman Jewison died on January 20 at the age of 97. His range was remarkable, from romantic comedies to socially conscious dramas, splashy musicals to classy caper films. Dramas like The Cincinnati Kid and In the Heat of the Night have only gotten better with age, and his most beloved film, Moonstruck, has become a modern classic. I interviewed Jewison by phone in 1994 for Only You, one of his lesser-known comedies, offering a rare romantic role for future superstar Robert Downey Jr. Jewison went on to direct an Oscar-nominated Denzel Washington as boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter in the drama Hurricane, and Michael Caine in The Statement (2003), his final directing gig. He was also a gentleman farmer, and a mentor to rising Canadian talent. A true mensch.

“I think the chemistry between Robert Downey Jr. and Marisa Tomei is something I haven’t had, possibly, since Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway in The Thomas Crown Affair.”

Tomei and Downey, the stars of the romantic comedy Only You, ought to be flattered by these words of praise, since they come from one of Hollywood’s most durable producer-directors, Norman Jewison. Only You is the 21st film directed by the Toronto native, in a distinguished career that includes The Cincinnati Kid, the Oscar-winning In the Heat of the Night, and Best Picture nominees The Russians Are Coming, The Russians are Coming, Fiddler on the Roof, A Soldier’s Story, and Moonstruck.

Only You centers on Faith (Tomei), a young schoolteacher engaged to be married to a dull podiatrist. Faith’s marriage plans are given an unexpected jolt when she receives a congratulatory phone call from David Bradley, an old school friend of her fiancé who’s about to catch a plane to Italy. The name “David Bradley,” it seems, has haunted her since childhood, when both a Ouija board and a fortune teller revealed that to be the identity of her ideal soul mate. And so Faith runs off to Italy in search of her mystery lover. Downey plays the stranger who may or may not be the man of Faith’s dreams.

Only You finds Jewison returning to the kind of light comedy-romance that launched his movie career: Forty Pounds of Trouble (1962), with Tony Curtis and Suzanne Pleshette; The Thrill of It All (1963), starring Doris Day and James Garner; and Send Me No Flowers (1964), the last of the Doris Day-Rock Hudson vehicles. Jewison’s biggest success of the past decade was another romantic comedy, Moonstruck, which earned an Oscar for Cher and a nomination for his work as director.

“As I get older, I’m retrogressing,” the 68-year-old filmmaker laughs. “Although I’ve done a lot of films of social content and strong dramatic films, I still feel at home with high-style comedy. I would also like to do another musical. I miss the musical form, because it too requires tremendous style, and that’s what excites me.”

Jewison also enjoyed working with his youthful cast, heaping praise on Tomei, Bonnie Hunt, and especially Downey, whom he calls “one of the best American actors in films today.” He adds, “It’s always fun to work with young people who are so fresh and a little bit untrained in film itself… It’s exciting—no one knows what they’re capable of and how far they can stretch.”

From a directing standpoint, Jewison insists there is absolutely no difference between a dramatic scene and a comedic scene. “If you approach a comedic scene with the idea that you’re going to be funny, you’ll destroy the illusion and have an unbelievable or over-the-top performance. An actor should approach both comedy and drama from the absolute viewpoint of believability. I think this is proved time and again by people like Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy and other successful actors who have been able to make us laugh and touch us in some way, because they believed what they were doing. They didn’t try to be funny, they were funny. I approach a film like this or Moonstruck exactly the same way I would approach a dramatic story. I think the real essence is in timing, and only those actors who have that gift of comedic timing can play in comedies.”

Jewison had a few selfish reasons for accepting his latest assignment. “Listen, when a script calls for scenes in Positano and Venice and Tuscany and Rome, you don’t turn away from it—especially when you’ve spent so much time in Arkansas and Paducah, Kentucky like I have. I haven’t had the chance to work in too many exciting, exotic locations like this, and I knew the food was going to be great! We ate better than any film in many, many years. It also gave me a chance to work with European crews again, which I hadn’t done since 1978. I had an English sound man and an English boom man, and Sven [Nykvist], who’s Swedish. and his crew. Everyone else was Italian. I got a chance to work at Cinecittà, and I could close my eyes and pretend I was doing a Vittorio De Sica film. I have great admiration for the Italian craftsmen and the Italian cinema. That paid off—the film has a nice look to it, and Milena Canonero gave it wonderful costumes.”

