Montage Magazine Fall 2011

Display until December 31, 2011

fall 2011 / can$6.50 us$5.00

fall 2011 MONTAGE published by the directors guild of canada / www.dgc.ca

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A FULLY INTEGRATED

The Filmmakers’ Lounge and the Sales & Industry Office are now at one location.

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ank b a i t o Sc eatres Th

HYATT REGENCY

TIFF Lightbox Bell

PLUS you can still expect onsite registration, promotional agencies, meeting spaces and Wi-Fi.

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tiff.net/industry/registration

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Look forward to a higher level of hotel service, decreased room rates and added food services at the Hyatt Regency, our host hotel.

REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN!

Street John

FESTIVAL CENTRE

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t s e W et e r t S ng

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by MATTHEW HAYS Take This Waltz is the buzz film of the summer, even before TIFF. Hays profiles Canada’s ultimate female hyphenate: director-writer-star Sarah Polley.

IN CONVERSATION WITH… LEONARD FARLINGER

by MARC GLASSMAN The director of I’m Yours, the hot new film starring Rossif Sutherland and Karine Vanasse, Farlinger is a partner with Jennifer Jonas in New Real Films. Together, they’ve produced films by Bruce McDonald (Trigger), Reg Harkema (Leslie, My Name is Evil) and Bruce La Bruce (Otto). Farlinger talks about life as a director, producer and Canadian film advocate.

GERRY BARR: MAN FROM ‘ S T E E L’

by SUZAN AYSCOUGH Profiling the new DGC president, who is a labour leader and an award-winning humanitarian.

AVI FEDERGREEN: PASSION AT E P R OD U C E R

by ADAM NAYMAN Veteran DGC production manager Federgreen is making the move to becoming a major indie producer.

Nayman profiles a filmmaker on the rise.

ON LOCATION: TWO TOP ALBER TA LOCAT ION M A N A GE R S TA KE U S FOR A WH IR L

by NANCY LANTHIER Robert Hilton and Edsel Hilchie are the subjects of Lanthier’s dual profile. They’ve worked (separately) on such productions as The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Brokeback Mountain—as well as TV and commercials. And they have stories to tell…

GOING FOR BROKE: A NE W B R E E D OF C A N A D IA N E N T R E P R E N E U R S IS CREATING MOVIES OUT S ID E OF T H E S YS T E M

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Viewpoint

Listen Up!

by Paul Gratton Canadians are embracing Netflix but what’s it doing to our media industries?

Gratton warns us of a digital Trojan Horse.

DGC Awards Celebrates a Decade

Parting Shot

by Sturla Gunnarsson

Editor’s note

by Marc Glassman

by Marc Glassman Looking at 10 great years of awards shows.

10 14 21 25 28 32 37

GOOD GOLLY, MISS POLLE Y!

by Mark Pancer On George Bloomfield.

Photos courtesy of: New Real Films (I’m Yours); Louisa Bloomfield

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CONTENTS

S A R A H PO L L E Y T hi s p a ge : I ’ m Yo u rs L EO N A R D FA R L I N GE R (C an a d a , 2 01 0 ) O pp o s i te pa g e : G e o rg e B l oo m fi e ld o n th e s e t o f A f ri c a n J o ur n ey (C an a d a , 1 99 0 )

co ver pho to:

D I RE C T O R S G U I L D O F C A N A D A

pub lished b y t he

CHRIS CHAPMAN F al l 20 1 1 , M o n ta g e

co ver pho tog raphy:

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FEATURES

by JANIS COLE Laurie Colbert and Dominique Cardona made Margarita without grants, distribution or an established producer. No, they’re not Americans; they’re feisty Canadians who want to make films their own way, without government support. Cole investigates them and others who are working outside of the system: Velcrow Ripper, Penelope Buitenhuis, Daniel Cockburn and Ingrid Veninger.

WHO’ S RUNNING THE SHO W?

by ALLAN TONG Tassie Cameron (Rookie Blue) and Jana Sinyor (Being Erica), that’s who. Tong finds out what two of the hottest Canadian showrunners do to turn their TV series into hits.

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DIRECTORS GUILD OF CANADA publisher

Sturla Gunnarsson, president Gerry Barr, national executive director & ceo mail@dgc.ca associate publisher DGC NATIONAL 111 Peter Street, Suite 600 Toronto, ON M5V 2H1 Tel: 416-482-6640 Fax: 416-482-6639 Toll Free: 1-888-972-0098 E-mail: mail@dgc.ca www.dgc.ca

Alejandra Sosa content manager

Peter Murphy editor

Marc Glassman art director

Alexander Alter copy editor

Deanna Wong ALBERTA DISTRICT COUNCIL 2526 Battleford Avenue, S.W., Suite 133 (Building B8, Currie Barracks) Calgary, AB T3E 7J4 Tel: 403-217-8672 Fax: 403-217-8678 E-mail: dgc@dgcalberta.ca www.dgcalberta.ca ATLANTIC REGIONAL COUNCIL 1657 Barrington Street, Suite 408 Halifax, NS B3J 2A1 Tel: 902-492-3424 Fax: 902-492-2678 E-mail: inquiries@dgcatlantic.ca www.dgcatlantic.ca BRITISH COLUMBIA DISTRICT COUNCIL 1152 Mainland Street, Suite 430 Vancouver, BC V6B 4X2 Tel: 604-688-2976 Fax: 604-688-2610 E-mail: info@dgcbc.com www.dgcbc.com MANITOBA DISTRICT COUNCIL The Union Centre, 202B-275 Broadway Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3C 4M6 Tel: 204-940-4301 Fax: 204-942-2610 E-mail: dgc@dgcmanitoba.ca www.dgcmanitoba.ca ONTARIO DISTRICT COUNCIL 111 Peter Street, Suite 600 Toronto, ON M5V 2H1 Tel: 416-925-8200 Fax: 416-925-8400 E-mail: odc@dgcodc.ca www.dgcodc.ca QUEBEC DISTRICT COUNCIL 4200 Saint-Laurent Blvd., Suite 708 Montréal, PQ H2W 2R2 Tel: 514-844-4084 Fax: 514-844-1067 E-mail: cqgcr@cam.org www.cqgcr.ca SASKATCHEWAN DISTRICT COUNCIL 2440 Broad Street, Suite #W213B Regina, SK S4P 4A1 Tel: 306-757-8000 Fax: 306-757-8001 E-mail: sk.dgc@sasktel.net www.dgcsask.com

proofreader

Daniel Glassman photo research

Radheyan Simonpillai advertising sales

Merrie Whitmore Directors Guild of Canada mwhitmore@dgcodc.ca Montage is published twice a year by the Directors Guild of Canada. www.dgc.ca montage@dgc.ca Undelivered mail returned to: Directors Guild of Canada, National Office 111 Peter Street, Suite 402 Toronto, Ontario M5V 2H1 Tel. 416-482-6640 Fax 416-482-6639 Please direct all editorial inquiries and letters to the editor to: montage@dgc.ca Letters may be edited for length and clarity.

Please include your name, address and daytime phone number.

Montage is available free of charge to all DGC members. Copies of Montage are available for $6.50 from the publisher and news outlets across Canada.

Canadian subscriptions $12, United States US $15 and International CDN $39 For subscription information or to order back issues, please contact DGC Montage.

Subscriptions: montage@dgc.ca All contents are copyright 2011 DGC. All rights are reserved and contents, in whole or in part, may not be reprinted without permission. Points of view expressed in Montage do not necessarily represent those of the DGC. The publisher assumes no responsibility for advertisers’ claims, unsolicited art, photographs, manuscripts or other materials.

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viewpoint As we approach our annual gathering of the tribes at TIFF and the DGC Awards, it’s worth remembering that the works being fêted are the result of both their creators’ vision and hard work, and of the social context from which they emerge. No amount of talent and ingenuity will get a film made if the resources aren’t in place to support it. Artists also live in the real world, where bills need paying and children need braces.

This is where the guild comes into the equation. Creativity lies entirely with our members but the DGC exists to foster the conditions in which that inspired inventiveness can flourish. The DGC’s mission is to advocate on behalf of our members’ creative, moral and economic rights. This takes many forms, from lobbying for government policies that benefit Canadian film and television to negotiating and administering a collective agreement to providing health, welfare and retirement plans for our members.

While we have a paid, professional staff in place across the country, it’s the elected leadership of the organization that provides the direction. These are the people who care enough about the guild to invest their time and energy to try and make it the best organization possible.

Two and a half years ago, the all-elected DGC representatives from both the national and district councils met in Toronto to begin the process that was to become our current strategic plan. There was no predetermined agenda other than to gauge the thoughts, feelings and insights of our elected representatives from coast to coast.

Remarkably, the themes that emerged were consistent across the board, amongst all craft, district council and national representatives. They told us that what’s most important to them about the guild is that it is a national organization representing creative people across the country. They expressed concerns about the Balkanization of our industry, and encouraged us to achieve greater collaboration between National and the District Councils. It was crucial to them that we bring a more national perspective to our collective agreement and to take steps to ensure that the organization remains sustainable in the face of massive political, economic and technological change. Thus began the drafting of our strategic plan and implementation of the most significant reforms this organization has seen since its inception 50 years ago.

The plan was ambitious but I’m proud to report that the process is well under way. As of August, DGC National and DGC Ontario have moved into a joint office and consolidated their administrative functions. DGC National has recruited Gerry Barr (profiled in this issue) as CEO. Gerry has a long history of value-based advocacy and is our first CEO ever with an organized-labour background. Preparations for the next round of collective bargaining are underway and each of the regional councils has asked DGC National to coordinate the process. Alberta is in discussions with B.C. to provide business and administrative support, Manitoba and Quebec have stepped back from the fiscal brink and the organization as a whole has achieved the integration, depth and capacity that will allow it to survive and thrive into the next decade.

What’s most exciting to me about this process is the sheer quality, talent and commitment of the individuals who have run for elected office in this organization for the past two years and the results their efforts have yielded.

Sincerely

STURLA GUNNARSSON PRESIDENT, DIRECTORS GUILD OF CANADA

editor’s note It’s always exciting to put out an issue of Montage as the Canadian festival season begins. We’re pleased to highlight DGC directors Sarah Polley and Leonard Farlinger, whose new features will premiere at TIFF and doubtless play at festivals across the country this fall.

Award-winning writer Matthew Hays is rarely effusive so when he sent an email saying how pleased he was with his “awesome” interview with Ms. Polley, we knew that his profile of her would be superb. And it is.

It was my pleasure as Montage’s editor to conduct a career-to-date interview with director-producer-writer Leonard Farlinger. His film I’m Yours should excite audiences this season and it was fascinating to delve into his creative process.

Suzan Ayscough, another veteran journalist, relished her assignment to write about Gerry Barr, whose values of social justice and working for the rights of labour organizations matched her own. All DGC members—and anyone interested in Canada’s media industries—should find her profile of him to be fascinating reading.

The DGC and Montage isn’t just about directors: its membership includes production designers, ADs, accountants, editors and many others. We aim to cover the entire industry. Articles on location managers Robert Hilton and Edsel Hilchie, showrunners Tassie Cameron and Jana Sinyor, indie directors (and outside-the-box funding strategists) Laurie Colbert, Ingrid Veninger and Velcrow Ripper and producer—and DGC stalwart—Avi Federgreen give a depth and resonance to this issue.

As always, I wish you “bon cinema” and hope you enjoy Montage!

MARC GLASSMAN EDITOR

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by PAUL GRATTON For all our constant lobbying for increased broadcaster expenditures and exhibition requirements on Canadian television channels, the very existence of a relatively vibrant and healthy Englishlanguage independent production sector in this country is something of a miracle, especially given our close proximity to the economic and cultural behemoth that resides just south of us.

The volume of Canadian production surpassed $2.3 billion in 2010 and it created 54,700 fulltime jobs (according to Profile 2010, published by the CMPA [Canadian Media Production Association], the APFTQ [Association des producteurs de films et de télévision du Québec] and Heritage Canada).

Quite remarkable!

This is a testament to the efficacy of public policy initiatives that have been put in place over the years, most of them designed to protect the integrity of the Canadian rights market: simultaneous substitution, tax disincentives aimed at cross-border media advertising, various funds available only for Canadian productions, provincial and federal tax incentives, and broadcasters’ conditions of licence. According to Profile 2010, fully 72 percent of the financing

for Canadian content comes from a combination of television licence fees, various tax credits and the Canada Media Fund. About a third of the hours spent watching television in Canada goes to Canadian content. Compare this to the unregulated theatrical marketplace for feature films, where Canada only attained 3.3 percent of the box office in the most recent figures released by Telefilm, with most of that number coming from Quebec.

Yes, much as we hate to acknowledge it at times, regulation works! And it is one of the reasons many of us have managed to sustain careers against somewhat imposing odds within the creative industries in this country.

But now we note the inescapable migration of audiences from conventional analogue platforms to digital over-the-top (OTT) services, i.e., programming sources that come into our homes via the Internet. Most of these are foreign in origin (YouTube, Facebook, Netflix) and have no Canadiancontent obligations.

The consumer trends are startling in terms of the speed with which new delivery systems are being adopted, with many especially younger consumers wanting their content how they want it, when they want it and on the device of their choosing. But are the OTTs a real threat to this Canadian system we have constructed over the years in order to ensure that Canadian voices have a space within which to express themselves? fall 2011

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It was in 2009 that the CRTC (Canadian Radiotelevision and Telecommunications Commission) concluded that Internet programming was complementary to conventional broadcasting activities in this country and did not require regulation. Now, a mere two years later, they have called for comments and updated research on these same matters. What has changed in so short a period? The answer is Netflix.

In less than a year of operating a monthly subcription-based service in this country, Netflix has amassed what will be over one million subscribers by the end of the summer, a threshold that it took Canadian premium pay television over two decades to attain. Its annual revenues from Canada next year will be over $100 million, an amount not quite yet equal to but fast approaching the annual revenues of First Choice or Movie Central.

Its monthly subscription fee is $7.99 a month, as op-

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posed to the roughly $15 a month charged for a Canadian premium pay service.

Its Canadian content levels are well below 10 percent as opposed to the 25 percent or more required of Canadian operators, not to mention the 30 percent of revenue that Canadian pay licence-holders must expend on Canadian content.

Some distributors have welcomed Netflix into Canada, as it provides new sales opportunities for hard-to-sell catalogue material, and the CBC has sold it a package of current Cancon television series to which it owns multiplatform rights. But none of this money is returning to the content-creation community; none of it is going into new production. Net­flix Canada has no Canadian office: it is programmed by two people out of their head office in Los Gatos, Calif.

Still, if it were just a catalogue play, one might buy the argument that OTTs

such as Netflix are not competing directly with Canadian broadcasters.

But Netflix changed the nature of the game when it started acquiring first-run pay windows. It shares pay windows for Twentieth Century Fox titles with Superchannel, and dayand-dates (premieres on the same day) for certain selected Mongrel Media ‘art-house’ productions with theatrical release and premium pay-television release. It might be argued that these efforts serve only to help prop up an ailing pay operator in Canada. Eyebrows were raised, however, when they recently announced their first pre-buy of a U.S. series, House of Cards, starring Kevin Spacey, for all television platforms.

