Mention the name James Joyce to most people, and they’ll be able to tell you that he was a brilliant Irish writer. There’s even a good chance they’ll be able to point to a copy of his much-revered masterpiece Ulysses on their bookshelf. But it’s also likely that they’ve never worked up the courage to read it, at least not in its entirety, due to its intimidating length, scope and the complexity of Joyce’s writing. But I predict that plenty of copies of Ulysses will be dusted off and eagerly opened with the arrival of Anjelica Huston on James Joyce: A Shout in the Street, screening at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival on July 6.

This eye-opening new documentary on Joyce, which is far more focused on spreading the word of his humanity and worth to new audiences than preaching to the choir, is all about narrative momentum and emotional impact. Eschewing the conventional approach of these kind of biographical documentaries, the film is less caught up in ticking off key facts than it is in emphasising Joyce’s exciting and precarious bohemian existence on the moral boundaries of his contemporary culture. This is a young person’s James Joyce documentary.

The film is narrated and hosted by Hollywood legend Anjelica Huston, who starred in the James Joyce adaptation The Dead (1987) directed by her father John Huston, and her appearance lends the film a great deal of weight. Through the sharing of her own experiences with Joyce’s work growing up in western Ireland, as well as those of her Joyce-obsessed father, we are reminded of the very real impact that this world-renowned but oft misunderstood writer has had on people’s lives. Taking this cue, , the film avoids the leaden weight of relying on interviews with scholars, instead relying on the commentary of various writers from around the world, all of whom have been inspired by James Joyce’s work. The result is really quite inspired.

I sat down with David Blake Knox, producer and writer of Anjelica Huston on James Joyce: A Shout in the Street, ahead of its premiere at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival on July 6.

James Curnow: Hi David. I recently had the good fortune to watch Anjelica Huston on James Joyce: A Shout in the Street and really loved it. But before we talk about your film, I’d like to hear a little bit about your career as a TV producer up to this point.

David Blake Knox: Well, I’ve been working quite a long time as a producer. I’ve worked in comedy programmes, entertainment programmes, dramas, a couple of feature films, but also quite a lot of documentaries. That’s been the most consistent part of my work. I worked in RTE, which is Ireland’s National Television and Radio broadcaster, for quite a few years, then I joined the BBC in London. I’ve also worked for HBO in New York. About 15 years ago, I set up my own independent company called Blueprint, and that’s the company that made the Joyce film.

I’m curious how you came to this particular project. I understand you have a long-standing interest in James Joyce?

That’s right. I read Ulysses when I was still in school. It made a big impression on me. Over the years, I’ve found myself returning to Joyce’s work quite often. 14 years ago I made a 90-minute feature film just about Ulysses and the 18 different episodes that the novel contains. I’ve had a long-term interest in Joyce and his work. This film, in a way, has been a long time in the making.

For those who only have a very vague notion of who James Joyce is, essentially that he’s an Irish writer – I know that I’ve had a copy of Ulysses on my bookshelf for a long time that I’ve probably been too intimidated too read – who is he?

You’re not alone in that! But I’ll tell you a curious thing about Ulysses, in particular, which is his greatest work. It is an extremely demanding book. There’s no avoiding that reality. But most people who read and finish it feel that it’s been worth the effort; that’s one point I would make.

The second thing is that although it is very difficult, even for native English speakers, it is also one of the most translated books in the world. There are over a hundred different translations of Ulysses, and it partly attracts translators and readers because of its linguistic complexity. There are versions of it in very small languages, or languages that have very few native speakers. There’s an Icelandic version, there’s a Faroese version. There’s even an Irish language version of the book. So even though it is difficult, I think of it a bit like a jump horse race. Some of the hurdles are fairly straightforward, and some are more demanding. Sometimes people don’t succeed in getting over the difficult ones, which is fair enough, but if you complete the course, I haven’t met anyone who finished the book who said it wasn’t worth finishing it.

Approaching a subject like James Joyce must be a little intimidating. Can you tell me a bit about the process of researching a film like this? How do you get to the point where you’re confident that you’re going to do the topic justice?

That’s a very big ask. I have been interested in reading Joyce’s work and reading about Joyce for a long time, so it was a little less intimidating for me than it might be for people who are coming to Joyce new and fresh. At the same time, Joyce was an irreverent writer. He didn’t like people who bowed down before anything. I think that when you’re approaching Joyce’s work, you also have to have the same kind of critical, irreverent spirit that led him so that you’re not trying to produce a piece that is overly reverential and adulatory. He wouldn’t have liked that. He had a very high opinion of his own work – justifiably, in many ways – but his attitude toward his own work and his attitude toward other people’s work was always critical.

Is that why you went more to writers than academic scholars for the film?

Yeah, absolutely. Fiction writers have a particular perspective on what it entails to create in the way that Joyce did. Also, Joyce scholars can sometimes end up preaching to the choir. They can be obsessed with detail and sometimes lose the forest for the trees. So I wanted to move away from academia and treat him as a writer being assessed by other writers. People like David Simon who’s written principally for television and might seem to be quite far removed from Joyce… Joyce still had a huge influence on him. On the other hand, Edna O’Brien who, in her own life, encountered some of the kind of problems that Joyce encountered of narrow-mindedness and censorship and religious prejudice. I wanted a range from young to old and from different genres of writing to provide their perspective on Joyce’s work, and life for that matter.

That sounds like a large piece of work. From research to completing post-production, how long did this project take you? Was it constant, or was it intermittent?

