UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH MARIO AZZOPARDI FOR THE DOCUMENTARY 'PROFILE OF A DIRECTOR'

Ontario, 1st July 1998

What challenges does “Total Recall” present to you as a director?

Well, whenever you're doing a series, a franchise based on a very famous film like “Total Recall” or “Stargate” for example, it's always difficult to achieve the same kind of talent because a film like “Total Recall” costs many many millions of dollars while our budget is a fraction of that. So consequently the television format compels you to differently dimensions in special effects, different dimensions in time that you need to shoot the film and scope too, so, but still you're still bearing the title of that big success. So consequently you have to find a balance between what you're going to present on television, a balance between what's expected and what you can actually produce.

Is it difficult working against the audience's expectations based on the film?

Of course it is and this is where our publicity department will come in to prepare the audience that what is on the screen may be based on the original franchise but it's going to be quite a different story.

Much of your past work has involved science fiction. Is this a deliberate choice?

Well, actually there's been quite a variety. There's been a lot of police work, like “Night Heat” and films like that and then eventually science fiction. But science fiction nowadays seems to permeate in every facet of television production so when the science-fiction era finishes I'm sure I'll be doing else. But I do like science fiction. I find it is a great new way of expressing oneself about modern spheres, modern subjects, modern anxieties in societies which science fiction seems to be able to tackle better than anything else.

For a series like "Total Recall", or for that matter any science fiction, how much does it have to be rooted in reality in the sense that the audience can identify with?

Every kind of fiction has to be rooted in human experience, it's now the re-telling of that human experience vis a vis the modern illusions that makes a film successful or not. I mean somebody famous and important said there are only four or five stories around. It's just retelling them in a form that the present audience understands. And that's what I think science fiction is, the retelling of other stories in modern terms.

Science fiction especially seems to have benefited from the arrival of computers for generating special effects, how much more are we going to see from computers in the film business?

I think we're coming to an era where we're losing our passion with the computer-aided special effects. I think in the future we won't stop using computers, we'll just be using them in a way where you will not notice that there is an effect. Like in “Forest Gump” for example, one of the actors with no legs - actually it was the computer that took does legs away but it was never noticed. Had it we not known that this was a famous actor we'd never have noticed that he was not really amputated.

Given all of that, there's even been some talk about computers making actors obsolete. Can we see that day coming?

I don't believe so. I think that's a myth. The central element of any story is human interaction and the face of a beautiful woman, the face of beautiful man, the face of a man, woman, child can never be substituted. The soul can never be substituted by a machine and what comes out of a story, what comes out straight from your soul onto the screen is what makes the magic, what we call IT. You know one has IT or one does not have IT, and if one has IT that you know he's a star. I think that will never be able to be replicated. It can be imitated but not replicated.

There's been a lot of criticism leveled at not only films but also TV programmes at the level of violence. What responsibility do you feel that directors have to be aware of this and perhaps limit the amount of violence in their films?

This is a paradigm question you know. I don't think it can be answered in one simple, one short interview. Look, everybody is responsible for everything we do, we're responsible for the type of information we pass on to our audiences, the driver of a car is responsible to make sure that when he drives on a highway he follows the rules. We also have responsibility of course in the kind of stories that we tell. But we also have the responsibility not to be censored, not to be able to express the human conditions in all its facets. And violence is part of the human condition so removing it from it is as irresponsible as over-using it. I think violence in our society is not...I refuse to believe that it is the fault of television or of film. In the States for example the possibility for a 10-year old to go over and grab a gun is much more irresponsible than showing a programme which needs the suspension of disbelief for it to have, to actually have... the audience has to actually want to stop to assume at the suspension of disbelief to enjoy the movie. I mean, the way a person reacts to a shot of somebody being shot on screen is very different from that same person reacting to seeing actually a person on the street being shot. So that suspension of disbelief is the frontier where you pay your eight bucks in order to see a movie. You go to your frontier of disbelief - to sit down and to forget your reality for two hours and you emerge into a different reality. Of course there is always going to be the odd person who's going to say - to not be able to make the distinction between reality and fiction but now that is the price we have to pay for everything in life. Does that mean that because of that one person we're going to shut down the millions and billions of people that go to the cinema and don't react in this way. Yes, cinema has to understand and see - it was thanks to the cinema that we were able to be in the middle of Rome or in the middle of a viking ship or in the middle of a space ship and our perceptions have grown because of that. Our perceptions have grown when we see violence, when we see how violence effects us. And then there are those film-makers who irresponsibly also exploit the situation and they exploit it only for their own use.

Taking all of that into consideration, do you feel that the work you do should contain a message or a lesson for people?

Look I am a story teller. Ok, I'm not a philosophy professor, I'm not an English professor. I tell stories. I sit down... I'm hired to mesmerize the audience with action. Now there are those directors and writers and actors who are extremely talented and extremely intelligent and who can use this medium to pass on a message. Yes, of course when the opportunity comes for me to express myself in a certain way we can do a film which is very close to my heart, very close to items and very close to dilemmas that I want to talk about or expose a certain philosophical outlook then it's great. But again, the normal price of a normal television hour as it is - a million and a half - that's just one hour tv and this is not being produced or made available by teachers, this is being made available by actors, so consequently its a market driven situation, if people want to see programmes that only educate, we're very happy to do them. We'd have to research more, we'd have to go to university to be given the diploma of teachers but we don't do that. We are primarily entertainers. We entertain. Yes there are and there are situations - like the books, there are books that you read for entertainment, there are books that you read of technical know-how, there are books that you read for your own education and there are philosophical books that teach you. The same with film. Not every book has to teach, a book can entertain, the same with film, not every book has to teach, it can also entertain.

