René Balcer visits Concordia

He also regaled audience members by recounting his persistence in the face of a stingy equipment manager who often needed to be bribed to borrow cameras.

“You had to develop strategies to get around him or cajole him just to get your equipment to get your project done,” he said. “I learned to never take ‘no’ for an answer.”

Fresh out of Concordia, Balcer flew out to Hollywood and through fellow graduate Nicolas Zavaglia, BA 77, met maverick American filmmaker Monte Hellman. Balcer began an apprenticeship with Hellman that eventually led him to an opportunity to write a script for Francis Ford Coppola’s Zoetrope Studios.

Although he was influenced by the likes of Scorsese, Goddard and the French New Wave, Balcer recounted how the film industry in the late 1970s seemed to be all about Star Wars and other epic action films, which is why he gravitated towards television.

“Luckily, TV picked up the slack and by the ’80s, with shows like Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere and others in the ’90s, I thought I’d better not be such a snob — TV could be really interesting,” he said.

He would soon help make television even more interesting. Balcer’s involvement with Law & Order helped change the standard for television drama.

Some of his proudest accomplishments revolve around controversial episodes he wrote for the last season of Law & Order, including ones about abortion and the American government’s use of torture.

In response, the press accused the show of being either too left wing or too right wing — which Balcer admits he found quite satisfying.

Balcer also discussed some of his more recent artistic undertakings, including the Tobacco Project Virginia, his collaboration with Chinese artist Xu Bing; The No Name Painting Association, a documentary he produced about renegade Chinese artists during the cultural revolution; and an opera based on the relocation of the Inuit on Ellesmere Island.

His most recent project is a documentary about Jewish refugees in Shanghai during the Second World War.

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