Montage Magazine Spring 2014

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DON’T MISS DGC MEMBERS AT HOT DOCS 2014 WORLD PREMIERE

EVERYTHING WILL BE D: Julia Kwan

Vancouver’s once-thriving Chinatown is disappearing as hip new ventures move into vacant storefronts to the astonishment of the many elderly denizens. Sundance award-winning director Julia Kwan crafts a heartwarming and cinematically stunning ode to a community in transition.

CANADIAN PREMIERE

SUPER DUPER ALICE COOPER D: Reginald Harkema, Scot McFadyen, Sam Dunn

Alice Cooper’s onstage encounter with a chicken in Toronto in 1969 catapulted him from rock star to rock legend. This dizzying blend of archive materials and rock opera follows the evolution of a preacher’s son to glam metal godfather.

TORONTO PREMIERE

COME WORRY WITH US! D: Helene Klodawsky WORLD PREMIERE

THE BOY FROM GEITA D: Vic Sarin

A young Tanzanian boy with albinism survives a brutal attempt to steal his body parts; witch doctors claim a potion made from them will bestow good fortune. The promise of surgery in Canada offers him hope.

FIND FILMS. BUY TICKETS.

WWW.HOTDOCS.CA /hotdocsfestival

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/hotdocs

/hotdocsfest

#HotDocs14

Can band members rock out on stage one minute and change diapers the next? Jessica and Efrim take their baby on a North American tour with Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra to find out if musicians—especially moms—can have it all.

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You entertain. We promote.

We’re better together. We help Canadian creators and producers reach the world. The Canada Media Fund is dedicated to funding exceptional Canadian content, providing vital industry research, and promoting what is uniquely ours, here, and abroad. Together, we can entertain the world. cmf-fmc.ca Visit canadaonscreen.ca to view great Canadian productions.

Join the conversation on Canadian content #eyeoncanada spring 2014

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CONTENTS

T hi s p a ge a nd o pp o s i te p ag e : Co n ti n u um .

C o u rte s y S im o n B a rr y

Phot os:

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

S PR I N G 20 1 4 , M o n ta g e

A D R E N A L I N E TO R O N T O

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CHRIS CHAPMAN

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Viewpoint

Listen Up!

The DGC Moment

Spirit of Place

by Sturla Gunnarsson

by Brian Baker Canada needs more authorship in TV and film

by Tim Southam & John N. Smith In recognition of the Guild’s 2013 Lifetime recipient

by Rob W. King A boy from the Prairies becomes a Canadian filmmaker

Editor’s note

by Marc Glassman

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FEATURES TH E C REATI VE D YN A M I C edited by MARC GLASSMAN Directors, composers and editors discuss how they can collaborate more effectively. A DGC initiative.

I N C O N VERSATI O N W I TH …

KA RI SKO G L A N D interviewed by KIVA REARDON The director of 50 Dead Men Walking, The Stone Angel, The Borgias and much more talks candidly about her career

SC I -F I C O U N TRY

by JASON ANDERSON Canada is the planetary hotspot for TV science fiction

M I C H EL L E M A C L A REN : BREA KI N G G O O D

by KIM LINEKIN A Canadian director breaks through on U.S. TV

H O T D O C S 2014: SH I F TI N G G EA RS

by ADAM NAYMAN How did Reg Harkema (Super Duper Alice Cooper), Julia Kwan (Everything Will Be) and Vic Sarin (The Boy From Geita) move from directing fiction features to docs?

Parting Shot

by MARC GLASSMAN Sturla Gunnarsson leaves the building

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D G C PRO F I L ES: TW O F RO M Q U EBEC

by MATTHEW HAYS Depicting two leading talents on the Quebec scene: Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais and Jean-Marc Vallée

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DIRECTORS GUILD OF CANADA publisher

Sturla Gunnarsson, president Brian Baker, national executive director mail@dgc.ca associate publisher DGC NATIONAL 111 Peter Street, Suite 600 Toronto, ON M5V 2H1 Tel: 416-925-8200 Fax: 416-925-8400 Toll Free: 1-888-972-0098 En français: 1-855-904-1880 E-mail: mail@dgc.ca www.dgc.ca