Jewison relished collaborating again with Sven Nykvist, with whom he first worked on 1985’s Agnes of God, especially since Nykvist’s camera operator is none other than the director’s son, Michael. “Sven is a great artist, he has a warm but very real quality in his work, A couple of weeks ago, I sent the second answer print to him in Oslo, where he’s working on a film with Liv Ullmann. He called me up and said [imitating Nykvist’s accent], ‘Ohhh, Norman, I love this picture! I cried! You made me cry! I don’t know why I was crying.’ He’s a real romanticist! And then we started to talk about simplicity—he wanted a couple of scenes changed, he thought they were trying too hard. He said, ‘You know, as we get older, we get more simple.’ And he’s right. I find my last four or five films are a little bit more simply shot than they used to be when I was razzle-dazzling everybody.”

Jewison began razzle-dazzling audiences as a writer, director and producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in the 1950s. In 1958, he came to New York and earned three Emmy Awards directing TV variety shows like “Your Hit Parade,” “The Andy Williams Show,” and the Judy Garland specials. He has been directing feature films steadily since 1962.

Asked for the secret of his longevity, Jewison replies, “I guess it has to do with your pictures making money. I’ve never found the studios to be that altruistic. It’s sometimes been a great battle to make the films I wanted to make. Certainly, nobody wanted to make A Soldier’s Story or Thomas Crown or Jesus Christ Superstar or The Russians Are Coming. They put a budget ceiling on In the Heat of the Night. They haven’t been films which were overtly accessible or commercial going in, but when they were finished I was lucky that the timing was right for the particular ideas that are expressed in those films. And I think everything in life has a great deal to do with timing. If you happen to come out with a picture that deals with an idea that everyone is bored with or that has been done to death in some other medium, you can be a victim—we can all be victims of timing, and what the audience out there really wants. I don’t think anybody knows, I’ve never met anybody yet who really knows, including Sam Goldwyn. You just have to deal with your own sense of adventure, your own curiosity, and try to find stories that will excite you, inspire you. That’s all directors really are—storytellers. First of all, you’ve got to have a good story. Sometimes they’re not easy to find, and when you find one that nobody wants to make, you have to bring to it a tremendous amount of energy, you have to be obsessive.”

Jewison’s ties to his native Toronto remains strong. “I live and I work out of here. I have a whole building with two or three editing rooms—we have our own Toronto Tribeca. I find Toronto is a good base for me because, first of all, I love my farm. I have a farm about 50 minutes outside Toronto, about 25 minutes northwest of the airport. So I can be in downtown Manhattan about as quick as Mike Nichols can get there from his farm—it’s only a 50-minute flight, and it’s a four-and-a-half-hour nonstop flight to L.A. I keep offices here and do all my postproduction here, and I have Film House, who are good sound people, and there’s a good lab. Then I have my farm with 90 head of cattle, and a couple of horses, and my geese and ducks and chickens. I’m happy. I couldn’t have all that if I were working in the village or in L.A. It means a lot to me.”

The veteran director has also shown his devotion to Canada by founding the Canadian Film Centre, a training ground for aspiring Canadian filmmakers. “We started the Film Centre because Canada did not have an AFI, or the advantages of the Cinematheque in France or a British Film Institute or Australian Film Institute. I felt it was necessary for us to establish a center of excellence in Canada, and we’re very proud of what’s happened in the last six years. We’ve turned out a number of feature films now, and we’re trying to train the producers and directors and writers, as many as we can, in the same way that the AFI is a center for advanced film studies.

“I’m very proud of a film we just finished called Dance Me Outside, on which I was executive producer. Bruce McDonald, who did Highway 61, is the director. All the actors are native Canadians from an Indian reserve in northern Ontario. It’s based on a book by W.P. Kinsella, who wrote the book Field of Dreams is based on. They raised $2.5 million to make it and it’s going to be in the Toronto Film Festival. It’s a wonderful little film.

“There’s always something to excite me,” says Jewison of his long and thriving film career. “I’m not beyond it yet.”

Pictured: Norman Jewison and Denzel Washington during filming of Hurricane. Photo credit: Maximum Film/Alamy. Only You is available to stream on Prime Video.