玛格丽特·阿特伍德：笔耕不辍是为力 (2019)(EN)Subtitles

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1 00:00:34 "A chair, a table, a lamp"
2 00:00:40 "above on the white ceiling"
3 00:00:42 "a relief ornament in the shape of a reef"
4 00:00:45 "and in the centre of it,"
5 00:00:46 "a blank space plastered over"
6 00:00:49 "like the place in a face"
7 00:00:51 "where the eye has been taken out."
8 00:00:54 "There must've been a chandelier once."
9 00:00:56 "They've removed anything you can tie a rope to."
10 00:01:05 And the Emmy goes to The Handmaid's Tale!
11 00:01:21 She said, "I never thought"
12 00:01:27 "that I would be a popular writer."
13 00:01:30 "I only wanted to be a good one."
14 00:01:34 Margaret Atwood!
15 00:01:43 She's a cultural and literary rock star,
16 00:01:47 an international treasure.
17 00:01:51 She's a major, major international voice.
18 00:01:56 Margaret's the founding mother
19 00:01:59 of Canadian literature
20 00:02:01 and she's our most recognized literary genius.
21 00:02:06 She writes for her times and she is off her times
22 00:02:10 but she writes for all times.
23 00:02:15 She will be part of the pantheon
24 00:02:16 of the great writers of our time
25 00:02:20 and she will be read forever.
26 00:02:48 Look, I'm coming out of a hotel.
27 00:02:52 It's so interesting.
28 00:03:08 In many ways Peggy is both an artist
29 00:03:10 and a scientist.
30 00:03:12 She's an observer.
31 00:03:14 She looks at details of things.
32 00:03:16 She does fulfill what Akira Kurosawa said
33 00:03:20 you must do as an artist,
34 00:03:22 "The artist never averts his eyes."
35 00:03:26 That means that you look at everything,
36 00:03:29 and the most horrible and the most beautiful
37 00:03:32 and that you never turn away.
38 00:03:42 And that's Venus looking in the mirror.
39 00:03:43 There's Athena, that's probably Juno,
40 00:03:46 that's the goddess Justitia,
41 00:03:49 but who is that sitting down
42 00:03:51 with something that looks like a pumpkin?
43 00:03:53 I don't know who that is.
44 00:03:57 That capacity to see detail
45 00:04:00 is what's really extraordinary about
46 00:04:02 her perceptivity.
47 00:04:04 You're probably seeing
48 00:04:06 some of the first replaceable collars.
49 00:04:09 So you would have the black suit,
50 00:04:11 which you wouldn't clean very often
51 00:04:15 and then you would have the collars,
52 00:04:16 which you would change quite frequently.
53 00:04:19 That sense of,
54 00:04:20 let's really look at something here.
55 00:04:22 What is happening,
56 00:04:24 because I'm not sure that
57 00:04:25 what's happening is so great.
58 00:04:28 Now why would you want that
59 00:04:29 hanging in your living room?
60 00:04:32 Two dead peacocks.
61 00:04:34 Excuse me Ms. Atwood.
62 00:04:35 I'm a bookseller from Montreal.
63 00:04:37 Please to meet you.　-Please to meet you.
64 00:04:39 And where do you do your book selling?
65 00:04:41 In Montreal West.　-Now Montreal West?
66 00:04:42 Yeah…　-Okay.
67 00:04:44 And what's the name of your shop?
68 00:04:46 Bonder Bookstore. We're one of the oldest
69 00:04:48 English language independent bookstores
70 00:04:51 Oh good for you.　-in eastern Canada.
71 00:04:53 You've held out.　-Yes, we did…
72 00:04:57 Lovely, lovely to meet you.
73 00:04:59 These are my sons.
74 00:05:03 Thank you very much…　-You're very welcome.
75 00:05:04 It's nice to meet you.
76 00:05:06 My teacher made me,
77 00:05:07 had us read The Handmaid's Tale in 11th Grade.
78 00:05:09 I love it. "Made…made me."
79 00:05:10 And I saw you speak years ago.　-I love that.
80 00:05:13 Yes.　-Thank you.
81 00:05:14 It did you good.
82 00:05:18 What's your earliest memory?
83 00:05:22 My earliest memory was from Ottawa,
84 00:05:25 so I remember the snow there.
85 00:05:26 It's a very snowy place,
86 00:05:28 but let's not do the psychological deep dive.
87 00:05:32 No no, I'm just curious.　-Yeah.
88 00:05:40 "You begin, you begin this way."
89 00:05:44 "This is your hand."
90 00:05:45 "This is your eye,"
91 00:05:47 "that is a fish blue and flat on the paper,"
92 00:05:50 "almost the shape of an eye."
93 00:05:53 "This is your mouth."
94 00:05:54 "This is an O or a moon, whichever you like."
95 00:05:57 "This is yellow."
96 00:06:00 "Outside the window is the rain,"
97 00:06:02 "green because it is summer"
98 00:06:04 "and beyond that the trees"
99 00:06:06 "and then the world, which is round,"
100 00:06:08 "it has only the colours of these nine crayons."
101 00:06:13 "This is the world, which is fuller"
102 00:06:15 "and more difficult to learn that I am sad."
103 00:06:19 "You were right to smudge it that way"
104 00:06:21 "with the red and then the orange."
105 00:06:24 "The world burns."
106 00:06:27 "Once you have learned these words,"
107 00:06:29 "you will learn that"
108 00:06:30 "there are more words than you can ever learn."
109 00:06:34 "The word hand floats above your hand,"
110 00:06:37 "like small cloud over a lake."
111 00:06:40 "Your hand is a warm stone"
112 00:06:42 "I hold between two words."
113 00:06:46 This is your hand.
114 00:06:56 Greetings, earthlings.
115 00:06:59 I come from a planet in a galaxy far, far away,
116 00:07:04 and in another genre.
117 00:07:07 I came here to discover
118 00:07:08 the answer to the question,
119 00:07:10 what are these human rights of which you speak?
120 00:07:15 The name of my planet is Mashup Six.
121 00:07:19 Our physical forms on Mashup Six would be puzzling
122 00:07:22 and possibly even alarming to you.
123 00:07:24 You would no doubt see us as a blend of
124 00:07:27 octopus giant sea slug and salt and peppershaker.
125 00:07:32 But luckily we have the ability to take on
126 00:07:36 protective shapes and colourations
127 00:07:38 in order to blend in with the surroundings
128 00:07:41 of the foreign planets
129 00:07:42 we have chosen to investigate,
130 00:07:45 thus to calm your nerves,
131 00:07:48 I have assumed the form of a short elderly,
132 00:07:52 frazzle headed female human person
133 00:07:56 from the country of Canada.
134 00:08:01 I was carried into the woods in a packsack
135 00:08:05 when I was six months old.
136 00:08:10 My dad was a forest entomologist.
137 00:08:13 We would live in tents
138 00:08:14 while he built a larger house.
139 00:08:17 There's no electricity,
140 00:08:18 there was two wood stoves.
141 00:08:22 This is my father's section of the house.
142 00:08:24 In my mother's things are arranged
143 00:08:27 on hooks and shelves in invaluable order.
144 00:08:31 Cups, pots, plates, pans.
145 00:08:34 This is not because my mother
146 00:08:35 makes a fetish of housekeeping,
147 00:08:37 but because she doesn't want to
148 00:08:38 waste time on it.
149 00:08:40 All her favorite recipes
150 00:08:42 begin with the word quick.
151 00:08:44 You don't even have to dress up like a girl.
152 00:08:47 Yeah.　-Nobody felt that I was,
153 00:08:49 that I was stepping out of bounds
154 00:08:51 if I chopped a little wood.
155 00:08:53 There weren't things
156 00:08:54 that I was really expected to do
157 00:08:55 except not move in the canoe.
158 00:09:01 My father did what he did
159 00:09:03 because it allows him to do what he does.
160 00:09:05 There he goes now in among the trees,
161 00:09:08 one or two or a clutch of children of any age
162 00:09:11 tagging along after him,
163 00:09:13 his own or his grandchildren,
164 00:09:15 their eyes getting larger and larger
165 00:09:17 as wonder after wonder is revealed to them.
166 00:09:20 (Speaking Latin)
167 00:09:23 Does it bite?
168 00:09:24 Yes it will bite. It will bite.
169 00:09:26 Don't you see it trying to bite me?
170 00:09:28 Does it hurt?
171 00:09:30 No, it doesn't hurt.
172 00:09:31 He's been getting through the skin.
173 00:09:33 May I hold him?
174 00:09:35 Actually I'll just look at him.
175 00:09:40 Harold, my brother, was very instructive.
176 00:09:43 He came home from his first day at school
177 00:09:45 and said, "Peggy, stand in a circle."
178 00:09:50 We often were in woods until
179 00:09:52 past the school entry time.
180 00:09:55 We would miss two months of school in the fall
181 00:09:58 and we would miss two months in the spring too.
182 00:10:02 My mother at least had been a school teacher
183 00:10:04 and she was able to arrange with the schools
184 00:10:07 to take us out
185 00:10:08 if she would promise to teach us the basics.
186 00:10:13 We learned how to read at least
187 00:10:14 because with no television or even no radio,
188 00:10:18 reading was one way you could get
189 00:10:20 information and entertainment.
190 00:10:25 I was an early writer.
191 00:10:26 I wrote comics and I wrote little stories
192 00:10:30 and I wrote my first novel when I was seven.
193 00:10:33 It was about an ant.
194 00:10:35 It was not a great success
195 00:10:37 but it was illustrated
196 00:10:39 and then I lost interest in writing.
197 00:10:42 I wanted to be a painter.
198 00:10:53 We were taken to The Red Shoes
199 00:10:55 for somebody's ninth birthday party
200 00:10:57 and the grown-ups evidently thought
201 00:11:00 little girls liked ballet,
202 00:11:01 they will like this movie.
203 00:11:06 The Red Shoes was about somebody
204 00:11:09 who has a career, namely dancing,
205 00:11:12 and has to choose between having a career
206 00:11:15 and being married to her husband.
207 00:11:19 Please Julian, wait until after the performance.
208 00:11:22 It'll be too late then.
209 00:11:23 You are already too late, Mr. Craster.
210 00:11:27 Tell him why you've left him.
211 00:11:28 I haven't left him.
212 00:11:29 Oh yes you have left him.
213 00:11:30 Nobody can have two lives
214 00:11:31 and your life is dancing.
215 00:11:38 No!
216 00:11:41 Don't do a career, girls.
217 00:11:44 This is not for you.
218 00:11:46 Not just don't be a ballet dancer,
219 00:11:48 don't be anything. But remember when this was,
220 00:11:51 it was the entrance into the 50s
221 00:11:53 which was the decade
222 00:11:55 in which a concerted effort was made
223 00:11:57 to get women into the bungalow
224 00:12:00 with the four kids and the washer and dryer
225 00:12:02 so that there wouldn't be room in the job market
226 00:12:05 for the men coming back from the war.
227 00:12:14 It was the military phase of schools.
228 00:12:17 The girls marched in the girls’ door.
229 00:12:19 The boys marched in the boys’ door
230 00:12:22 and then you had to sit in rows
231 00:12:24 and put up your hand
232 00:12:26 and also the pace at which things moved
233 00:12:29 was glacial.
234 00:12:32 So I think I did develop an ability
235 00:12:34 to look very attentive
236 00:12:36 while thinking about something else.
237 00:12:39 "On the window ledge beside mine,"
238 00:12:41 "Cordelia and Grayson and Carroll are sitting,"
239 00:12:44 "jammed in together, whispering and giggling."
240 00:12:48 "I have to sit on a window ledge by myself"
241 00:12:50 "because they aren't speaking to me."
242 00:12:52 "It's something I said wrong,"
243 00:12:54 "but I don't know what it is"
244 00:12:55 "because they won't tell me."
245 00:12:57 "Cordelia says it would be better for me"
246 00:12:59 "to think back over everything I said today"
247 00:13:01 "and try to pick out the wrong thing."
248 00:13:04 "That way I will learn"
249 00:13:05 "not to say such a thing again."
250 00:13:08 "When I've guessed the right answer"
251 00:13:10 "then they will speak to me again."