I realize it may be like answering which child you prefer but in all the productions you've done do you have a favorite production?

Ah..I think some of best works was done in a show which I liked very much and I lived with for about four years called "Outer Limits" which is science fiction but again based on a...to come back on what you were saying before, based on a parable that we want to explore. And rather than teach I would much rather say explore a situation and the idea with "Outer Limits" was that we would explore a human condition and then come to a point where the audience decides which way they want to go.

I'd like to take you a little back. Tell me, what was your first big break as a director?

I finished directing my first feature film in Malta. Ah.. on my 21st birthday actually. That's when we wrapped. It was very political, committed film based on Romeo and Juliet. But we had the Christian democratic party, and the socialist party as the antagonistic background. And that film started all the controversy that I was very very proud of having caused at the time. And then of course things went on, I joined the national reportary company in Malta and I wrote plays and I directed them and one of the plays that I wrote had some problems with submissions there and that's what was really that propelled me to come to Canada. Now I have an invitation to go back and produce the play there, which I'm looking forward to doing one of these years perhaps.

Malta is a very small country comparatively speaking. What is it like coming to a country like Canada?

What's it like? My goodness. I traveled a lot before I came to Canada and its a cultural shock! You know, in Malta one believes that they're at the center of the world there. Suddenly you come here and you see these skies, these vast skies and its quite a different situation. But Malta, beautiful beautiful Malta has the closeness of society you know, however irritating at times, you knew were you stood. Here, its a country that says here I am, take it all, if you can - and you're awed by the vastness of it all in all facets of society. The opportunities - nobody says no in Canada, everybody says maybe - which is just as frustrating but it's very challenging to be here. There are opportunities that don't exist in Malta, of course.

It seems that you heart is still in Malta. Are you still active in the film industry there?

Thanks to the Prime Minister of Malta, Alfred Sant, finally we have a film fund which will be generating a lot of co-production interests and I helped in setting it up.. setting up the Malta film fund and hopefully we will be producing a co-production there very soon.

What's the film industry like in Malta?

Its a service industry. There's no Maltese film industry. Its a service industry. When you say what is the Canadian film industry, what is the American, British, you must refer to actual product being produced by the company, originated by the company, I don't think there is anything like this in Malta, at least not yet, I don't know whether there will be. Malta is too small to be able to afford the amount of money that is needed to have an industry but Malta has a very viable service industry. So many films have been there and used the crews there to make films, international films, so that's where it's at in the moment. Hopefully we will change this with the creation of the fund - by having a co-production so we will be able to co-produce, co-start projects which would be originated from Malta, eventually in the future.

It seems similar in some ways to the Canadian film industry.

Again size does matter! You know, to go with a topical film banner, the film "Godzilla", the Canadian film industry...I think it started as a servicing industry. The Canadian film industry is now very alive and well and it is generating a lot of programmes that originated from Canada for the world. And as such we are at a stage now where we can enter into co-productions. Again Canada needs to co-produce. I don't think Canada can on its own support film of such magnitude that can go around the world and finance it on its own. I don't think it can do that. The way is to co-produce. So Canada is entering the stage where it needs not only co-produce with the US but we can produce with France, which we do a lot, with the rest of Europe, with the rest of the world. And that is a very exciting situation because it opens up other possibilities. Rather than only doing films. But listen we'll never say no to them. But we will have the opportunity to make films for other sensibilities, accept only for the American sensibility.

I understand your next project is called "The Stork Derby". Can you tell us something about that?

One of my next projects. We're going to shoot that in April. Its a true story that traveled around the world, that was reported around the world. It happened in 1927 in Toronto. It took 10 years actually. This lawyer in Toronto left a million dollars of 1927 money to the woman who would have the most children. In the ten years after his death and this created a great big storm of stork derby reported - started to be reported by the Toronto Star and eventually went around the world. There were even people from India asking whether they can enter the derby here but of course it was only offered to Toronto women. And the authorities at the time saw it fit that they should only donate this money, this prize money to acceptable families of the time, and the acceptable families of the time were angloxason, protestant, white women and this was contested by three other families, and Italian family, a family from Quebec - and English family from Quebec - and a woman who had children by different men. Three women were persecuted, especially the Italian family - this one had 23 children in all, not in those ten years, but in her life she had 23 children and they were ostracized, they were persecuted by the RCMB to just shut up, you know, and this French-Canadian woman eventually sued and got a consolation price of 10,000 dollars just to shut up, which she shared with the other two. It's a great story and I'm looking forward to that one. But it is only one of the things I'm doing now. In the autumn I'm doing something else for HBO. It's a fabulous cop story about a cop who goes undercover but in order to protect his cover he allows himself to commit murder, you know to protect the case. Its a dilemma story which I like very much.

I have to ask you about this house. I understand you built it yourself?

I didn't build it. We had it built for us. Come here (Mario's daughter Kira enters in shot). This is my daughter Kira and she was wasn't even born when we started building this. As mummy came here to make sure that the things were being done right, and Therese was pregnant with Kira.

But you had a hand in the design, didn't you?

Well, Therese had a hand in this. I give all credit to her. Therese is behind the camera there. She designed it and she worked with the architect over a long long long year of it and I was very happy with it. We‘re very proud of it.

I was going to ask how is building a house like directing a film?

Well again, thank goodness I was in Mexico and Germany for a long time when this was being built. So again, all credit has to go to her because really. I paid for it, that's all!