Feisty firecracker Hagar Shipley has lived an unconventional life. Her passionate heart has always ruled her head and her choices have put her at odds with family and friends. Reflecting on the life she has led, the men she has loved and lost, and the sons she has estranged, we follow her journey as she reconciles the decisions she has made.

The Stone Angel, the highly anticipated feature film based on the beloved best-selling novel by Margaret Laurence, is written and directed by Kari Skogland.
Six-time Academy Award nominee and one-time winner Ellen Burstyn will play Hagar Shipley - a witty, irascible, and fiercely proud woman. Faced with the prospect of a nursing home, Hagar sets out on an impossible journey in search of a safe haven.
Time has become unstuck for Hagar and she relives the agony and ecstasy of a stormy marriage fueled by her uncompromising pride. Facing the twilight moments of her life, she must come to terms with her hand in the tragedies of her past, and finally relinquishes her heart to the love she felt for the man who ignited her passions.
The Stone Angel is a bittersweet tale of love and hate, joy and pain, lust and loss. It's about a woman who believes that growing old is not for sissies, and "rages against the dying light."
The screenplay was written by Kari Skogland, who is also directing and co-producing the film. Having first read Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel as a teenager, the story stayed with Skogland until she had the opportunity to adapt and direct the story for the screen: 
"What resonated all those years was the deep intimacy with someone coming to terms with her life wholly lived - for better and for worse - and her imminent death manifested as an erosion of dignity. As a young woman, this book was my awakening to the concept of lives lived before mine. It made me think about how I will live my own life, where I will end up, and how it will end. It was an epiphany." 
Skogland is producing the film through her Toronto-based production company Skogland Films, along with Liz Jarvis of Winnipeg's Buffalo Gal Pictures. The story of The Stone Angel has also resonated with Jarvis for many years:
"The Stone Angel is so true and wise - one of those touchstone books I return to every few years.  Reading Kari's script inspired me to experience this story in a whole new way, and inspired a wonderful cast and crew to join us. It is an honour to be working with people who understand and appreciate the spirit of Hagar Shipley."

KARI SKOGLAND - Writer, Director, Producer
Kari has just completed her own adaptation of The Stone Angel, starring Ellen Burstyn. Kari was named by Hollywood Reporter as one of its "Ten Directors to Watch" for her debut as writer-director of Liberty Stands Still. Kari's career began by directing award winning commercials and music videos. She then moved into television where she started with the enormously successful and multi-award winning series Traders (nominated for 9 Geminis including Best Director and won Best Series).  White Lies, a movie for CBC, was nominated for several Geminis and an International Emmy and won a Tout Ecran.  Her films The Size of Watermelons starring Donal Logue and Paul Rudd, Men With Guns starring Donal Logue and Callum Keith Rennie, Liberty Stands Still (written by Kari as well) starring Wesley Snipes and Linda Fiorentino, have all screened and won awards at major festivals in Canada (Toronto FF, Montreal FF), the US (Slamdance, Chicago, Houston, USA, New York, Cinequest, Seattle) and around the world. Most recently Kari was nominated for both a DGC award and a Gemini for her work on The 11th Hour for CTV and for her film Chicks With Sticks and won the DGC Best Director for her work on the mini-series Terminal City.

