Press Archive » Articles » 2004


CBC Online - October 2004

"Open Heart: A Chat with Megan Follows"

Megan Follows stars in Open Heart as pediatric cardiovascular surgery nurse 'Sherry Cardinal'. She's immediately recognizable to audiences around the world for her starring role in the Anne of Green Gables movies based on L.M. Montgomery's books, and has led a prolific career on television, stage, and screen, in both Canada and the U.S. "Without a doubt, Megan Follows is one of the finest actors I've ever worked with." says Open Heart Director Laurie Lynd. "She has an amazing range and is nuanced and subtle but can be funny and silly, too. She's in practically every scene... and her performance is so remarkable - compelling, riveting, emotionally engaging, so real. It was a real pleasure for me to work with someone capable of giving that. Megan is smart, and it shows in her work."

Sitting in a Toronto café on a blustery October day, Megan is equally effusive about Lynd. "I really loved working with Laurie. He was not only a great guide at the helm of the ship, in terms of really keeping us focused on the story, but he also was a really great collaborator to create a character with. I felt like I had a real partner - that we were on the same page. It was a wonderful experience."

When asked what attracted her to the film in the first place, Megan is thoughtful: "What makes the tragedy told in this film different from others is the complexity of everyone's role in the story. It's too easy to vilify 'the bad doctor', or 'the greedy hospital', whereas the real issues are more complex, like, who has the power in health care and medicine in our society, where is the money coming from, what value is placed on care, who has the right to good care, and what are the checks and balances in the system... it's the system on trial."

"The doctor - he's not simply the 'bad guy'; he, too is sort of a victim of the system that's put him in a position that he's not actually ready for. So it was the shades of grey that I found interesting about Open Heart. I got the feeling that it was a film that would certainly raise more questions than it answered, and I liked that too, because of just how huge the subject matter is."

The conversation turns to how she approached her own role in Open Heart. "I liked, given the potential trappings of something being a 'disease of the week' kind of movie, that 'Sherry' was full of character defects. I often find that a character's flaws are what's most fascinating about them. She's rough around the edges and rubs people the wrong way, demanding a lot from people and not always doing so in a very graceful way. Like the fact that she wasn't a brilliant parent, both because of her own addictions and her own inability to de-stress from the trauma that she was witness to. It's a fascinating part of the psychology of being in that profession, because you are losing people, and how much of that are you taking home - where are you putting those emotions, that grief? At first, she's not, obviously, putting them in a very productive place. Finally she makes a decision to stand up and say something, her own arrogance being such that she feels that she has a right to do so, and certainly some of that arrogance is justified, but some of it isn't. Throughout the film she gets all of these little lessons, these little eye-openers where she's having to question her own personality, and her own judgments ...at the point in the story when she realizes she has to take a stand, she's already alienated and isolated herself from her co-workers, so the story is about hearing the validity of the message beyond the messenger."

Open Heart is, at it's most basic level, a movie about whistleblowers and the consequences faced by such, a subject which Follows makes no bones about: "There's a cost. Not everybody who stands up to injustice - not all snitches - are rewarded. Not everybody ends up being Erin Brockovich - walking away with three million dollars and a congratulatory 'you took on the bad guy and won' slap on the back. I hope that we got a sense of that at the end of Open Heart, where you realize that it's going to be a long journey for her, because she did put her neck out and there were not many people who were willing to put theirs out there with her. I think that's what's really scary about the issue - the ethics and the morality of choice, and the consequences for coming from an ethical place when it's going to cost you... and at what point does not taking a stand make you complicit in what's going on? That's a frightening thought, especially when you're dealing with innocent people's lives."

"Imagine, you hand your child over to a hospital, and you're so vulnerable. It's a parent's worst nightmare. There's already a risk factor, but if there's an added risk factor on top of that, it's inconceivable. Plus, the whole idea of a cover-up, everybody protecting their ass, is chilling."

The producers of Open Heart made every effort to create a realistic surgical environment - preparation for the role ranged from the obvious down to small details that, while not being overt, lent an added level of realism to the movie. "We had advisors on the set who were great," recalls Follows, "and I went and observed open heart surgery ...it was unbelievable. I thought I was doing well, standing behind the barrier an arm's reach away from the gentleman's chest cavity while it was being sawed open, but I nearly did faint at one point and had to be gently escorted from the room and offered a beverage. I think it was the smell of the flesh being cauterized that got to me. But I went right back in..."

The surgical visit made a lasting impression on Megan: "What was really fascinating was the casualness - the actual lack of drama when things are going well, and yet the stakes are so high, so there's this amazing duality there. The level of concentration was incredible to watch...the apparent ease of doing something so unbelievably complicated... I'm told there's an added element of tension in the room when pediatric heart surgery is being performed because it's human beings at the beginnings of their lives being operated on, plus children's hearts are extremely small, about the size of a walnut. It was a fascinating experience and I was really impressed by the doctors and nurses and their level of expertise and their ease."

During shooting, attention to detail was a daily regime."On the set we had some real nurses advising us, because just the way you handle the tools, the "sterile zone" on your body, why you can't drop your hands below chest level, and the way you handle instruments - it's all seemingly so obvious, but you get in there and it's really hard to keep straight! We were also filming in a real working hospital, so we got to have some great conversations with the nurses."