252 00:13:15 In our guidance textbook in 1952
253 00:13:19 there were a lot of future careers for men
254 00:13:22 and there were five for women,
255 00:13:24 nurse, public school teacher, airline stewardess,
256 00:13:29 that's what they were called then.
257 00:13:31 Secretary and Home Economist.
258 00:13:34 So I took home economics
259 00:13:35 because of all those five things,
260 00:13:37 they made the most money.
261 00:13:39 I was quite mercenary.
262 00:13:43 We thought maybe
263 00:13:43 she'd be a home economist you see,
264 00:13:45 because she, started sewing her own clothes
265 00:13:48 but, they looked great on the outside,
266 00:13:50 but on the inside they were just
267 00:13:52 in danger of falling apart.
268 00:13:58 I thought maybe I would go to journalism school
269 00:14:01 and I was discouraged from that
270 00:14:03 by being told that if I was a female
271 00:14:06 working for a newspaper,
272 00:14:07 I would be writing nothing but the obituaries
273 00:14:10 and the fashion pages.
274 00:14:15 So then I thought I would run away to Paris,
275 00:14:18 live in a garrett, drink Absinthe,
276 00:14:20 smoke cigarettes, write masterpieces,
277 00:14:23 die young.
278 00:14:24 But first I would go to
279 00:14:26 English language and literature
280 00:14:28 because I might conceivably end up
281 00:14:31 as a teacher before jumping off the bridge.
282 00:14:38 We used to read poems at the Bohemian Embassy.
283 00:14:41 The Bohemian Embassy was an early
284 00:14:44 Toronto Coffee House
285 00:14:45 on the edge of coffee houses.
286 00:14:47 You went up a long rickety a flight of stairs
287 00:14:51 and you came into this room
288 00:14:52 that was completely black and filled with smoke
289 00:14:55 and had the check tablecloths,
290 00:14:58 the bottles with candles in them
291 00:15:00 and it served coffee
292 00:15:04 and it was the best test.
293 00:15:06 I mean if you could get through
294 00:15:07 the Bohemian Embassy,
295 00:15:09 you would be able to read almost anywhere
296 00:15:10 because the washroom opened right on
297 00:15:13 to the main room
298 00:15:15 and they had the first espresso machine
299 00:15:18 that I ever saw in Toronto
300 00:15:19 and you would be getting just to
301 00:15:20 the most poignant moment
302 00:15:23 and someone would flush the toilet
303 00:15:24 and open the door
304 00:15:26 or they would turn on the espresso machine.
305 00:15:28 So you'd be reading along and you'd hear…
306 00:15:34 How are you going to be a woman poet
307 00:15:36 within a society that defines women
308 00:15:38 as either those with the white gloves and girdles
309 00:15:41 or the smiling person who is always there
310 00:15:44 with your dinner on the table,
311 00:15:45 no matter when you may come home.
312 00:15:47 For us at that time
313 00:15:49 it was a matter of self-definition.
314 00:15:50 You had to make the place
315 00:15:52 that you would then be in.
316 00:16:03 "There's a street that would take you"
317 00:16:04 "down towards the river."
318 00:16:07 "There's a boathouse"
319 00:16:08 "where they kept the skulls once"
320 00:16:10 "and some bridges, trees, green banks"
321 00:16:13 "where you could sit and watch the water"
322 00:16:16 "and the young man with their naked arms"
323 00:16:18 "and their oars lifting into the sunlight"
324 00:16:20 "as they played it at winning."
325 00:16:23 "On the way to the river are the old dormitories"
326 00:16:27 "with their fairy tale turrets"
327 00:16:28 "painted white and gold and blue."
328 00:16:32 "When we think of the past,"
329 00:16:33 "it's the beautiful things we pick out."
330 00:16:36 "I don't go to the river anymore"
331 00:16:38 "or over bridges,"
332 00:16:40 "we're not allowed on."
333 00:16:42 "There are guardians now."
334 00:16:52 Oh you're a good sport.
335 00:16:53 This is the most bizarre meeting.
336 00:16:55 I think it's amazing.
337 00:16:58 Is that, is that yours?
338 00:17:00 That's my box that I was standing on
339 00:17:02 to look tall.
340 00:17:04 We met through an ad
341 00:17:06 in the Harvard Summer School News.
342 00:17:09 I was looking for a roommate and a place to live
343 00:17:13 and she answered the ad.
344 00:17:15 My initial impression, Gosh, she's really mousy,
345 00:17:18 very quiet, kind of nerdy girl.
346 00:17:21 It turned out she wasn't quiet.
347 00:17:24 She lived very lively in fact
348 00:17:26 and quite forbearing.
349 00:17:29 Anti-war demonstrators protest U.S. involvement
350 00:17:32 in the Vietnam War
351 00:17:33 in mass marches, rallies and demonstrations.
352 00:17:36 Marches include students, housewives,
353 00:17:39 beatnik poets, doctors, businessmen,
354 00:17:41 teachers, priests and nuns.
355 00:17:44 In the first Anti-Vietnam March,
356 00:17:46 I think it was the fall of '65
357 00:17:49 in Cambridge and I got inveigled into it
358 00:17:52 by a friend of mine who said,
359 00:17:54 'let's go for a walk,'
360 00:17:55 then I found that I was in this march.
361 00:18:01 It is dangerous to read newspapers.
362 00:18:05 While I was building neat castles in the sandbox,
363 00:18:08 the hasty pits were filling
364 00:18:10 with bulldozed corpses
365 00:18:13 and as I walked to the school,
366 00:18:15 washed and combed,
367 00:18:16 my feet, stepping on the cracks in the cement
368 00:18:20 detonated red bombs.
369 00:18:23 Now I am grown up and literate
370 00:18:25 and I sit in my chair as quietly
371 00:18:28 as a fuse and the jungles are flaming.
372 00:18:31 The underbrush is charged with soldiers.
373 00:18:34 The names on the difficult maps go up in smoke.
374 00:18:38 I am the cause.
375 00:18:40 I am a stockpile of chemical toys.
376 00:18:42 My body is a deadly gadget.
377 00:18:45 I reach out in love.
378 00:18:46 My hands are guns.
379 00:18:48 My good intentions are completely lethal.
380 00:18:51 Even my passive eyes
381 00:18:53 transmute everything I look at
382 00:18:56 to the pocked black and white of a war photo.
383 00:18:59 How can I stop myself?
384 00:19:02 It is dangerous to read newspapers.
385 00:19:07 It was a very tense time for all of us
386 00:19:10 in graduate school.
387 00:19:12 I was under the acts of being drafted.
388 00:19:15 My draft board man couldn't wait
389 00:19:17 to throw me to the wolves in Cambodia
390 00:19:19 or wherever the worst things were happening then.
391 00:19:24 Peggy and I were kids together.
392 00:19:26 We were both from odd places.
393 00:19:29 She was a wild Canadian girl
394 00:19:31 and I was from the Bush of Montana, the badlands,
395 00:19:34 and we were fish out of water.
396 00:19:36 I didn't know where I was and neither did she,
397 00:19:39 but we clicked.
398 00:19:41 See I didn't feel like a fish out of water,
399 00:19:42 I felt like a spy.
400 00:19:44 I moved unseen among them.
401 00:19:46 They did not know.
402 00:19:50 She was smarter than anybody at Harvard.
403 00:19:54 She was very sexy in a way
404 00:19:56 that only somebody from Montana and Canada
405 00:19:58 might, might relish.
406 00:20:00 My roommates, they were both southern gentlemen,
407 00:20:02 just thought she was awful.
408 00:20:04 She had opinions.
409 00:20:05 She'd march in and would take me over
410 00:20:07 and make me write my paper.
411 00:20:09 She knew she was good
412 00:20:11 and she didn't bother to hide it.
413 00:20:14 She alienated practically everybody
414 00:20:16 in a certain group
415 00:20:17 and then others, the real people
416 00:20:19 that became our friends just thought
417 00:20:21 it was terrific.
418 00:20:23 In the historic Harvard yard
419 00:20:25 have been made friendships,
420 00:20:26 which have lasted for life.
421 00:20:28 You'll see your classmates,
422 00:20:31 men from every section of the country.
423 00:20:34 Did I understand correctly
424 00:20:36 that when you were a student at Harvard,
425 00:20:38 there was a library you couldn't go into
426 00:20:40 because you were a girl?
427 00:20:41 When I was a student at Harvard,
428 00:20:45 there was a library I couldn't go into
429 00:20:49 because I was a girl.
430 00:20:51 Yes. It was Lamont Library
431 00:20:53 and it was for male undergraduates
432 00:20:55 and it had all the modern poetry in it,
433 00:20:58 and I was a poet.
434 00:21:00 I could get those books if I knew what they were,
435 00:21:03 I could get them out,
436 00:21:04 but I couldn't go in there and see what they had.
437 00:21:09 How can you express that so calmly?
438 00:21:12 Because, because I'm old.
439 00:21:18 I set The Handmaid's Tale
440 00:21:19 in Cambridge, Massachusetts,
441 00:21:22 home of Harvard, which prides itself
442 00:21:24 on being the heart of liberal democracy,
443 00:21:27 but started as a 17th century
444 00:21:29 puritan theocracy.
445 00:21:33 Nobody figured out that The Handmaid's Tale
446 00:21:35 is about the Harvard English Department.
447 00:21:39 They didn't hire women at that time.
448 00:21:47 Well I put the headquarters
449 00:21:48 of various secret services and things here.
450 00:21:52 Well, for example, Widener Library is the,
451 00:21:54 is the head of the secret service
452 00:21:56 and the Harvard Coop
453 00:21:58 is where you get automated prayers
454 00:22:01 and the Brattle Theater
455 00:22:03 is where you get your outfits.
456 00:22:06 I can't remember,
457 00:22:08 I meant to look back to the book,
458 00:22:11 were they actually hung on the wall or
459 00:22:13 were the bodies displayed?　-They were displayed.
460 00:22:15 They were displayed there. That's right.
461 00:22:17 They were hung.　-They were hanged elsewhere
462 00:22:20 and displayed there.
463 00:22:21 Some of them were hanged at the Kennedy Center.
464 00:22:24 "Ring around the rosy"
465 00:22:26 "A pocket full of posies"
466 00:22:29 "Ashes, ashes, we all fall down"
467 00:22:33 "The children on the lawn"
468 00:22:35 "joined hand to hand"
469 00:22:36 "go round and round"
470 00:22:39 "each arm going into the next arm,"
471 00:22:41 "around full circle"
472 00:22:43 "until it comes back"
473 00:22:44 "into each of the single bodies again"
474 00:22:51 When she got the Governor General's Award,
475 00:22:53 the phone was right outside my room
476 00:22:56 and it rang and she answered
477 00:22:59 and there was a shriek.
478 00:23:02 She was astounded, you know,
479 00:23:04 it's my first book.
480 00:23:05 It's too early.
481 00:23:06 I mean, what's wrong with them?
482 00:23:07 To go and get the prize
483 00:23:08 I actually borrowed Susan's dress
484 00:23:11 and high-hoed off
485 00:23:12 without my Hush Puppies,
486 00:23:14 which weren't there when I got back.
487 00:23:17 My two roommates disposed of them.
488 00:23:21 They felt that Hush Puppies were too…
489 00:23:24 déclassé for a person of my stature.
490 00:23:30 "Dear Charles,"
491 00:23:31 "Well I guess all my friends will hate me now"
492 00:23:33 "that I've won the Governor General's."
493 00:23:36 "Wondering if you can take some"
494 00:23:36 "black and whites of me,"
495 00:23:38 "I'm going to need some."
496 00:23:40 "See you soon, Peg"
497 00:23:44 And we decided to get married
498 00:23:47 to protect me from the draft.
499 00:23:49 I remember they had a
500 00:23:50 Chinese Justice of the Peace
501 00:23:52 that she found in the Yellow Pages in Boston
502 00:23:55 and I remember him saying,
503 00:23:57 "Love each other for what you are."
504 00:23:59 "Forgive each other for what you ain't."
505 00:24:08 I call upon the Handmaid of Honour,
506 00:24:12 Margaret Atwood, one of Charles' oldest friends.
