Allan King

SARAH POLLEY

You know you’ve done something right when half the speakers at your memorial service are less than half your age. Allan King died at the age of seventy-nine this year, but it seemed as though a great number of the people who got up to speak about him at his memorial were under forty. I was struck by the impact one man could have on communities past, present, and future. I already knew the impact he’d had on me.
      I first met Allan King when I was ten years old. He was directing me in a few episodes of Road to Avonlea, and my memory of him seems to revolve around a lack of presence. He was almost invisible. He let himself disappear. I often thought in later years, after I fell in love with his legendary body of work, that it was a shame I didn’t get to know him back then. But more recently I’ve thought that maybe I did.
      He was trusting. He never gave direction. He never once raised his voice. These are qualities that a child actor, used to booming voices and micromanaging, deeply values. Most directors stormed on set, made themselves known, demonstrated their control, their vision, and defined the set with their character. Allan didn’t. It was as though we were all functioning on our own and his role was to watch us respectfully from the corner. I remember Michael York once guest-starred in an episode and he turned to my ten-year-old self after a take and said, “How am I doing? This guy is giving me no idea.” I remember thinking, Don’t you know? When I was working with Allan, I seemed to get into a rhythm of trusting my instincts, paying attention, being rigorous with my work, assessing it, and trying to make it better. He gave even a ten-year-old that freedom, responsibility, and respect. When another more vocal, controlling director would inevitably replace him on a subsequent episode, those skills had to be put away again until Allan came back. He taught me a lot by saying nothing at all.
      I didn’t hear the name Allan King again for about fifteen years. I saw that the Toronto Film Festival was doing a retrospective on his documentaries and I was flummoxed. Huh? The episodic TV guy made documentaries? Good for him!
      I have always been embarrassed by my lack of film knowledge. I do my best to see as many films as I can—but mostly it’s so I don’t get caught in awkward conversations where I reveal myself as a complete moron. Sometimes I wonder whether I even like the medium that much. The retrospective that year of Allan’s work made me passionate enough about his work to become an expert on at least one filmmaker. In a few days I saw most of his films and was left breathless, overwhelmed, and in awe of the silent man I knew from the set. His films made me ask questions I’d never asked myself—about how we can connect to one another, how far we are capable of reaching out to other people. So much has been written about his films—about his pioneering of vérité, his interest in community, etc. What I came away with above all, particularly in his later films, is a passionate curiosity about how we can make compassion practical; how we can transform it from an emotion into something that actually reaches someone. Can you be a healing force for an adolescent’s pain and anger? Can you be of use to someone when they are losing their memory in unpredictable pieces? Can you help someone as they go through the process of dying? These are daunting questions to ask ourselves. But, as his wife, Colleen, said at his memorial service, “He wasn’t afraid of the world.”

(Excerpted from Brick 84, used by permission of the author)