Part of Megan's role prep was unintentional, unanticipated, and nearly caused her to back out of filming, "I went through a strange period, because my own child was sick at the time. I was on my way up to start the movie, and my daughter developed an infection that wasn't healing, which landed us in the Toronto Sick Children's Hospital - on the night of the blackout, no less. We discovered that she had a very serious condition that had been misdiagnosed elsewhere. It was pretty frightening; for about 72 hours we were in triage with my daughter as they tried to diagnose what was going on. It turned out to be a very rare condition she had, and it meant that she had to be stabilized in Sick Kids as they fought the infection off. The producers were very, very kind during this period, especially as it looked like I wasn't going to be able to do the movie. So at one point [Executive Producer] Phyllis Platt gently asked me if I was going to be able to do this, and I replied that I was waiting for a piece of information which would tell me what the situation was with my child. So we waited. My husband was here, and my mom lives here, and we finally found out that my daughter was basically going to be observed for a period of weeks while they also fought off this infection. So they said, go and do the movie. I ended up repeatedly flying back and forth between St. John and Toronto, sleeping at the Sick Kids, and flying back to St. John to shoot. It was incredibly surreal."

"I certainly have an appreciation for parents having to turn their children over to the care of a hospital - and we're very lucky in Toronto - Sick Children's Hospital must be one of the best hospitals in the world, and my daughter got the care that she needed... I saw first-hand the passion and hard work the nurses were putting in on behalf of my child on the floor at night, and the one-on-one interaction. In their roles as caregivers, nurses have a tremendous amount of empathy and compassion - they are in the work of service. As a mom myself, I have incredible respect for them. I know how hard they work. It requires an enormous amount of heart and soul, and they're often not really acknowledged or rewarded for the level of work they're putting in."

She pauses to take another sip of her coffee. "So that was all the preparation I needed for the role," she laughs "- and then some!"

Follows is frequently seen in productions on both sides of the border, both on TV and in film. When asked how she would characterize the differences between working in a guest spot on C.S.I versus, for example Made In Canada, Megan took a few minutes to reflect on the differences between working in Canada and working in the States. "Really it comes down to money, doesn't it? It comes down to the kind of money that productions have - the budgets of films - and I'm not talking salaries. In Canada we make a little go a long way, and we've been doing that for so long, so it's kind of a weird flip to be on C.S.I., where the amount of time they'll allow just for lighting, is incredible."

"Down there you're not fighting for some very fundamental things - you just allow your DOP time to light. Up here we are far more often fighting against the clock. For example, I'll never forget doing ER: during one scene that was less than a minute, we spent, I don't know, six hours - something you'd hardly ever see on a TV show up here. I've never seen so much coverage as on ER, and the huge sets, and the snow machine, and the wind machines... you would have thought you were doing a multi-million dollar movie. Of course, you were actually doing a multi-million dollar series. The production value is quite a wonder to see. And it's a different product then, too."

"That's why it's so unfair to compare American programming to Canadian, on visual content alone. I remember joking with Paul Gross last year when the Canadian Television Fund budget came out, and I forget the amount, but we looked at each other and said, well, that's a season and a half of ONE American show. I mean, I did episodes of The Fugitive, which only lasted two seasons, but that was nearly two million U.S. an episode. We can't compete with that. So in Canada we've got to be something different, but our airwaves are so bombarded by that other stuff ... "

"You can tell I have some feelings about this!" she laughs, "because I love this country and I love working here and I oftentimes think we get to do things here that are really unique, things that would never happen south of the border. Content here is extremely important, as it always should be of course, but here it's important because that's almost all we have - we're spread very thin."

Not limiting herself to the realm of movies and television, Follows has a successful stage career as well, and talks about the satisfaction that she gets from this very different discipline. "One of the luxuries of doing a play, and there are not many luxuries - in fact, the word luxury is not necessarily a word that I would associate with the theatre," she smiles ruefully, "– is the joy of running something from beginning to middle to end, the pure storytelling, and the excitement of that."

"In comparison, film is so fragmented. Film is obviously a collaborative process, very much so, to the point that I do what I do, and it's out there, and I pray that someone will appreciate a bit of this, a bit of that, but it's completely out of my control - I'm not the director, and I'm relying on the editing to make or break what I've done, because editing can either heighten or destroy, and it's really such a completely different kind of thing. You deliver up something and it's gone."

"Of course in the theatre it's just as intangible in the sense that you also do it and it's gone, but you get to do it all the way through, and then you get another chance at it, and then another chance at it. It's a very different experience - your relationship to the story. I kind of think of film as a deconstructive process, where you're working in fragments - you read something at the beginning, and then you break the puzzle down into all of these little pieces and then you focus for however may hours a day on one little piece of that puzzle. They say that 'God is in the details', and making a film is, at it's best, an experience of being saturated in moments of detail."

"Theatre, on the other hand is a re-construction - you start and you're building, building, building. You're working in a chunk here and a chunk there and then you put it together and work on the flow. Plus, there's nothing quite like the high of doing a show on the stage when it's going well - although there is nothing worse than being on the stage when it's not." She laughs and takes another swig of her coffee, "At least in film you can go 'Oh fuck, well, it's going to be over soon - this moment will pass', but of course the other frightening thing about film is that once it's there, it's there forever. I love 'em both though!"


Source: CBC Online