507 00:24:17 Margaret and I went to camp together
508 00:24:19 and we learned a whole bunch of social songs
509 00:24:22 in the six…social.　-They weren't social,
510 00:24:24 they were humanist.
511 00:24:25 Humanist, thank you, humanist songs
512 00:24:27 and here's the first one, are you're ready?
513 00:24:29 We're ready.　-A one, a two, a three.
514 00:24:30 Let's go.
515 00:24:32 Close your eyes
516 00:24:33 and point your finger on the map.
517 00:24:34 Just let it linger.
518 00:24:36 Any place you point your finger to,
519 00:24:39 there’s someone with
520 00:24:40 the same type blood as you.
521 00:24:42 England, China or Alaska,
522 00:24:44 Mexico, or Madagascar,
523 00:24:47 Indonesia, Ireland, or Peru,
524 00:24:50 there's someone with
525 00:24:51 the same type blood as you.
526 00:24:56 When I first laid eyes on Margaret,
527 00:24:59 she looked a little bit like
528 00:25:00 a young Jane Goodall,
529 00:25:01 and she was wearing rubber boots
530 00:25:03 and sort of khaki greens
531 00:25:05 and she motioned over to me as she used to do.
532 00:25:08 She had these squirming kids sitting at her feet
533 00:25:11 in front of this yucky hut
534 00:25:15 where she kept frogs and toads
535 00:25:18 and snakes and insects and everything else
536 00:25:20 and she said "I need you to stroke a toad"
537 00:25:22 "to prove to the kids you won't get warts."
538 00:25:25 So I did.
539 00:25:26 I stroke the toad and I didn't get warts
540 00:25:28 and it was the start of a unique friendship
541 00:25:31 that has gone on now from almost 60 years.
542 00:25:39 I began painting Margaret back in 1968.
543 00:25:45 She really and truly believes that
544 00:25:47 she has the answer to everything
545 00:25:49 and she doesn't, but she believe she does.
546 00:25:51 She's so incredibly quick
547 00:25:52 to respond to any questions.
548 00:25:55 Her brain never stops going.
549 00:25:57 Any question posed to her,
550 00:25:59 she always has a smart ass answer for.
551 00:26:02 She could always come up with something
552 00:26:05 and this isn't necessarily always right,
553 00:26:07 but there you are,
554 00:26:08 it's just her perception of the world,
555 00:26:10 but I respect that in her.
556 00:26:14 This is one of the first ones.
557 00:26:16 Margaret and I had been walking around
558 00:26:19 an abandoned farm
559 00:26:20 and she happened to pick up this caterpillar.
560 00:26:24 I took a photo of her,
561 00:26:25 which I then turned into this print
562 00:26:27 and in the print
563 00:26:29 Margaret is turning into the butterfly
564 00:26:31 and I called the piece
565 00:26:32 "It Was Fascination I Know"
566 00:26:34 based on the Nat King Cole song.
567 00:26:36 It was fascination I know,
568 00:26:40 and it might have ended right then
569 00:26:42 at the start
570 00:26:44 just a passing glance, just a brief romance
571 00:26:48 and I might have gone on my way empty hearted.
572 00:26:53 I'm not embarrassed to say that
573 00:26:55 I think at some very profound level
574 00:26:57 I was in love with her when I was young.
575 00:26:59 She started sending me her poems
576 00:27:02 because somewhere somehow she felt
577 00:27:05 that they would be…
578 00:27:07 triggers for my imagination and they were.
579 00:27:10 I read the Journals of Susanna Moodie,
580 00:27:13 her manuscript that she sent me
581 00:27:14 based on the original Susanna Moodie's book
582 00:27:17 written in the 1850s.
583 00:27:19 I realized she had hit on something magnificent.
584 00:27:23 This is a poem about the cholera epidemic
585 00:27:26 and the people coming into Ontario in the 1840s.
586 00:27:32 "After we had crossed the long illness"
587 00:27:34 "that was the ocean,"
588 00:27:35 "we sailed up-river"
589 00:27:37 "On the first island"
590 00:27:38 "the immigrants threw off their clothes"
591 00:27:41 "and danced like sandflies"
592 00:27:44 "We left behind one by one"
593 00:27:47 "the cities rotting with cholera,"
594 00:27:49 "one by one our civilized distinctions"
595 00:27:52 "and entered a large darkness."
596 00:27:56 "Whether the wilderness is real or not"
597 00:27:59 "depends on who lives there."
598 00:28:03 It's a question of form and patterning.
599 00:28:06 Poetry is closer to music.
600 00:28:09 So it's my theory, though I can't prove it,
601 00:28:11 that a different part of the brain is involved.
602 00:28:14 I think the part
603 00:28:15 that's closer to music and mathematics.
604 00:28:18 Control of the bodies
605 00:28:20 Control of the heart
606 00:28:23 Control of the bodies
607 00:28:25 Control of the heart
608 00:28:28 Tell it like it is…
609 00:28:30 Well, my first one wasn't this roaring success.
610 00:28:33 I mean it was for a first novel,
611 00:28:35 but published in '69
612 00:28:37 just as the women's movement was beginning.
613 00:28:40 So some reviewers reviewed it
614 00:28:41 as the cutting edge of feminism
615 00:28:44 and others reviewed it as something
616 00:28:45 I would grow out of when I became more mature.
617 00:28:51 "She went into the kitchen and returned,"
618 00:28:53 "bearing the platter, carefully with reverence,"
619 00:28:56 "as though she was carrying something"
620 00:28:58 "sacred in a procession,"
621 00:29:01 "an icon or the crown on a cushion in a play."
622 00:29:05 "She knelt,"
623 00:29:06 "setting the platter on the coffee table"
624 00:29:07 "in front of Peter."
625 00:29:09 'You’ve been trying to assimilate me.'
626 00:29:12 'But I’ve made you a substitute,'
627 00:29:14 'something you’ll like much better.'
628 00:29:16 'I’ll get you a fork.'
629 00:29:19 The Edible Woman was very popular
630 00:29:22 for women of our age,
631 00:29:24 women in our late twenties
632 00:29:26 who were thinking maybe we should start
633 00:29:28 to think about getting married and doing that.
634 00:29:31 And so the whole experience
635 00:29:33 that Marion goes through
636 00:29:35 was an experience that many
637 00:29:37 of the women of the 60s were going through.
638 00:29:42 Hi Thelma, later gator.
639 00:29:45 Good morning Mr. McClelland.
640 00:29:46 A publisher had written me a letter saying,
641 00:29:49 "if you ever have a novel, could we see it?"
642 00:29:50 So I finished this novel, I send it off.
643 00:29:52 I actually got a letter saying
644 00:29:53 we'd like to publish this,
645 00:29:55 and then I heard nothing.
646 00:29:56 Then I published a book of poetry
647 00:29:58 and won the prize, and I'd gotten a letter
648 00:30:01 from the publisher saying,
649 00:30:02 we see in this newspaper article about you
650 00:30:04 that you have an unpublished novel.
651 00:30:06 Could we see it?
652 00:30:07 You've been seeing it for two years.
653 00:30:10 Good morning, dear.
654 00:30:11 A little work for ya, I stayed up last night.
655 00:30:14 Thank you.
656 00:30:14 Just a few, uh, few letters.
657 00:30:16 So then he said, "Let's have a drink."
658 00:30:19 "We'll publish your novel."
659 00:30:21 And I said, "Have you read it?"
660 00:30:23 And he said, "No but I will.
661 00:30:25 And then he said,
662 00:30:26 "We're so sorry we lost your manuscript."
663 00:30:29 "It's because there…"
664 00:30:30 "the woman in charge of it got pregnant"
665 00:30:32 "and you know what that does to their brains."
666 00:30:38 "And she put it in a drawer"
667 00:30:39 "and didn't tell anybody."
668 00:30:42 But I have spies everywhere　-Good.
669 00:30:45 and I happen to know that it was on his floor
670 00:30:48 with a lot of other manuscripts on top of it.
671 00:30:51 I did do my first book signing
672 00:30:54 when that book came out
673 00:30:55 in the men's sock and underwear department
674 00:30:59 of the Hudson's Bay Company in Edmonton, Alberta.
675 00:31:03 It was the publicist’s first week on the job
676 00:31:07 and I think she thought it was a good spot
677 00:31:09 because it was near the escalator
678 00:31:11 and I think she thought people would be
679 00:31:13 going up and down the escalator,
680 00:31:15 which they did,
681 00:31:16 and all these guys in to buy their white fronts
682 00:31:19 and they would see this,
683 00:31:21 and they would gallop in their galoshes
684 00:31:24 in the other direction.
685 00:31:28 I think I sold two copies.
686 00:31:30 That was an interesting initiation.
687 00:31:33 I went into Montreal and walked by a bookstore
688 00:31:37 and saw The Edible Woman in the window.
689 00:31:42 I thought, I've got to read that.
690 00:31:44 So I bought it,
691 00:31:45 started reading it on the airplane,
692 00:31:48 went back to my apartment
693 00:31:49 and read it through the night.
694 00:31:51 I resonated with her writing so deeply.
695 00:31:54 It was as if I lived between the lines
696 00:31:57 of what she wrote.
697 00:31:59 I called the head of Atlantic Little Brown,
698 00:32:04 Peter Davidson,
699 00:32:05 and I had a telephone that had two lines,
700 00:32:08 so I hit the button, dialed his number,
701 00:32:11 and then the other button lit up.
702 00:32:14 It was Peter on the other line.
703 00:32:16 I said, "What are you calling about?"
704 00:32:18 And I said, "Margaret Atwood".
705 00:32:20 He said, "That's what I was calling you about."
706 00:32:23 "She needs an agent."
707 00:32:25 And I said, "I want to be her agent."
708 00:32:29 It's beautiful. You can see the whole bay.
709 00:32:33 So I'm here to tell you
710 00:32:34 that I have a mere 12 pages to go.
711 00:32:38 At last.
712 00:32:41 Wow, that's great, Peggy.　-Wow?
713 00:32:44 Yeah.
714 00:32:45 I was a bit apprehensive about meeting her
715 00:32:48 because I knew she was an academic,
716 00:32:50 as well as a poet and a novelist
717 00:32:53 and I didn't have that intellectual bent
718 00:32:56 that she had,
719 00:32:57 but the first question she asked me was,
720 00:33:00 what sign was I?
721 00:33:02 And at that time we looked very much alike
722 00:33:05 and so it was like meeting a sister
723 00:33:06 almost instantly.
724 00:33:17 "You fit into me"
725 00:33:18 "like a hook into an eye"
726 00:33:21 "a fish hook"
727 00:33:22 "an open eye"
728 00:33:25 What's interesting about Power Politics
729 00:33:27 is it's not women as the victim of man,
730 00:33:30 it's two individuals
731 00:33:33 playing power politics together.
732 00:33:36 The fantasy of the poem might be
733 00:33:38 how do we eliminate that power struggle
734 00:33:40 in a relationship?
735 00:33:42 "We are hard on each other"
736 00:33:44 "and call it honesty,"
737 00:33:45 "choosing our jagged truths"
738 00:33:47 "with care and aiming them across"
739 00:33:49 "the neutral table."
740 00:33:51 "You asked for love"
741 00:33:53 "I gave you only descriptions"
742 00:33:56 "Please die I said"
743 00:33:58 "so I can write about it"
744 00:34:01 Or some of them have suggested
745 00:34:02 there's a cruelty in your work.
746 00:34:03 Do you think that's valid?
747 00:34:06 We talked about Power Politics and…
748 00:34:07 Is there cruelty in life?
749 00:34:11 Yes.
750 00:34:12 Why should there not be any in my work?
751 00:34:14 Maybe I, I was in a very Pollyanna mood
752 00:34:17 when I read that and that's why I got sad
753 00:34:19 because I thought you left out a lot of joy,
754 00:34:21 a lot of understanding, a lot of reaching out,
755 00:34:23 a lot of compromise.
756 00:34:25 There's a very prolific line of books
757 00:34:27 that you can get that contain these plots
758 00:34:30 of boy meets girl,
759 00:34:31 happiness and understanding result.
