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Henry Poole is done with life. Dealt one blow too many, he lives in solitude, drowning his sorrows in vodka and Krispy Kremes, waiting for death to come. But the caring characters around him—with names like Hope and Dawn and Patience—keep crashing his pity party. So does a stain on his house, a stain that looks a lot like the face of Jesus.

That's the storyline in Henry Poole Is Here, a sweet, quirky and uplifting film opening this week.

That's also, in some ways, the storyline for director Mark Pellington, who suddenly lost his wife four years ago to complications from a ruptured spleen. Pellington (The Mothman Prophecies and music videos for Bruce Springsteen, U2, Pearl Jam, and more) was 42 at the time—and left alone with a 2½-year-old daughter, Isabella. There were days when Pellington wanted to end it all, but Isabella and others who loved him gave him the hope to carry on.

Pellington on the 'Henry Poole' set

Today, Pellington describes himself as "a changed man." He'll never get over losing his wife at such a young age (she was 42), but says he's graduated from darkness into light—and he wants that to show in his filmmaking. Thus he's doing more positive—and "less nihilistic," he says—music videos and movies, particularly U23D (which he co-directed) and now Henry Poole, based on a script by Albert Torres and starring Luke Wilson. The film, made in 30 days for a modest $7 million, "is a small movie with big ambitions thematically," says Pellington.

We recently chatted with the director about Henry Poole and his own rocky journey.

The film includes themes of hope and redemption in the wake of despair and depression. That's almost your life story, isn't it?

Mark Pellington: I read the script before my wife passed away, and I thought it was charming and funny. But when you go through an event like that, where it really shakes up your beliefs, you're both angry and questioning about all things. So when you decide to reenter the world of work—which has always been a spiritual thing for me, because work and life and art and creation are all kind of the same—you're a different person.

And when you do a movie, it's always a really meaningful task because you invest so much of your soul into it. So when I reread the script, I just thought it spoke to the range of emotions that I wanted to throw into in the making of a movie, as opposed to something nihilistic or really, really dark. I just felt that there was a lot in the script [for a good movie]. The core story was the same as the original script, but we added a lot in the finished film—some ironic, quirky shadings to show the heart and soul of the relationship between the characters who were all experiencing loss in one way, shape or form. That's what interested me, and that's what I could connect to. But in no way is it my story. It's Albert's script and Albert's story. Yet I was able to, as a person and a filmmaker, gravitate toward it because of the characters and Henry's journey.

Albert's original screenplay was called Stain, and in the film, Henry claims that the apparition is just that. So, is it an apparition, or a stain?

Pellington: On one level it is a stain, and on another, it is an appearance. To Esperanza [Henry's Catholic neighbor], it appears to her as the face of Jesus, and to Henry it only appears to just be a water stain. But what was it really? A miracle or a mistake? That's really left up to the audience. That's true of any work of art, or any piece of music—everybody brings their own life experience to it, and with that, their own sense of faith, belief, spirituality, religious inclinations. Everybody brings their own perspective to it.

I'm not Catholic, and I wasn't about to invest my own spiritual or religious beliefs into it. I was telling the story and depicting the characters with just as much honesty and truth as I could. Some people are going to say it's a dogmatic, Catholic film. But that's their opinion. It's art, and any time you get into religion or politics, you're never going to please everyone. We're just trying to tell the story.

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