Alejandra Sosa editor

Marc Glassman art director

Alexander Alter copy editor

Jocelyn Laurence photo research

Nick Gergesha 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 1496 Lower Water St. Suite 501b Halifax, NS B3J 1R9 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.dgc.ca/manitoba ONTARIO DISTRICT COUNCIL 111 Peter Street, Suite 600 Toronto, ON M5V 2H1 Tel: 416-925-8200 Fax: 416-925-8400 E-mail: odc@dgcontario.ca www.dgc.ca/ontario

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Merrie Whitmore Directors Guild of Canada mwhitmore@dgcontario.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 600 Toronto, Ontario M5V 2H1 Tel. 416-925-8200. Fax 416-925-8400 Please direct all editorial inquiries and letters to the editor at 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 2014 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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Publication Mail Agreement 40051973 QUEBEC DISTRICT COUNCIL 4200 Saint-Laurent Blvd., Suite 708 Montréal, PQ H2W 2R2 Tel: 514-844-4084 Fax: 514-844-1067 E-mail: action@dgc.ca www.dgc.ca/quebec SASKATCHEWAN DISTRICT COUNCIL c/o 111 Peter Street, Suite 600 Toronto, ON M5V 2H1 Tel toll free: 1-888-972-0098 Fax: 416-925-8400 E-mail: sdc@dgc.ca www.dgc.ca/saskatchewan

viewpoint By the time you read this, it will be spring, the DGC will have a new President and I’ll be cheering the organization along from the sidelines. Reflecting back over my six years at the helm, I’m struck by the strength, vitality and diversity of our organization and the commitment of its leadership, membership and staff, whom I’ve had the good fortune of working with and for whom I have developed an enduring affection.

We’ve faced many challenges over the past six years. In my first term, Canadians elected a government that was hostile to our sector. The Prime Minister openly referred to us as “gala-going elites” and mused about dismantling institutions and a regulatory environment that our predecessors had spent decades building. We responded with thoughtful, well-researched arguments, refrained from shrill sloganeering and engaged with the government of the day, eventually earning its respect.

We didn’t win every battle, but working with our fellow guilds, unions and industry associations, we succeeded in firmly entrenching the importance of the screen-based industries to the Canadian economy and social fabric.

Then came the global economic meltdown. Production dried up, revenues fell and by 2009, all of our District Councils but one were in the red. Together, we conceived and executed a strategic plan that responded to the new economic reality. We consolidated the Ontario and National offices, realigned our assets, provided financial and administrative support for the smaller Councils and created a better, more efficient organization. Today we’re providing better services that ever, are building our reserves and have implemented a dues-reduction protocol that put over $100 back into the pockets of every full member last year.

Then came the Canadian Media Fund debacle. Again, we worked with our fellow stakeholders to save one of the vital engines of our screen-based economy.

At the CRTC, we lobbied effectively and achieved our goal of implementing revenue-based spend requirements and the Programming of National Interest (PNI) regime, resulting in the most robust production levels we’ve ever enjoyed in this country. In Quebec, we negotiated our first-ever collective agreement for English-language directors. And last year, we negotiated a Standard Agreement that achieved major economic gains for our lowest paid members.

Those are just a few of the headlines. They reflect what this organization is capable of when we work together and speak as the strong, mature and united voice of Canadian filmmakers from coast to coast. The DGC is a microcosm of Canada and like Canada, we experience currents of provincialism and militancy. My parting message is to urge you to resist these impulses. Our strength is in our unity and we’re only as strong as our weakest member.

It’s been a privilege and an honour to serve as your President. I look forward to seeing you on the floor.

Sincerely,

STURLA GUNNARSSON PRESIDENT, DIRECTORS GUILD OF CANADA

editor’s note With springtime comes many things for members of the DGC: the AGM, taxes, Hot Docs, Montage and the Creative Dynamic.