760 00:34:33 They're called Harlequin Romances.
761 00:34:35 They don't cost very much
762 00:34:37 and you can get them in every drugstore.
763 00:34:41 We were drifting apart.
764 00:34:43 I was gonna be an academic and she wasn’t.
765 00:34:48 And I couldn’t get a job.
766 00:34:50 It’s bad for the male not to have a job at all.
767 00:34:56 Does writing demand
768 00:34:56 a particular kind of selfishness?
769 00:34:59 Everything demands a particular
770 00:35:01 kind of selfishness.
771 00:35:02 You're asking whether the kind
772 00:35:04 that writing demands is different
773 00:35:05 from everybody else's kind.
774 00:35:07 Yeah…
775 00:35:10 In order to write, you have to go into a room
776 00:35:12 and shut the door and say,
777 00:35:14 go away everyone, because I am going to write.
778 00:35:18 What sustains you as a writer?
779 00:35:19 That's a very mysterious area.
780 00:35:22 I don't think anybody really knows that
781 00:35:25 and I, I don't really want to find out.
782 00:35:28 There's a lot of things that I just
783 00:35:30 would rather not know about writing
784 00:35:31 because I think that
785 00:35:32 if you get too curious about it,
786 00:35:34 then start dissecting the way you work
787 00:35:37 and why you do it, you'd probably stop.
788 00:35:41 That's one of my superstitions.
789 00:35:42 Okay…
790 00:35:45 She came up to me at a party
791 00:35:47 and I didn't know who she was
792 00:35:50 and she said, "You should have won this award."
793 00:35:53 Well, he had written a book called "five legs",
794 00:35:55 which was very experimental and interesting
795 00:35:57 and probably should have won
796 00:35:58 the Governor General's award for that year
797 00:36:02 and I said so,
798 00:36:04 which of course endeared me to him.
799 00:36:07 I thought, wow that's a very intelligent woman
800 00:36:09 I said to myself.
801 00:36:12 And he was the photographer
802 00:36:13 for the House of Anansi Press,
803 00:36:16 he took all the author photos,
804 00:36:18 so he took my photo.
805 00:36:20 I was fascinated with her of course.
806 00:36:22 Yeah her hair was all tied up.
807 00:36:24 I said, I said,
808 00:36:24 bring down your hair
809 00:36:27 and she did
810 00:36:29 and I think that pretty well fixed it.
811 00:36:31 They were both married at the time when they met
812 00:36:34 I believe
813 00:36:35 and I think both marriages were in trouble.
814 00:36:40 I don't think that
815 00:36:42 their falling in love came as a shock
816 00:36:45 to their mates, particularly
817 00:36:48 after all, it was the 60s
818 00:36:50 and I think the record of love affairs
819 00:36:53 at House of Anansi with the writers and editors
820 00:36:58 is sort of legendary.
821 00:36:59 They used to meet in the basement
822 00:37:00 of Longhouse Books
823 00:37:03 and you were told never to go downstairs
824 00:37:05 when Peggy and Graeme were there.
825 00:37:08 He's funny
826 00:37:10 and, that counts very, very high.
827 00:37:13 Once you aren't really worrying about
828 00:37:15 where your next meal is gonna come from,
829 00:37:17 funny is important.
830 00:37:20 We could get pigs heads.
831 00:37:21 We could.　-See the little pigs heads there.
832 00:37:23 Great cook, smart,
833 00:37:26 all of the above
834 00:37:30 and knows how to put out a fire.
835 00:37:33 This is very important.
836 00:37:42 Mordecai Richler described Canada
837 00:37:44 in the mid 20th century as,
838 00:37:46 "here a poet, there a professor,"
839 00:37:48 "and in between thousands of miles"
840 00:37:50 "of wheat and indifference."
841 00:37:53 You felt you had to leave to…
842 00:37:55 to go somewhere, to be someone.
843 00:37:58 Atwood, was among the first writers
844 00:38:01 of her generation, not to leave
845 00:38:04 and in her case to actually
846 00:38:05 found the nationalist movement
847 00:38:07 to propel it forward as a literary space.
848 00:38:11 We needed to have writers
849 00:38:14 and there were very few
850 00:38:16 and most of them went abroad,
851 00:38:18 they went to the States, they went to Britain,
852 00:38:21 they went to France.
853 00:38:23 Graeme Gibson had importance as a novelist,
854 00:38:26 author of small, sharp, very original novels
855 00:38:29 in the late sixties, early seventies.
856 00:38:31 And he also was from early on,
857 00:38:33 a leader as a, a cultural spokesman
858 00:38:36 as an agitator.
859 00:38:38 In the 1970s, Margaret Atwood, Graeme Gibson,
860 00:38:41 Margaret Laurence, Timothy Findley
861 00:38:43 went about establishing some of the pillars
862 00:38:47 of the community, the tribe of Canadian writers,
863 00:38:50 such as Pen Canadis, the Writers' Union.
864 00:38:52 A little bit later, the Writers' Trust.
865 00:38:55 We found that access to our own audience
866 00:38:58 was denied us
867 00:38:59 by the fact that the publishing houses
868 00:39:01 were controlled by foreigners
869 00:39:04 or else were very timid about publishing Canadians
870 00:39:06 because they thought that Canadians
871 00:39:08 weren't reading Canadians.
872 00:39:10 I got to be on the board
873 00:39:11 of the House of Anansi Press
874 00:39:13 and that meant we had to think up ideas
875 00:39:16 for supporting our literary publishing.
876 00:39:19 They had already successfully done
877 00:39:21 the Draft Dodgers Guide
878 00:39:22 and the book on the Spadina Expressway.
879 00:39:25 So they were looking for another idea like that
880 00:39:27 and that was when I said,
881 00:39:28 we need something on Canadian literature
882 00:39:30 because there isn't one.
883 00:39:32 30,000 copies sold in the first year,
884 00:39:34 which is astonishing for a Canadian book.
885 00:39:37 And in fact, Survival,
886 00:39:40 Margaret's guide to Canadian literature
887 00:39:42 was responsible for
888 00:39:43 the survival of the House of Anansi.
889 00:39:49 Every country has in its own conception of itself,
890 00:39:52 its geographical mythology if you like,
891 00:39:55 a place that represents the unconscious
892 00:39:58 or the mysterious place
893 00:40:00 or the place of adventure
894 00:40:02 or the place you go
895 00:40:03 to encounter your deepest self
896 00:40:05 and for Canadians, it's the north.
897 00:40:13 Even as far back as
898 00:40:14 the beginning of the 20th century,
899 00:40:17 Canadians were writing animal stories
900 00:40:19 in which the animal was the hero
901 00:40:22 and the person hunting the animal
902 00:40:25 was the villain.
903 00:40:31 We didn't want to live in the city.
904 00:40:33 We both liked the land
905 00:40:35 and we liked the independence of that farm.
906 00:40:40 The grand introduction was being taken
907 00:40:43 with my younger brother Graeme
908 00:40:45 to this country farm,
909 00:40:47 which had never been part of our childhood.
910 00:40:49 I mean, farms were not on our radar at all.
911 00:40:52 And so it was sort of that moment
912 00:40:54 where we got out of the car
913 00:40:55 and we were walking towards
914 00:40:57 this sort of decrepit looking rundown farm
915 00:41:01 and so that was really that moment
916 00:41:02 where my brother and I and my father
917 00:41:04 looking at us going,
918 00:41:05 this is Margaret.
919 00:41:12 She sent me the manuscript of Surfacing,
920 00:41:15 which is brilliant, brilliant.
921 00:41:17 I was so struck by her connection to nature.
922 00:41:23 She was writing about that setting
923 00:41:26 and she was also writing about a woman
924 00:41:28 whose father was lost in the woods somewhere
925 00:41:30 or maybe they had drowned.
926 00:41:32 So the novel is about
927 00:41:35 her searching for him
928 00:41:36 and trying to put the pieces together.
929 00:41:39 It's also about accepting your own power
930 00:41:43 and not allowing anyone else
931 00:41:47 to take it from you.
932 00:41:50 What do you think of me?
933 00:41:53 You think I’m a jerk.
934 00:41:56 "The power flowed into my eyes,"
935 00:41:59 "I could see into him,"
936 00:42:01 "he was an imposter, a pastiche,"
937 00:42:03 "layers of political handbills,"
938 00:42:06 "pages from magazines,"
939 00:42:07 "affiches, verbs and nouns glued on to him"
940 00:42:10 "and shredding away,"
941 00:42:12 "the original surface littered"
942 00:42:14 "with fragments and tatters."
943 00:42:17 It's hard for a woman writer
944 00:42:19 to write a man character that men approve of.
945 00:42:21 Even if you take all the bad things
946 00:42:23 that men say about themselves
947 00:42:24 in their own men characters
948 00:42:26 and put them into a man character
949 00:42:27 in a book by a woman
950 00:42:29 then the men think they're being attacked,
951 00:42:31 even though you've got it
952 00:42:32 straight from the horse's mouth.
953 00:42:35 The audience who read it,
954 00:42:36 especially in the States
955 00:42:37 took it as a feminist message.
956 00:42:40 It's a term that Peggy never would accept
957 00:42:44 because rightfully
958 00:42:46 it's not just a theme for women,
959 00:42:49 it is a theme for a person.
960 00:42:52 This is the very last chapter of the book
961 00:42:55 and it says
962 00:42:56 "this above all"
963 00:42:58 "to refuse to be a victim."
964 00:43:01 "Unless I can do that I can do nothing".
965 00:43:06 When surfacing was published in Canada,
966 00:43:09 Jack McClelland was going
967 00:43:11 to give a party for Peggy at his mansion.
968 00:43:16 We were a little late going
969 00:43:18 and so we got to the street
970 00:43:20 and people were just flooding into the house.
971 00:43:22 We thought it was going to be a small gathering.
972 00:43:25 So I took Peggy's hand and we went in
973 00:43:29 and it was overwhelming.
974 00:43:33 After that evening, we went back to her house
975 00:43:35 and Peggy didn't turn the light on.
976 00:43:38 We went into the living room and we sat there
977 00:43:41 and she was very quiet and she said,
978 00:43:46 "I never thought"
979 00:43:49 "that I would be a popular writer."
980 00:43:52 "I only wanted to be a good one."
981 00:43:59 The devil comes to the writer
982 00:44:02 and the devil says to the writer,
983 00:44:03 I will make you the best writer
984 00:44:05 of your generation, oh more than your generation.
985 00:44:09 I'll make you the best writer of your century.
986 00:44:11 Forget that, of the millennium.
987 00:44:13 Not only will your fame endure
988 00:44:14 but during your lifetime
989 00:44:16 you'll become extremely famous
990 00:44:17 and well known and highly praised.
991 00:44:20 You'll win all of the prizes
992 00:44:21 and you'll sell millions of copies of books,
993 00:44:23 you'll become very, very rich.
994 00:44:26 And all you have to do
995 00:44:27 is sell me your grandmother, your mother,
996 00:44:30 your wife, your kids, your dog, and your soul,
997 00:44:34 and the writer says, okay, okay,
998 00:44:40 give me the pen. Where do I sign?
999 00:44:41 And then he says, just a minute…
1000 00:44:43 What's the catch?
1001 00:44:52 What’s that?　-I'm making a quill pen.
1002 00:44:56 I'm doing a little book with Biblioasis.
1003 00:45:00 Part of it is going to be
1004 00:45:03 a copy of this poem about this feather
1005 00:45:06 that I'm writing with the feather.
1006 00:45:12 I've actually written with
1007 00:45:14 Charles Dickens' quill pen.
1008 00:45:16 Wow.
1009 00:45:17 Isn't that exciting?
1010 00:45:18 I had a choice between it
1011 00:45:19 and Lord Byron's metal pen.
1012 00:45:29 I start with handwriting
1013 00:45:31 because that seems for me
1014 00:45:34 to allow more of a flow from brain
1015 00:45:37 to hand to the page.
1016 00:45:40 When I have about 50, 60 pages,
1017 00:45:44 then I can start thinking about structure.
1018 00:45:47 I'm more of a downhill skier.
