It has been 16 years since director Christine Jeffs last delivered a feature film and 23 since she made her debut with the coming-of-age tale Rain, based on the Kirsty Gunn book of the same name.
Now, another New Zealand book has got her back in the saddle. She has adapted A Mistake, Carl Shuker’s acclaimed 2019 novel of medical misadventure, ethics and human fallibility. It is centred on single-minded senior surgeon Elizabeth Taylor – portrayed in the film by American star Elizabeth Banks – who gets caught in a blame game and hospital politics when a young female patient dies after routine surgery.
“I wanted to tell something that I felt was worth telling as a story, rather than just do films for the sake of it, because I could have done a lot of that,” says Jeffs.
After Rain, which went to Cannes, Jeffs directed Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig in 2003′s Sylvia, a portrait of the relationship between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. She then headed to America for 2008′s Sunshine Cleaning, starring Amy Adams and Emily Blunt as siblings.
Since then, Jeffs has continued directing commercials, exhibited as a photographer, completed a masters degree in fine arts, written a few unproduced screenplays, and continued riding competitively in equestrian events.
A Mistake’s compelling opening chapter, which throws readers into the operating theatre, caught Jeffs off guard when she read it after buying it at a local bookshop. After reading the novel twice more, she was tracking down the screen rights. They had already been optioned by prolific producer Matthew Metcalfe. Jeffs rang him and presented him with a fait accompli.
“She didn’t say, ‘Hi, how are you?’” says Metcalfe. “She said; ‘Matthew, you have the rights to A Mistake. I have to write and direct it; I am so passionate about it.’ We had wanted to work with Christine for more than a decade, so it wasn’t hard to say yes.”
“I kind of claimed it, which I had no right to do,” Jeffs says with a laugh on Zoom from the Matakana farm she shares with husband, veteran cinematographer John Toon, and a horse or two. With Shuker’s blessing – he turned her down flat when she asked if he wanted to write the screenplay – and his occasional advice, Jeffs set about writing her drafts.
Jeffs had another reason to make a hospital drama, having had personal experience of the medical system. She says she’d rather not elaborate on that but there might be a clue in her 2020 photographic exhibition Subject to Consent, which featured a stark 2015 photo of Toon sporting surgical scars, taken upon his return home from hospital.
“Yes, I did spend quite a lot of time in ICU waiting rooms and things like that and it’s a long and winding story, but the outcome was positive and very educational, and there are a lot of things I learned about the medical system that I had no idea about.”
At just 182 pages, the book offered manageable brevity, places to explore and characters to expand on.
“It did allow for me to open up questions about some of the relationships and outcomes, and to dive sideways into some of the clues that were in there. Apart from the amazing writing and all the research, it’s also got sentences with clues in them. So, I had to be a bit of a detective.
“An adaptation is never going to be page for page. So, for me, it’s firstly finding something that I respond to, and then working out which parts of it seem true to me, and which parts I would expand and why. What are the things about the characters I want to explore?”
Despite her own detective work, Jeffs didn’t want the film to be a medical mystery to be solved.
“It was important to me that it was about human fallibility, and about how, when we don’t have our eye on the ball, not just technically but personally, we can just let things slip, how that does have a cumulative effect.”
The script found an enthusiastic reception in Banks, who is best known for her comedy leanings as an actor and director. She’s had people in stitches before, just not ones requiring an on-set surgical adviser.
“She was on set the whole time and she brought a lot of energy and focus. She’s a pro. People are really responding to how good she is and how textured she is,” says Jeffs.
Another imported cast member is veteran English actor and playwright Simon McBurney who plays hospital administrator Andrew McGrath. He brings a quiet menace to his character’s scenes opposite Banks as surgeon. Especially in a scene straight from the book when he extols the medical virtues of flesh-eating maggots as an illustration of his views on hospital HR and why he thinks women are not suited to the profession.
The film changes a few things from the novel. Shuker’s story is set in Wellington but the film shifts it to Auckland, where Taylor lives on the Devonport waterfront in a house that, like the book’s, has a borer problem.
The medical verisimilitude that Shuker, a former editor at the British Medical Journal now working for Te Tāhū Hauora/ Health Quality & Safety Commission, brought to the novel is replicated in the film – so much so that a NZ International Film Festival screening in Wellington last month had to be stopped after the eight-minute surgery scene because some audience members felt unwell. The scene used prosthetic torsos used for surgery training and real laparoscopic footage on monitors in the theatre.
“It doesn’t worry me how realistic it is but, yeah, it is pretty intense.”
Toon was behind the camera, as he has been on Jeffs’ previous films and commercials.
“What’s really cool about him as a cinematographer is he really listens to what’s going on in the dialogue and in the scene … he was also involved in just kind of being part of my journey over the years that it took to make the film. He’s a sounding board and he’s very much bigger than the role of the cinematographer. I can just concentrate on the performance, and I don’t need to worry. He’s not going to put up a thousand lights and take 10 years to light it. He’s very much like: the best light in the room is the one you turn off.”
The film debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York in June, where among the glowing responses was a piece written for Forbes.com by medical columnist Dr Lipi Roy. As well as complimenting the film on how it echoed her own career experience, she said of A Mistake: “This film is not Grey’s Anatomy. Think of Apocalypse Now meets Terms of Endearment.”
Jeffs did get some constructive criticism at Tribeca – from the programmer who introduced the screening. “She turned around to me in front of the audience and she said, ‘Don’t leave it so long for your next film.’ I was, ‘Oh, okay.’ Embarrassing.”
A Mistake is in cinemas from October 10.
