Peter Cattaneo Talks About Balancing Comedy and Pathos in “The Penguin Lessons”

EXCLUSIVE:Directing a penguin in a feature film is no easy feat, but it turns out that penguins are a great source of unscripted comedic moments. That’s what director Peter Cattaneo discovered while making his latest feature, Penguin Lessonswhich will have its world premiere tonight (Friday) at the Toronto International Film Festival in the Galas section. (Check out the exclusive clip from the film above.)

“It became clear to me early on that you can have a plan and the penguin will do whatever it wants,” Cattaneo says of the Steve Coogan-helmed project, in which his character Tom unexpectedly finds himself pulled into caring for a penguin.

“In the early stages of filming, we just had to go with the flow. Steve was very good at adapting to whatever was happening at the time. There was a really great moment where the penguin takes a dump, but it just wasn’t in the script, but Steve improvised and we kept that. There were these great moments that weren’t in the script and would never have worked unless they happened unexpectedly.”

In the moving film, which is based on the true story and memoir of the same name by Tom Michell, Coogan plays Tom, a disillusioned Englishman who travels to Argentina to work as an English teacher at a prestigious boarding school. With political turmoil all around him and his class full of hopeless teenagers, Tom expects his life couldn’t get any more hectic—that is, until he takes a trip to neighboring Uruguay and inadvertently gets sucked into caring for a penguin he rescues from an oil-stained beach. Jonathan Pryce (Two popes) plays the role of the school principal.

Full of temperament Director Cattaneo is directing from a screenplay adapted by Jeff Pope, while 42’s executives/producers Ben Pugh, as well as Rory Aitken, Andy Noble, Adrian Guerra and Robert Walak are producing.

Cattaneo was drawn to the project because of the unexpected bond between the grumpy man and the penguin amid the unrest in 1970s Argentina. “There’s a great flavor to that movie because, yes, there’s a sweet penguin in it, but Steve’s character, Tom, has this irony and this down-to-earthness that I think balances it out really well.”

He adds: “The innocence of the Penguin and the fact that he takes this character from being cynical and emotionally closed off to being awake, in many ways gave us the key to a pretty good character that could really give the whole thing some kind of emotional backbone. And the best thing about Steve is that he can be miserable but still be funny.”

It turns out that penguins have a very limited shooting window, as they have a mating season and a malting season, so scheduling the project’s shoot had to fit between those two seasons. “They’re more restrictive than the stars,” Cattaneo jokes.

Working with some of France’s top animal trainers, Cattaneo recalls the first time he met some of the animals, saying, “They were all wobbling in a parking lot in Leon, France, and they were so cute, but then you throw them into this pool of water and suddenly they glide so beautifully—it was really deep. I knew we had to capture that because watching them go from wobbling to swimming is just a miracle.”

While the relationship between man and penguin is at the heart of the story, the film is set against the backdrop of Argentina’s “Dirty War,” during which the military, security forces, and death squads hunted down political dissidents believed to be aligned with socialism following a 1976 coup. An estimated 22,000 to 30,000 people were killed or missing.

“It’s a period in history that is still incredibly painful for Argentines,” Catteneo says. “Even when I was there, doing research, they found the remains of a missing person, and those remains were given to her family so she could have a proper burial.”

For Catteneo and the team, it was important to drip-feed the story. “We didn’t want the audience to be disoriented, but more intrigued by the historical elements,” he says. “We wanted them to understand enough of the story that maybe they didn’t feel the need to Google the coup, but if they wanted to know more, they could. It was just trying to find the human story in this political story, and we focused more on the themes of imprisonment, isolation and protests, and at what point does someone stand up and say something.”

Lionsgate has picked up U.K. rights to the project, with Rocket Science handling international sales. CAA Media Finance is handling domestic sales.