Finn’s ‘Dream With The Fishes’ Comes True Writer/Director Finn Taylor Speaks From The Heart In New Film

Finn Taylor wasn’t sure what to expect from his first college poetry class. If he’d known what he was getting into, he might have been intimidated.

The class, or rather the teacher, ended up changing his perspective on life.

This was in the mid-1970s. Taylor, then an undergraduate at the University of Montana in Missoula, was years away from being a writer/ director of such films as “Dream With the Fishes” - which is now playing at the Lincoln Heights Cinemas.

What he would become was profoundly influenced by the man who walked into class that first day.

A man named Richard Hugo.

“It wasn’t like he came into class and was a tall, thin person dressed in a white, linen suit, professing,” Taylor said during a recent phone interview. “He was a heavyset, energetic kind of guy, dressed casually, who probably was going to go to a bar after class.”

Hugo, for those of you who don’t know, was a renowned literary figure. The author of several volumes of poetry, two of which were finalists for the National Book Award, he also was director of Montana’s creative writing department.

An earthy man, who died of leukemia in 1982, Hugo was as capable at conjuring up poetic imagery as he was incapable of being effetely elitist. He ended up influencing a whole generation of writers and artists.

Taylor, a native of Oakland, Calif., was one.

“In his poetry he always had this sense of sadness and humor combined,” Taylor said. “And even though he wasn’t a perfect man - I mean, we all knew he had a drinking problem - he had a very passionate hunger for life. You can read it in his poetry.”

Taylor has the same kind of hunger. You can view it in his movies.

Even the one that didn’t turn out the way he wanted. A Hollywood screenwriter since 1989, he co-wrote the script “Pontiac Moon” that became a Ted Danson-Mary Steenburgen project. “I was unhappy with that film,” Taylor said. “I go for a darker, quirkier kind of humor, and they turned it into a sitcom.”

When he finished the screenplay for “Dream With the Fishes,” he was determined to bring his own vision to the screen. So he set out to direct it himself.

Within two months he had the funding. Shooting began in San Francisco on June, 1996, and 26 days later he was done. The film premiered almost exactly a year later in New York and Los Angeles.

“Dream With the Fishes” is an offbeat kind of buddy story involving a pair of mismatched guys, one who is dying and one who doesn’t want to live. Over the course of a couple of weeks, they do their best to live their lives to the fullest - they go nude bowling, for example, and try to resolve family angst - before the final lessons are learned.

The inspiration for the plot came from Taylor’s own life. He had a friend, he explained, an antagonistic sort who could harass a woman and, instead of getting slapped, would end up having a relationship with her. They traveled together all over the country.

After a big argument, Taylor took off for Europe to live off the money he’d been saving for just that purpose. Shortly afterward, though, he learned that his friend was deathly ill.

“So I came back,” Taylor said, “and I ended up spending all my money to help him live out his fantasies over his last few weeks.”

When he first began contemplating making the experience into a movie, Taylor knew he didn’t want to go Hollywood again. He wanted to be real, but in a way that wouldn’t sacrifice humor.

“I guess I wanted to have this, I guess you could say, life message,” he said. “But I wanted to do it in a funny film. I didn’t want it to be perpetually maudlin.”

To do that, Taylor relied on his actors - David Arquette as the suicidal Terry, and newcomer Brad Hunt as the dying Nick. He also relied on his inspiration, the doomed friend.

“He knew the clock was ticking,” Taylor said. “so he was really engaged in life. When you’re around somebody like this, in every moment, the effect is contagious. It’s altered my life to a point where I got really serious about following my dreams rather than settling for doing it halfway.”

Finally, of course, he relied on what he learned in that poetry class so very long ago.

“He never wrote trying to please whatever checklist or genre,” Taylor said of Hugo. “He just wrote from his heart.”

, DataTimes