It was more or less constant, and it was a very demanding project partly because three different broadcasters were funding us. One was RTE, one was BBC, and one was ARTE, the French-German channel. They all wanted, understandably, their own editorial input, and they all wanted us to be aware of the levels of knowledge about Joyce and his work. For example, there would be a very high level of awareness of Joyce in Ireland, but there might not be as high an awareness of Joyce in Germany. The reality is that he is a world writer, and you have to appreciate and respect that his reputation is genuinely global and that he’s had an enormous influence.

How can we see that influence today?

In some respects, Joyce has even influenced people who’ve never read his work. Not only in stylistic terms, not only the ways in which he redefined the novel, but also because of his contributions globally in changing laws about censorship and extending what you could write about, pushing a lot of frontiers further back. All of that has affected people who may never have read or even heard of Joyce.

Obviously, it’s had an influence on Anjelica Huston and her father John Huston. Anjelica was heavily involved in this project, narrating and appearing in the film. I’m curious, how did she become involved?

First of all, I knew that her father had a lifelong interest in Joyce. He read Ulysses when it was very difficult to obtain a copy because it was banned in so many countries. Incidentally, in some countries, it still is almost impossible to obtain. In many Islamic countries, it’s not obtainable, partly because the central character is Jewish and partly because of the sexual content, particularly in relation to women and women expressing sexual desire. It was banned for many years in the Soviet Union of Eastern Europe and in China. As a matter of fact, Ulysses, in particular, is almost like a gauge of the democratic credentials of a country because the countries that have turned to ban it have usually been countries that have quite oppressive political regimes. The availability of the book usually signals there has been a liberalisation, or at least an easing, of censorship and restriction.

But I’ve wandered! We were talking about John Huston. He had a lifelong interest in Joyce. In fact, he bought the Martello Tower in which the beginning of Ulysses was set, and he donated it to the Irish people. It’s now a James Joyce museum. He lived in Ireland for many years, and Anjelica grew up in the west of Ireland, so she had a connection with the country personally. Like her father she had been interested in Joyce, and she had performed on stage the famous soliloquy of Molly Bloom. Of course, she had starred in her father’s last film, his version of The Dead, which is a very beautiful film and in many respects, by far the best adaptation of Joyce’s work for the cinema. I knew that she had a connection with Joyce. When I contacted her and we talked about it, I realised that she felt very deeply about Joyce and his work.

And did you enjoy the collaboration?

I thought she was great to work with, actually. She’s a very intelligent actress and very intelligent person. She was very in-tune with the route that I wanted to take, and it was a very enjoyable collaboration… a productive one as well.

Earlier we were talking about the difficulty of adapting James Joyce for film. I’m curious what you think about the very idea of turning this kind of literature into cinema. How do you translate something into moving images when the value of it is so deeply in the language?

In the case of Joyce, I think it’s really, really difficult. I think that people who try and take a literal view in their adaptations of Joyce’s work can run into problems, because his books are not conventional narratives. In many respects, they’re about language rather than plot. The ones that have been most successful, like John Huston’s… admittedly, the short story that he was adapting is more naturalistic than some of Joyce’s work. Nonetheless, the reason I think it was successful was because Huston understood the dynamics. He’s a much-underestimated director, in my opinion. He’s really good with actors, really good with casting, really good with capturing the essence of Joyce’s story without slavishly following it. He made some changes in the narrative, but he did so in order to make a film that would work. They were relatively minor changes, but I like that attitude that he brought. He was obviously rather hugely impressed by the book, but he wasn’t enslaved. I think if you’re trying to make a film of Joyce or about Joyce, it’s that balance that you have to strike.

The impact that Joyce has had on you is quite clear. But are there key documentary filmmakers that have influenced you?

Actually, John Huston made documentaries as well as making narrative films, which I think are great. There was one which dealt with shell-shocked soldiers from World War II. It’s a wonderful, wonderful film. Martin Scorsese has made a number of fantastic documentaries. Some of the filmmakers that I like are perhaps not as well known for making documentaries as for making feature films. But I do think that a good documentary will have some of the same characteristics as a good feature film. To me, they have to have the same kind of sweep; the same kind of emotional heft. The sense of structure, I think, is quite similar in a good documentary to a good feature film.

What’s the reception been like to this film thus far?

I’ve had great feedback. I wanted this film to be entirely credible to Joycean enthusiasts. I didn’t want them to say, “No, actually, he didn’t go to Trest in 1904. He went in 1905.” That type of thing. I wanted it to be bulletproof because there are people who are absolutely devoted to Joyce and who know his work much better than I do. I didn’t want them to be disappointed that there had been any kind of casual approach to factual material. I wanted to be meticulous in the way I presented the details of his life. I tried to do that.

At the same time, I wasn’t making the film for people who already knew a lot about Joyce. I was also making it for people who knew very little about him. It is a challenge to make a film that will simultaneously be respected by Joycean scholars but also interest, entertain, and intrigue people who had never picked up a book by Joyce and knew nothing about him, or his extraordinary life. I wanted it to have both of those dimensions: to be entirely credible but also to be accessible.

Well as somebody who had a limited understanding of who Joyce was, you’ve achieved your goal. This is a really powerful film. Thank you so much for your time.

I appreciate that. That certainly was my aim. To give a sense of a life and a career which had its ups and downs, had a lot of suffering, some of it inflicted by Joyce, particularly on his family…that it wasn’t just a black and white situation. It was a life of great achievement, but with a great price to be paid.

Tickets to see Anjelica Huston on James Joyce: A Shout in the Street at the Melbourne Documentary Film Festival are now available.