HOW IT STARTED
The screenplay for The Stone Angel was written by Kari Skogland, who also directed and co-produced the film. Based on the bestselling novel by Manitoban author Margaret Laurence, the seeds for the screen adaptation were actually sewn more than three decades before cameras started rolling.
Having first encountered Margaret Laurence's The Stone Angel as a teenager, the book truly struck a chord with Skogland:  "When I read The Stone Angel in high school, it was probably force-fed to me at the time, but it resonated and stayed with me for all my adult life. The story was so timeless, about the circle of life, in a way that had not been told to me before.
"So I suddenly looked at my old aunts and my old uncles and thought 'wow, they've lived lives of passion, and they've made mistakes, and they have regrets, and they've had a life'. And yet, at my tender age of 14 or 15, I'd only ever seen them as having this one-dimensional place in space, which was how I was seeing them, and it was an epiphany for me. It's what stayed with me."
Unbeknownst to Skogland, reading The Stone Angel at that time would be the start of an unpredictable lifelong journey of passion and purpose. After high school, she set out on the path of becoming a filmmaker. Along the way, over the next two decades, the book resurfaced in her mind time and again. Until the time was finally right.
"As I became a more accomplished filmmaker I think it was always in the back of my mind that somehow this story would be mine to tell. Several years ago I was looking for a project, and I thought, you know, I have to track down the rights to this book," explains Skogland.
In doing so, she discovered the rights were owned by another production company - one she had already worked with - but had not yet been brought to the screen. So Skogland expressed her interest in making The Stone Angel.   
"I went directly to them and said 'wow, what a great coincidence - we've been doing a lot of work together, and I love you guys and you love me - what do you say??' And they said 'you know Kari, you probably are the one to do this' so I spent the next year writing the script."
From there, with things on the fast-track to getting the film off the ground, the unthinkable happened:  "There we were, we were going to make this movie, and then the company that had been so supportive decided they were going to close their production arm and were out of the production business. So that put a little damper in my spirit. But I thought 'alright, well how do I get the rights? I'll buy the script from you.'"
Being the one script they wanted to keep, it took Skogland more than one year to secure the rights and the ability to make the film on her own. It was a strategy she now jokes about:  "I stalked the CEO of this company. I showed up at every meeting that he had. I made his assistant my best friend. And he finally relented, and indeed, they gave me the rights."
Now with script in hand, and the ability to move ahead 'free and clear' in bringing The Stone Angel to life, indeed the time was right. Skogland felt it was finally her story to tell:  "Once I had the book in my hand, and was actually writing the script, besides being a dream come true I kept saying 'this is my movie, I'm the one to tell this story'. It was finally happening." 
What Skogland needed next was the right producing partner, in the right place:  "After I got the rights I hit the ground running. There was fantastic karma to be shooting this movie in Manitoba - I don't think I could have made a different choice, to be honest. It had to be Manitoba for all kinds of karmic reasons.
"Liz Jarvis of Buffalo Gal Pictures, who is from Manitoba, loved the material. She knew it as a kid, and sort of had the exact same experience of it as I had. We're similar age so we seem to be in the same space in our lives, and going through similar issues, and she just got it. So from there, it became a process of just figuring it out," says Skogland.
"Liz felt as passionately about it as I did, which was incredibly important because it took us another almost two years to pull it together. We both worked tirelessly, and got lots of rejection. But we just kept refusing to take 'no' for an answer from anybody along the way, and eventually started getting positive response."
From her perspective, producer Liz Jarvis' story is a little bit different than Skogland's - but she tells it with just as much passion: 
"Kari Skogland called me from out of the blue one day and told me that she'd been working on a script called The Stone Angel. She told me the whole history in about 40 seconds, and I said 'yes, send me the script'. Within less than a minute the script was on my email, because Kari lives with her PDA and the phone and the car, and you know, I caught right away that there was an incredible energy there," explains Jarvis.
"So I read the script, and cried at the end. That's how it started."         
Jarvis was another Canadian student required to read The Stone Angel in high school. By the time that happened, though, Jarvis was already familiar with the book:  "My mother was my main introduction to most literature and she would always pass books to me as she was reading them. So I'm sure that I must have read The Stone Angel two or three times when I was a teenager.
I've revisited it every decade, because I always found as I grew older, the book said something more to me . Just like Alice in Wonderland - believe it or not, The Stone Angel and Alice in Wonderland are both books that I read once a decade.
"When I first read it, I felt that it was an incredibly intimate portrait of one person's life, and that there was such drama just because it was so intimate,  -- that this character was so expressive about her life," Jarvis recalls. "It's definitely a book that was important to me then, as much as it is now."

