‘Hunger Games’ director Gary Ross screens ‘Pleasantville’ at Ebertfest

CHAMPAIGN-URBANA, ILL. | Gary Ross took a break from post-production on his new film “Ocean’s 8” to fly in specially for a Saturday afternoon screening of his 1998 film “Pleasantville.” Chaz Ebert, introducing Mr. Ross, related how important it was for the writer/director to make the trip in.

“Roger was an early proponent of the movie when it first came out,” Mr. Ross said before the screening.

He related receiving a call from Roger Ebert not long after the film came out to discuss why he had written the dark comedy.

“I hadn’t seen this in 15 years, so it was a really great experience,” he said. “This is a big deal for me, as it is for you.”

“Pleasantville” stars Tobey Maguire and Reese Witherspoon as suburban siblings David and Jennifer, who are magically transported into the fictional town of Pleasantville, the setting for a “Leave It to Beaver”-style 1950s sitcom. In Pleasantville, husbands and wives have separate beds, sex is nonexistent and firefighters only rescue cats from trees. David and Jennifer inadvertently bring change to the town, whose residents begin morphing from black-and-white to color.

“This was my critical look at nostalgia,” Mr. Ross said. “In every era there is always someone trying to ’make America great again,’” he said, mocking President Trump’s campaign slogan. “It’s mythmaking in order to avoid the unpleasantness of life,” he said of false nostalgia such as that in the TV shows that “Pleasantville” parodies.

“Although we were a progressive household … I remember my mom struggling to have a career in midlife,” Mr. Ross said of his home life growing up in the 1950s before the feminist movement. His father, Arthur A. Ross, was a “graylisted” screenwriter, who was often shunned for his political beliefs.

“We derive strength from our pluralism, not our conformity,” Mr. Ross said of the message he was trying to impart in the film. “We can be so afraid of the chaos of being free that we keep ourselves in a kind of a prison.”

He said he most related to the arc of William H. Macy, who plays George, a positive but uptight Pleasantville father who lacks passion and expects his wife Betty (Joan Allen) to have dinner ready as soon as he gets home from work.

As more and more of Pleasantville’s citizens turn into color, the black-and-white townspeople begin shunning the “colored,” thereby allowing Mr. Ross to use that narrative device as an allegory against racism and a rejection of “false utopia.”

“We’re afraid of the things outside of ourselves,” he said, saying that the civil war within Pleasantville takes to task humanity’s innate fear of “the other.”

When asked about the conversation he had with Roger Ebert not long after the film premiered in 1998, Mr. Ross said he wasn’t quite sure he had “the vocabulary” at the time to answer Ebert’s questions.

“I think it’s about more than TV. It’s about how we confront real emotions that we may be afraid of,” Mr. Ross said. “It’s about how we change, tolerance, openness and empathy, and a lot of things that are pretty fundamental.”

Mr. Ross warned that history continues to repeat itself, with fear and prejudice continual conditions of human history.

“The ephemeral nature of what makes life worth living is the beautiful part,” he said of the film he made when he was 38 years old. Mr. Ross has since directed “Sea Biscuit” and the first “Hunger Games” film.

Mr. Ross also discussed a tricky shot following a bowling ball in the fictional universe as well as leaving some narrative threads open, such as Miss Witherspoon’s character remaining in Pleasantville while Mr. Maguire’s character returns to the real world.

Mr. Ross said he purposely ignored “the rules” of Hollywood screenwriting that all loose ends must be wrapped up, and the fantastical nature of “Pleasantville” allowed him to do so.

“Everyone is free to imagine” how things ended after the closing credits rolled, he said.

Paul Walker, the “Fast and the Furious” star who died in 2013 in an accident, had a small role in “Pleasantville.”

“It was great to see him up there again,” Mr. Ross said.

“Part of pluralism is that we all have to get into this tidy mess together,” Mr. Ross said of the current cultural atmosphere of division. “We need to stop having affirmation of our own point of view all the time.”

At the time of its production, “Pleasantville” had more CGI shots than any film in history up to that time. To come back and look at films years later, Mr. Ross said, was a wonderful experience.

“There are a couple films of mine I won’t see again,” he said, but “Pleasantville” is not one of those.