TIFF showcases a theatre to film adaptation 'The Last Five Years'

TORONTO -- Theatre and cinema shared the stage at this year's Toronto International Film Festival with big-screen adaptations of live productions and footage of a play.

"The Last Five Years," starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan as a couple that falls in and out of love, is an adaptation of the hit off-Broadway musical by Jason Robert Brown. The comedy-drama made its world premiere to many rave reviews at the festival, which runs through Sunday.

"I was so excited to make it," said the Oscar- and Tony-nominated Kendrick, who shines in the role of a forlorn actress. "I kept saying that the material is so good that we could just like stand there sitting on our asses and it would still be incredible.

"For people who know the show, I hope they enjoy our interpretation of it, and people who don't, it's like finding out that somebody's never had pizza and I'm like: 'You should try it, you're going to love it. It doesn't matter where it's from or how good it is, it's ... pizza, you're going to love it."'

Of course, turning a theatrical production into a story for the big screen comes with challenges, and writer-director Richard LaGravenese had to tweak the story in order to make it work for the cinema.

Such was also the case with "The Riot Club," which is based on the play "Posh" by Laura Wade, who also wrote the screenplay. The story follows two young men, played by Max Irons and Sam Claflin, as they're inducted into a secret society at Oxford University. Irons' character also falls for a fellow student (Holliday Grainger) in the drama that comes to a head at a lengthy dinner scene.

"The love story isn't in the play," said Lone Scherfig, who directed the film that made its world premiere at the fest. "It is quite different. The play is basically the dinner (scene), so she spread it out much more. You see their world more."

That expansion "helps the film translate" better to an international audience, added Scherfig.

As Nicolas Billon -- who wrote the play "Elephant Song" and its feature adaptation that made its world premiere at the fest -- puts it, film is "a really different medium" than theatre.

"There are obviously similarities in terms of story, but I think in terms of how you structure that story, I think it's a whole other animal," he said.

Directed by Charles Biname, the "Elephant Song" film stars Xavier Dolan as a psychiatric patient, Bruce Greenwood as a doctor and Catherine Keener as a nurse.

Billon said he found some advantages to telling the story in cinematic form.

"One of the great things that you can do with film that I find much harder to do in the theatre is play with unity of time," said Billon. "That's really a big one and that's something that I wanted to play with."

Prolific playwright Israel Horovitz took charge of the entire big-screen adaptation of his play "My Old Lady," serving as both writer and director.

Kevin Kline stars in the comedy-drama as a New Yorker trying to sell the Parisian apartment he's inherited from his late estranged father. Maggie Smith and Kristin Scott Thomas play the apartment's occupants.

"It wasn't something I always wanted to do," Horovitz -- who's known for plays including "The Indian Wants the Bronx" and "What Strong Fences Make" -- said of working in cinema.

"I was hired to direct a film way back in the day and I quit before we started shooting because I realized it was going to take a couple of years. Back then I tended to write more than a play a year and my first love was theatre and I thought, 'If I do this film, it's like three plays I won't write,' and I didn't like that film that much."

By contrast, he "really loved" "My Old Lady" and embraced the challenge of putting it on the big screen, he added.

"It's one of my very favourite plays of my own, it's one of my very favourite plays period, and it wanted to be a movie. It needed Paris to be onscreen, not just talked about, and I felt I wanted to do something that would frighten me a little bit -- something that was really different and challenging."

With "A Midsummer Night's Dream," director Julie Taymor didn't do a film adaptation but rather a "cinematic experience" of her acclaimed stage production of Shakespeare's immortal fantasy. Shot with four cameras over four days at the Polonsky Center in Brooklyn, N.Y., the piece features footage from performances in front of a live audience.

"There is almost no theatre piece that's shot like this because we're really there and yet there's a live audience," said the Tony-winning director of "The Lion King." "We had an opportunity to go on stage during the daytime and do close-ups and moving camera, so hopefully it makes it more of a movie-movie, but still a play."

Taymor said there are no visual effects in the movie, but they did edit it so audience members in the movie theatre "get to sit in all the best positions."

"So you get a whole different kind of in to the story and I love it. I love it equally on film and theatre."

-- With files from Canadian Press reporters Andrea Baillie and Laura Kane.