TELLING THE STORY
There was no question in Skogland's mind that The Stone Angel had to be made in Manitoba - home of its author Margaret Laurence. Liz Jarvis felt the same way: 
"It was really gratifying to know that this film would be shot in the province where it was imagined, because the landscape plays a huge part. Margaret Laurence's creation of the town of Manawaka is not necessarily her hometown of Neepawa. I think she drew on a lot of small towns around Manitoba, and a lot of people she met through her life, to create this town of Manawaka, and these characters. So the story is very much grounded in the landscape of Manitoba."
A few years before making The Stone Angel, Jarvis was involved as a crew member in the adaptation of another great Canadian story (The Diviners). During this process, she was reminded of another book from her past: 
"I often thought about The Stone Angel as perhaps being even better material for a film, but it's also got that great epic sweep, which makes it very difficult to condense into the specific moments that will work as a screenplay. And that's what I thought that Kari had done a really good job of - picking out those moments that would work visually, the moments that were the dramatic turning points of the lead character Hagar's life.
"She told me she was doing the 'sex, drugs and rock n roll' version of The Stone Angel," says Jarvis with a smile.
From early on, Skogland knew the kind of story she wanted to tell, encapsulating that teenage experience of discovering its essence for the very first time, and drawing from the way her feelings for the story changed along with her perspective as she got older. She explains her vision: 
"I wanted to achieve a story that resonated with everyone -it's a woman's story, but it's also a mother-son redemption story, kind of an epic love affair between many people and many players.     
"This story to me was about people and how a little event that happens has a ricochet effect and ripple effect through life. And it was so universal -- we are all so motivated by our past, our parents' past-- the legacies that come with each generation. My feeling was that this story had not been told in cinema, not in this way. Particularly not with this feminine spin on it, but that told a male story as well. And that was what I wanted to bring to it.
"I hope the critics and scholars of Margaret Laurence won't take me to task with some of the interpretations I've had to make, but I found a lot of passion in her book. It's veiled, it's under the surface and then it bubbles up. So part of my own take on the story was to bring that to the fore and to show it in the most honest way one could - because everybody was having sex with everybody, and if they weren't, they wanted to.
"That is what comes through in the sexual story between Bram and Hagar, a story that to me was very important to tell. Because between these two people, the love and the sex were intertwined. So as that came apart, as the two of them could not find a way to love each other unconditionally, so too, their sexual life peaked. She could never admit that in fact she lusted after him AND loved him - and I think that is true of so many people.
"Relationships come apart for all the wrong reasons. We get married, and then spend the rest of our time trying to change each other. So I thought that was very universal, and all those things were wrapped up in this incredibly epic story.
"I told this to Margaret's daughter, Jocelyn Laurence, and said 'I hope you're not going to take to me to task because I've kind of done the sex, drugs, rock n roll version of The Stone Angel - it's full of sex and full of passion' and she said 'no, I think it's going to be great'. So I'm hoping she still agrees at the end of the day."
Turning up the 'sexy factor' in the story was, in a way, like telling a different story. It meant following the same arc, but using different images to convey the action. Liz Jarvis explains some of the changes that were made in turning the book into a screenplay: 
"Kari did contemporize the story, she made it happen now rather than in the original time period that the novel was written in, so there are some differences that she employed to make it more relevant to a modern audience.  For example, the person Hagar tells her story to in the abandoned house, which was an abandoned cannery in the novel, isn't a salesman-type anymore - it's now a young man who is there for a tryst with his girlfriend. Kari's ideas about the novel set a solid path for the  process of realizing the vision, not only for her, but for all the other really creative people that came along on the project. So it's been a kind of evolving vision, I guess you could say."
Realizing the vision meant keeping as true to the book from a story perspective, while updating the images used to tell the story. In selecting the moments and turning points to bring to life, Skogland chose the ones that could best be contemporized.
"I had to update the story in the sense that this story was written in the 60's, and we are now in the 21^st century, so you can't tell the same story - I couldn't be in a flashback and then flashing back from that. I felt it had to have a contemporary quality to it or we wouldn't be talking to the very people that I felt the book always talked to, which were teenagers. So I had to update it in a way that it therefore ripples through a lifespan, with different sensibilities in the various ages.
"Film is such a different way of communicating than, in this case, the written word, which is such an internal way to tell a story. It's very much in this woman's head - Margaret in her sensibility and language, created this story. So how do you translate that to film?? Well of course you have to actualize a lot of the scenes, and so you have to take what is a thought, almost a dream quality, and turn it into an event that we see. 
"So I wanted to maintain the spirit, as closely as I could, so it's been a bit of a dance because there are so many Margaret Laurence fans, I'm bound to have gotten it wrong for somebody. But I hope I get it right for a lot of people, and also that I bring it to life for a lot of people who haven't read the book. I want to bring this story - this timeless story - to people who perhaps would never pick up the book or wouldn't ever get past the first chapter. So that's really the goal.
"The other goal is to take it outside of Canada. Although this is a wonderfully unique Canadian story set in the classic Canadian prairie - the kind of movie we used to joke about when I was a kid, and now here I am, so go figure! - I wanted to tell this story in a way that had new vision. We could tell the past without it feeling stodgy."