In just three years, Michael Kennedy’s Creative Dynamic has become an eagerly anticipated annual event that is relevant, informative and exciting. Kennedy’s idea has power and simplicity. Filmmaking is a collaborative art, so why not have a dialogue with key players to find out how to make the system work better? The first time Kennedy asked producers to join directors and engage in far-reaching discussions about what each does and how they could bridge barriers to work more effectively together. The second time, directors and writers talked about storytelling—how that process gets transformed from the page to the screen—and in what ways that creative narrative can be improved. This year, with the co-operation of the DGC’s new partner, the Screen Composers’ Guild of Canada, Kennedy hosted an all-day session centering on post-production: What sound and picture editors, composers and directors do after the shooting has wrapped. We’re pleased to present an abridged edition of this year’s Creative Dynamic in this issue.

We mentioned Hot Docs as another spring event, which draws the attention of media professionals across the country. This year, we asked Adam Nayman to find out what it’s like for filmmakers who have made fiction features to direct documentaries. In “Switching Gears,” we discover what happened to Vic Sarin, Julia Kwan and DGCer Reg Harkema when they made a doc. From the days of X-Files and Battlestar Galactica to now, Canada has become renowned for its success on television within the science-fiction genre. DGCers Simon Barry, Pat Williams, John Fawcett and Jay Firestone have made shows like Continuum, Orphan Black and Lost Girl big hits here and internationally. Jason Anderson tells us more in “Sci-Fi Country.”

Montage is pleased to focus on two of the Guild’s most talented directors, both of whom happen to be women. Kim Linekin profiles rising TV director Michelle MacLaren and Kiva Reardon conducts a candid conversation with veteran filmmaker Kari Skogland, who is our selection for this issue’s vivid cover.

Finally, we’d like to acknowledge that Sturla Gunnarsson is passing the baton as DGC President with this issue.

It’s been a great pleasure working with Sturla for the past six years and we look forward to seeing more of his memorable films and TV work in the future.

We hope you enjoy this season’s Montage.

MARC GLASSMAN EDITOR

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UP N E LIST

CANADA NEEDS MORE AUTHORED WORK

by BRIAN BAKER It’s widely recognized that there’s more variety and originality in television today than ever before. The best shows— the royalty of contemporary TV—are those absorbingly intricate, compulsively watchable serializations that have captured the imaginations of critics, broadcasters and the viewing public. They’re usually dark in theme and humour, push the boundaries of content, language and imagery and feature anti-heroes wracked by unholy urges and psychoses. They’re the new novels: dense, complex and rich, both populist and artistically satisfying. If Dickens were around today, he’d be writing original series for HBO. We all know the titles: The Sopranos, The Walking Dead, Girls, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Americans, House of Cards, Homeland, True Detective, Game of Thrones, Girls and a myriad of others. From overseas we’ve seen similarly groundbreaking fare, including The Bridge and The Killing from Denmark and Utopia, Broadchurch and Sherlock from the U.K. Sometimes it seems there are so many shows that it’s impossible to stay on top of all of them.

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usual crazy budget constraints, the overall impression one has is of a confidence and energy and an ability to play in the big leagues.

But the persistent question is: How do we create more of them? Where, one wants to ask, are more of the really exceptional shows?

Cable doesn’t have a monopoly on the good material.

Network television, typically viewed as the numbers winner but playing second fiddle to cable’s high-torque artistry, is increasingly part of this renewed creative swell.

Much-admired and popular shows such as The Good Wife, Person of Interest, Scandal, House, Criminal Minds, The Following, Parks and Recreation, Modern Family have brought a level of wit and relevance to what had seemed to many to be tapped-out genres.

The point is, there is an abundance of great television everywhere today. And like great work from any time, it extends the possibilities of the medium, engages with the zeitgeist and sets the terms of the cultural conversation.

What about Canada? Where are we amid this embarrassment of riches? On the face of it, things have never been better in the Canadian media industry. The shows being made encompass a wide palette of tones, styles and genres and, remarkably, given the vast welter of programming options available to viewers, they have found loyal audiences. For instance, Motive has reached 1.3 million viewers and Saving Hope 1.6 million. Several shows like Motive and Rookie Blue are playing on U.S. networks and many others are playing all over the world. Despite the

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Due to the talents of a robust creative community, an emerging entrepreneurial confidence and a sound regulatory environment, we have established a mature economic and industrial foundation in which productions can flourish. On the niche side of the business we have a new crop of more aggressively authored shows: Pat Williams and Simon Barry’s Continuum, John Fawcett and Graeme Manson’s Orphan Black, Sheri Ellwood’s Call Me Fitz, before them Less than Kind and Slings and Arrows in English Canada while in Quebec, Podz’s 19-2 and JeanFrançois Rivard’s Série Noire stand out. These are shows that can hold their own with the best television anywhere.