In Canada, Netflix recently crossed a line when they acquired the full pay windows to a Paramount Pictures output deal.

That means they bought exclusive pay windows for our territory and took the product off the market.

Yes, this summer’s current Transformers blockbuster movie will premiere in Canada exclusively on Netflix.

With huge cashflow and deep market capitalization, Netflix and its ilk have the potential to outbid Canadian broadcasters on a variety of first-window rights. And those rights that have formed the essential underpinning of our cross-subsidization model for Canadian content creation (protect the Canadian broadcaster’s investment in foreign acquisition, in exchange for which they accept an obligation to exhibit and spend a regulated amount on Canadian content).

subsidized as a percentage of cable/satellite revenue in this country, the negative financial impact on domestic content production attributable to the arrival of unregulated but fully competitive OTT services in Canada is imminent and potentially very significant.

It will take a year or two before your average pay subscriber notices that key titles are missing from their premium pay subscriptions (there are only five major studios, and two of them are already providing premium pay windows on Netflix). Canadian pay operators account for 90 percent of the financing that comes from the entire Canadian television sector for the financing of English‑language feature films, so Netflix’s incursion into Canada could have a fairly rapid negative effect on our always fragile feature film industry. There is also concern that some segments of the audience will either drop cable and get most of their TV from the Internet (with maybe rooftop antennae for sports and local news) in order to save money (cord-cutting) or at least start trimming their monthly cable/satellite bills by eliminating some specialty service bundles (cord-shaving). As most broadcasters have expenditure requirements expressed as a percentage of revenue, and most of the Canada Media Fund is

The time to call on the CRTC for regulation is now. Within five years we may find ourselves with a majority of viewers accessing most of their content on the Internet, essentially opting out of the Canadian broadcasting and distribution systems that we have spent decades building up. It is therefore essential that this consumer activity be folded in as a complement to our present system of subsidy, and not be allowed to eat away at its very foundations.

Netflix argues that it is only a year old in Canada, and the OTT subscription industry is still embryonic. Yet it is already buying up rights to programs that would otherwise be going to our indigenous licenced broadcasters and, by providing new competition, driving up costs even more for acquiring American product.

Paul Gratton is the former vice-president of Bravo!, Space, Drive-In Classics, Book TV, Sex TV and numerous other CHUM television properties. He has served as chair of the Canadian Television Fund (CTF) and the Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television (ACCT) and currently serves as chair for the First Weekend Club (FWC). He has consulted for the CMPA, the DGC, APFTQ, Bell, Télévision Quatres Saisons, APTN and Première Bobine, to name a few.

by MARC GLASSMAN One of the key events in Toronto’s fall cultural calendar is the awards night devised by the Directors Guild of Canada (DGC). Over the past decade, this validation of Canadian cinema and television has grown in size from the Boulevard Club to the Carlu to the Fairmont Royal York Hotel and in critical importance across the country. DGC president Sturla Gunnarsson’s comment is appropriate: “It is an honour to be a part of this organization and to lead the celebration of the best work created by DGC members last year.”

The ceremony, which will take place at the Royal York on October 29, offers prizes in 19 categories ranging from best feature film to the newly instituted best short and includes in its sweeping range the Allan King Award for best documentary, directors prizes in TV series, TV-movies and feature films, and six editing nods, three each in picture and sound. Lifetime achievement awards are being given to three industry giants, veteran directors Ted Kotcheff (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, Joshua Then and Now) and George Mihalka (My Bloody Valentine, La Florida) and the original executive director of the Canadian Film Development Corporation (now Telefilm Canada), Michael Spencer.

CBC personality Jian Ghomeshi hosts the DGC Awards this year and is a booster of Canadian film and its celebration. “The story of Canadian film and

television is its directors and the rest of the people behind the scenes…in the popular sense, we think of the directors as the stars, not the actors,” says the affable host of Q on CBC Radio One.

Comparing the DGC Awards to the music industry’s Junos and the literary Gillers, Ghomeshi observes, “Part of cultivating a strong and proud industry is by events like the DGC Awards that send a message about the wealth of talent that makes work here.” He goes on: “We’ve seen Canadian film become more international, in terms of where they’re shot and who’s making the movies. The films are more accessible and popular.

The critical shift has been impressive.”

Avi Federgreen has seen the transformation take place, and as the chair of the DGC awards committee, couldn’t be happier. “We’re the talk of the town,” he says to Montage with undisguised glee.

“Alan Goluboff [then the DGC president] wanted to start an awards show,” he recalls. “I thought it was a great idea. I was the original chair; I’m in my 11th year now. The same committee—Donna Noonan, Charles Wilkinson, Stephen Surjik, James Bredin—has been working together with the same passion for all that time.

We wanted to make this the best awards show in the country and I think we have. We’ve gone through a number of terrific people at the DGC who worked

on the show with us— from Carrie Sutherland to Cindy Goldrick to Lisa Mahal to, now, Alejandra Sosa. Our main technical person, Carmen Arndt, runs an awesome show.”

A former production manager and crew member, Federgreen loves the inclusive nature of the awards night. “We’re the only show that honours all our members including the ‘little people’: the ADs [assistant directors], the art department and the accountants.” He’s pleased that the ceremony allows time for guests to eat their meals: “It just makes everyone happier that they’re attending.”

One of this year’s key lifetime recipients is legendary filmmaker Ted Kotcheff, who is still producing Law & Order: SVU at 80. “It’s the biggest honour of all to be recognized by your peers,” says Kotcheff. “They’re directors and if they acknowledge you, that’s a great thing for me, especially because it’s in Canada. I am Canadian and never will be anything else. No matter where I go, I’m still a kid from Cabbagetown in Toronto. It’s in my soul; it’s indelible.”

While DGC attendees will appreciate the presence of Kotcheff and others, for Federgreen, this year’s show is “bittersweet.

It’s time for me to leave.

I’m producing films right now and my focus has to be on that.” There’s no doubt that the DGC will miss his contributions to the guild—and especially to the awards show.

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MISS POLLEY! 10

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by MATTHEW HAYS

It’s but days after Sarah Polley has put a lock on the final cut of her second feature, Take This Waltz, and she’s already dispelling rumours. No one’s seen it, and the film’s distributor, Mongrel Media, is restricting all advance press screenings until just before its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival.

But Polley’s already seen the film described as a “romantic comedy” on the Internet. “I’m very much hoping that goes away before the film opens,” she tells me. “If people show up expecting a romantic comedy, they’re going to be disappointed. That’s not what it is. It’s more of a romantic drama.”

Photography: Chris Chapman

GOOD GOLLY,

Sarah Polley on secondfeature syndrome, making Canadian film cool again and her romantic drama Take This Waltz

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“Having worked in Canadian film my whole life, I expected it would play for one week, maybe two, in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver” —Sarah Polley on her hopes for Away From Her And if anyone knows a thing or two about managing expectations, it would be Polley. The gifted actor—who has been performing since she was a child, working with everyone from Terry Gilliam to Atom Egoyan to John Greyson—found herself behind a massive success story with her own 2006 feature directorial debut, Away From Her. That film, about a couple (Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent) dealing with the wife’s advancing Alzheimer’s, got epic critical accolades and loads of awards (as well as sweeping the Genies, Christie won a Golden Globe for her performance, and there were two Oscar nominations).

“It was a great time, because I wasn’t attached to it,” Polley says now. “I had very realistic expectations for the film. Having worked in Canadian film my whole life, my expectations were that it would play for one week, maybe two, in Toronto, and hopefully for a week in Montreal and Vancouver. Those were my hopes—simply that my film would open. So I was able to just treat the whole thing as a really fun ride I wasn’t expecting to go on.”

And that, she says, “was the best possible way to experience that. Very little stress involved. I’ve tried to approach this film in the same way. It could go really well [or] it could end up like a lot of people’s second films. As long as it’s the film that I wanted to put out to the world, then there’s not a lot to be horrified by. I mean, I hope it does well for the investors’ sake, but so much of what happens now is out of your control anyway.”

It seems a mighty relaxed attitude, given the pressures Polley must be under. After all, given the success of feature number one, she is now about to become subject to second-feature syndrome. She laughs when I tell her she seems ludicrously Zen, given the circum-

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Polley says this bit of chiding on Pevere’s part led her to push aside the scripts she’d been reading. “I took what he’d said to heart.

I went back to a script I had been working on a few years earlier. I remembered that it was bringing me a lot of joy and happiness, and I wanted to focus on that. The best shot you have is to do something you believe in. I say that to anyone making their second film: make it what you really want, because the reviews are already written.”

As Polley began to write and rewrite, she knew the experience of making Take This Waltz was going to be quite a different one. After all, Away from Her had been based on a short story by celebrated Canadian author Alice Munro—an adaptation for which Polley received rave reviews.

“It’s a lot harder to love what you’re doing when it’s your own work,” she admits. “Away From Her was a joy, because even if I wasn’t confident about my own abilities, it was about Alice Munro’s.

So when there was a line or a moment from the story, I could cling to that as something I continued to love, because I felt her imprint more than mine. Whereas with this, I was kind of on my own, and it’s a lot harder to like the things that you write, as opposed to the work of one of your favourite authors. It’s harder to have confidence in it.”

The flip side of that was the thrill Polley reports feeling as she watched her own words come alive on set and, ultimately, on screen.

“You feel the intense privilege of making a film when it really is your idea from scratch, your words from scratch, and you’re seeing these amazing actors delivering those words and creating these images you

just came up with out of the darkness of your bedroom one night.

With that, you feel the privilege of what it means to be a filmmaker even more.”

Polley says she did not consciously seek out other cinematic models to guide her when conceiving of the film. “I’ve worked with some filmmakers who are literally looking at other films during a break in filming. You always feel like, ‘Are we here creating something or are we doing something that’s indicative of the other kinds of films you like?’ I’m really wary of referencing things too closely, but I know that I’m influenced heavily by Bergman movies—though you won’t see that influence with this film—and I love Woody Allen movies. John Cassavetes is someone else I’ve been influenced by. I don’t know that you’d look at the film and see that impact. But it could be obvious— sometimes it’s more obvious than you think.”

Polley does attribute much of her directorial skill to one person in particular: Atom Egoyan. “I probably can’t count the number of things I learned from Atom. I had been acting my whole life when I worked with him, and at that point I had absolutely no respect for film as a medium. I feel like he’s the reason why doing this has merit, why it’s interesting, and how I can contribute through art as well as political action. I began to see the value in it. He, for me, is the beginning of wanting to be a filmmaker. I don’t know that I’ve worked with many other filmmakers who treat people with such genuine respect and gentleness, constantly. It’s true about Atom.”

And Polley adds that this led to a sort of litmus test for filmmakers: do they make the Atom Egoyan Standard? “It makes your tolerance for people who don’t behave that way on the set really low, because you know it can be done. It then becomes difficult to understand the kind of megalomania that often comes with filmmakers, because you’ve worked with someone who’s made really great films without that.”

Polley says that some of her most profound revelations about screen acting arrived while working with Egoyan. “He always demands that there’s something going on beneath the surface of what someone’s playing, so that people are playing on many levels. That taught me to look for a depth and a bit of confusion and complexity to what actors are doing, and to try to create an environment where that can happen.”

The acting background has led Polley to believe she’s “really quite controlling. If I’m writing dialogue, I have too stringent a way of thinking how those lines are going to be said. I’ve got stuff in my head that’s hard to shake.

“Working with actors like Michelle Williams—she’s so great, what she ends up doing is far better than I’d imagined it. I don’t come up against myself with someone like that; I can let go. I would say that with all the actors in this film, they exceed what I imagined.

I learned that it’s fine to step back.”

When asked about the most rewarding part of making Take This Waltz, Polley also reverts to actor-speak. “I felt like with this film I was able to really be in the moment. I did not feel that with the first film. I felt like I was in a constant panic, every day. I don’t know if that was a function of it being my first film or the environment on the set, but with this film I felt like at least every couple of days I would have a moment where I’d look around and feel so grateful, and so lucky, and feel so alive, and be so happy to be there. Not caring about what came of it, but just being happy to be there. For that reason I have a lot of great memories of creating this film.

“Susan Cavan, who produced this film, created this environment where things were so organized and so calm, and people were so well taken care of that I was able to focus on making the film. That’s a really rare thing to get…anywhere. At no point did I feel that I was not getting really great advice or that my creative freedom was being threatened in any way.

“I had that experience on both films, and it’s one that most firstand second-time filmmakers don’t get—that I’m making my film, without compromise. To have that experience once in your career is really lucky. Twice is kind of unbelievable.”

While Polley is optimistic about the film she’s just completed, she’s also haunted by the fate of some projects she worked on and believed in but that somehow failed. In particular, she recalls Peter Wellington’s 2003 feature Luck, in which Polley played a woman

caught up in a relationship with a man tortured by a gambling problem (Luke Kirby). “The story of that film in many ways is the story of being an English-Canadian filmmaker. You make a film that’s as good as it possibly could have been, that actually could have got a pretty big audience, and it got great reviews. People who reviewed it in Variety and other American places said to me, ‘What the hell is wrong with the Canadian industry that you made this film that is so amazing, that actually has this actor who’s going to be a big star and it’s so obviously something that can get an audience, and it’s buried?’

The story of that film is so embarrassing.”

Polley insists that when people start talking about the kind of cinema we need in Canada, they usually just don’t know we already have it. “People say, ‘We need a Four Weddings and a Funeral in this country!’ We’ve already had those movies, but you’d never know, because the distributors don’t seem to have the confidence in the movies. Some of the distributors get behind their films, but it’s rare.”

Polley does say she sees a lot of reason for optimism in the Canadian film milieu. “I’m noticing a lot more younger women making movies. It feels like there’s an environment that’s more conducive to supporting women making films.”

But she also knows the film community faces an uphill battle now that the Conservatives have a majority. “The industry’s constantly under siege, and we’re always having to justify ourselves. Despite all the struggles, I think we have a creative freedom here that’s unmatched anywhere. With the Conservative government, a lot of us are thinking, ‘What happens if they pull the plug on funding?’ I guess then we all have to go to the States and make American films.

“But no matter how much money you make in the States, no matter how famous you get, you’re never going to have the feeling that the film is yours. And I think that it makes for better films when they are yours. I get why people are bitchy about subsidies: why should our tax dollars go to this? But our tax dollars go to bizarre things like subsidies to oil companies that already make billions in profit. The alternative [to no subsidies for films] is nothing [being produced]. I think as an industry we have to be confident in our arguments.

“It’s about whether or not we’re going to have a culture.”

A regular contributor to the Montreal Mirror, Matthew Hays has also written for The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Daily Beast and Cineaste. He teaches courses in film studies at Concordia University. He is the author of The View from Here: Conversations with Gay and Lesbian Filmmakers. fall 2011

Photography: Michael Gibson

Left and opposite page: Take This Waltz Sarah Polley (Canada, 2011)

stances. “I get stressed about the process. I get stressed if something’s not going right during filming—because you can do something about that. But getting stressed about what happens to a film once it’s made—it just seems to me [that] that’s a stress that’s self-destructive and doesn’t go anywhere.”