1019 00:45:49 I try to go as fast as I can
1020 00:45:51 and then I have to backtrack a lot
1021 00:45:53 and fill in and re-vision
1022 00:45:56 and when you re-vision it
1023 00:46:00 you see things that you might not
1024 00:46:01 have seen the first time through
1025 00:46:03 when you were writing it.
1026 00:46:05 I quite frequently have a lot of crossings out.
1027 00:46:09 I quite frequently have a number of arrows.
1028 00:46:12 I also have arrows
1029 00:46:14 that point to the back of the page
1030 00:46:17 and marginal notes.
1031 00:46:18 I can see some of those.
1032 00:46:20 And I can't say that my handwriting
1033 00:46:22 has improved any
1034 00:46:24 in the intervening years.
1035 00:46:28 It's worse than ever.
1036 00:46:33 She writes whenever she gets a chance.
1037 00:46:35 She writes a lot of her speeches on airplanes
1038 00:46:38 because it's uninterrupted time.
1039 00:46:41 She's always written whenever she could
1040 00:46:43 squeeze it in among other responsibilities
1041 00:46:45 and so on.
1042 00:46:48 She puts the laundry in and then she goes upstairs
1043 00:46:50 and writes a chapter.
1044 00:46:52 You walk by her studio
1045 00:46:53 and you can hear her giggling away
1046 00:46:54 as she's writing away,
1047 00:46:56 giggling to herself at her own jokes.
1048 00:47:01 There is a dimension to Margaret Atwood's work
1049 00:47:03 that isn't always recognized.
1050 00:47:06 It's amusing to think of her
1051 00:47:07 as having different personas
1052 00:47:08 for the different books.
1053 00:47:09 She's writing deliberate dystopias,
1054 00:47:11 when she's writing Alias Grace,
1055 00:47:13 it's historical fiction.
1056 00:47:15 To watch that series
1057 00:47:17 that Sarah Polley has put together
1058 00:47:19 it's quite wonderful because it's so well done.
1059 00:47:28 Alias Grace is based on a double murder
1060 00:47:31 that took place in 1843
1061 00:47:33 in which the manservant was hanged
1062 00:47:36 for the murder of his employer, Thomas Kinnear.
1063 00:47:40 The housekeeper was also murdered,
1064 00:47:42 but the maidservant Grace Marks was condemned
1065 00:47:45 as an accessory in the first murder.
1066 00:47:48 The sentence is death by hanging.
1067 00:47:53 But then a lot of people petitioned on her behalf
1068 00:47:58 and her sentence was commuted to life.
1069 00:48:01 Right before he was hanged McDermott said…
1070 00:48:04 Grace Marks made me do it!
1071 00:48:07 She…
1072 00:48:09 Murderer!
1073 00:48:10 He was however a well-known liar,
1074 00:48:13 but just because somebody is a well known liar
1075 00:48:15 doesn't mean they're lying on every occasion.
1076 00:48:19 He gets hanged.
1077 00:48:20 She's the only person left alive
1078 00:48:22 and she never told.
1079 00:48:23 I think it was for me the beginning of
1080 00:48:26 questioning narrative and realizing…
1081 00:48:30 how subjective people's narratives were
1082 00:48:33 and how complicated it is really is
1083 00:48:35 to know the truth in the past
1084 00:48:37 and to how ephemeral identity is.
1085 00:48:41 These were questions that
1086 00:48:43 got lodged in me with this book
1087 00:48:45 that ended up informing everything
1088 00:48:46 I ever did later.
1089 00:48:49 Grace, open the door.
1090 00:48:53 Grace Marks was a woman who was prey
1091 00:48:56 as most women of her class were in that time
1092 00:48:59 and actually indeed of any class at that time.
1093 00:49:01 She was completely not in control of her life.
1094 00:49:04 She was used, harassed and abused on every side.
1095 00:49:09 I knew that lock or no lock sooner or later
1096 00:49:11 he'd find a way of getting in.
1097 00:49:14 Once you're found with a man in your room,
1098 00:49:16 you are the guilty one
1099 00:49:17 no matter how they get in.
1100 00:49:19 As Mary used to say,
1101 00:49:20 there are some of the masters who think
1102 00:49:21 you owe them service 24 hours a day
1103 00:49:24 and should do the main work flat on your back.
1104 00:49:26 There is a narrative you could pull of Grace Marks
1105 00:49:28 where she may or may not
1106 00:49:30 have murdered these people,
1107 00:49:30 but if she did, you know,
1108 00:49:33 was it a form of self-defence
1109 00:49:35 or was it a response to
1110 00:49:38 years and years of trauma
1111 00:49:39 or was it a response to the situation
1112 00:49:41 she was living in?
1113 00:49:46 You can't write a, a piece of fiction
1114 00:49:49 that does not come to grips
1115 00:49:52 in some way with quotes,
1116 00:49:54 morality by which I mean
1117 00:49:56 the constant choices
1118 00:49:58 we are all faced with all the time
1119 00:49:59 about what to do.
1120 00:50:02 I don't put characters into my books
1121 00:50:04 who are paragons of virtue
1122 00:50:06 for the simple reason that
1123 00:50:07 such characters would be unutterably boring
1124 00:50:10 and not human.
1125 00:50:12 None of us are paragons of virtue.
1126 00:50:20 The garlic mustard kills
1127 00:50:22 all other plants around it
1128 00:50:23 when it makes a patch.
1129 00:50:26 So this plant here is called May Apple
1130 00:50:29 and the Garlic Mustard cannot compete with it.
1131 00:50:34 There are things that are important to writers
1132 00:50:36 as writers that may not enter into
1133 00:50:40 their personal life
1134 00:50:41 and there may be things that are important
1135 00:50:43 in their personal life
1136 00:50:44 that never get into the writing.
1137 00:50:47 For instance, weeding.
1138 00:50:50 Weeding is very important to me.
1139 00:50:52 It's not in my work.
1140 00:50:53 It's an invasive species.
1141 00:50:54 But I do a lot of weeding.
1142 00:50:56 However, if I wrote about
1143 00:50:57 this weeding that I do
1144 00:50:59 and made it as big in my work
1145 00:51:01 as it is in my life, you can get very bored.
1146 00:51:05 First I pull out a weed
1147 00:51:06 then I pull out this other weed
1148 00:51:08 and then after that I pull out this other weed
1149 00:51:10 and I found another weed that I hadn't seen
1150 00:51:13 and I thought, how did that weed get in there
1151 00:51:16 and I pulled that one out too.
1152 00:51:18 So there are great stretches of writers' lives
1153 00:51:21 or any artists lives
1154 00:51:23 that aren't very interesting
1155 00:51:25 and have nothing to do with their work.
1156 00:51:39 She wasn't of the generation quite
1157 00:51:42 that was involved in protest in strength,
1158 00:51:45 she was a few years earlier.
1159 00:51:48 Peggy came to activism quite gradually
1160 00:51:50 and I think just because her skin
1161 00:51:52 is very permeable to what's going on in the world,
1162 00:51:55 she started thinking about some of the kind of
1163 00:51:58 critique and activism that was going on
1164 00:52:00 and got engaged in it.
1165 00:52:13 When I heard about the bathhouse raids
1166 00:52:15 somebody said to me
1167 00:52:16 "police have raided the bathhouses"
1168 00:52:19 and I said
1169 00:52:20 "What have they got against cleanliness?"
1170 00:52:24 People think that they can beat up on
1171 00:52:27 supposedly powerless smaller groups
1172 00:52:30 because it's fun,
1173 00:52:32 and because they think they can get away with it,
1174 00:52:36 makes me angry,
1175 00:52:38 makes me sick,
1176 00:52:39 and I don't see why anybody in a society
1177 00:52:42 that calls itself a democracy
1178 00:52:45 should have to suffer from
1179 00:52:46 institutionalized contempt.
1180 00:52:49 My colleagues and friends, please join with me
1181 00:52:53 in welcoming to our country, to our province,
1182 00:52:56 and to our PEN Benefit,
1183 00:52:58 a very special surprise guest,
1184 00:53:01 Mr. Salman Rushdie.
1185 00:53:08 Actually, I'm not a real activist.
1186 00:53:10 Real activists are people
1187 00:53:12 who devote their lives to these things.
1188 00:53:14 I am not that person.
1189 00:53:16 I am often asked to
1190 00:53:18 speak on behalf of such people
1191 00:53:21 and the reason I'm asked is that
1192 00:53:22 I don't have a job
1193 00:53:24 so I'm not risking my livelihood by doing so,
1194 00:53:29 whereas other people would be.
1195 00:53:33 Margaret Atwood has the energy left
1196 00:53:35 at the end of the writer's day
1197 00:53:36 to also talk about everything
1198 00:53:38 from women's shelters in her neighborhood
1199 00:53:41 to how to get a writer imprisoned
1200 00:53:43 in Russia attention.
1201 00:53:45 She tweets with people.
1202 00:53:47 She goes in public and has conversations
1203 00:53:51 with complex difficult conversations with people.
1204 00:53:53 Many writers of great esteem and seriousness
1205 00:53:58 don't actually have the stomach for that.
1206 00:54:00 She does.
1207 00:54:01 Somebody asked me today well isn't Twitter
1208 00:54:03 this really stupid thing
1209 00:54:04 that's dumbing down everything?
1210 00:54:06 I said, no it's…
1211 00:54:07 you're confusing it with writing.
1212 00:54:10 It's not writing, it's signaling.
1213 00:54:12 Put it in the same category as the telegraph,
1214 00:54:15 the send before flags, the smoke signals.
1215 00:54:18 It's a form of signaling
1216 00:54:20 not a form of writing as such.
1217 00:54:22 There's always the hope that Margaret Atwood
1218 00:54:24 will retweet you because you do…
1219 00:54:25 Is that the hope?
1220 00:54:26 God, we're in trouble　-I think, I mean, you do…
1221 00:54:27 if that's the hope.
1222 00:54:28 You do re-tweet people who ask you.　-I do but…
1223 00:54:32 Yes, I do.
1224 00:54:33 It depends what they're asking.
1225 00:54:34 I think you've re-tweeted me once.
1226 00:54:36 And was that fun?
1227 00:54:38 It was fun. It was very exciting.
1228 00:54:39 I put you on a Top 10 list.
1229 00:55:02 Margaret understood from the beginning that
1230 00:55:04 you can be a mother. You can be a wife.
1231 00:55:06 You could be a writer.
1232 00:55:08 You could work,
1233 00:55:09 but you couldn't do all of them
1234 00:55:10 and so she had to have the support.
1235 00:55:13 If you have children,
1236 00:55:15 everything revolves around their schedule.
1237 00:55:18 When they're babies,
1238 00:55:19 you write when they're sleeping,
1239 00:55:21 if you're still inclined to write,
1240 00:55:23 usually you're too tired to do that.
1241 00:55:26 When they get a little older,
1242 00:55:28 and they might go to daycare,
1243 00:55:29 you write when they're in daycare
1244 00:55:31 or you write in the evenings.
1245 00:55:33 When they are old enough to go to school,
1246 00:55:35 you write when they're at school.
1247 00:55:38 She just was going to make sure that
1248 00:55:39 Graeme wasn't going to be her handmaid
1249 00:55:44 as the way that men always had women as handmaids.
1250 00:55:49 She somehow was smart enough to pull it all off.
1251 00:56:01 "We live in a tree way up in a tree."
1252 00:56:03 "It's fun in the sun and a pain in the rain,"
1253 00:56:06 "but we both have umbrellas way up in the tree."
1254 00:56:09 "What's this we see?"
1255 00:56:10 "Oh my oh me."
1256 00:56:12 "Someone's taken the ladder"
1257 00:56:13 "away from the tree."
1258 00:56:15 "How will we get down, down,"
1259 00:56:17 "down to the ground?"
1260 00:56:18 "Are we stuck here forever"
1261 00:56:19 "in this horrible tree?"
1262 00:56:22 "There's a friend in the tree."
1263 00:56:24 "We are free. We are free."
1264 00:56:26 "We don't need a ladder"
1265 00:56:28 "with a friend in the tree."
1266 00:56:30 It was written when I was two,
1267 00:56:32 so my mythology was always that
1268 00:56:33 the curly headed one was me
1269 00:56:35 and the other one was my friend.