But the persistent question is: how do we create more of them? Where, one wants to ask, are more of the really exceptional shows, the ones that tackle broader cultural questions, that create new character archetypes on the order of Tony Soprano, Hannah Horvath, Frank Underwood, Don Draper, Daenerys Targaryen or Walter White, that revel in the messiness and complexity of both individual behaviour and societal, political and even philosophical themes?

Where are the shows that take on the issues that confront us on a daily basis, and take them on not in an earnestly didactic way but in a bracingly dramatic and fully humanized manner? Where are the shows that both shamelessly entertain and compel you to think? Where are the shows that get people talking and arguing and that help define who we are as a culture? For that is what the best of today’s programmes do and it is what Canadian television needs to do in order to capitalize on the successes of the present and move things to the next level.

The finest shows on the air today are the best for one principal reason. They are authored shows, driven by a strong point of view, a unique voice, whether a writer or

director or the two together or both in one. These shows have a distinct creative focus and bear the imprint of their creators and the creative team brought together to realize them.

Broadcasters, especially the CBC, which should be the natural home for such material in Canada, need to recognize the importance of the authorial voice in the creation of first-rate television drama and to make space for, encourage and empower those voices. If we want to see the best work we can do, that will have to happen.

Although the production realities and market and audience dynamics are different for feature films, the same principle of the authorial voice pertains. Interestingly, television, which has always been considered an impersonal and industrially modeled art form, is today in many cases a more persuasive vehicle for original screen expression than much commercial cinema. By refusing to talk down to their audiences, and by assuming viewers are as open to the nuanced, the unexpected and the thought-provoking as they themselves are, television creators have won the laurels previously worn by the moviemakers. The crossover of writers and directors between film and television today is a sign of the creative parity and cross-fertilization between two quickly merging camps.

genre expectations and dubious commercial imperatives—of casting, for instance, or narrative formulas—that work against distinctiveness and obstruct rather than assist their chances of connecting powerfully with audiences.

If the best television today is the product of strongly articulated visions and voices, then certainly the feature film should be regarded in a similar light. As with television, broadband entertainment product will always have its place and its raison d’être in the film marketplace. But if the situation prevails in which work that does not necessarily conform to the dictates of the market is considered suspect or irrelevant, and the personal, authorial voice is ignored, the prospects for a meaningful film culture will always be remote. Everyone involved in the film and television industry in Canada should do their utmost to resist that state of affairs. Take heart from the wealth of talent and vision and the prime conditions for work that we currently possess, and ensure those films and television programs with a clear, underlying artistic vision behind them will always be encouraged and given space to flourish.

Like the developments in the television industry, Canadian film has seen a heartening growth in both the number and quality of dramatic features over the past decade.

This is especially noticeable in Quebec, where the work of such filmmakers as Denis Villeneuve, Phillipe Falardeau, Denis Côté, Jean-Marc Vallée, Kim Nguyen and Xavier Dolan has added lustre to an already rich and established cinematic tradition. In English Canada, feature films struggle to achieve a presence in the culture the way they do in Quebec. Like the work on offer in television, English Canadian features, while technically strong, often tend to be hampered by standard spring 2014

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The DGC Moment: John N. Smith’s

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LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD MONTAGE

spring 2014

Introduction by Tim Southam We all know about the HBO Revolution, the Basic Cable Revolution and, of course, we’re right in the middle of the Netflix Revolution.

But before HBO, AMC and Netflix, there was The Boys of St. Vincent, John N. Smith’s audacious 1992 film starring Henry Czerny, Johnny Morina and Brian Dooley. It tells the story of the systematic abuse of boys by priests at a religious orphanage. It is a film so politically provocative, so unflinching in its portrayal of the abuse, yet so sensitive in recording its emotional impact upon the boys that the movie broke out of harness and played on screens large and small around the world. Originating as it did in television, it rewrote the Canadian filmmaking playbook and reminds us now what is possible when an exquisitely made film also has a mission.