The $9 million feature Take This Waltz, starring Luke Kirby, Michelle Williams, Seth Rogen and Sarah Silverman, is a film about romantic confusion and people choosing between different kinds of love. If that sounds cryptic, it’s meant to. “I’d rather people show up and be surprised,” Polley says of the audience experience.

And while the shift in tone may seem significant, Polley insists there’s a connection between her two features. “Yes, this is very different than Away From Her, in many respects. The look of the film and its tone are different. “[But] In a strange way that’s probably not obvious to anyone but me, they’re companion pieces. They’re both looking at the nuances of marriage at totally different times in life. And the nuances of romance. So they’re looking at very similar things, but with people at very different levels of maturity.” (Both films also notably include infidelity as a major plot point.)

Polley says the major decisions around her second feature (Would she direct her own screenplay or adapt again? What kind of film would she choose?) came after some soul-searching. “I wanted to take a break from directing after Away From Her. I started thinking very strategically about what my next film should be and looked at some scripts from the States. I was getting a lot of advice. I think when you start thinking strategically like that, it’s probably the end of making good films. I was in that zone of uncertainty.”

Polley went back to acting, starring in Vincenzo Natali’s sci-fi feature Splice, in which she played opposite Oscar-winner Adrien Brody. Then, when Polley was walking down a Toronto street on a cold, snowy day, she bumped into veteran film critic and Toronto Star reporter Geoff Pevere. “He said, ‘Hey, Sarah, just so you know, it doesn’t matter what your next film is! The review will simply read, “Disappointing sophomore attempt,” and you can just insert the name of your film!’ And that was the best thing anyone could have said to me, because at that moment, I realized that for my second film, I had to just make the film I wanted to make. I mean, you’re going to get screwed anyway. So it had better be what you believe in. It was brilliant, in a way.

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LEONARD FARLINGER in conversation with…

by Marc Glassman

Tall, breezy and unassuming, Leonard Farlinger is no one’s idea of a movie mogul. A tour of New Real Films, the film company he runs with his business and life partner, Jennifer Jonas, underlines that impression. Located on the second floor above a restaurant in Toronto’s trendy Little Italy, its tight quarters filled with desks, computers and files, this office is intended for work, not to impress visiting plutocrats.

It’s a place well suited for Farlinger and Jonas, two “can-do” types who rallied the film community to create Trigger, the iconic rock drama that gave the dying Tracy Wright her last, and best, role. The duo pour the profits from their films back into New Real, making it one of the most prolific indie companies in the country. New Real has produced films by hot and contemporary directors like Bruce McDonald, Bruce LaBruce, Reg Harkema and, of course, Farlinger over the past decade. (See Filmography for details.)

Sitting on a couch in the company’s one informal communal room, with posters of New Real’s Leslie, My Name is Evil and Otto; or, Up with Dead People on the walls, director-writer-producer Farlinger is excited as he talks about his new directorial effort I’m Yours, a road film starring Rossif Sutherland and Karine Vanasse, which premieres at TIFF this fall—and his career to date.

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LF: Leonard Farlinger, director, writer and producer, New Real Films MG: Marc Glassman, editor, Montage Left: On the set of I’m Yours Leonard Farlinger (Canada, 2011) Below left: On the set of Trigger Bruce McDonald (Canada, 2010) Bottom left: Leonard Farlinger with Bruce McDonald Below: Farlinger with partner Jennifer Jonas (left) and actor Rachael Leigh Cook on the set of All Hat Leonard Farlinger (Canada, 2007)

LEONARD FARLINGER SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY I’m Yours (2011) Director, writer Trigger (2010) Producer Leslie, My Name is Evil (2009) Producer George Ryga’s Hungry Hills (2009) Executive Producer Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008) Co-Producer Toronto Stories (2008) Co-producer All Hat (2007) Director Monkey Warfare (2006) Producer In the Dark (MOW) (2004) Director The Perfect Son (2000) Director, writer Collateral Damage (1993) Director, writer, producer Kumar and Mr. Jones (1991) Producer

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Photographs, courtesy of New Real Films

Odyssey In August (1990) Producer

MG: Your new feature drama I’m Yours does a lot of the things that people complain Canadian films never do. It has a really engaging storyline. You could argue that it’s a genre film, a road film. It’s an edgy film about people falling in love. Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night won five Academy Awards in 1934 with a film about a couple falling in love while on the road. Were you thinking about that film and others while you were working on I’m Yours?

LF: It’s a bit of a hybrid and homage to a lot of my favourite films. I thought of Breathless, more than anything else, and Five Easy Pieces, but also Something Wild and all those berserk sexy ’80s movies. It’s got a piece of that and a piece of my own crazy personality.

One of my pet peeves about independent movies in general, and it’s not specifically a Canadian thing, is that sex and romance are always tainted. It’s always a mess. And that’s just not interesting to me.

I want people to have sex and to fall in love and for it to be okay.

There’s a lot of that in I’m Yours. And my one agenda, if I have no other agenda, is that I didn’t want it to make it cynical. People are afraid that if they don’t make cynical stories that they’ll end up with something cheesy and stupid and not worth watching. That’s the real challenge. That was my mandate in the film—to make a love story that isn’t cynical.

One of the things about all the movies Jennifer [Jonas] and I make [at New Real Films] is that, at their heart, there’s something redemptive about them. And that’s a choice. I have heard people say that the non-redemptive film is dead. Jennifer and I aren’t interested in having the kind of company that makes cold, contemptuous films.

Because it’s too long to go through the process of making a film just to come out with a cynical answer.

MG: For I’m Yours to work, there has to be some real chemistry happening with the leads. How did you make your choices, casting Rossif Sutherland and Karine Vanasse as your couple?

LF: I saw Rossif in High Life, talked to him on the phone and cast him first. I went down after that and looked at all these super-hot American broads. Then someone thought of Karine and I loved her in Polytechnique and Emporte-Moi. She flew to Toronto from Montreal and it was the first time she’d ever done an English audition. And I thought, “You know what? It’ll be so much cooler if my female lead was French and exotic.” It’s like having Julie Delpy opposite Ethan Hawke in those Linklater films or Melanie Laurent in Beginners. It’s a neat way to do it, you know? Then it’s different no matter what.

MG: Did you change the script after Rossif and Karine were cast?

LF: The two of them changed the film because of who they are as people. In a way, I’m Yours was much broader before they were cast.

It was much more ‘snappity-snap, funny line, funny line, funny line…’

We took all that out because what the actors were doing seemed so real. We started thinking when we were cutting the script, ‘Wow, it’s so cool when they don’t talk.’ When they just look at each other, you give the audience something to do. Instead of just sitting there, hearing people chat, going ‘I get it, I get it’... the audience can be surprised. Who cares what they’re saying, anyway? It’s what’s going on internally that’s more interesting anyhow.

Whether or not you like Karine and Rossif, they both have very internal lives. They’re amazing to hang out with and amazing to watch perform and amazing to watch imbuing themselves in the characters.

You give them ideas and they just start processing them. They’re re-

ally different. Karine is so experienced and knows how to hang out in front of the camera. She knows how to look beautiful and emotes to everything – basic stuff like waking up and being mad and being sexy and being passionate. That’s like breathing for her. She’s been doing it since she was 11 years old, right?

And Rossif…how many Canadian leading men can you even think of that can do what he does in the film? That could actually sit there and objectify themselves enough to think, ‘All right, I can sit here and look at this girl and have her want me’ and not get fucked up about it?

MG: It sounds like you ditched a lot of your script and allowed for quite a bit of improvisation. That shows a lot of confidence on your part.

LF: You do get more confident. And you need to come to the point of just loving being on set. It’s a great place to be when you’re a director. Just to be there and get to watch all of these talented people doing amazing shit for you. I really liked what Karine and Rossif were doing. Rossif is such a serious actor and at the same time is such a beautiful guy in real life so he brings that to the role. To Karine, I kept on saying ‘You know, Karine, you’re in this movie and it’s so real what you’re doing.’ Always encouraging her to be herself. And they really liked and respected each other, which made all the difference. I let the process guide the narrative and accepted that in a character film, if it’s not going to be genuine for them, then it isn’t going to be real or interesting for anyone.

MG: Do you think that changing the feel of the film will affect how I’m Yours does in the theatres?

LF: The whole thing about making these small independent movies is to try and figure out some way to make them different, because they aren’t going to be American movies. That’s the painful truth about what’s getting financed in Canada and what’s not getting financed now. I think what’s easier to finance are derivative Americanstyle movies. And to a certain extent that makes perfect sense. We’re developing some of those kinds of movies ourselves.

The goal we’re all trying to achieve is to generate real box-office numbers. It’s a laudable goal, but it might be ushering in the death of our national cinema. You remember that notion we had once upon a time that we were going to have a national cinema and national stars and that was the way to go? I think we’re skewing a bit more to wanting to make more American-like movies because they’re the ones that are successful. It’s probably not a good time to pitch a remake of Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould.

We feel that we should be emulating their style and their approach to making movies. It’s reasonable, I guess, in the homogenized theatrical world where we’re getting to be more and more the same.

And where independent films have huge Hollywood stars in them but are somehow still independent movies. It’s amazing how Hollywood has come back to the top, the way that it was in the mid-‘60s, before that revolution of filmmakers came along and changed everything.

Now Hollywood is back in control again.

MG: You feel that way even here in Canada?

LF: Totally. Look at the theatres, man. Do we have five percent English-Canadian movies in the theatres? Is it one percent? It’s nothing.

It’s because what is seen in most of our theatres is controlled.

And it’s a subtle control. It’s not like the old Jack Valenti model, where the Hollywood guys were screaming, ‘We won’t make any movies up in Canada anymore if we don’t get our way.’ The truth now is that it’s what people have been bred and educated to want to see and they don’t even know about other movies because they’re not being told to watch them.

MG: Do you feel limited by the kind of budgets you have to deal with here?

LF: I guess so. It’s an interesting question. When the story is right and the location is great, I like to feel [like], ‘Yeah, you don’t have to bring fall 2011

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which really don’t. It’s actually run completely parallel. There’s never really been a time when we haven’t been doing both: making movies and having a family. I find them…I wasn’t going to say interchangeable, but it’s always been a part of the dynamic.

All Hat Leonard Farlinger (Canada, 2007)

MG: Have there been tough times? Making films in Toronto can be very hard.

LF: Someone has to stay buoyant in the partnership or else…. It’s so insurmountable, sometimes, making the movies. People are always saying to us, ‘Oh, guys. You keep doing it. I can’t believe you keep doing it.’ Oh, god. We get beaten down so hard by so many people and we have to develop so many films to get one off the ground. We get so many more no’s than we get yeses. To others, it seems like we’re getting yeses all the time, but it’s not like that at all. It’s only because we do so many.

We’re developing seven movies now. What will the next movie be? I can’t even tell you for sure. And that’s the only way to do it in Canada. One for five is what François Girard told us. One for five. And I would say that’s probably true.

40 people out here and get everything lit up.’ You just need the actor and a camera and you can do anything.

It shouldn’t bother you, you know? It’s nice to have 35mm when you’re shooting people’s faces. And it’s nice when you shoot a low-budget movie to use 35mm because the budget doesn’t immediately reveal itself to the audience. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing for some movies!

You know, it was great for Monkey Warfare [directed by Reg Harkema, starring Don McKellar and Tracy Wright] to look so roughand-tumble. It really worked for the film [which was set in Toronto’s hard-up, bohemian Parkdale district], but sometimes you don’t want that to be the first reveal on a film. In I’m Yours, we start with some beautiful 35mm footage and a huge soundtrack [by] The National and then have some crazy crowd shots in New York, so you don’t have to go through that low-budget hurdle at the beginning of the movie.

You’re trying to seduce people right from the beginning, you know? We did the same thing in Trigger [directed by Bruce McDonald, starring Molly Parker and Tracy Wright]. We came out with that Hair song right away. And the reaction is, ‘Fuck, these guys could go anywhere with this movie.’ Those are little tricks we’ve learned along the way just to distract people from the fact that you’re asking them to pay the same price that they’re paying for big movies.

They shouldn’t have to be immediately indoctrinated into what lowbudget means.

I’m Yours Leonard Farlinger (Canada, 2011)

MG: Girard must have told that to you and Jennifer when you were at Rhombus. How did you move from there to the Canadian Film Centre?

LF: I directed a short educational film called Collateral Damage, which was about how the media manipulates us. We put it out in high schools…today, kids wouldn’t even listen to it. It’s like a foreign language, saying that they can’t believe what they see on TV, but back in those days people were interested in that sort of idea.

The Centre saw it and that got me in. I was accepted into the program as a producer. I was in there in their fourth session, with Ondaatje, John Greyson, Christina Jennings and David Wellington.

We had a stellar group. And I read 100, 150 scripts. By the end of that process, I was just so disillusioned. I hated everything I read. I thought producers were treated like shit.

While I was at the Centre, I was writing this 500-page journal because my brother was dying of AIDS. I wrote every day, very methodically, right up until he died. Then I adapted the journal and wrote my own script. Jennifer and I got it financed and made it. That was my first feature, The Perfect Son.

MG: You and your partner, Jennifer Jonas, produced Trigger, which has a reputation for being a quality effort made very quickly on a small budget. What was it like creating that film, especially given the circumstances that Tracy [Wright] had been told that she had so little time left to live?

LF: A lot of the drive for making Trigger came from Jen and me because we were so connected to Tracy. It was an especially collaborative thing between Jennifer and me, Daniel MacIvor and Bruce McDonald and his wife, Dany. The four of us asked ourselves, ‘How are we going to fuckin’ make this movie because we don’t have much time. We gotta do it now.’ In the end, the community matched our drive. I mean, everyone in the most beautiful way was part of making that film happen. Being at the centre of it was one of the most amazing experiences of my life.

MG: Was the dynamic between the brothers in the film like that between you and your brother?

LF: Oh yeah, totally; the dynamic is lifted exactly from it. Finding the tone in that movie—the gallows humour that flows through scenes [between actors Colm Feore and David Cubitt]—came from watching my brother do that as he was dying. He’d crack joke after joke. That was his way of coping with it.

I guess the thing that really worked in that film was—in terms of getting it financed—that when people read it, they would cry. That was one way to stand above the other first-time projects that were on the table. There was a truth to it. I would do a million things differently now, but there are moments between the two of them that still hold you. Colm and David seem really genuine. The two of them acted well together.

MG: What’s it like to be working creatively with Jennifer, who is your life and business partner?

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MG: Was that the first New Real film?

Photos courtesy of New Real Films

Leslie, My Name Is Evil Reg Harkema (Canada, 2009)

LF: Well, we’ve made kids together, not just films! All my friends say it’s an unfair advantage to have a great producer as a wife when you’re a writer and director. What attracted me to her is that she is so human and sweet and loving a person. Working on so many movies has not made her jaded.

For us it’s different than other couples. I met her on the film set of Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. I was her second A.D. We did three movies together at Rhombus after that. I showed her my short film and said, ‘Here, I’m working on a feature. Why don’t we make the feature together?’ And so there’s never really been a time that we haven’t worked together.

