Frederick Wiseman on Tackling the Tolstoys, Finishing ‘The Wire’ and Never Ever Retiring
variety.comManori Ravindran International Editor Frederick Wiseman, a voracious reader, doesn’t watch television. In fact, he’d never really gotten through a whole series until recently, when he watched HBO’s “The Wire.” “I don’t know why, but it was interesting,” he tells Variety drily.
Every couple of years, the 92-year-old master documentarian behind such seminal films as “Titicut Follies” and “Juvenile Court” has churned out a sprawling documentary fixated on a microcosm of society or some sort of social issue, but when the pandemic paused those efforts for two and a half years, it’s Wiseman’s literary proclivities that drew him to Sofia Tolstoy’s writing for his new fiction film “Un Couple,” which premiered Friday in Venice’s Competition section.
Wiseman and sometimes collaborator, the French actor and writer Nathalie Boutefeu, were brainstorming small-scale projects that could be made in pandemic-proof conditions, when they landed on the diaries of Leo Tolstoy’s long-suffering wife and writer, which Boutefeu had been reading.
The diaries lent themselves to a monologue-focused project, much like Wiseman’s “The Last Letter” (2002) and “Seraphita’s Diary” (1982). “We’re both very interested in Tolstoy, and the issues that affected their marriage, because despite the fact that Tolstoy was one of the richest men in Russia, their marriage had a lot of the problems that one sees in contemporary couples, both of whom are talented, both of whom are working — issues around the care and education of the children, and who gets up at night,” says Wiseman.
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