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Warrior Spirit
Interview
Taken from the press kit, 7 january 1995
"Wolves Hunters" and "Gold Hunters" are two novels by James Oliver Curwood. Each novel is a series of adventures involving the same characters. After reading them, you know it’s impossible to adapt them for the screen. You may as well attempt to relate Tintin’s adventures in one single film !
So you put the books away in a box and their pages join thousands of others, orphans of your memory. And you tell the producer that no, you really don’t want to adapt children’s stories.
And the days pass. And you find yourself thinking about them in spite of yourself. You no longer remember what the characters were doing at one point or another in the story, you no longer remember the story but you remember the characters. Even better, they grow in your mind like ivy or weeds.
And, in the next shot, you find yourself on all fours in your study or library, searching through the boxes of books with the frenzy of a junkie. And you disturb the producer at home on a Sunday, pleading with him not to give the story to anyone else.
And you reread the books to find, in the heart of each chapter, the characters that have grown in your mind. And you’re surprised by the number of justifications provided over the pages by the author for your extrapolations.
After several months of gestation and relations with the dead author, you give birth to a screenplay that, in turn, will become a book, but a book of images that others will leaf through.
The plot, that worried you so much, has imposed itself on you. Curwood’s ideas have incarnated themselves in our day and age and you feel the happiness felt by every cocoon.
Curwood has sown his seeds in my mind and the book of images that you are about to leaf through is as much mine as his. It is no more faithful to one than the other. It has our qualities and failings, like a child has those of its parents. It’s a bridge between 1908 and 1995.
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