We set up a whole set of rules without saying so. At the same point that we established our emotional relationship—you know, those unwritten life partner rules that you make in the first five minutes of meeting somebody—we were busy setting up the same rules about how we’d make the films too: how we respect each other when we’re making the movies and which of our opinions matter and

LF: Yeah. At first, it was only going to be my movies. But then it became sort of awesome to have friends approach us and say, ‘Hey, you know, you want to make this movie with us?’ Reg Harkema, for example, had cut Childstar for Don [McKellar] and couldn’t finance Monkey Warfare anywhere. No one wanted to make it. And that’s why we made it ourselves for so cheap. Eventually people gave it money, after we’d finished it. It’s the same story with Trigger, in a way.

These films came to the end of their development train and couldn’t get distributors. We’d read the scripts and go ‘This is amazing. What the fuck is going on out there?’

We started Monkey Warfare again, with really nobody on board.

We took it one stage at a time: ‘Oh, hey. Here’s the promo.’ ‘Here’s

the first cut.’ And more people would come on board as we went along. It’s a bit of a harrowing way to do it. I wouldn’t advise that anyone do it that way because you do have to put up your own money and green-light yourself.

You do have to have a lot of confidence. And it is getting harder.

So you could even do it right, like we did with Monkey Warfare and Trigger and I’m Yours and you could still get nothing. You could end up not getting the money. There’s no real guarantee. So I absolutely, categorically do not advise anyone to do it the way we have.

Our other huge advantage in green-lighting our own projects is that we have an awesome crew of fellow filmmakers, friends in production and post-production, total professionals, who really help us and inspire us to make the films great.

MG: What excited you about All Hat, which became your second feature film?

LF: We were approached with an adaptation of a different novel by Brad Smith and although we passed on that one, we were interested in him. We contacted Brad and found out about a book he had almost completed. He sent us the manuscript for All Hat, which we liked a lot. We pitched it as a caper film and, over a long period of time, developed it and got a chance to make it. It was a movie that people could always see [being made] because the book was really nicely written. It was an easier pitch than a lot of films. We worked with Brad on his screenplay adaptation. I have different feelings about it. I love it. I’m proud of it. The cast was amazing. I think on the surface it’s an entertainment film, but I think on the other side of it, it wasn’t all that thematically cinematic.

What really attracted me to it was the opportunity to direct crazy horserace scenes, which are just amazing things to do. Just to be on a racetrack and have nine thoroughbreds fly out of the gates feels huge.

So the film looks cinematic. It’s just that the narrative doesn’t give enough space to the viewers to come up with their own idea of what’s going on. You don’t actually become invested in the inner lives of the characters because you’re being told what they’re doing.

What I’m learning in my own arc as a filmmaker is how you have to draw people in—how not to tell them, but to get them to participate in the narratives themselves. And I say that, and it’s sort of strange because Trigger is almost all talk and yet something happens in that film that draws you in. Maybe it’s in the quiet moments, when Tracy and Molly are driving around and they’re barely talking, that you actually start to participate.

What makes a movie a movie and what makes television TV is that one medium tells you what to think. And that’s TV. Like: ‘Oh, doctor, look at this.’ ‘Oh, yes. This is very unusual.’ ‘Well, do you think it’s a cancer?’ ‘Well, it could be.’ ‘No, I think it’s something we’ve never seen before.’ (Laughs)

You know, that’s TV. But films can’t do that. You’re not making a movie if you don’t leave something for the viewer to fill in.

MG: How did the distribution work for All Hat? LF: You know, with All Hat, we sold it everywhere. And that was the last gasp of the territorial model. It just was fabulous to see it in full operation, but the places where they paid, like, $50,000 five years ago, they pay $5,000 now. Think about that. What can you buy with $5,000? You can’t even buy a day’s worth of film stock. It’s changed so much. And to think that the change won’t influence the films that are getting made is a fantasy. Everything’s going to change. The subject matter, the films, the way they’re distributed, the way they’re seen…everything.

I wish that there could be more of a relationship between the distributors and the filmmakers and that that relationship could be recognized by the people that are giving the money—that they don’t defer totally to the expertise of the distributors, that they gave the filmmakers more room to come up with marketing strategies, too. I know why the people with the money say, ‘No, these guys [the distributors] are specialists.’ But inasmuch as we support creative new Canadian films, we have to support creative new strategies for releasing them. fall 2011

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community needs to promote the work. Our approach as a nation to promoting our films has to change.

MG: What’s the difference between being a director and being a producer?

Above: Monkey Warfare Reg Harkema (Canada, 2006) Left: Trigger Bruce McDonald (Canada, 2010)

LF: When you’re the director —particularly when you’re the writer/ director—you’re really responsible for being the author of everything that happens. When you’re the producer, you’re trying to bring everything that you have to offer to the film. When you’re a producer who’s a director, you can bring that experience of being in the authorship seat to the table and you can see how that fits in with what’s already been prescribed by the property that you’re trying to make.

People say “What does a producer do?” And I always answer: “Everything.” I try to bring my filmmaker self into the producer gig. I offer everything I know to the filmmakers who we work with, and if it’s too much for them, I step back. Usually I find them very encouraging. “No, no, no. I want you to do that. I want you to keep thinking with me.” And the reward they get for that is that they get somebody who’s watching their ass who’s really going to make sure that everything that they have in their mind, they can get—and that they get constantly challenged.

The bigger question is, which do I prefer? I prefer writing and directing.

MAN FROM ‘STEEL’

by SUZAN AYSCOUGH

MG: Is there a stamp that says New Real Films to you and Jennifer?

LF: I do think that Jennifer and I are starting to give the films we produce a certain kind of New Real vibe. We try to make them very emotional. It’s great to distract people at the beginning of the film and give them a higher-budget feel, but the most important thing about an independent movie is to make it genuinely, authentically emotional, which big American movies can’t really do.

I think we did it with Monkey Warfare. I don’t think it’s like any other movie that Reg has made. And I think the same thing of the film we produced with Bruce LaBruce, Otto; or, Up with Dead People.

It’s an oddly emotional movie for a political gay satirist (laughs). And I think that of Trigger. It’s a lot like Bruce McDonald’s other movies, but I think it’s distinct because it has a real emotional core. I do believe that was what we supported most in the rendering of Trigger. So that makes us unique kind of producers.

MG: Where do you see the indie film scene going?

LF: The most painful thing about making independent movies is how hard it is for people to see them. I mean, VOD [video-on-demand] and TMN [The Movie Network] and Corus are fabulous. Oh, man.

People see the movies then. You couldn’t imagine in the last month how many people talked to me about Leslie [the most recent Reg Harkema/New Real film] because it’s on TMN. It’s great, to be honest.

We make them for people to see them.

Sometimes the best movies you make don’t break out in movie theatres. You just have to take that in stride. Trigger is a great film and it didn’t really sell many tickets. It was painful. But you can’t measure a film’s success that way. It’s too defeatist, you know? Some of the films have done super well. It can’t just be about what happens commercially. It has to be about what you think of the films that you’re making and the people you’re working with as well as the audience you are sure will be moved by your film, if and/or when it finds them.

Every movie needs promotion. Word-of-mouth is bought. While not all movies that are promoted are successful, all successful films are promoted. That responsibility is not only the distributors’; the whole

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MG: How about your future?

LF: The answer is to keep working, to make movies all the time, to make one a year at least if not two. After the international success of All Hat, we had enough money to buy a house in Rosedale. Instead, we’ve been plugging that back into every movie.

I’m still learning, you know. I’m reconstructing my entire perception of what can get made, what should get made and what it is that works in film. I constantly find myself relearning and listening all over again. That was my favourite thing about I’m Yours: I got to think about things differently again and discover new stuff. I just got so excited.

Marc Glassman is a broadcast and print journalist, executive director of This Is Not a Reading Series and editor of Montage.

Photos courtesy of New Real Films

MG: It must help that you and Jennifer are producers. Do you see a real disconnect between the festival system where Canadian films get some prominence and what happens in the marketplace?

LF: I think that movie stars will be more important. American theatrical deals will have to come in at the beginning of any concept of a movie. It’s crazy to say, but the theatrical release is still more important than anything. And it’s so hard for the distributors to put up money, because it’s just not working. I don’t think we’re going to find a way to monetize the Net.

So I think films will have to become event movies or so current that they’re game-changing films structurally or narratively. The band has narrowed and it’s frightening.

Don’t let the suit fool you. Gerry Barr talks about “global equity” not “global economy.”

His leadership is about “long-term struggles that see incremental gains.” And the DGC’s new CEO means lifelong term.

Barr’s latest triumph as the CCIC president-CEO (Canadian Council for International Co-operation) ultimately led to new legislation that now effectively holds the Canadian government accountable for how it spends foreignaid dollars. Not too shabby.

He has been a social activist in one form or another since the heady hippie decade of idealism—the rock’n’roll ’60s. He has a stellar track record of reaping concrete results, be it for the CCIC, the NDP, the Steelworkers Union in Canada or famine relief in Africa.

Barr’s CV reads like a behind-the-scenes action movie, where he even makes pit stops in Sana’a, justified by the fact it was easier to travel via Yemen to get between Ethiopia and Eritrea during their border wars in late-’90s Africa.

“He’s a very quick study,” says director Sturla Gunnarsson, DGC national president and chair of the national executive board. “You never have to say anything to him twice.

He has that reputation as being a world-class listener.”

During his 20-plus years at the Steelworkers Union, Barr ultimately became a negotiator and organizer, setting up “new bargaining units” across Canada.

“I’m from ‘Steel’,” Barr has been known to joke.

Reached by mobile phone en route from Ottawa to Toronto this summer, the affable Barr spoke with Montage about his work, his family, his motives, his insatiable passion for justice—and an uncanny ability to swim with sharks unscathed.

When asked how that works, he told Montage: “I guess you’re talking about public life in Ottawa! It’s important to remember that sharks also have interests and needs. The trick is to be around them without ending up as lunch!” Indeed.

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BORN AND RAISED IN QUEBEC AND ONTARIO Born in Montreal, Barr was actually raised in both Ontario (St. Catharines) and Quebec (Sherbrooke). The civic activism springs from his family roots.

“I was raised in a family fundamentally committed to community service,” he explains. “My dad, who was an immigrant and son of a sea captain, was a United Church minister, so we went from one congregation to another. But the United Church–religious side didn’t take—I’m a secular kind of guy.

“What did stick, however, was working with people at the community level, imagining ways ‘this could be better’,” he continues.

“That’s where I learned the wisdom in that old phrase that ‘one can disagree without being disagreeable.’ When you work with many people and many different perspectives it is really key that the civility be maintained. It’s about making things better.”

Barr’s only brother is very accomplished in pediatric research and has become a world-renowned expert on Shaken Baby Syndrome and on the phenomenology of infant crying. “There’s a lot of achievement packed in there!” he says proudly.

Barr went to university first at Acadia and then transferred and graduated from Trent with a BA in Philosophy. He worked briefly as a journalist and later got involved in community organizing, which led him to the downtown core of Toronto in the ’60s. “We were all going to organize communities!” he recalls.

At the time, there was a neighbourhood group called the East Don Urban Coalition that worked to ensure community access to City Hall, government agencies and public authorities. They wanted to make sure that benefits flowed to communities that needed them.

“I was involved in the organizing of community efforts very early on,” Barr says. “There was a lot of community activism then; Don Keating really gave me my formation as a community organizer. I kind of got captured by it!”

Barr eventually found his way into the Social Planning Council of Metropolitan Toronto, which focuses on changing key urban problems. “One of my early colleagues there was Ross McLellan, who became a member of the Ontario legislature in 1975 in a campaign in which I worked as his campaign manager,” Barr says somewhat shyly.

The roots of his campaign organizing skills in the NDP were also planted in the ‘60s and ran all through the ’70s in Toronto.

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“I began working in Toronto in public relations for the Steelworkers Union so the skill set I’d acquired as a community organizer mattered” — Gerry Barr

He was a community organizer in Riverdale and eventually in Toronto’s College Street community known as Little Italy.

“I was recruited into the organizing staff of the NDP when Stephen Lewis was the leader of the party. Stephen and I got to be friends,” he recalls.

Barr was identified by the party as a kind of liaison/outreach worker and ran many campaigns before eventually moving from the provincial party to the federal party.

MOVE TO NEWFOUNDLAND He moved to Newfoundland at the behest of the federal NDP and headed up a by-election campaign in St. John’s West. The NDP came from nowhere to a 35 percent outcome in the by-election contest in which John Crosbie was first elected to the Canadian House of Commons.

It had turned a corner with its major vote increase—much like the stunning kind of growth in the NDP votership that was recently seen in Quebec in the 2010 federal election.

Three years after the Crosbie win, the NDP won its first ever seat in the House of Commons when Fonse Faour gained a by-election upset victory. By then Ed Broadbent was the party leader and Barr was Faour’s campaign manager in his by-election.

“Newfoundland is also where my partner [his wife of over 30 years] and I started our family—we had our first child there,” Barr says.

In Newfoundland, he also served as the executive director for the Newfoundland and Labrador Federation of Labour.

It was after that labour experience that he joined the Steelworkers Union, part of his journey that also segued nicely with his passion for human rights.

“I began working in Toronto in public relations for the Steelworkers Union,” says Barr. “So the skill set I had acquired working as a community organizer—including media, outreach and communications—all of it mattered. But that was only the beginning and I ultimately ended up organizing new bargaining units for the union and negotiating on a local level, of course, many times winning collectivebargaining rights.”

He ended up in the national office of the Steelworkers Union, largely as the result of an effort in the ’80s that led to the Steelworkers Humanity Fund (SHF).

He became its first executive director and one of the “intellectual parents” that founded it. He says the ongoing multimillion-dollar famine-relief organization really began out of necessity.

“That was during a staggering food emergency and famine across sub-Saharan Africa and the Horn of Africa,” he begins. “People remember it as ‘the Ethiopian famine’; Ethiopia was its epicentre and it was already wracked by both war and drought.

“It captured public attention in the early ‘90s, including mine, and there was a charged public atmosphere in Canada and the world,” he continues. “There were issues of global equity and global poverty in front of citizens everywhere, including us in North America, and people wanted ‘to do something.’

“In our case, the idea was a bargaining policy at the Steelworkers to negotiate a kind of ‘social clause’ that allowed for a deduction of a cent an hour for humanitarian assistance and international development and solidarity work, for each worker. That was the idea, to raise ‘a penny an hour,’” he says.

Photos courtesy of Make Poverty History (Bono; stick puppet); photography by François Demers (press conference)

Back in the politically charged ‘60s, Barr worked directly with the NDP’s Ontario leader, Stephen Lewis (more recently Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations). He conceived and managed the byelection campaign that won the NDP its first seat in the Canadian House of Commons from Newfoundland and Labrador.

In the late ’70s, Barr moved on to the Steelworkers Union in Toronto where he started “in public relations,” the backbone of a skill set he fondly calls “media outreach and communications,” and worked his way up to negotiator before he moved on in the ‘90s.

Barr’s move to Ottawa to lead Canada’s main coalition of humanitarian agencies and non-governmental organizations was a serendipitous crossing of two worlds, but first, a little background.

