Why director Michael Mayer is glad the release of The Seagull was delayed

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In an era addicted to haste and topicality, it’s cheering to discover a project that happens to have benefited from delay. Film and theatre director Michael Mayer shot The Seagull in 2015, but his screen adaptation of the Anton Chekhov play is opening only now. Gaps and conflicts in creative and production schedules kept pushing off completion of the classic tragicomedy about unrequited love and artistic ambition. That gave Mayer more time to finesse details of his period production set in late 19^th century Russia – and more box office clout.

“We had a cast that was probably even more appetizing to audiences, if you look at Saoirse [Ronan] and Elisabeth Moss, for instance. They are much more of the moment than they were even a year ago. You really want new audiences to experience the genius that is Anton Chekov, and this will help get audiences to watch,” Mayer said in a recent phone interview. Meanwhile, in the lead role of the grand actress Irina, Annette Bening – whose “yes” was crucial to launching the idea for the adaptation about five years ago – is a star who shines on undiminished.

But The Seagull adaptation also benefits from another kind of delay, or at least of distance. It was back in 1994 that filmmaker Louis Malle shot director Andre Gregory’s ongoing workshops of Uncle Vanya in an abandoned New York theatre with Wallace Shawn in the title role, Julianne Moore playing Yelena and playwright David Mamet contributing the script. The film, Vanya on 42nd Street, would introduce a much wider audience to the already popular notion that Chekhov’s self-pitying and distracted characters are utterly modern, and many, many updated stage productions of Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, The Three Sisters and The Seagull followed.

Perhaps the poorly received Days and Nights, a 2014 movie that set the action of The Seagull in the 1980s at a country house in rural New England, marked the last gasps of the trend. Certainly, Mayer is going classic, placing the action in Russia in the 19th century – with a lakeside house in upstate New York that actually belongs to Russian émigrés doubling for a country estate – and a script from dramatist Stephen Karam that keeps the dialogue more or less historic.

“It’s a really juicy story. There’s jealousy, there’s attempted suicide and suicide, there’s affairs, arguments about art and love and money. It feels very contemporary in that way,” Mayer said. “And yet the specifics of that world are very much of interest to me and separated it from something like Vanya on 42nd Street – or any one of the updated versions where The Seagull is set in the Hamptons or in Los Angeles in modern times or something like that.”

Whatever he may think of those updates, he certainly appreciates what Malle achieved in Vanya: Mayer actually sat in the audience for one of the workshops on which the film is based.

“The film was this strange kind of hybrid of the rehearsal process that the audience was allowed to engage in. … I really loved how it became a hybrid, and loving that so much I knew that was something I didn’t want to get near. It had been done as brilliantly as it possibly could be, and I thought a realistic version of The Seagull in English hadn’t been nailed yet. I thought it was worth trying to capture this period, and this Russian existence, for an English-speaking audience, and bring a more contemporary filmmaking quality to it.”

Certainly, the catalyst for the adaptation was highly cinematic: Mayer was approached by Tom Hulce, the actor of Amadeus fame who now works as a producer, with an idea: What if the action of The Seagull took place in flashback and the film actually began with the opening moments of what was Chekhov’s last act, a scene in which Irina hastens to the side of her dying brother at his estate?

“It was very particularly a concept to start later in the story, to begin the film with the characters as they are, not as they were. The movie kicks into a flashback to [make you] understand they carry some of the emotional baggage with them. There is a dual experience for the audience. They are aware things are going to get heavy.”

When it came to shooting, in a mere 21 days on the property in upstate New York, Mayer particularly valued the proximity to his cast’s performances that film permits, relying on the camera to relay emotional material that Chekhov had to cover with text. In particular, Moss gets mileage from quick scenes that reveal the isolated young Masha’s alcoholism, while Bening shines as the aging prima donna determined to hold on to her power.

“There was an intimacy that could allow the viewer to fill in certain gaps that Chekhov relied on longer scenes to do,” he said. “Sometimes our actors didn’t know where the camera was. We got some very unguarded moments from them. It was always sort of hovering. It felt like we could get intimate with it; the camera is in the room, on the porch, on the lake, in the bathroom.”

Mayer says his work in film keeps him fresh, but he’s back on Broadway these days, directing the upcoming production of Head Over Heels, a jukebox musical based on tunes from the 1980s girl band The Go-Go’s. The key, he says, is to be true to the medium: “When you are making a film, you want to make sure the experience you make is a cinematic one, that you honour what cinema can do but theatre can’t – and vice versa. When you make a play … the live experience is the big takeaway. You can only have this experience in the theatre, and similarly you can only have this Seagull if you have a camera that can get in close.”