Liev Schreiber on How Father’s Death Mimics His Character in New Film ‘Across the River and Into the Trees’
variety.comMalina Saval Associate Editor, FeaturesPlaying a character in a film who dies by suicide, adapted from a book penned by a famed author who met the same fate, is already a heady experience.
But for Liev Schreiber, who tackles the stoically heroic Colonel Richard Cantwell in the big screen version of Ernest Hemingway’s final full-length novel, “Across the River and Into the Trees,” life imitated art — which imitated life — in ways not even Schreiber could have expected.“One of the things that happened to us in this epic, long shoot [in Venice, Italy] is that my father had found a sarcoma on his leg — a very, very rapid [growing] one,” Schreiber told a crowd gathered for a special screening and premiere of the film, directed by Paula Ortiz, at the Sun Valley Film Festival Thursday night. “We only had a month left to shoot,” he continued, “and the crew graciously stopped the film and let me go home to Seattle, where my father lives, to be with him, and I got him into a treatment clinic.
And [by this point] the tumor was all over the lungs, everything. So, I got back to Venice to finish shooting the film. And then my father calls and he says, ‘I’m not doing chemo anymore.’ And in [Washington] they have euthanasia laws, and my father decided he’s going to take the pill and do it.
And at this point we were also having trouble with the financing of the film — we couldn’t finish the film. And the Italian crew found out that my father was dying — that he was planning to take this pill — and they worked the next few weeks for free, they worked straight through without getting paid.
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