Not only did The Boys of St. Vincent kick off the decade that saw TV emerge as a dominant creative platform, not only did the film push boundaries socially and politically, it crystallized the casting and performance strategies John had developed on his three earlier films, Sitting in Limbo, Train of Dreams and Welcome to Canada, and then took with him to Hollywood to direct three films, including his hit movie Dangerous Minds starring Michelle Pfeiffer.

John’s work is enshrined in film history. An Emmy, an Oscar nomination, multiple Geminis, a DGC Award, major box-office and ratings success, and reams of rave reviews have mirrored John’s every move. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada. More importantly, he did jail time for refusing to reveal his sources on a story about the FLQ. And this brings us to the question of city. John is a Montrealer. He has said that in Montreal, a person cannot avoid politics. The same can be said of watching his films.

Watching John N. Smith’s films is exciting, it is inspiring and it makes political consciousness seem as essential as breathing.

John N. Smith’s acceptance speech When I got a phone call from Sturla Gunnarsson, telling me in his wonderfully enthusiastic way that the DGC had decided to give me this honour, I was astonished. I always harboured a private sense that I had had a career, but to tell you the truth I didn’t think anybody else had noticed.

Then came the bad news. I was going to have to put together a clip of my work! But the bad news became good news.

What happened next was that I started to look at my films, at least the ones I could get my hands on, which was something I had not really done before.

Generally when I had finished

a film it would take me a couple of years before I could even look at it. When it was fresh, all I could see were the mistakes I had made and the problems we never found solutions for. Then I would move on to the next project.

But here I was, retired, with time to sit and absorb a lot of my films.

I must say it was a rewarding experience, looking at work that was done even in the ’70s and ’80s. It was a great pleasure to revisit so many moments that had been so intensely lived. There were Pierre Letarte’s wonderful images, and on the screen was the work of superb actors.

There were great passages of dialogue by Des Walsh, Guy Vanderhaeghe and my son, Bruce Smith. And so many skilled and dedicated people: great editors, production designers and those somisnamed chieftains, the first ADs. I learned so much from people like the great Tony Lucibello. So here I was, living not in the present but in the past, and it brought me back to how this all started, back in the late ’60s.

I was a graduate student in political science and history at McGill. The Vietnam War was on and I was very engaged politically. Sit-ins were in the air.

When we took over the administration building at McGill, I was right at the centre of it all. After a memorable week of us occupying the building and being thrown out by the police, I found myself in the office of the local CBC News and Current Affairs producer.

I was there with my friend Ron Blumer, who was a budding filmmaker. We said we had been very poorly represented by the media and wanted to tell our side of the story. Ron was the filmmaker guy and I was the content guy. The CBC producer, a lovely man named Paul Wright, said OK. He gave us a half-hour television program to make, paid us $50 each and we spent the next month or so cooking up a cross between a film and a TV current affairs show. The

experience of putting ideas onto a screen, all the details of thinking and researching and writing and taking still photos, recording interviews and sound effects, filming and editing, rewriting, putting it all together—what was, to me, this magical process of creating something that comes from what you think, what you feel!!!!—made me say to myself, “This is what I want to do with my life.”

I was 25 years old and this was my eureka moment.

The program we made was controversial, received good reviews and got me a job in the CBC Current Affairs department. I was lucky enough in the next few years to make lots of TV programs: documentaries for CBC, CTV, ABC, PBS in New York and then the NFB in Montreal. I was lucky enough to be trained for a few years by the great cinematographer Doug Leiterman. I learned from three of the best: Allan King, Patrick Watson and Donald Brittain.

Since that start 45 years ago, the time has flown by, allowing me to do project after project, making films that always caused me to be swept up in this totally absorbing activity called filmmaking.

From the script stage through writing and rewriting, casting, prep, shooting, editing, music, sound work and mixing, I loved it all.

Of course it was not always without terrible battles. My first year in the industry saw me in prison in Montreal, defending the right of confidential sources. There were bitter battles over The Boys of St. Vincent; it took a year before the Supreme Court of Canada allowed it to be shown in Ontario and Quebec. There were many battles with producers and Hollywood studios and networks. For example, the CBC effectively buried the Tommy Douglas story in a craven capitulation to political pressure. These struggles are indeed part of the game—and they are not fun.