It is characterized as a one-cent-per-hour deduction from wages, which works out to about a $20 contribution from an employee per year. They invited employers to match that.

“As you negotiate this through hundreds and hundreds of collective agreements involving hundreds of thousands of employees, it very quickly adds up and provides significant resources for this kind of work,” Barr elaborates.

Barr’s ability to negotiate the seemingly impossible is another reason he’s in this job today.

“We’re a labour organization and Gerry comes from the trenches,” notes Gunnarsson, chair of the six-person DGC search committee, which voted “unanimously” for Barr. “He understands the dynamics of labour and collective bargaining; he has managed organizations through big changes, and the guild is also in the midst of a fairly dramatic restructuring.”

Barr understands structure, and building it.

“The Steelworkers Humanity Fund is so simple and sustainable because it was built into the existing collective-bargaining unit and was therefore virtually cost free,” he explains. “There are many labour-based funds like this now in Canada.”

The fund “also generated reflections in the union about bigger questions of social justice,” Barr points out.

“He comes from principle-based advocacy,” Gunnarsson adds.

“He’s righteous. He also has extensive experience in effecting public policy, and the guild is in the business of effecting public policy.”

When Barr was asked how his huge ‘penny-an-hour’ got started, he simply says: “It came to me like many other ideas about global equity that came to many people at that time. The intensity of the crisis had such searing consequences of governance failure and it showed what really happens when things fall apart in an utter way.

“Whole societies find themselves in civil war and conflict,” he continues. “It reached out for a response. Many people responded in all sorts of ways and this is one example of a response that was in for the long haul because it’s such a sustainable system. It’s an efficient and effective way of generating resources, and in a way that has accountabilities.”

Barr used the word “accountable” quite regularly.

“When you take the money of the members, you have to account for what you do with the resources,” he explains.

Barr says the Steelworkers Humanity Fund ensured that the “millions of dollars” in donations were “spent wisely and appropriately” to provide famine relief in Africa, “ending up in the right hands,” by partnering with masterful non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as Oxfam Canada.

“First you choose partners very carefully!” Barr laughs. “You choose ones that you know, ones you have real connections and relationships with.” Because this Steelworkers Humanity Fund was brand new to this work, it didn’t have a network of seasoned relationships.

They sought advice and support of organizations like Oxfam Canada and other Canadian NGOs who were very seasoned and had

Top: Gerry Barr with Bono Above, left to right: Barr at a press conference on Parliament HIll, December 2010; and with a stick puppet, 2005

an approach consistent with the kind of thing the SHF was interested in doing.

“They acted as interlocutors and introduced us to their partner organizations, so we felt we could be confident about the accountability right from the beginning,” explains Barr. “You don’t want to be making this up as you go along, right? We learned our work alongside organizations that had been doing this for quite a while.”

Those organizations were very happy to get a call of good wishes from the SHF, backed by millions of dollars.

“That’s exactly right and we said ‘Can you help us?’ And they did,” Barr continues. “We built our own institution within the Steelworkers Union, if you will, and now there are many other outreach strategies, including community health clinics, within the labour movement. They operate as Canadian charities.”

ACTIVE CITIZENS: DON’T GIVE UP! Barr believes fervently that social activists carry much more clout than they realize.

“Active citizens are really what make all this happen, both in the South and in the North, if I can put it that way—both in the developing and the developed world,” he observes. “It is citizen action that makes it all go. And that, of course, is also true in the trade-union movement, in the Canadian Co-op Movement, the Credit Union movement—it’s all about citizens becoming active and facing their own truth.”

Barr takes the attitude that many people will get involved if they think they can actually make a difference.

“Activists need to be enabled,” he explains. “It’s about enabling communities to do what they know inherently they need to do. It’s about helping communities identify priorities and organizing strategies and structures to achieve those priorities.”

Barr’s 11 years with the CCIC emerged directly from the work with the Steelworkers Union and the Steelworkers Humanity Fund, which is a member of the council. It is itself the big-tent group for non-governmental groups and humanitarian agencies working internationally, based in Canada. It is to the NGO community what Canadian Cooperative Association is to co-ops or credit unions: it’s the central body.

“We played a role,” says Barr, who was approached and appointed CCIC president in 2000.

It strengthens the practices of NGOs and represents them before parliamentary committees and the quality and quantity of aid, all of which matters to NGOs, particularly in light of the fact that they partner with government from time to time.

Government frequently will turn to NGOs to both design and implement programs. “That’s true in Canada as well,” Barr observes

The council is an important piece of the puzzle when it comes to international development and solidarity work. The issue of the quality and quantity of Canada’s aid contribution is always front-andcentre for an organization like the CCIC.

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When asked why Barr is the right choice for the DGC at this point in time, he said: “Gerry doesn’t come from our world, but he comes from the world of labour and we are a labour organization. He has all the skill sets to represent our membership of 4,000 workers, including 500 directors, in the political environment that governs our industry. Film and television in this country exists today because of one reason, and that is public policy.

“A key part of Barr’s challenge will be to communicate to the politicians so that they understand our $5 billion industry,” Goluboff continues. “The politicians change and we have to keep reeducating them. And it’s a huge industry. And Gerry gets that; he’s spent years in Canada. He could sit down just as comfortably and talk to the prime minister or sit down the same way with one of my production assistants standing on a street corner in the middle of winter.”

So try to remember—don’t let the suit fool you.

Suzan Ayscough—president of Ayscough Communications—is a media expert in Canadian moving pictures. She has been a correspondent for Screen International and Daily Variety as well as a TV producer (Heartland pilot) and VP communications for Alliance and Telefilm Canada. Follow Suzan on Twitter: @OnCamera3000.

Barr in the CCIC office in Ottawa, December 2010

spending abroad,” Barr explains. “As you rightly pointed out earlier on, this is about accountability.

“When you have billions of dollars going out the door, and these are taxpayers’ contributions, you want to know and make sure that they are used as effectively as possible,” he says.

Barr believes that one way of ensuring that aid is spent in good and effective ways is to have legislation, which creates a framework for public accountability and guides ministers of the Crown who are responsible for taking aid decisions.

“It’s the beginning of accountability,” he cautions after years of experience. “And conversely if you don’t have rules and guidelines, you know that holes can be blown in that accountability very quickly,” he says.

For more than 40 years, Canada had no such legislation at all.

“It was strictly Canadian government policy, made up on the fly, as it were,” explains Barr. “Representatives still had to account to the Canadian people, but I think it’s fair to say that it was a grave weakness in that there was no legislation.

“Over the course of several minority governments, we managed to put together a consensus on Parliament Hill that all parties ultimately supported,” he says matter-of-factly, although getting all Canadian parties to agree on anything is truly remarkable.

When asked how he thinks all of these diverse experiences will help him as the CEO of the Directors Guild of Canada, Barr says: “It’s skills about mobilization, listening, grafting strategic planning, reflecting on opportunities available and an ability to discern the strengths of the community that you find yourself in. And if you have these kinds of broad leadership and organizing skills, you can apply it quite widely. And I think that’s what people do. And I’d be willing to guess that’s also what directors do. It involves complex work with all sorts of contributions from all sorts of people and issues of timing and opportunity are always arising. It takes discernment to be able to get the mix of facts and circumstances to see what can be achieved. So at the end of the day, organizations that act most effectively are learning.”

Montage also tracked down Alan Goluboff (DGC Ontario chair and member of the CEO search committee), first A.D. on the set of a CTV pilot he’s currently shooting called Stay With Me.

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Gerry Barr is a member of the Order of Canada (C.M.). In 2008 he received the World Peace Award of the World Federalist Movement in Canada for his exemplary contributions to international development cooperation and world peace. He was awarded the Pearson Peace Medal in 1996 for his personal contribution to aid to the developing world, mediation in conflict and peaceful change through international cooperation.

He is the co-chair of Make Poverty History (Canada). MPH campaigns for More and Better Aid, Trade Justice, the cancellation of the debt of the world’s poorest countries and—in Canada—the eradication of child poverty. Barr is also co-chair of the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, a national coalition organized to monitor, and promote public discussion of, the human rights implications of antiterrorism laws in Canada and other countries.

Barr is a former executive director of the Steelworkers Humanity Fund, a labour-based non-governmental organization that supports projects undertaken by partner organizations in 13 countries and five regions of the world. He has served on several boards and steering committees including those of the North-South Institute (1994–2000), the Ethical Trading Action Group (1996–2000) and the Horn of Africa Policy Group (1991–93).

DGC’s six-person CEO search committee:

Chair: Sturla Gunnarsson, DGC national president and chair of the

national executive board

B.C. chair: Nick Kendall

Ontario chair: Alan Goluboff

Quebec chair: Ann Sirois

Chair, national directors’ division: Tim Southam

National secretary treasurer: Grace Gilroy

Photography by François Demers. Opposite page: Photos courtesy of Mongrel Media

BARR: A WORLD-CLASS LEADER

AVI FEDERGREEN: PASSIONATE PRODUCER

by ADAM NAYMAN

What makes Avi run? A love for Canadian indie cinema propels this former location manager and line producer into the limelight of executive film production.

Forget about Avatar and Transformers: Dark of the Moon. If you want to see a truly spectacular example of 3-D filmmaking, look no further than André De Toth’s 1953 chiller House of Wax, starring Vincent Price as a sculptor whose figurines are uncannily lifelike. As the first major American studio film to utilize 3-D technology, House of Wax was a novelty at the time of its release, but it hasn’t lost its power over the decades. Just ask Avi Federgreen. fall 2011

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Score! A Hockey Musical Michael McGowan (Canada, 2010)

Photos courtesy of: Mongrel Media (One Week; Score! A Hockey Musical); Avi Federgreen (Hungry Hills). Photography by Peter Stranks (bottom, One Week)

Hungry Hills Rob King (Canada, 2010)

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Mike said ‘Then I guess you don’t want to do it?’

I said ‘Fuck it.’ And then we did the impossible.

Mike is one of the most unbelievable directors I’ve ever worked with—a dear friend and a true partner. We went down the road together from Toronto to Tofino for $1.8 million dollars and made a movie that we think is a classic and that will stand the test of time.”

Whatever one thinks of One Week—or, for that matter, Score! A Hockey Musical—there’s no question that Federgreen’s belief in a populist filmmaking instinct makes him something of a rarity in a country where the great majority of producers (and filmmakers) are still locked into the post-Cronenberg auteurist model. “I think that reviewers sometimes don’t give Canadian films a break,” says Federgreen when it’s pointed out that there’s a disparity between what audiences think of One Week and the notices from critics. “Critics can be harsher on our stuff than they are on American movies. If you read every review for every Canadian film that was reviewed this year, how many of them would be positive? We’re supposed to be the nicest people in the entire world, but we sure don’t always show it when it comes to our own cinema.”

One film that Federgreen worked on that did get good reviews from the highbrow set was Reg Harkema’s gonzo and Godardian Leslie, My Name is Evil (2009). “I love Reg,” says Federgreen, “because he doesn’t fit inside a box.”

That Federgreen is able to reconcile his taste for crowd-pleasing entertainment in the McGowanesque vein with Harkema’s meta-cinematic provocation could be an indicator of either omnivorous taste or simply the drive to work steadily, but either way, he’s not one to pigeonhole himself into a single mode of moviemaking. This flexibility has led him to forays into producing for television (on Ken Finkleman’s characteristically caustic Good Dog) and also steering shorts like Annie Bradley’s acclaimed Pudge (2008) and features like Hungry Hills, directed by Rob King, toward slots at TIFF. “One of my goals when I started out was that within 15 years, I would produce my own movie,” he says. “George Ryga’s Hungry Hills was the film that gave me that credit for the first time.”

Federgreen obviously enjoyed the feeling, because it seems like he’s trying to get his name on as many projects as possible; he estimates that he has about 20 films in development right now. “One Week was sort of a calling card for me in terms of optioning stuff. I’m always looking at material, reading, thinking about what kind of stuff I’d want to watch, trying to build a catalogue. I think I read 50 to 100 scripts a year, and 20 to 50 novels. If you don’t read, you don’t find anything.” It’s a punishing pace, but Federgreen says it suits him fine. “I’m a workaholic.

I don’t like to sit around while time goes by. If there’s something that appeals to me and that has potential, I won’t pass it by. I don’t want to have any regrets in my life about things I wish I’d done.”

That explains why, in the midst of everything else, Federgreen says he plans to open up his own distribution company in the next few years. He says that his mandate is to try to help Photography by James van der Woerd (Dead Before Dawn); Peter Stranks (One Week, top); Jeremy Jemec (One Week, bottom); Leah Jaunzems (ACTRA Awards); Hector Mackenzie ((Yukon)

On the sets of: One Week (top and bottom) Michael McGowan (Canada, 2008)

“When I was 10 years old, I saw House of Wax on television,” says the Edmonton-born producer. “I pointed at the set and said to my dad, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ He said he didn’t understand. I said, ‘I want to be the person who makes that.’”

Nearly 40 years later, Federgreen has become the guy who helps to make movies. And, in a rather poetic turn of events, he’s currently executive-producing a 3-D horror film: the CaEmotional Arithmetic (2007) and All Hat (2007). nadian zombie opus Dead Before Dawn, starHis rep at the time was of somebody who was ring Christopher Lloyd and Kevin McDonald. willing to do pretty much anything to get the “It’s the first time Telefilm has ever financed a film over any hurdles and onto the screen—-a 3-D movie,” says Federgreen. “[They] were obviquality that endeared him to his new collaboraously very cautious about what sort of project tors. they were going to support for their first kick at

“The first time I saw Avi was across the table that can. Tim Doiron and April Mullen had been at an OMDC industry consultation–type meetdeveloping this project for a number of years. It’s ing,” says All Hat producer Jennifer Jonas. “His funny and fresh and not like stuff we’ve seen bepassion in that crowded room made an impresfore. And we’re making it for a small budget.” sion. All Hat was an ambitious project at that

That last point is a familiar refrain for Federbudget level, with all those races and horses; green, whose ascent over the past two decades what was unique was Avi’s immediate response from the deep trenches of Canadian film work when I asked him if he’d be willing to walk the to co-producing the opening night film at the line with me—meaning that he’d help me get Toronto International Film Festival (2010’s Score! every available dollar on the screen without the A Hockey Musical) has come without abandonsafety net of leaving the contingency unspent. ing the bottom-line principles he brought over from his previous life in the computer business. “When I was 10 years old, I saw Federgreen had always been interested in mov- House of Wax on television. I pointies—as a teenager he had helped to manage a ed and said to my dad, ‘I want to multiplex at the West Edmonton Mall—but it wasn’t until an old friend living in Toronto of- be the person who makes that!’ fered him a job on a set that he had any inkling — Avi Federgreen He immediately said yes, and we have had the of getting into the business.

“My best friend, Byron Martin, was working good fortune of working together many times on a Canadian-Swiss co-production called Wait- since. Apart from his different hair lengths, Avi ing For Michelangelo, and he asked me if I want- doesn’t change. He’s always his refreshing, pased to work as a P.A. He said that I wasn’t going sionate self.”