ABOUT THE STONE ANGEL
The Stone Angel is perhaps the best-known of Margaret Laurence's series of novels set in the fictitious town of Manawaka, Manitoba. First published in 1964 by McClelland and Stewart, The Stone Angel tells the story of Hagar Currie Shipley, using parallel narratives set in the past and present-day (early 1960s).
In the present-day narrative, 90-year-old Hagar is struggling against being put in a nursing home, which she sees as a symbol of death. The present-day narrative alternates with Hagar's looking back at her life.

SOME FACTS ABOUT THE BOOK
· Although Margaret Laurence had been publishing fiction for a decade before The Stone Angel was published in 1964, it was this novel that first won her a wide and appreciative audience.
· When The Stone Angel was first published in 1964, most reviewers recognized it as a major achievement. Robertson Davies, in The New York Times Book Review, praised Laurence's insight into character as well as her "freshness of approach her gift for significant detail."
· A reviewer for Time described The Stone Angel as "one of the most convincing and the most touching portraits of an unregenerate sinner declining into senility since Sara Monday went to her reward in Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth."
· The book, amongst other titles by Laurence, was banned by some school boards and high schools, usually following complaints from fundamentalist Christian groups labelling the book blasphemous and obscene.
· The Stone Angel has been translated into French, as L'Ange de pierre (Montréal, 1976), into German, and eleven other languages.
· The Stone Angel was one of the selected books in the 2002 edition of Canada Reads, where it was championed by Leon Rooke.

ABOUT MARGARET LAURENCE
Margaret Laurence was born in Neepawa, Manitoba, in 1926. Upon graduation from Winnipeg's United College in 1947, she took a job as a reporter for the Winnipeg Citizen.
From 1950 until 1957 Laurence lived in Africa, the first two years in Somalia, the next five in Ghana, where her husband, a civil engineer, was working. She translated Somali poetry and prose during this time, and began her career as a fiction writer with stories set in Africa.
When Laurence returned to Canada in 1957, she settled in Vancouver, where she devoted herself to fiction with a Ghanaian setting: in her first novel, This Side Jordan, and in her first collection of short fiction, The Tomorrow-Tamer. Her two years in Somalia were the subject of her memoir, The Prophet's Camel Bell.
Separating from her husband in 1962, Laurence moved to England, which became her home for a decade, the time she devoted to the creation of five books about the fictional town of Manawaka, patterned after her birthplace, and its people: The Stone Angel, A Jest of God, The Fire-Dwellers, A Bird in the House, and The Diviners.
Laurence settled in Lakefield, Ontario, in 1974. She complemented her fiction with essays, book reviews, and four children's books. Her many honours include two Governor General's Awards for Fiction and more than a dozen honorary degrees. Margaret Laurence died in Lakefield, Ontario, in 1987.


THE CAST

SHOOTING THE ACTION 

MEMORABLE QUOTES AND READING HABITS

THE ART OF ADAPTATION

HOME