Luckily for me, I also was the

kind of person who works best in a group. My youth was spent passionately playing team games, mostly hockey and football, so I was at home in what, as you all know, is essentially a team game. For me, filmmaking has always been a group creative activity. The better the group, the better the film.

I spent 20 years at the NFB, where there was a standard of cinema that aimed at being world class and where the mantra was telling our own stories to Canadians. Twice in my career I went to the States, first to New York and then much later to L.A., but I found it unsatisfying, in that I was making American stuff. Maybe it was my years at the NFB but, for me, the rewards of telling Canadian stories have been so, so special. Whether it was Dieppe or Sitting in Limbo or The Englishman’s Boy or Welcome to Canada or The Boys of St. Vincent or Prairie Giant, there was always a special atmosphere on the set.

We were telling our stories, rooted in our own communities—and this is how, I believe, we make our own identity and from that, our own country.

Finally, if I may be personal for a brief moment, there is one person I have to thank: Cynthia Scott. She is one of our greatest filmmakers, an Academy Award-winner for Flamenco at 5:15 and the creator of the very best of our alternative dramas at the NFB, Company of Strangers. We have been together for most of the last 40 years. She has been an inspiration to me. I assure you I would not be here if I had not had the good luck to have encountered her when she was available. So thank you from the bottom of my heart, Cynthia.

I tell you, I am a lucky man.

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John N. Smith accepts the DGC’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Courtesy the DGC.

by TIM SOUTHAM & JOHN N. SMITH

This brings us to the question of country. At the height of this Hollywood success, John decided that telling Canadian stories making full use of the creative freedom Canadian productions generally offered him was his true calling. He came north and gave us more provocative films like Dieppe, Random Passage, Love and Savagery, Prairie Giant and The Englishman’s Boy. And this would be a good place to acknowledge something remarkable. As I look at John’s table I see a family of filmmakers: John, his partner, Cynthia Scott, and his son, Bruce Smith. What a powerhouse.

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SPIRIT OF PLACE Left, top to bottom: The Grey Fox (Phillip Borsos, 1982). Courtesy TIFF. Keir Gilchrist in Hungry Hills (Rob W. King, 2009); Moccasin Flats: Redemption (2008). Regectomy (2013). Courtesy Rob W. King.

Right, top to bottom: Who Has Seen the Wind (Allan King, 1977).

Courtesy TIFF. King on set for Hungry Hills. Courtesy Rob W. King.

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TO THE HORIZON AND BACK Regina. A kilometre beyond our new house was the Cinema 6, a drive-in movie theatre. Drawn by the flicker of images, my best friend and I walked across long-established wheat fields newly ploughed for housing to the high fence, peered through a knothole in the wood and realized the back three rows of parking stalls were empty. We scaled the fortress wall, stretched out two speakers, cranked the volume and lay hidden in the overgrown grass. I saw The French Connection, Klute and Vanishing Point while under the stars. This is how I discovered and embraced flawed film heroes who lived outside the margins of normal society.

By Rob W. King

Our childhood experiences, set however briefly in landscapes and in communities small and large, shape our perspective and that in turn shapes our story choices, our characters, our locations and how we choose to frame them. The best films, as in all art, begin with and then transcend the vernacular.

My father completed seminary school in Ohio and moved us to Weyburn, a southern prairie community where he accepted a “calling” as the Lutheran pastor. At five years old, I was allowed to roam freely past the edge of town into the muddy gardens and open Saskatchewan fields, my mind full of fictional quests, the sawed-off blade of a hockey stick firmly stuffed into my rubber boot in case I needed an imaginary pistol.

As a pastor’s son, one often has to struggle hard to avoid the bullies. I developed a twisted sense of humour that gained me new friends. I spent a lot of time in the Zion Lutheran church in Weyburn but I preferred the open prairie and its grander possibilities.

As I reached my teen years, I lost interest in religion, having run afoul of authority figures who often seemed to be just another kind of bully.

My father accepted a teaching position at the University of

In high school I saw Allan King’s Who Has Seen The Wind, an inspirational film because it was set in Weyburn.