Federgreen is grateful for what he’s learned to like the work, that it was mostly picking up cigarette butts and throwing out garbage, and from Jonas and her partner in New Real Films that I was going to go home each day smelling (and in life), Leonard Farlinger. (Their latest film, like a trash can. I said that as long as it gets me I’m Yours, will start cruising the festival circuit into the business, my response was ‘Whatever.’ this fall.) “I’ve always been grateful for all the So I went from an $80,000-a-year job to making advice I’ve been given over the years,” he says.

“I’m like a junkie when it comes to learning about $19,000 my first year in film.”

From there, Federgreen quickly developed about the business.” a reputation as somebody who was willing to He got another crash course in pushing a work in a number of different capacities. He film over the finish line when he signed on as found gigs as a location manager on a number a line producer for Michael McGowan’s crossof Toronto-based productions and began mak- country odyssey, One Week. It’s a project that ing some important contacts—people he re- started with Federgreen doubting that its maker spected but was also willing to nudge for better would be able to pull it off. “They called me with opportunities. A stint as a location manager on Mike McGowan on the phone and asked me the metaphysical drama series Twice in a Life- what I thought of the script,” he says. “I loved time (a Canadian gloss on Quantum Leap minus it, but I asked them about the budget. I said that the science-fiction underpinnings) led Feder- they couldn’t do it for $1.8 million dollars, and green to ask the experienced producer Marilyn Stonehouse for a chance to do more. Recognizing his ambition, she gave him a crack at being the show’s production manager, which gave him a new professional niche.

Steady employment followed. Federgreen says that his most truly transformative experience was a subsequent gig as the production manager on It’s Me…Gerald, a sort of proto– Curb Your Enthusiasm that was shot in the Yukon. “Going there changed my life,” he says.

“It was one of those spiritual things that comes along once in a blue moon.” It started a run where his name started appearing on a string of major Canadian films as a line producer or associate producer, including TIFF selections like

more Canadian indies make it into movie theatres. While he does his best to be diplomatic, it’s clear that this is something of a sore point.

“It’s hard to get a movie financed in Canada or to get a distributor to attach themselves to you,” he says flatly. “Some distributors won’t touch low-budget movies, which is unfortunate because there’s great work being done.”

The question is whether, after being on so many sets, Federgreen thinks he has it in him to be a director himself: to be the guy behind the camera. For all his apparent confidence, he’s pretty modest on this matter. “I think you have to have the right makeup to be a director, and my creative thing is being able to add commentary and give my input. I couldn’t carry that weight. I know business, I know money, I know finance and marketing. That stuff is in my blood. Directing is something that other people are born with—it flows through their veins like wine. People like Don McKellar, Bruce McDonald, Patricia Rozema and Kari Skogland… it’s an amazing group in this country.”

Even if Federgreen doesn’t want to direct, he has definite ideas about cinema and, perhaps remembering his own awe at seeing House of Wax all those years ago, they mostly have to do with getting through to an audience. “How do you know you’ve made a good movie?” he asks.

“I think it’s about how people go out afterwards to a coffee shop and talk about it for hours on end. I don’t care about the box office, the Golden Reel. That’s not success. If people can relate to a film, if it speaks to them, if they’re affected by it…for me, that’s a successful movie.”

Adam Nayman writes on film for Cinema Scope, Montage, POV, Cineaste and The Grid.

Top to bottom: Leslie, My Name is Evil Bruce McDonald (Canada, 2009) On the set of Dead Before Dawn April Mullen (Canada, 2011) Avi Federgreen with Alison Waxman at the 2011 ACTRA Awards.

Scouting in the Yukon for A Discovery of Strangers (in development) One Week (two images) Michael McGowan (Canada, 2008)

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“Let me see. What am I responsible for? What aren’t I responsible for?”

Edsel Hilchie is a location manager, so it’s perhaps understandable that a response to a question about his duties would elicit a sigh and a dodge—and if you’ve reached him on set, then quite likely a polite “Can I put you on hold?” as he takes another call.

A location manager’s job is one of the most detail-loaded of all the positions in film and television.

Among the first people to start working on a project and the last to leave it, the manager’s duties have only just begun once all the locations with the right look have been found. He or she must then break down the script to schedule dates for filming and striking sets, negotiate fees with property owners, wrangle necessary permits and insurance, arrange parking for trucks, prepare temporary facilities for holding the production, the crew, talent and food services, ensure smooth crew movement to, from and at the site, and return the location to the condition in which it was found. Location managers also handle public relations at the site—they are the face of the production to the community—and will distribute filming notifications and coordinate crowd control.

A good location manager is familiar with weather patterns, ambient lighting conditions, traffic in and around the location, airplane flight paths and even copyright issues should the film shoot in a public place where there is artwork. They know details of virtually every shot—its set design, camera angle and lighting—and they know where the Portaloos are since they set them up.

To get the full picture of the role of a location manager, I spoke with two top professionals in Alberta, where almost every production is specifically locations-based—and rarely shot in a studio. Edsel Hilchie has handled locations for dozens of television shows and several feature films, including Brokeback Mountain.

Photo courtesy of eOne Films (The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn, Part 1)

by NANCY LANTHIER

ON LOCATION 28

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TWO TOP ALBERTA LOCATION MANAGERS TAKE fall 2011

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Brokeback Mountain Ang Lee (U.S., 2005) RIght and far right: Location shots of Columbia Icefields Middle (three images): Monte Walsh Simon Wincer (U.S., 2003) Below: Location shot of Alberta Badlands Opposite page: Inception Christopher Nolan (U.S., 2010)

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Left: Location managers Edsel Hilchie (top) and Robert Hilton

His colleague Robert Hilton has also managed many television locations along with such films as Twilight, Breaking Dawn and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

Both Hilchie and Hilton are upbeat and generous communicators. They share key characteristics that make a worthy location manager: a sense of adventure that propels them to explore mountain ridges and strangers’ property and, on the other hand, an acute attention to detail, allowing them to ace any level of government’s permit package. It’s these apparently diametrically opposed traits that enable them to imagine the transformation of an office into an ultra-high-tech sci-fi lab, then calculate the amps required for every single plugged-in cord.

The best part of the gig for both Hilchie and Hilton is undoubtedly scouting locations. And Alberta offers locales in spades. For the recently shot Twilight movie, Hilton says, “The director was looking for Alaska. He wanted one spot in particular: a desolate, lonely, very high-altitude area with a highway. To get that barren look, you need to go the Columbia Icefield. There’s a section where the Jasper highway runs through it; you get tons of snow and virtually zero vegetation. It’s got that feeling as if you were driving a pass at 10,000 feet, when really it’s only about 5,000 feet.”HIlchie and Hinton say they’ve travelled every square inch of Alberta. Their photographic databases contain 15- to 20,000 images. When first contacted about a film, they’ll select from these images based on a script or even a compilation of creative concepts. Then many location managers will build a website for a film, with locations and looks for every scene.

Photo courtesy of Warner Bros. Home Entertainment (Inception)

Above: Location shots of Drumheller, Alta. (two images)

Photos courtesy of: Town of Drumheller (Drumheller), Alliance Films (Brokeback Mountain), Brewster Inc. (Columbia Icefields), Robert Hilton (Monte Walsh, Columbia Icefields, Badlands)

A LOCATION MANAGER TAKES ON STRANGERS

At least this part of the job has become streamlined; up until a few years ago, a location manager spent numerous hours gathering maps and taping photographs together, scanning them, adjusting them in Photoshop—and then inevitably shutting down someone’s email system because the files were so enormous.

“Now I just send them the link to a website,” says Hilton. He uses Google Earth and sends images on the spot with his iPhone. Like most things in this world, everyone wants everything faster. And a good location manager has that, too, under control.

When we spoke, Hilchie was working on the television series Hell on Wheels, about the building of the railway across the United States in the late 1860s. “It started in the east and went all the way to the west coast. The great thing we have in Alberta is the ability to provide all those different looks. I’ve driven producers through the land and they say, ‘Wow, this could be Kansas.’ And then you drive more, and they say, ‘Holy smokes, this could be Arizona.’ A little further and they pick another state.”

Along with their adventure-seeker/detailstickler dual personalities, Hilchie and Hilton share another attribute both agree is most vital for the job: adaptability. “Just when you think you’ve got every last detail figured out, it changes,” says Hilton. “There are just too many variables you can’t control, and all you need is for one of those variables to change and it can completely destroy all the plans. If you’re not ready to quickly adapt to that, you will not do well as a location manager.”

Hilton recalls working on the 2001 film Speaking of Sex, with Bill Murray, James Spader and Catherine O’Hara. ”Suddenly there were problems with the downtown location; we lost it for that day. I discovered this early as I showed up on set with the first trucks. After a quick discussion with the producer, we determined another place we might get into right away. As we packed up, I was on the phone talking to all the people involved at the new location, the University of Calgary, asking whether I could pull our shoot a couple weeks ahead of the schedule— be there in an hour with the whole unit. And we pulled it off, even with city police involved for a driving shot.

“It was one of those times when you think you’re about to have a heart attack because the stress level is so huge. But when it all comes together, there’s nothing like it. It’s an adrenaline rush: you’ve been able to take all these strings and synch them and make them work as a single unit—you could almost call it the drug of film.”

Hilchie concurs, recounting a retooled shoot in southern Alberta. “I was doing Texas Rangers [2001], a scene with 100 cattle crossing the river. But all week the river kept rising; the studio decided to cut it. Next morning, I wake up with a call from the producer. ‘Guess what? The scene’s back on.’ One of the animal wranglers knew of a farmer with a place

upriver where it wasn’t too high. ‘Go find it,’ he told me. ‘We’ll be one hour behind you.’”

Hilchie drove for almost three hours. “And I found it. On one side, it was reserve land; the other side was owned by a Dutch farmer who spoke very little English, but I managed to put the contracts together on time. What am I going to do? Say no? They’re going to say, ‘You’re fired. We’ll get someone else.’“

I’ve driven producers through Alberta and they say “Wow, this could be Kansas” — Edsel Hilchie

Not everyone is amenable to giving a film crew’s dozens of trucks, hundreds of people and tons of equipment access to their property.

So location managers hone yet another professional attribute: salesmanship. Sure, it can be a financial bonanza when a film takes over a house or small business, but money isn’t always the ticket. (Both Hilchie and Hilton decline to speak about fees because of the countless variables involved.) “Sometimes you have to sell them on the idea of the film, present it in such a way that people can find ownership or pride in it,” explains Hilton. “So they get to say, ‘I was involved with this. That was my farm. That was my kitchen.’”

While working on the 2000 film Snow Day, Hilton convinced an entire block of homeowners in Calgary’s most unique neighbourhood, Mount Royal, to succumb to a shut-the-citydown snowstorm on Easter long-weekend. “We had to create the ultimate snow day, so much snow that you could not function, so kids in turn could get a ‘snow day.’ We brought in 500 dump truckloads of snow and buried the whole block in up to four feet of it. It took us three days to set it up and months to plan. It worked because everyone on the block understood that it was this wonderful kids’ film; they all had family, and all their kids wanted to be a part of it.

So they were willing to allow their block to be changed for upward of a month. We changed the climate!” he recalls with evident satisfaction.

Nancy Lanthier likes the locations in Vancouver, where she lives and works as a journalist.

Calgary’s Fortress Mountain ski resort was crumbling into desolate ruins when the director Christopher Nolan, hovering above in a helicopter, selected it as a location for his 2009 psychological sci-fi thriller, Inception.

The film’s culminating scene, involving ski chases, explosions and an avalanche, would require the construction of an enormous mountaintop fortress; the nearblinding snowstorm created itself.

B.C.-based location manager Rino Pace, who has helmed several Calgary-based films, was called in to supervise the remote mountain site. The film involved three months’ set construction, a 10-day shoot and a spring wrap when the snow melted.

Pace has plenty of experience working in the Kananaskis parks system (115 km west of Calgary), where Fortress Mountain rises: he knew who to contact about filming at the shuttered resort and has secured scores of tricky crown land permits. After contracts were signed, he took charge of the film’s base camp, built on the parking lot at the foot of the mountain, and roundthe-clock snow clearance of the eight-km road to the main highway.

The persistent challenge, recalls Pace over the phone from the B.C. set of the next Superman movie, Man of Steel (also directed by Nolan), “was transportation between base camp and the film set on the mountaintop.” His team of drivers became snowcat virtuosos, whizzing “six to eight people, set pieces and camera equipment up and down the mountain” all day long.

“That took a huge amount of logistics,” says Pace. “In 10 feet of snow, you just don’t go anywhere you want when you want.” But other than the relentless strong wind, the shoot was relatively smooth. The sun set at 3:30 p.m., so the day was manageable.

Nolan’s penchant for wild locations is one of his signatures. In interviews after Inception’s post-production, the director said, “We took our actors to the top of mountains and under the water and all over the world, and they rose to every challenge marvelously. I am a great believer in getting out there on location and confronting an environment—because it brings so much to the credibility of the action. I think it adds something to the feeling the audience has of being taken someplace they haven’t been before.” — N.L. TOP LOCATIONS IN ALBERTA (ACCORDING TO THE EXPERTS)

Robert Hilton DRUMHELLER: “Breathtaking landscape. It’s like being on the moon. If someone said, ‘I need to do a moonscape,’ I’d head straight to Drumheller.”

COLUMBIA ICEFIELD: “Massive glacier surrounded by big sharp peaks. We used it for the movie Everest.

Everyone’s like, ‘Wow, you were in the Himalayas!’”

Edsel Hilchie FORTRESS MOUNTAIN: “In the middle of the Rockies, it offers 360-degree views of mountain ranges, and yet it’s easily filmable, it’s accessible. Inception’s culminating action sequence on the ice-laden mountaintop was shot on Fortress Mountain.“

LONGVIEW: “Gorgeous ranch territory. It has wideopen prairie that stretches all the way to the mountain.” fall 2011

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When the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), then called the Festival of Festivals, programmed a film I’d made with Holly Dale, after we’d spent two years working for nothing, we were thrilled to get free passes to the festival instead of money. We never questioned how we’d pay the rent working like this. We just kept doing it, eagerly making another dozen films the same way and gladly exchanging five more TIFF launches for festival passes.

While cash-strapped indie filmmaking has been around since the ’70s, digital equipment and self-distribution is making it more accessible, resulting in extra demands on limited Canadian funds to support a swelling pool of filmmakers.

Filmmaking entrepreneurs are becoming cannier than before, inventing alternative strategies to produce and package their features, on passion over financing. The tenacity of this elite sector has paid off by rewarding film audiences at home and around the globe, winning accolades for filmmakers and participants alike and mapping out shoestring terrain worthy of emulation.

“To be outside the law, you must be honest.”

—Bob Dylan

Laurie Colbert and Dominique Cardona decided to become filmmakers when they met at a women’s film festival in France in 1989. After making two highly successful documentaries, Thank God I’m a Lesbian (1992) for $50,000 in arts-council grants and My Feminism (1997) with $80,000 from arts councils, foundations and the NFB’s FAP (Filmmaker Assistance Program), they turned their talents to fiction.