1270 00:56:37 I read it a lot to my son these days
1271 00:56:38 so I have to, oh moan! Oh groan!
1272 00:56:56 Go Alder, hurray!
1273 00:57:21 I was going to be organized
1274 00:57:23 about the way I wrote a novel.
1275 00:57:26 I got some filing cards
1276 00:57:27 and I divided the filing cards
1277 00:57:30 into five groups of eight
1278 00:57:33 and there were going to be
1279 00:57:33 five sections in the novel
1280 00:57:35 and there are going to be eight characters
1281 00:57:38 and then I wrote on the filing cards
1282 00:57:40 what my idea was about the characters.
1283 00:57:43 So I knew everything about these characters.
1284 00:57:45 I knew what they had for breakfast.
1285 00:57:46 I knew about their family relations.
1286 00:57:48 I knew where they lived.
1287 00:57:49 I knew what sort of clothing they wore
1288 00:57:51 and it was 200 pages and nothing had happened.
1289 00:57:54 I never used that system again,
1290 00:57:56 it was actually a complete screaming failure.
1291 00:57:59 I archived the novel that wasn't working
1292 00:58:04 and after a riotous birthday party
1293 00:58:07 in our back garden,
1294 00:58:08 we went to Berlin.
1295 00:58:17 As the communist barrier
1296 00:58:18 between East and West Berlin
1297 00:58:19 grows higher and stronger,
1298 00:58:21 the more determined grows the will of those
1299 00:58:23 in the east to escape.
1300 00:58:25 Remember these people are risking their very lives
1301 00:58:28 to taste something we too often take for granted,
1302 00:58:31 liberty.
1303 00:58:39 We travelled into the East,
1304 00:58:40 we travelled to Poland,
1305 00:58:41 we travelled to Czechoslovakia.
1306 00:58:44 We were also living in West Berlin
1307 00:58:46 when the wall was coming down.
1308 00:58:51 I began The Handmaid's Tale in Berlin
1309 00:58:54 on a rented German typewriter.
1310 00:58:59 Well I was one of those teenagers
1311 00:59:01 who was reading Brave New World.
1312 00:59:05 I was reading 1984
1313 00:59:07 about the time it was first published
1314 00:59:10 and I had always pretty much
1315 00:59:12 wanted to write a dystopia,
1316 00:59:14 but most of them were from
1317 00:59:16 the point of view of men.
1318 00:59:19 So I thought it would be interesting
1319 00:59:22 to take one of those dystopic societies
1320 00:59:25 and flip it
1321 00:59:26 and see what that felt like
1322 00:59:29 from the point of view of a woman in it.
1323 00:59:36 A chair, a table, a lamp.
1324 00:59:44 And a window with white curtains
1325 00:59:47 and the glass is shatter proof
1326 00:59:48 but it isn't running away they're afraid of,
1327 00:59:52 a handmaid who wouldn't get far.
1328 00:59:55 It's those other escapes.
1329 00:59:57 The ones you can open in yourself,
1330 00:59:59 given a cutting edge
1331 01:00:03 or a twisted sheet and a chandelier.
1332 01:00:07 Peggy came to my cottage in Santa Monica.
1333 01:00:10 She was very quiet.
1334 01:00:12 I said "What's happening with the new book?"
1335 01:00:15 And she said "It's very hard to write."
1336 01:00:18 "It scares me."
1337 01:00:21 What I was writing is scary.
1338 01:00:23 That's why people are scared.
1339 01:00:25 They know it's not too far away from
1340 01:00:28 what those people would like to do
1341 01:00:30 if they got all the power.
1342 01:00:36 I'm told that tens of thousands of prayer meetings
1343 01:00:39 are being held on this day
1344 01:00:42 and for that I'm deeply grateful.
1345 01:00:44 We are a nation under God
1346 01:00:47 and I believe God intended for us to be free.
1347 01:00:50 Pro life! Pro life!
1348 01:00:52 And that was a pushback decade.
1349 01:00:56 People were pushing back
1350 01:00:57 against seventies feminism
1351 01:00:59 and saying things like, I'm not a feministbot,
1352 01:01:02 and they were also saying things like,
1353 01:01:04 well, you have achieved all your goals
1354 01:01:05 so what's the fuss?
1355 01:01:07 And they were also saying, this has gone too far.
1356 01:01:10 And in the religious fundamentalists
1357 01:01:14 area of the United States,
1358 01:01:16 they were saying women belong in the home.
1359 01:01:22 I'm grasping at straws, I know,
1360 01:01:25 but straws can be useful.
1361 01:01:27 The rule that I made for the book
1362 01:01:29 was that nothing went into it
1363 01:01:31 that had not happened in real life
1364 01:01:34 somewhere at some time
1365 01:01:37 and that's why I collected all of the research.
1366 01:01:41 And the reason I made that rule is that
1367 01:01:43 I didn't want anybody saying,
1368 01:01:44 you certainly have a twisted,
1369 01:01:45 weird, evil imagination,
1370 01:01:48 you made up all these bad things.
1371 01:01:50 I didn't make them up.
1372 01:01:53 These were all from the mid eighties.
1373 01:01:55 Charges of brainwashing.
1374 01:01:57 So this is the disciples
1375 01:01:59 of an 1100 member religious sect.
1376 01:02:03 They subordinate women,
1377 01:02:05 they discourage social contact with non-members.
1378 01:02:08 They arrange marriages.
1379 01:02:10 The wives of the coordinators are called quotes,
1380 01:02:13 "Handmaidens".
1381 01:02:17 I didn't make it up.
1382 01:02:21 Ceaușescu in Romania mandated
1383 01:02:24 that women should have four children.
1384 01:02:27 He gave them pregnancy tests every month
1385 01:02:29 and if they weren't pregnant they had to say why.
1386 01:02:34 And of course what that meant was that
1387 01:02:36 people were having children
1388 01:02:37 that they couldn't afford to support
1389 01:02:39 and they were putting them in orphanages.
1390 01:02:46 Under Hitler there were these biological wives.
1391 01:02:50 So if you were an S.S. man,
1392 01:02:52 you could have more than one woman
1393 01:02:54 to produce more little S.S.children.
1394 01:03:05 What kicked it off was the idea that
1395 01:03:07 some people were already having them,
1396 01:03:09 that women should go back into the home.
1397 01:03:12 So if women should go back into the home,
1398 01:03:15 how are you going to get them there?
1399 01:03:17 You would have to reverse the financial progress
1400 01:03:20 that they made over the past, say 150 years.
1401 01:03:24 So they moved from a point
1402 01:03:25 where they couldn't control their own money
1403 01:03:27 into the 20th century and the 21st century
1404 01:03:31 in which they gained the right
1405 01:03:32 to control their own finances,
1406 01:03:34 have their own bank accounts, own houses.
1407 01:03:38 So how would you get them back into the home?
1408 01:03:40 You would have to immediately cut that off,
1409 01:03:42 cut off the access to money
1410 01:03:44 and the credit card unfortunately
1411 01:03:47 allows you to do that
1412 01:03:48 should you wish to very quickly.
1413 01:03:52 Only one bad review in 25,
1414 01:03:55 a book already in the top 10
1415 01:03:57 of many important American bestseller lists,
1416 01:04:00 an honorary chair at a major American University,
1417 01:04:03 critical acclaim and adoring fans.
1418 01:04:06 Margaret Atwood has struck again.
1419 01:04:08 And how does she feel about
1420 01:04:10 this newfound U.S. fame?
1421 01:04:12 Pleasant.
1422 01:04:14 In my Canadian understated way I can say
1423 01:04:16 it makes me feel quite good.
1424 01:04:24 The Handmaid's Tale was made into a movie.
1425 01:04:27 I think the acting in it is great.
1426 01:04:30 It was Natasha Richardson
1427 01:04:32 and Faye Dunaway was wonderful.
1428 01:04:33 You may call me Serena.
1429 01:04:35 Harold Pinter did the screenplay.
1430 01:04:39 Harold wrote the voiceover for Natasha,
1431 01:04:43 which she recorded
1432 01:04:44 and then the decision was made to take it out,
1433 01:04:47 which I think was a mistake
1434 01:04:49 because it's very hard just to act
1435 01:04:51 with your face alone.
1436 01:04:54 Someone who is keeping the lid on
1437 01:04:58 but seething with furious thoughts.
1438 01:05:01 Margaret's visit in North Carolina
1439 01:05:04 when we were shooting on the Duke Campus
1440 01:05:07 was really a very, very extraordinary visit.
1441 01:05:13 It was the day we were shooting
1442 01:05:14 the scaffold and the hanging on Duke Campus
1443 01:05:18 in front of the Cathedral.
1444 01:05:20 She went like, oh my God…
1445 01:05:23 you'll never get away with this or so.
1446 01:05:25 I said, but you wrote it,
1447 01:05:27 you know it just exactly as…
1448 01:05:29 Yes, but it felt so real to her all of a sudden.
1449 01:05:37 They were doing the hanging scene
1450 01:05:40 and just as they were hanging
1451 01:05:42 this unfortunate Handmaid
1452 01:05:46 a wedding party walked out of the Duke Chapel,
1453 01:05:49 a wedding rehearsal party
1454 01:05:51 and they of course they were…
1455 01:05:58 Yes!
1456 01:06:04 I was asleep before.
1457 01:06:05 That's how we let it happen.
1458 01:06:07 When they slaughtered Congress,
1459 01:06:09 we didn't wake up.
1460 01:06:11 When they blamed terrorists
1461 01:06:12 and suspended the Constitution,
1462 01:06:15 we didn't wake up then either.
1463 01:06:17 They’ve done a great job, just terrific
1464 01:06:19 but let's be clear,
1465 01:06:21 the television series is not my work.
1466 01:06:23 It's the work of a lot of other people.
1467 01:06:25 You will bear children for them.
1468 01:06:33 When you're adapting a book like this,
1469 01:06:35 you're setting up a whole world
1470 01:06:36 and that world has a whole bunch of rules
1471 01:06:38 and I think it's a testament to
1472 01:06:40 kind of Margaret's storytelling
1473 01:06:41 and the way that Margaret constructs a story
1474 01:06:44 that it would…
1475 01:06:47 translate very well to a TV series.
1476 01:06:49 Here's the secret, I'm a Victorianist,
1477 01:06:53 this is the secret. I'm a Victorianist.
1478 01:06:56 Charles Dickens…
1479 01:06:59 wrote like a television series,
1480 01:07:02 that's how he wrote his novels,
1481 01:07:04 it's why they make such good television series.
1482 01:07:07 That cutting back and forth
1483 01:07:08 goes all the way back to The Odyssey.
1484 01:07:11 The Odyssey is constructed
1485 01:07:12 like a television series,
1486 01:07:16 so it's one of these fundamentals of
1487 01:07:19 sort of basic storytelling.
1488 01:07:22 They filled the air with chemicals and radiation
1489 01:07:26 and poison
1490 01:07:30 so God whipped up a special plague,
1491 01:07:36 the plague of infertility.
1492 01:07:39 I read the book
1493 01:07:41 and they set up a meeting with Margaret
1494 01:07:43 and I went and talked to her
1495 01:07:44 and I was very nervous,
1496 01:07:46 and…but…you know,
1497 01:07:50 that didn't compare to how nervous I was
1498 01:07:52 when I wrote the first script
1499 01:07:53 and I had to send it to her,
1500 01:07:55 if you can imagine sending Margaret Atwood
1501 01:07:58 your version of The Handmaid's Tale
1502 01:07:59 is like lovely.
1503 01:08:02 She really liked it.
1504 01:08:04 Thank God and she was very kind
1505 01:08:07 and…treated me like a writer.
1506 01:08:10 And after that we…I was very…
1507 01:08:14 uncomfortable changing anything in the book,
1508 01:08:17 because I really thought it worked,
1509 01:08:19 not because I had some sort of
1510 01:08:20 fealty to the novel,
1511 01:08:22 but I really thought the book worked as a story.
1512 01:08:24 Margaret was actually more encouraging
1513 01:08:26 to changing things
1514 01:08:27 because she had had this book
1515 01:08:28 adapted to as a movie,
1516 01:08:29 as an opera, as a play.