I went on to discover Canadian films like The Rowdyman and The Grey Fox—stories of outsiders, each of them set against remarkable landscapes.

The first film I made was a music video. I talked the band into an anti-racist theme and had the heroic young victim run to a church for sanctuary, only to find the doors locked. I explored my twisted side when I made an NSI (National Screen Institute) short called Talker, which pitched a man trying to get a word in edgewise into a psychiatric nightmare.

In another twisted short titled Rejectomy, our hero discovers minutes after having a vasectomy that his girlfriend no longer wants him in her life. He stumbles his way into a pedestrian tunnel and finds a cabal of guys all dressed like Batman. They have kidnapped a judge to protest the inequality of rights that fathers face in the family court system.

These characters weren’t hurtling across western America in a Dodge Challenger with 100 cops on their heels as Kowalski did in Vanishing Point; nor were they robbing trains on high mountain passes at gunpoint while charming beautiful women, as Bill Miner did in The Grey Fox. They were struggling to make

sense of life in a frustrating world where there was no horizon. For someone from the prairies, that horizon, even the absence of it, is ever important in a story.

My Movie-Of-the-Week (cowritten by Laura Milliken), Moccasin Flats: Redemption, has several heroes. One is a young boy who communicates through graffiti and is witness to a gang murder. The other is a recovering junkie who is saved by a traditional belief system. The bullied and the faithless are tossed at each other by circumstance. For one of the climactic scenes, we were able to get the old Cinema 6 drive-in as a location. It was shut down and largely used to graze llamas.

But the screen was still there, as were all the steel poles that once housed the speakers.

From a story point of view, we were shooting a scene where the dreams of two characters are shattered forever, where love and loyalties are challenged and retribution handed out with boots and fists. The dilapidated silver screen and the wide sky beyond seemed the perfect backdrop.

What really made the day magical was when cinematographer James Kinistino downloaded the dailies and projected them onto the big screen. We sat in the long grass, just as I had done as a boy, and watched our day’s work flicker under the stars.

The darkened shapes of the llamas moved through the fireweeds and paid us no notice.

One of my favourite films is Lawrence Of Arabia, a story filled with wide horizons and great adventure. It centres on a character who earns the faith of a people and then is seduced by his own belief that he is a god. Another, Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves, has characters set against a wide, harsh landscape, surrounded by the sea and oppressed by religion. I was surprised when the heartwrenching actions of Emily Watson’s character eventually reveal God’s existence. It’s a

film I can never quite get out of my head.

I now live in Toronto. It has been an adjustment on many fronts, including navigating amidst the layers of brick, concrete and glass. To re-set an old joke: A Saskatchewan farmer once came to Toronto and said he liked the city, except for the fact that all those buildings blocked the view. I now imagine films about dispossessed characters in an urban landscape. If I could shoot a film in Toronto, I’d make sure the buildings were somehow cleverly and importantly interfering with the view, cutting off the horizon.

The last feature film I made in Saskatchewan was Hungry Hills. Written by my friend Gary Fisher and based on a novel by rebel Canadian playwright George Ryga, it follows the tale of a young man who is ostracized by his community for reasons he does not understand.

Escaping a distant reformatory, he returns to the hills to fight for his place in the world. It took 16 years to find the resources to make Hungry Hills. In a pivotal early scene, two outcast boys meet outside the faded local church. Their story is then carved into the gullies and flatlands of the bordering prairies. I knew the landscape it needed and I surrounded myself with actors, a production designer, a cinematographer, an editor, a composer, a colourist and producers who had also grown up in small prairie towns, from Weyburn to Estevan, from Tuxford to Gravelbourg—friends and kindred spirits.

our rubber boots—imaginary wooden pistols no longer shoved inside but cameras ready to tell a tale as perhaps no one else could.

The prairies will be somehow omnipresent in every film I make and Weyburn will always be a part of that vernacular.

Perhaps the greatest twist of fate or faith I might ever tell you is that I met the love of my life on a film set. Turns out she had lived a few doors down from us. My father baptized her in the Zion Lutheran church. I probably wasn’t there that day. More likely I was working my way towards the wide and endless horizon.

Veteran director Rob King is a member of the DGC.