Their entertaining lesbian coming-of-age short Below the Belt (1999) played before Anne Wheeler’s lesbian-themed Better Than Choco-

Daniel Cockburn raised less than half the budget of Colbert and Cardona to make his first feature, You Are Here (2010). With $100,000 in arts-council grants, he wrote a script and brought creative producer Daniel Bekerman on board. Cockburn initially intended to build on his reputation of making excellent shorts by doing a longer art video, but under Bekerman’s guidance he honed the overly ambitious script with multiple actors and numerous locations.

Bekerman further helped him shave the budget and shift gears to making a guerrilla-style feature movie. It was partly a leap of faith for Cockburn with his passion carrying him on.

“I’m sure our three-year production process per feature would move much faster with funding” —Laurie Colbert

Above, top to bottom: I am a good person / I am a bad person Ingrid Veninger (Canada, 2011)

It took five years from the time Cockburn conceived the idea for You Are Here until he launched it at the prestigious Locarno Film Festival last summer. Sustaining him was his work as a freelancer in various artist-run centres, which sometimes took him away from the film to work fulltime contracts. He says there was a fine balance between the film needing all of him, letting him go at times to make a living and his having to tell the film to wait when a break was needed. In the final two years it completely took over his life. “What kept the film from falling on its face,” he says, “was talented people who liked the script and wanted to bring something to the film. I followed the lead of department heads who know their craft.”

His ultra-low budget was funded with arts grants and FAP, with everyone working for free.

Telefilm Canada came on board with marketing funds for the launch at Locarno, with the excess rolling into its Canadian premiere at TIFF, allowing for a publicist, one-sheets, postcards, posters, a poster service, after-party and a banner in the TIFF sales office, a rare perk for a low-budget indie film. The critical attention at TIFF secured Canadian sales agent Traction Media and fall 2011

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Photos courtesy of GAT Productions (I am a good person/I am a bad person). Photography by Benjamin Lichty (bottom)

A NEW BREED OF CANADIAN ENTREPRENEURS IS CREATING MOVIES OUTSIDE OF THE SYSTEM

by JANIS COLE

late at Berlin and, like Thank God I’m a Lesbian, pleased the home crowd when it showed at TIFF. They developed their first feature with Colbert writing and sharing directing duties with Cardona. Both produced the film alongside seasoned producer Carolynne Bell.

It took Colbert and Cardona three years to complete their accomplished debut feature, Finn’s Girl (2007), about a newly single mom (Brooke Johnson) caught between raising her daughter and running an abortion clinic after the death of her lesbian partner. Having worked successfully with $450,000 that they raised largely on tax credits and private donations, the two employed a similar financing scheme for their $500,000 film Margarita (2011) with the addition of Telefilm’s low-budget feature film fund.

Cardona points out that by turning their midtown Toronto home into a production office, editing suite, shooting studio and secure equipment lockup, they have maintained many guerrilla practices that the duo first used when making docs. A $2,000 electrical upgrade has allowed them to shoot parts of both features at their roomy home, Margarita almost entirely. They further cut costs by hiring all local actors, having no hotel or taxi travel, using crew production vehicles, keeping wardrobe costs to a minimum and borrowing art for the existing wall colours in both features to keep design costs down. They had no stunts in Margarita after learning the cost in Finn’s Girl, and they own a well-stocked Final Cut edit suite.

Colbert and Cardona arranged the 19day shoot of Margarita for the slow season of November/December to select from the widest possible available crew. The film gets a rich look from cinematographer Gregor Hagey, who used a Red camera, and a good, fast grip/gaffer crew headed by Loreen Ruddock.

By hiring first-time producer Rechna Varma, who negotiated advantageous deals, Margarita was eligible to recoup 40 percent of the closeto-union labour fees paid to crew through provincial and federal tax credits. ACTRA’s lowbudget CIPIP (Canadian Independent Production Incentive Program) allowed for a savings of 30 percent in performer fees, with no buyouts.

They take care of people working with them by providing excellent catering and making good on their promise of no overtime. They refuse to go into personal debt to make a film, only using their credit cards until the tax credits arrive.

After attending carefully planned festival launches with their films, they seek out distributors (Women Make Movies for the docs and Mongrel Media for Finn’s Girl) to handle the promotion and marketing. Finn’s Girl has enjoyed more than 80 international screenings and done good DVD business for a Canadian indie.

What would they change? “I’m sure our three-year production process per feature would move much faster with funding,” declares Colbert. Cardona chimes in, “We would enjoy using more tools, even a dolly or crane.” In the meantime, their passion to tell the women’s stories that interest them while maintaining complete creative control works successfully in the lowbudget niche they have carefully carved out.

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Directors Laurie Colbert and Dominique Cardona

It has taken the benevolence of the entire industry to create these exceptional movies outside of the funding system

Below: You Are Here Daniel Cockburn (Canada, 2010)

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filmmaking, travel, friends and family together in her DIY low-budget approach to personal films. She has carved out an amazing featurefilm niche for herself, making three movies in the past four years.

Only (2008) was written, produced and directed by Veninger and Simon Reynolds and stars Jacob Switzer, Veninger’s then-12-year-old son. “We made it because we absolutely had to; it was an urge,” she says, “and a passion to document my son’s transition to his teen years.”

The story was born in December 2007, written in January, rehearsed in February and shot in March. Financed for $10,000 on both filmmakers’ credit cards, the entire film was shot during the week of March break, at and around a northern Ontario motel previously run by Veninger’s father. Nine months after conception Only launched at TIFF to high critical praise and went on to a self-distributed theatrical run with Veninger or Reynolds attending every screening.

Only formed the mold Veninger would follow for her next movie.

Modra (2010) is Veninger’s debut film as the sole writer, producer and director. She shot it in Slovakia with a crew of three and 20 mainly local actors. The story follows two 17-year-olds at that awkward stage between being a kid and an adult, and stars Veninger’s Slovakian family and newcomers Hallie Switzer (Veninger’s daughter) and Alexander Gammal. Her main financing came from Telefilm’s low-budget feature-film fund. She had a successful launch with Modra at TIFF and secured Mongrel Media for Canadian distribution rights and Toronto-based CCI Releasing Inc. for international sales.

Photography by Fred Jaguenau (Colbert and Cardona)

Director Daniel Cockburn

Photography by Benjamin Lichty (top) and Hallie Switzer (bottom two), I am a good person/I am a bad person; courtesy of Katrin Bowen (Amazon Falls). Movie poster designed by Paul Sych, faith.ca

Left, top to bottom: Katrin Bowen (centre) on the set of Amazon Falls Katrin Bowen (Canada, 2010)

distributor Pacific Northwest Pictures. Bekerman’s commitment to the film has continued throughout distribution.

You Are Here stars the late legendary actress Tracy Wright in one of her final performances. Because the film had a run at Bell Lightbox, it is eligible for the Genie Awards this year.

Meanwhile, Cockburn is developing two scripts that are more reasonably sized and intended for smaller crews so that everyone can get paid.

He would like You Are Here to make sales that would allow him to pay his actors and crew who donated their talent and brought quality work to his film.

Ingrid Veninger delivers quality films with zero grants and nominal funding. No stranger to the business, she has acted in films and television for 30 years and produced indie films for directors such as Charles Officer and Peter Mettler. After helping numerous filmmakers, the inventive entrepreneur pulled her passion for

On the heels of Modra, Veninger used her credit cards to engage Braden Sauder to do sound and Benjamin Lichty to shoot her microbudget film I am a good person/I am a bad person (2011). With a cast of 23, including Veninger and her daughter, Hallie Switzer, the story follows a daughter travelling with her mom as they show a film at festivals, an experience that at first tears them apart but eventually transforms them. The script was written in March and the film was completed in six months. Veninger plans to handle the launch herself and find a distributor through festival screenings, as she has done with previous films.

Velcrow Ripper’s approach to filmmaking is as inspiring as his topics of humanity, hope and peaceful activism. His stellar indie docs made over the last 30 years include his decade-long concentration on the feature-doc trilogy Fierce Love—Scared Sacred (2002), Fierce Light (2010) and Evolve Love—set for a 2012 release.

Scared Sacred started as a solo journey for Ripper, working without any funding for almost a year before the director/cinematographer/editor found three producers and raised $500,000 from NFB, British Columbia Film, Vision TV and tax credits. Evolve Love started with $27,000 Ripper raised from individual donations through an online Kickstarter campaign. The trade-off of starting without traditional funding allows him to maintain creative freedom, shape his stories without interference and own his films when he is finished. He lives by his motto, “Shoot first, ask questions later.”

His advice for others walking the Indie path is, “Don’t let anything stop you because that’s what passion is all about. You end up becoming an entrepreneur and making your money in the back end.” As a self-distributor, Ripper has added 13 short movies to the Fierce Light DVD, and Evolve Love will have a strong web component.

Katrin Bowen left Alberta for Hollywood at 17 to become an actress. Her dream of stardom was shattered after a few B-movie roles, but the people she met and her adventures there provided the story idea for her debut feature, Amazon Falls (2010). Written in two weeks by Curry Hitchborn and shot with a Red camera by Cliff Hokanson, Bowen directed her feature in 12 days, with no money in advance. It took almost a year for post, working around editor Franco Pante’s schedule with $100,000 of in-kind services from Deluxe and Sharpe Sound. Vancouver actress April Telek jumped at the lead role when she read the script, which has earned her a B.C. Leo Award.

The commitment of 70 cast and crew, who donated their services entirely in kind, still amazes Bowen. Actor Zak Santiago even flew himself up from Los Angeles to volunteer, while spirited P.A. Candice Barrans directed traffic for 12 hours daily and location manager Christina Ollson worked tirelessly to find a bar for key shoots in two days. As part of a B.C. ACTRA deal, Bowen provided shares in her film, which has already been sold to TMN. To qualify her cast and crew for the Genie Awards, she has self-distributed and promoted theatrical screenings in Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto and Montreal. “We bought no ads. We got people in the cinema through online contests, social media, planning an event and attending the screenings.”

Canadian veteran director Penelope Buitenhuis emulates the motivational indie mantra she has placed on her website (www.penelopebuitenhuis.com): “I believe that anyone can be a filmmaker, you just have to do it… Make it.

Show it. Be proud of it.”

It is in this spirit that Buitenhuis plunged into her Telefilm-funded feature A Wake (2009), about a troupe of theatre actors gathered for the wake of their deceased director (Nicholas Campbell). Shooting from a skeletal script outline developed with one of the actors, Krista Sutton, Buitenhuis let the actors improvise their dialogue, a technique she loved from her work on the improvised TV drama Train 48.

Acknowledging that there is limited funding for feature films in Canada, Buitenhuis took a low-budget approach rather than waiting forever to raise money: “With digital media you can make your own films cheaply.” A Wake was shot in 10 intense days at a farmhouse in Cambridge, Ont., and has played theatrically in Canada, won festival prizes and been presented

by Telefilm in Perspective Canada at Cannes.

“I think of poets as outlaw visionaries, in a way” —Jim Jarmusch

Independent filmmakers are the poets of cinema. Working outside the system, they possess a tireless passion to get their films made.

Keeping creative control and ownership of their work makes up for the funding comfort they forfeit.

Marketing indie films is equally important to getting them made. Without receiving critical attention at film festivals like TIFF and VIFF (Vancouver International Film Festival), which annually launch films like Finn’s Girl, You Are Here, Only, Modra, Scared Sacred, Fierce Light and Amazon Falls, filmmakers say their films could have died. Instead, they have played for audiences and won awards.

If Colbert and Cardona’s new film Margarita launches at VIFF, their story about a Mexican nanny (Nicola Correia-Damude) who is balancing a reluctant-to-commit Canadian girlfriend with a long-term job in Canada that is in danger of ending will stand a good chance to find a distributor and enjoy a theatrical run.

Veninger would also like I am a good person/I am a bad person to play theatrically after launching at festivals. The tireless entrepreneur will also carry DVDs in her purse to sell, and do whatever else it takes to get her latest film seen.

Working with $10,000 of self-financing and up to a modest $500,000 in funding, these indefatigable directors and producers also rely on the generosity of cast, crew and facilities to work out deals that fit their low budgets. It has taken the benevolence of the entire industry to create these exceptional movies outside of the funding system. Imagine what the resourceful filmmakers could pull off with a greater lowbudget funding pool to get them started.

Amazon Falls Katrin Bowen (Canada, 2010) I am a good person/ I am a bad person Ingrid Veninger (Canada, 2011)

Janis Cole is an award-winning filmmaker, professor at OCAD University and writer for publications including POV and NOW magazine. fall 2011

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WHO’S RUNNING THE SHOW?

by ALLAN TONG They say that in film, the director is God. The writer, director of photography, production designer and editor all serve “His” or “Her” vision.

However, this rule is overturned in television.

Here, the scribe runs the show—dictating the story arc, sketching character developments and setting the tone of the series week after week.

Here, the director takes a backseat.

Perhaps the difference lies in the early days of cinema, when silent films encouraged directors to order around actors on set; by contrast, TV evolved from the writer-driven medium of radio. Whatever the reason, the writer rules episodic television and wears the crown of “showrunner.” “Producer and showrunner are the same job,” proclaims Jana Sinyor, the creator and showrunner of CBC’s hit series Being Erica.

Simply put: “A showrunner is a writing producer and the creative head of the series.”

Quite often, the showrunner is also the creator of the series. Erica evolved out of conversations between Sinyor and Ivan Schneeberg and David Fortier, co-presidents of Temple Street, which produces the series. “It started as an idea for a teen series, about a girl who travels back in time through a painting in her bedroom,” recalls Sinyor. The concept evolved into a one-hour drama before it aired in 2009 as Being Erica, starring Erin Karpluk as Erica Strange, whose therapist sends her back in time to resolve her life’s regrets. “Much of it is autobiographical, and much of it is not,” Sinyor says without elaborating.

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That central twist has resonated with audiences around the world. Not only is the show entering its fourth season in Canada, it’s syndicated in almost 30 countries, including Estonia and Taiwan. Sinyor runs the show with executive producer Aaron Martin (Degrassi: The Next Generation; The Best Years), who came aboard after CBC enjoyed the pilot.

Opposite page, bottom: Sinyor with director Ken Girotti

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Sinyor had control of the script for the pilot and was on set every day for the shoot. Writing for Degrassi: The Next Generation and writing and producing Dark Oracle taught Sinyor about post-production, working with directors, dealing with network executives and collaborating with freelance writers, but nothing prepared her to showrun Being Erica. “It was a very steep learning curve,” she recalls now. Though Sinyor was more involved with the filming of the pilot than with any episode since, she didn’t relish the experience and no longer sits on set. “It’s hard for me to stay focused and stay in the role of constantly observing without actually doing anything,” she explains.

Helping Sinyor was veteran TV director Holly Dale, who was hired over the phone while she was directing the cop drama Cold Case in Hollywood. Dale loved Sinyor’s script and impressed her and the producers during an extensive interview. “The story was there,” she recalls, but not the casting. “Holly was most definitely involved in the casting process for the role of Erica,” says Sinyor. “It was getting very close to the time we were supposed to start shooting and no one was feeling 100 percent comfortable committing to the actors we’d seen.” Eventually they agreed on a Prairie actress named Erin Karpluk because her youthful face could “transcend age 17 to 37,” explains Dale. “It was like finding Lucy of I Love Lucy.”