1517 01:08:31 So she in a very unique way, was more of an expert
1518 01:08:34 on having her work adapted
1519 01:08:36 than I was an expert at adapting,
1520 01:08:39 certainly this work.
1521 01:08:47 The way that Margaret wrote June was so real.
1522 01:08:50 She was so flawed. She's so complicated.
1523 01:08:52 She did the wrong thing.
1524 01:08:54 She is seeing things and doing things
1525 01:08:57 that are not necessarily
1526 01:08:59 the most morally correct things to do.
1527 01:09:03 And so I felt like she'd also written
1528 01:09:04 this incredibly complicated character
1529 01:09:06 that was very real and very human.
1530 01:09:15 So the costume is partly inspired
1531 01:09:17 by nuns of course,
1532 01:09:19 but also by the Old Dutch Cleanser package
1533 01:09:22 of the 1940s,
1534 01:09:23 which showed this pretty sinister looking woman
1535 01:09:26 holding a great big stick.
1536 01:09:28 And she was supposed to be chasing the dirt,
1537 01:09:30 but she had a bonnet that was hiding her face.
1538 01:09:34 So I think imprinted on that as a child,
1539 01:09:37 it was quite a mysterious figure.
1540 01:09:41 Any sort of head gear, hats, baseball cap,
1541 01:09:44 sunglasses, anything that conceals the actor
1542 01:09:48 is something that is issued in filmmaking
1543 01:09:51 because it covers up the very real estate of
1544 01:09:54 what they're paying for, the actor, Lizzie Moss.
1545 01:09:57 In this case,
1546 01:09:59 it was such a huge part of
1547 01:10:01 what made up the Handmaid's experience
1548 01:10:05 in Margaret Atwood's story
1549 01:10:06 that I really wanted to try it
1550 01:10:09 and so secretly I had five made
1551 01:10:12 and took them to New York because I knew
1552 01:10:14 that I was going to see Elizabeth Moss
1553 01:10:16 and I had her put them on.
1554 01:10:19 I had her turn very slowly to the camera
1555 01:10:21 and it was like the most beautiful pan
1556 01:10:24 to the Dutch Masters paintings.
1557 01:10:30 One of the most gratifying things
1558 01:10:31 about making the show has been
1559 01:10:33 seeing these women protesting all over the world
1560 01:10:37 wearing those costumes.
1561 01:10:38 All those costumes will become a symbol of
1562 01:10:41 oppression and resistance,
1563 01:10:43 you can look at that red cloak
1564 01:10:44 and those white wings
1565 01:10:45 and know exactly what that person is seeing
1566 01:10:49 or what they stand for.
1567 01:10:52 And the biggest lesson of The Handmaid's Tale,
1568 01:10:54 the biggest lesson in that story is that
1569 01:10:56 they keep looking back and saying,
1570 01:10:58 man, we ignored the warning signs.
1571 01:10:59 We let it get too late.
1572 01:11:01 Here in this country it has already gone too far.
1573 01:11:05 It is my high honor
1574 01:11:08 and distinct privilege
1575 01:11:10 to introduce to you the President Elect
1576 01:11:13 of the United States of America, Donald Trump.
1577 01:11:19 The night of the election,
1578 01:11:21 we were in Toronto, we were in production.
1579 01:11:24 We were about almost at midpoint of year one.
1580 01:11:29 And I think our motivation going in was,
1581 01:11:33 we need to do a great job for Margaret.
1582 01:11:36 We need to honor Margaret's book
1583 01:11:39 and I think that was kind of
1584 01:11:41 what we carrying on our shoulders.
1585 01:11:44 And then after the election,
1586 01:11:46 I think we had this sense of,
1587 01:11:48 we can't let Margaret down
1588 01:11:49 and we may be carrying forth her vision
1589 01:11:53 for the entire country, for America.
1590 01:11:57 They said it would be temporary.
1591 01:12:00 Nothing changes instantaneously.
1592 01:12:04 In a gradually heating bathtub
1593 01:12:06 you'd be boiled to death before you knew it.
1594 01:12:10 As each and every day unfolds
1595 01:12:12 in a Trump administration,
1596 01:12:14 we feel like we're in a pre Gilead world
1597 01:12:17 and desperate to pull it back.
1598 01:12:23 Who's got the power?
1599 01:12:24 We've got the power!
1600 01:12:26 I woke up after Trump's election and I thought,
1601 01:12:29 this is the most awful thing that's ever happened
1602 01:12:31 and then, I don't know, I spoke to Peggy
1603 01:12:34 and she said but there's going to be
1604 01:12:35 a march on Saturday and you gotta come
1605 01:12:38 and then we got to wear a pink hat or something.
1606 01:12:39 I said I have no pink hat but I'll come.
1607 01:12:43 What we look back on nostalgically
1608 01:12:45 is democratic freedoms.
1609 01:12:48 They're under attack, not only from the right,
1610 01:12:50 but also from the extreme left.
1611 01:12:53 So the best time to live in
1612 01:12:55 is the sweet spot in the middle
1613 01:12:57 when the pendulum hasn’t swung too far either way.
1614 01:13:02 It's that middle, middle part
1615 01:13:04 where you're less likely to get…
1616 01:13:07 lynchings and burnings.
1617 01:13:13 So I didn't know before going
1618 01:13:14 exactly what I was going to be,
1619 01:13:16 but I turned out to be an assistant about Lydia
1620 01:13:19 and there was Elizabeth
1621 01:13:21 and she was supposed to be
1622 01:13:22 not pointing at the person
1623 01:13:25 who is being slut shamed at the moment
1624 01:13:28 and I was supposed to whack her on the head
1625 01:13:30 to make her pay attention and do the pointing.
1626 01:13:33 It was so surreal having her on the set.
1627 01:13:35 I mean there's nothing like
1628 01:13:39 playing a character from a novel
1629 01:13:42 and then having the author
1630 01:13:44 be standing next to you
1631 01:13:45 and then hit you in the back of the head.
1632 01:13:46 Her fault…
1633 01:13:50 Go on.
1634 01:13:52 And understandably, she didn't want to hurt me,
1635 01:13:55 so she kind of kept doing it a little bit
1636 01:13:56 on the softer side,
1637 01:13:58 and sort of had to keep saying like,
1638 01:14:00 it's okay, like, try a little bit harder…
1639 01:14:02 So Elizabeth was turning around and saying,
1640 01:14:04 "Come on, give me a whack."
1641 01:14:05 No I'll hurt you. "No, come on."
1642 01:14:07 And finally on a last one,
1643 01:14:09 she went and she just whacked me to the point of
1644 01:14:11 where my little caplet went like a little bit off
1645 01:14:13 and that's what's in the show.
1646 01:14:16 And we had to shoot it several times
1647 01:14:17 and then they added a sound effect.
1648 01:14:21 And I sort of turned around and was like,
1649 01:14:22 oh, that was good. We're done.
1650 01:14:24 I don't want to see what you do next.
1651 01:14:37 So this is a building in DC.
1652 01:14:40 This is a building in DC.
1653 01:14:42 If you can promise explicitly.
1654 01:14:43 They needed to be explicit.
1655 01:14:51 You bring us Commander Blaine and we have a deal.
1656 01:15:01 Hi, how are you?
1657 01:15:03 The worst kind of terrorist.
1658 01:15:04 The worst kind of terrorist.
1659 01:15:06 He was the worst.
1660 01:15:07 And tomorrow we're doing the cover release
1661 01:15:09 for the new book.
1662 01:15:11 Tomorrow the cover comes out?　-in the morning
1663 01:15:14 Oh my God.　-Do you want to have a quick…
1664 01:15:15 You can have a preview.
1665 01:15:17 Show Elizabeth a preview.　-Shall we show you?
1666 01:15:18 Yeah.　-You can have a…
1667 01:15:20 There it is.　-Oh my god!
1668 01:15:22 That's so cool.　-That's a good reaction.
1669 01:15:23 That's the kind of reaction we like.
1670 01:15:24 Can you see the thick…
1671 01:15:27 The Testaments has a more complicated structure
1672 01:15:30 than The Handmaid’s Tale.
1673 01:15:32 It doesn't have a single narrator.
1674 01:15:34 So one is a young girl growing up in Gilead
1675 01:15:39 suitably attired in a vivid shade of spring green.
1676 01:15:44 On the back is someone
1677 01:15:45 from our culture in the future
1678 01:15:49 who looks quite different.
1679 01:15:51 And what did it of course was
1680 01:15:52 Trump being elected and circumstances changed,
1681 01:15:55 that everything we thought wasn't true anymore.
1682 01:15:58 Right.　-It motivated me to…write it.
1683 01:16:02 The same way the arrival of the eighties
1684 01:16:06 kicked off The Handmaid's Tale
1685 01:16:07 because everything started to go
1686 01:16:10 the other way around in the eighties.
1687 01:16:13 Reading The Testaments for the first time
1688 01:16:16 was an absolute joy.
1689 01:16:17 I didn't go to sleep.
1690 01:16:19 I read all through the night
1691 01:16:21 and through half of the next day.
1692 01:16:23 I'm not sure I stopped for a meal,
1693 01:16:26 I possibly did but I can barely remember
1694 01:16:29 because it's so completely engrossing and magical
1695 01:16:33 and she's such a consummate storyteller
1696 01:16:39 that she just hooks you in all the way.
1697 01:16:44 This is the queue for Margaret Atwood.
1698 01:16:47 Just tuck yourself into the left
1699 01:16:48 for Margaret Atwood. Just here.
1700 01:16:51 Thank you.
1701 01:16:52 Just tuck yourself into the left
1702 01:16:53 for Margaret Atwood.
1703 01:16:56 There is an incredibly strong desire
1704 01:17:00 to meet Margaret Atwood
1705 01:17:01 because she's changed so many people's lives.
1706 01:17:04 She's also fallen into this tragic
1707 01:17:08 but brilliant vein of connecting perfectly
1708 01:17:11 to some of the more alarming and disturbing
1709 01:17:15 political currents in the world.
1710 01:17:16 So she's like perpetually relevant.
1711 01:17:19 She resonates now even more than
1712 01:17:21 she did 20, 30 years ago.
1713 01:17:34 I'm collecting a whole bunch of Handmaidiana
1714 01:17:37 which keeps me busy,
1715 01:17:39 the hand soaps tale where somebody
1716 01:17:41 made a Handmaid out of those hand soaps
1717 01:17:43 by putting a red thing on the bottle and…
1718 01:17:48 The many, many pictures of people
1719 01:17:50 whose dogs and cats have had
1720 01:17:52 those collars put on them,
1721 01:17:55 then they put little capes on the animal
1722 01:17:58 and send me the picture.
1723 01:18:01 The White House Christmas decorations
1724 01:18:04 that Melania revealed
1725 01:18:05 through the magic of the Internet,
1726 01:18:08 bonnets were put on top of them
1727 01:18:09 and they became a very colourful
1728 01:18:12 long row of Handmaids.
1729 01:18:21 "Dear God, you who created"
1730 01:18:23 "the great and wide sea"
1731 01:18:25 "with its creatures innumerable."
1732 01:18:27 "We pray that you hold in your gaze"
1733 01:18:30 "those who dwell in your underwater garden"
1734 01:18:32 "in which life originated."
1735 01:18:34 "And we pray that none may vanish from the Earth"
1736 01:18:37 "by human agency."
1737 01:18:39 "Let them come to life again"
1738 01:18:41 "and let us be forgiven for our oceanic murders"
1739 01:18:45 "and for our foolishness,"
1740 01:18:46 "for being arrogant and destructive"
1741 01:18:49 "and help us to accept in all humility"
1742 01:18:51 "our kinship with the fishes"
1743 01:18:54 "who appear to us as mute and foolish,"
1744 01:18:57 "for in your sight we are all mute and foolish."
1745 01:19:04 She has always brought to her work,
1746 01:19:07 a very direct critique of
1747 01:19:10 the destructive ways of human beings.
