Henry Poole Is Here represents a very personal project for filmmaker Mark Pellington, the visually stylish director behind Arlington Road, The Mothman Prophecies and Pearl Jam’s notorious “Jeremy” music video, among many others. Pellington was deep in pre-production on a Harrison Ford film that would eventually become the much-less-interesting-without-him Firewall when, in late July, 2004, he suddenly lost his wife (a matter addressed in this long-form music video made for Keane, never commercially aired after it was deemed “too depressing”), leaving him as a single father of a three-year-old daughter.
Admittedly devastated, Pellington sank into a depression. He returned to work on the small screen with a few episodes of Cold Case, but began searching for projects that he felt spoke to a deeper emotional and personal truth than his first couple movies. Almost immediately, his mind returned to Henry Poole Is Here. “I first read it in 2003,” recalls Pellington. “My manager brought it to me, I read it, liked it, but I
was engaged in another film at the time. [In late 2004], I was looking at my own films and
thinking that they weren’t feeling right. So I re-read the script and met with
(writer) Albert (Torres) again, and said, ‘This is what I’m drawn to and
interested in,’ since Albert owned the property. For me it was about ideas of image and loss and
memory, and I said there was some other stuff I’d like to shave away. Every
writer and director have to sort of fuse together and ask, fundamentally, ‘Do we see
the same thing?’ in order to venture forth on a path to get it made.”
“It’s about turning the page on the past and being present,” continues Pellington of his film, which details a man (Luke Wilson) in crisis who moves back to his adolescent neighborhood and encounters a woman (Adriana Barraza) who believes she sees the face of Jesus Christ in a stain on the side of his stucco home. “I never felt like we were making a religious picture. The characters are religious, (Adriana) is a Catholic woman who sees this, but that’s the character’s story, not anything outside of that. It’s not like, ‘Oh, let’s make this dogmatic, religious film that pushes faith.'”
The experience proved a cathartic one for Pellington, as a place to channel his feelings. “I can hear a song and feel the loss of my wife, and then put a lot of that into my interests, because of what I do,” he says, of his music video work. But this was a grander scale. “We had 30 days. You have a picture in your head, and when you start everything goes away, and each day is like a jigsaw puzzle — you try to formulate the reality of that picture. Maybe about 10 days in, you start to see connections and relationships, and new shapes emerge. Because what I learned — probably my biggest growth as a filmmaker, and in life — was to be completely planned and then get there on set every day and say, ‘I have no idea.’ Not being chaotic or crazy, but just being free to say, ‘OK, let’s see what happens.’ Not controlling as much, because implied with the control is fear. To say I’m going to trust and love my actors and let them do what they want since everyone is on the same page with the text.”
“Each film is different because I’m at different places in my life — they’re different cars, different engines,” Pellington concludes. “I think The Mothman Prophecies was propping up a very weird narrative with a lot of style. The style and the sound of it kind of was the experience, whereas this was the opposite — kind of get out the characters’ way.”