Dale says that a pilot offers a director more of a level playing field with the showrunner, because there’s a discovery process while the show’s visual and narrative style is being set. The director as well as the showrunner have to answer questions like, “How will the show look?

Will it be long lens? Wide lens? Monochromatic or rich in tone?” says Dale.

Dale went on to direct other episodes of Erica, but she held less responsibility after the pilot. That first show established the style and tone of the entire series, allowing Sinyor and her writers to roam with their characters. “As directors, when we go to a television show, it’s a producer’s medium,” explains Dale. “It’s not like

Photography by Stephen Scott (Being Erica)

Left, top to bottom: Being Erica creator Jana Sinyor; Sinyor with executive producer Aaron Martin; Rookie Blue co-creator Tassie Cameron

Photography by Stephen Scott (Sinyor, Sinyor and Martin); courtesy of eOne (Cameron)

“When we do a TV show, it’s a producer’s medium, unlike feature films, where we own the vision” —Holly Dale

a feature film, where we own the vision. We’re there to interpret the vision of the writers.” Even on a pilot, the final cut lay with Sinyor and her producers. “You’re not the solo captain,” says Dale, “but you are driving the ship with a lot of input from the producers around you.”

Dale has also directed shows scripted by Tassie Cameron, the showrunner and co-creator of the Toronto cop series, Rookie Blue, now embarking on its third season on Global-TV and ABC. Co-executive producer Ilana Frank pitched Global the show’s concept loosely based on a talk she and Cameron had had with a police consultant while working on the 2008 miniseries Would Be Kings. Global committed to 13 episodes about rookie cops, based on the idea, team and Cameron’s original script. Along with co-creators Morwyn Brebner and Ellen Vanstone, Cameron further polished the idea and convinced ABC in the U.S. to sign on. “Then we were off to the races,” recalls Cameron.

They didn’t need to shoot a pilot, since Global had already given Rookie Blue the green light. Instead, Cameron focused on 13 episodes, drawing upon her experience from the hit action series Flashpoint, which was shared by an American and Canadian broadcaster. “It was my first time working with two networks on a prime-time summer series,” recalls Cameron, “and I learned a lot from every conversation I had with the producers, the network executives, the writers and the actors. I learned very basic lessons about how to do the first season of a show like this.”

A key lesson was to make sure that every episode of the first season acted as a series of pilots to brand the show. “Spend the money onscreen [visuals, effects, sound, music]. Stay primal, emotional and relatively simple, in terms of storytelling. And hire the very best cast you can find.”

Echoing Sinyor, Cameron doesn’t see a distinction between showrunner and producer. “I wear one big, undefined hat. I try to tell the best stories possible while being mindful of the budget, the schedule and the needs of the actors and the crew.”

Before she even sets foot on a set, the showrunner controls the series. The showrunner guides her writing team through several rewrites before a director enters the picture. “We try hard to make sure the scripts are tight and make sense before we start shooting,” says Cameron, “so usually there aren’t that many questions to answer on set.” Cameron encourages her writers to be there too: “I actually wish the writers had more time to spend on set, talking to the directors and the actors and being there to help out when necessary.”

The opposite occurs on Being Erica, because the show doesn’t have a story department. Instead, the series employs freelance writers and an on-set producer. Meanwhile, the director receives the same white script that all the department heads read. Rookie Blue offers directors a little more leeway. Explains Cameron, “Sometimes we’ll send them an outline if there are certain things we want them to think about in advance or if they’ve got time to read and want to see what’s in store for them.”

David Wellington is an exception, she notes, since he’s an executive producer on the series

and will read everything from the pitch page onwards. Cameron, though, is happy to read a director’s notes all the way through the process to ensure that she and the director are on the same page. “The script meetings with our directors are crucial to the way we like to work. I get worried when directors come in and have no thoughts, ideas or questions about the script.”

Sinyor calls a very different tune on her show. “Generally, directors don’t see that as their role,” she explains. “It’s very unusual they would come to me with notes.” By that time, the show’s nine writers have knocked the script into many permutations. In fact, “When the director comes with a full whack of notes, that’s a warning sign that things are weird.”

Really, the only person the showrunner answers to is the network, particularly when she or he presents the season’s story arc. “If I pitch the network and they’re on board,” says Cameron, “I’m good.” Sinyor admits that the network can be right sometimes when they veto an idea or suggest changes, but ultimately she and her producers know the show better than anyone else. “We’re like the guys riding the horse and they have to bet on our horse and go where we wanna go.”

Being Erica (Canada, 2010)

So, where does that leave directors and how do they work with their showrunners?

This intricate dance begins with the showrunner choosing her partner, almost always someone who’s already learned the steps. “‘What shows have they done?’,” Sinyor will ask her staff when she listens to their suggestions for directors. “‘Are they collaborative?

Are they difficult? Have they done shows in the same vein as Erica?’ We’re trying to get the closest match possible.”

Tassie Cameron agrees that experience is critical and is more important than whether a director has overseen police dramas or not. “I would be very nervous to have a director on our show who had never directed one-hour episodic television. Our schedules are so tight, and decisions have to be made so quickly that I would worry that a first-time television director would get swamped pretty quickly.” At the same time, Cameron remembers trying to break into hourlong TV herself. “We make sure there are a couple of slots for newer people. It’s tricky with ABC, which has to approve everybody.”

Past rookie directors were disasters for Sinyor. She has since been discouraged from taking chances on new blood. “They were indecisive and struggled under pressure,” she recalls with a shudder. “They’d back themselves into corners and panic.” They wouldn’t ‘get’ their day and would wind up in overtime while her producers calculated the costs. She recalls green directors who were spending too much time on setting up a straightforward scene, because they hadn’t prepared. “One example,” she says, “was several characters having a conversation in a straight line before the camera. It looked unnatural.”

The same disorganization infects post-production and delays the overall process. “You can’t fall 2011

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“We know our show better than a director who’s in for one episode but when it works out well, it feels like a partnership” — Tassie Cameron

Photography by Annabel Reyes (Rookie Blue), courtesy of eOne

Rookie Blue (Canada, 2011)

The process is similar on Rookie Blue, differing only because executive producer David Wellington often doubles as director (eight in the past season alone) and so steers the tone meetings. “I’m happy to leave it to someone who talks about visual language,” says Cameron. She will sit down with the director after he first reads the script to ensure he understands the intent of each scene. “I can’t tell you how surprised I’ve been in a couple of situations when I’ve been on set and directors have missed major points in the script.” That’s a lesson she learned on series predating Rookie Blue, and she admits it’s her fault, not the director’s, when these discrepancies arise.

For Sinyor and Cameron the line is clearly drawn: they and writers control the words, while the director creates the images. The showrunners will seek out the director for his visuals.

“How do we shoot this?” asks Sinyor. “How do we make this cool?” Generally, neither show-

Sinyor and Cameron challenge the very definition of showrunner by stressing that each episode they make is a team effort, particularly the contributions of their producers. “I went into the job thinking, ‘I will run a show by myself,’” confesses Sinyor. Now after three seasons, she vows, “I will never run a show by myself. The show will be bad.” That said, Being Erica is Sinyor’s baby. “There can only be one person in charge at the end of the day,” she says.

Film and TV are like neighbouring countries sharing similar customs and language, but the geography is completely different. Sinyor prefers the TV landscape, “because I want to work on a writer-driven model.”

Ironically, being a showrunner has made Sinyor respect, even admire directors. She tried directing a short film once, and vows never to do it again. “I could not do what they do. It is not my talent.”

Cameron agrees: “I don’t know how they do it.” When she was younger, she dreamed like everyone else of becoming a writer-director.

However, reality taught her that “writing is hard enough. Directing has a different skill set that I respect and could not do, especially now in television.” She finds directing “terrifying,” but remains curious. “I’d consider directing a short to see how that felt,” she adds, not counting her directing days as an NYU student.

Both writers and directors are storytellers, but Cameron points out, “I know a lot more outwardly insecure writers than directors. The directors I’ve worked with have a certain con-

Photography by Annabel Reyes (Rookie Blue), courtesy of eOne

let a director go two days into a shoot and start all over again. That involves a lot of money.”

Once the director is hired, the showrunner calls the tune and leads the dance. Directors change every week, but the directorial style of each episode remains consistent. “We try not to see much variation, to be honest,” admits Cameron. “Somebody might be renowned for being great with actors. Somebody will have a great eye. Ideally you pair them with the script that works with their specific excellence.” Cameron invites directors to insert their stylistic flourishes, but will reign them in if they deviate too far from the script’s intent by saying, “That shot’s good for your demo reel, but not for the story.”

Sinyor recalls how the house style for Being Erica developed in the first season and was entrenched by the second. “We do dollies and steadicams,” she cites as examples. “We don’t do any handhelds, only for fight scenes.” Sinyor, the guest director and the producer will hold extensive tone meetings where they study the script, page by page.

“We try to keep the show as real as possible,” she explains, balancing the show’s fantasy aspect of the title character travelling back in time to resolve her personal conflicts with the realistic drama that takes place in those flashbacks.

runner will ask the director for storyboards, but will rely on regular conversation. The storyboards come in handy only if the setup is complicated.

“Don’t get me wrong,” explains Cameron. “We want beautiful shots and highly visual, inventive sequences as much as anyone—as long as they’re serving the story, making it better and not distracting from the characters or the moment or the tone of the show. As long as they’re honest to the moment.”

Sinyor allows more give-and-take with her directors during casting. The director can choose actors for minor roles, but Sinyor and her producers exercise the right to cast particular actors for particular roles. “We wrote the script and conceived the character. We have a specific thing we’re looking for. And directors tend to get that.” Meanwhile, Cameron strives to compromise with the director but “if it comes to a big fight the producers tend to win.”

Holly Dale enjoys working with Sinyor.

“She’s specific with what she wants, but also respectful of the director. She’ll tell you what she’s looking for—the tone, the feel, character arc— and allow you to interpret it.” Dale, who has directed episodes of Flashpoint, observes that Sinyor and Cameron work similarly: “They’re specific about what they want. They know their scripts and are confident with their choices.

They’re good at guiding many different personalities and making the show work.”

The director’s job is essentially done once she or he hands in the first cut. Erica has a system where the two producers complete the editing process, and Sinyor steps back completely to await final delivery like an expectant parent.

Editing is not her forte. “Usually, the episode is significantly different from the first to final cut,” remarks Sinyor. The final has the stamp of the two producers, who maintain the series’ overall tone, which can vary from director to director.

Cameron has had some editing training and is more comfortable in the cutting room.

However, she steps away when she becomes “supersaturated” with seeing the footage over and over. Instead, Wellington maintains Rookie Blue’s tonal consistency in the editing room.

Wellington, producer Ilana Frank and showrunner Cameron work in tandem, joining the new wave of creative partnerships in TV drama series. They each bring strengths to the mix, giving the show greater depth and visual impact than such dramas did in the past.

David Wellington originally came on board the pilot to advise on everything from casting to sets, then wound up directing several firstseason episodes. His having had directorial input from the very start, and continuing on a regular basis, has helped to shape Rookie Blue visually and dramatically.

Cameron, who is perfectly happy to sit behind a laptop instead of a camera, finds the relationship between Frank, Wellington and herself to be a fruitful one. “I guess directors who want to initiate television shows either need to be able to write themselves or need to find the right writer to partner with.” After all, she explains, a network will green-light a show based on a great script. At Being Erica, Sinyor would love to have a director-producer, but they haven’t attracted one due to competition from U.S. series.

“It’s one thing we’re missing.”

fidence that a lot of writers don’t share. [They have the charisma to say] ‘I can summon the troops and I’m gonna use this lens.’”

Cameron echoes similar sentiments after having teamed up with producer David Wellington on Would Be Kings and The Eleventh Hour as well as Rookie Blue. She adds, “I also love working with the directors we hire onto the show, and ideally, the process feels like we’re partners in telling the story.”

That said, the final word belongs to a team led by the showrunner, aided by the writers, directors and producers. “[We] know our show better than a director who’s in for one episode— but when it works out well, I would definitely say it feels like a partnership for everyone involved.”

Rookie Blue (Canada, 2011)

Allan Tong is a Toronto filmmaker who’s directing the short political satire Little Mao for Bravo! and co-directing Leone Stars, a documentary about an amputee soccer team in post-war Sierra Leone. fall 2011

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I first met the director George Bloomfield on the CBC movie of the week And Then You Die. Also an actor, George was playing a Mafia kingpin as well as directing the movie.

As a rookie A.D. I was assigned to pick George up and take him to the effects house so they could make a mold of his head for the big shooting scene. In his one scene George is shot in the head by Kenneth Welsh and a tube snaking through the fake scalp spouts blood. We had one kick at the can, as the reset would put us hours behind. As always, George nailed it on take one and after a little blood cleanup, I got to drive him home, both of us laughing the whole way.

For years George and I worked with our dear friend and now deceased stunt coordinator/paramedic Ty Codi. Every time they were together George would ask Ty for the 40 dollars Ty owed him and they would both laugh. I never understood the inside joke until George told the story at Ty’s wake.

Before I met George he had had a heart attack on set and Ty was the first paramedic on the scene. Ty ripped open George’s shirt, got his heart pumping and saved his life. For years to come, every time they met on set George would ask Ty for the 40 dollars he owed him for the ripped shirt.

George commanded the set with experience and humour. I learned so much from George and will never forget him. Goodbye, chum, and I hope you get your 40 bucks from Ty.

Film & Television Relief Program

Emergency Financial Aid for Film & Television Workers

Below, left to right: George Bloomfield in 1970; in a production of Rainmaker, 1958; on the set African Journey; (Canada, 1990); with Len Birman and Henry Ramer in 1970.

Bottom, left to right: On the set of The Jane Show (Canada, 2006) with Shawn Hitchins, and in a wig.

THE FILM & TELEVISION RELIEF PROGRAM provides emergency financial aid to entertainment industry professionals who work in all aspects of film & television production.

This year hundreds of your colleagues and their families will receive assistance with rent or mortgage payments, grocery money, utility payments and other basic living expenses when their health, housing or ability to work are at risk due to an illness, injury, sudden unemployment or other personal financial crisis.

The program is funded by Canada’s film and television unions and guilds and personal support from industry members.

You can do your part to help a friend bounce back by raising money on set through the Film & TV Charity Challenge and joining the Reel Friends Plan weekly payroll donation program.

For more information visit: www.emergencyrelief.ca SUPPORTED BY

Photos courtesy of Louisa Bloomfield

PARTING SHOT 42

Parting Shot On George Bloomfield

By Mark Pancer

The Film & Television Relief Program is a program of the Actors’ Fund of Canada.

The Actors’ Fund is the lifeline for Canada’s entertainment industry and is a registered charity. www.actorsfund.ca. fall 2011

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You’ve gone to

the ends of the Earth

your Vision.

to capture

Trust

Technicolor to bring it to the

World.

From MacGillivray Freeman’s “Arabia 3D,” an IMAX theatre film

One Vision from Set to Screen 44

Montreal 514.939.5060 MONTAGE

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Toronto 416.585.9995

Vancouver 604.689.1090

technicolor.com