1748 01:19:13 Maddaddam Trilogy is her most vocal call
1749 01:19:17 for us to understand
1750 01:19:19 how we are impacting on the planet
1751 01:19:22 and how human society and our habits
1752 01:19:25 are that much more destructive
1753 01:19:28 that we are actually
1754 01:19:29 putting the whole thing at risk.
1755 01:19:32 Should we continue down the road that we are on?
1756 01:19:37 The biggest threat to us as a species
1757 01:19:40 would be the death of the oceans
1758 01:19:43 and the reason that is the biggest threat for us
1759 01:19:46 because we're not plants,
1760 01:19:48 we breathe oxygen
1761 01:19:49 and 60 to 80% of the oxygen that we breathe
1762 01:19:53 is created by the marine algaes,
1763 01:19:56 so kill the oceans, you will choke to death.
1764 01:20:06 Yeah, right there.
1765 01:20:14 There it is right there, see?
1766 01:20:16 They're Humpback Whales.
1767 01:20:19 This has been an excellent trip.
1768 01:20:21 I've gone to places I've never been before,
1769 01:20:24 I've learned things I didn't know.
1770 01:20:27 I was happy to see the Skuas and some Gannets.
1771 01:20:33 Most people go for the Puffins
1772 01:20:34 'cause they're cute.
1773 01:20:36 No, there's a couple babies.
1774 01:20:37 Oh! Look at the back.　-Babies.
1775 01:20:39 You got your binoculars to look at the babies?
1776 01:20:41 Bird watching it takes hours
1777 01:20:43 to wait for a bird to come.
1778 01:20:45 I think it's a type of contemplation,
1779 01:20:49 or meditation.
1780 01:20:51 That's just like, just like a painting.
1781 01:20:54 That you're in the wilds,
1782 01:20:57 that you're in nature
1783 01:20:59 that takes spirit, that spirit rises
1784 01:21:01 with these different colors
1785 01:21:03 and habits that they have
1786 01:21:06 and they've gone all over the world.
1787 01:21:08 They were in Peru and they were in Morocco, Cuba.
1788 01:21:18 I loved the birding trips,
1789 01:21:19 but I didn't love them because of the birds
1790 01:21:22 because, you know, for a small child
1791 01:21:24 you could like traipse along in the woods
1792 01:21:25 and there are a lot of mosquitoes
1793 01:21:26 and then suddenly all the adults go, shhh!
1794 01:21:28 It's over there.
1795 01:21:34 The things that are killing them
1796 01:21:35 are eventually going to kill us.
1797 01:21:38 They are in the canaries in the coal mine.
1798 01:21:46 So where's that drone?
1799 01:21:47 Come on drone. Come on, come on.
1800 01:21:52 We've been going down to Pelee Island
1801 01:21:53 for more than 20 years.
1802 01:21:58 About four or five years ago
1803 01:21:59 we were part of a group that set up
1804 01:22:01 a migratory bird station observatory on the island
1805 01:22:04 because it's right on the tip of Point Pelee.
1806 01:22:06 A very, very rich focus of migrating birds
1807 01:22:09 come through there each spring and fall.
1808 01:22:13 What's that?
1809 01:22:14 Yes I know it, I can hear it but I can't see it.
1810 01:22:37 Gorgeous.
1811 01:22:43 The origin story of Angel CatBird
1812 01:22:45 is a collision between our hero,
1813 01:22:49 a cat, an owl, a car
1814 01:22:53 and a vial full of gene splicer.
1815 01:22:57 I was always a cat person.
1816 01:22:58 I had lots of cats.
1817 01:23:01 I know their ways, but I'm very fond of them.
1818 01:23:04 So how do you do a project
1819 01:23:07 that takes into account our fondness for cats,
1820 01:23:11 but our also our fondness for birds
1821 01:23:14 and our and the necessity of
1822 01:23:16 preserving their numbers.
1823 01:23:19 She was in touch every step of the way
1824 01:23:21 in terms of design as well as the final drawings.
1825 01:23:24 I would start off with comps and mockups
1826 01:23:26 and I would send them over to her.
1827 01:23:27 She'd take a look at them
1828 01:23:29 and she'd approve things
1829 01:23:29 or say she wants more of this or more of that.
1830 01:23:32 We worked together to come to
1831 01:23:33 something that would make the book sing.
1832 01:23:36 Margaret does do drawings.
1833 01:23:37 Along the way as we were creating the comic book
1834 01:23:39 when we were trying to do some character designs
1835 01:23:42 there were a couple of times
1836 01:23:42 when she'd jump on in there and say,
1837 01:23:43 oh, this is kind of what I want
1838 01:23:45 and she would draw like, I want this idea,
1839 01:23:48 which was really cool to see her drawings.
1840 01:23:54 I don't think you've seen any
1841 01:23:55 actually original pages.
1842 01:23:56 I have not seen the original pages.
1843 01:23:58 I've seen pictures of the original pages.
1844 01:24:00 But I haven't seen…
1845 01:24:02 Well, Johnny is wonderful.
1846 01:24:03 We wanted somebody who could actually draw,
1847 01:24:07 an anatomically correct flying catbird person
1848 01:24:13 that looked as if it would actually fly.
1849 01:24:16 So how much fun is it
1850 01:24:17 writing a superhero comic book?
1851 01:24:18 I cannot tell you how much fun I have had.
1852 01:24:21 So is that important to you?
1853 01:24:22 Fun. You know, 'cause…
1854 01:24:23 Well, if you're not having fun then what is it?
1855 01:24:26 It's homework.
1856 01:24:28 You remember how much we didn't like that.
1857 01:24:33 When Graeme decided to stop writing fiction,
1858 01:24:36 Graeme told me, "I'm not gonna write anymore."
1859 01:24:39 "This is it."
1860 01:24:41 And I said, Oh Graeme, that's terrible.
1861 01:24:43 Why are you doing that?
1862 01:24:44 He said, basically, I don't have anything
1863 01:24:46 more that I want to say.
1864 01:24:48 And I thought, well,
1865 01:24:51 why doesn't he do an anthology?
1866 01:24:53 And he created this gorgeous book.
1867 01:24:57 He writes essays about birds.
1868 01:25:02 He says most of us think of birds as spirits,
1869 01:25:06 their wings, that they're the spirit of us.
1870 01:25:09 Look at the color, they're gorgeous.
1871 01:25:13 But I don't know their names now,
1872 01:25:14 partially because of the changes in me.
1873 01:25:17 But then you don't need the names,
1874 01:25:18 the birds don't know it.
1875 01:25:20 It's also it's easier
1876 01:25:21 particularly because dementia,
1877 01:25:23 I mean, but I start before I knew I had it,
1878 01:25:27 I got tired of saying that bird is a…
1879 01:25:32 what the hell do they got to do with the bird?
1880 01:25:34 And I'm so moved
1881 01:25:42 by how beautifully he is now walking
1882 01:25:45 to the end of his life
1883 01:25:48 with his disease of dementia.
1884 01:25:53 Margaret is his caregiver basically,
1885 01:25:57 and she's taken the approach that
1886 01:26:00 the way to handle it at this stage
1887 01:26:02 is to take him with her on her travels
1888 01:26:05 and to integrate him into
1889 01:26:08 whatever she's doing
1890 01:26:09 so he isn't being sort of
1891 01:26:10 shuffled off to the sidelines
1892 01:26:13 and treated really as a non-person.
1893 01:26:15 He's still very much a person
1894 01:26:16 and she's devoted to him.
1895 01:26:18 She always has been devoted to him
1896 01:26:20 as he is to her.
1897 01:26:24 I think they are still mad for each other.
1898 01:26:27 They're entranced and enchanted by each other.
1899 01:26:31 How many couples can say that after
1900 01:26:33 30 or 40 years?
1901 01:26:39 I'd forgotten all about some of this stuff.
1902 01:26:41 Look at this weird Saturday Night cover.
1903 01:26:43 When was that?
1904 01:26:44 Oh, when I was a not a blonde yet
1905 01:26:46 and I don't know who came up with this hat,
1906 01:26:48 but it wasn't my hat.
1907 01:26:50 That's not my sweater.
1908 01:26:51 Those aren't my glasses
1909 01:26:52 and those are not my earrings.
1910 01:26:56 My favorite props person was the one
1911 01:26:58 who took off all my black clothes
1912 01:27:01 and put on another whole set of
1913 01:27:03 different black clothes
1914 01:27:04 that looked exactly the same.
1915 01:27:07 Look at all of this. Look at this one.
1916 01:27:11 How very puritanical.
1917 01:27:14 That's when you were a man.
1918 01:27:15 I was not a man.
1919 01:27:17 Could her chilling tale of the future
1920 01:27:19 really happen?
1921 01:27:21 Did it happen?
1922 01:27:22 Not quite. But…
1923 01:27:29 We desperately want more from her.
1924 01:27:31 You know, we desperately want more from her,
1925 01:27:33 but not really, you know,
1926 01:27:35 like you're sort of like…
1927 01:27:38 At so much of the time,
1928 01:27:39 it's so beautiful and it's perfect,
1929 01:27:42 but it's unsettling
1930 01:27:43 and she's like that in life too.
1931 01:27:44 She'll say the thing
1932 01:27:46 no one else is willing to say to you,
1933 01:27:48 she'll tell you the hard truth
1934 01:27:49 you don't really want to hear.
1935 01:27:51 Yes?
1936 01:27:52 She has been a hugely warning force
1937 01:27:56 about important issues
1938 01:27:59 and reminded the writers that
1939 01:28:01 it's not just a self expression,
1940 01:28:03 writing is actually your dialogue with the world
1941 01:28:07 and your commitment to giving the world
1942 01:28:10 an image of itself that it needs.
1943 01:28:12 So I think that books like The Handmaid's Tale,
1944 01:28:16 like Surfacing, like Alias Grace
1945 01:28:19 remind us that the problem is inside all of us.
1946 01:28:23 You're going to read this?
1947 01:28:25 How old are you?　-I’m seven.
1948 01:28:26 My goodness. Well, good luck with it.
1949 01:28:30 There's definitely a feeling that
1950 01:28:32 this is my word to the world
1951 01:28:35 so I'm going to finish saying what I have to say
1952 01:28:38 and do what I can to make sure that
1953 01:28:42 there's a legacy for literature,
1954 01:28:44 for feminist causes, for the environment.
1955 01:28:48 This is her shot at getting the message out there
1956 01:28:51 and by god she's getting that message out there.
1957 01:28:54 She is just remarkable.
1958 01:29:08 "So here we are again, my dear,"
1959 01:29:10 "on the same shore we set out from"
1960 01:29:12 "years ago, when we were promising,"
1961 01:29:15 "but minus - now - a lot of hair,"
1962 01:29:18 "or fur or feathers, whatever."
1963 01:29:21 "I suppose we’ve both come far."
1964 01:29:24 "But how far are we truly,"
1965 01:29:25 "from where we started,"
1966 01:29:26 "under the fresh-laid moon,
1967 01:29:28 "when we plotted to astound?"
1968 01:29:31 "When we thought"
1969 01:29:32 "something of meaning could still be done"
1970 01:29:33 "by singing, or won, like trophies."
1971 01:29:38 "Ah well, my dear, our leaky cardboard"
1972 01:29:41 "gondola has brought us this far."
1973 01:29:44 "No longer semi-immortal, but moulting owl"
1974 01:29:47 "and arthritic pussycat, we row"
1975 01:29:50 "out past the last protecting"
1976 01:29:51 "sandbar, towards the salty"
1977 01:29:54 "open sea, the dogs’-head gate,"
1978 01:29:57 "and after that, oblivion."
1979 01:30:01 "Anyway, my dearest one,"
1980 01:30:04 "we still have the moon."
1981 01:30:21 What advice do I give
1982 01:30:22 to seventeen and eighteen year olds?
1983 01:30:24 Okay my first piece of advice is next time vote.
1984 01:30:34 The second piece is just
1985 01:30:36 with everything that comes your way
1986 01:30:38 there's two questions to be asked.
1987 01:30:40 Number one, is it true?
1988 01:30:43 And we are living in a period
1989 01:30:46 in which some people are trying very hard
1990 01:30:48 to make truth irrelevant.
1991 01:30:51 Truth is not irrelevant.