We were all out there, an hour from Regina, in a place that was then relatively untouched by civilization and is now in the crosshairs of a potash company. We were ravaged by tics, visited by a bear and slogged through mud as we created our collective fictional world. We watched the sky for changes in weather, for amazing shifts of light across the hilltops, in spring 2014

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The Creative Dynamic Third annual event March 22, 2014 TIFF Bell Lightbox

Created by the National Directors Division (NDD) of the Directors Guild of Canada (DGC), the Creative Dynamic was co-sponsored this year by the Screen Composers’ Guild of Canada. The focus was on the collaboration between composers, editors and directors. Montage’s editor Marc Glassman has abridged this report of the day’s events, due to considerations of length. Film credits for participants convey only a small sense of their careers. All of the directors and editors are members of the DGC.

The Creative Dynamic. Front row, left to right: David Evans, Geoff Ashenhurst, Robert Carli, Michael Kennedy.

edited by MARC GLASSMAN Michael Kennedy, film director (Little Mosque on the Prairies, Made in Canada) and originator of The Creative Dynamic Three years ago, I felt that the creative collaboration between the primary partners in filmmaking could be improved. The goal today is to explore the creative collaboration that happens in the whole postproduction phase. I’m thrilled we can discuss it with the Screen Composers’ Guild of Canada, which has now formed an alliance with the DGC.

In preparation for this event, the DGC sent surveys, separate ones, to picture and sound editors, composers and directors.

We asked about timing. When’s the best time for the editor to become involved in a film? The directors generally said, “Late in the pre-production,” while the editors replied, “As soon as possible.” No surprise there.

We asked about the degree of supervision that the editors would like to see from the director in making the first cut. About three times as many editors as directors said, “No supervision, thank you very much.”

This came out in the surveys: the reality is that in the TV world, the directors have very little interaction with the music aspect. They’re gone by then and if a director comes from a film background, like me, that really is a disconnect.

The main hurdle or limitation? Editors said it was time, quickly followed by budget. The composers agreed and so did the directors, who followed with [interference from] the network followed by the producers. Same as the editors.

When asked what was the most rewarding aspect of their role in post-production, editors overwhelmingly said, “Storytelling, creativity and collaboration.”

I really liked seeing that. Editors really see themselves as storytellers, just like writers do. I thought that was an interesting choice of words. I often refer to the editor as being like the second director. I teach a filmmaking course sometimes and I say to the students, “You can learn an incredible amount about directing in the editing room.”

The sound editors replied that they found postproduction rewarding because the results were “better than any one could do on their own.” I love that creative dynamic: the whole greater than the parts.

Everyone agreed on that.

Directors said their most rewarding aspect of post-production was seeing everything come together. You start with a vision, and then you go

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Photos: Callan Field

THE CREATIVE DYNAMIC: CANDID CONVERSATIONS WITH COMPOSERS, EDITORS AND DIRECTORS

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The expectations are a lot higher now than what they were. Certainly, we’re working longer days and more hours. The technology has made a lot of things easier and less labour-intensive. However, the expectations have gone way, way up. If you can get involved in the sound edit and sound work as the picture edit is going on, it makes everything a lot easier. You need to have communication with composers.

I was working on a TV show a couple of years ago and I really needed to talk to the director, to see which direction he wanted to take on a scene.

And the response I got was, “There’s no need for you to talk to the director.” And my response—in my head—was, “Are you kidding me?” You need the editor, you need the sound editor, you need the composer and you need the director to be in the conversation. That’s part of the creative process. That is under attack, or is being eroded, more than ever.

through a long, piecemeal process of breaking it up and shooting a lot of little things that don’t seem to add up. Even in the edit room when you put the picture together, it’s still only partially up to that vision, but when the music finally comes in, kapow! It finally comes to life again. Yup. One vision, one voice. That is very exciting.

Let’s look at what concerns people about postproduction. Directors were concerned about two things: budgets and time. But, to me, the most interesting thing I found was this observation from the editors: “loss of thinking time and contemplation.”

These words came up a lot. It’s not just rushing to get it done for the network or the producer.

We know that digitization has helped to make things go faster. You don’t have to go through racks of trims any more, but it’s the diminished opportunities for reflection that has hurt creative people.

Steve: I was talking about a television show. The biggest challenge you have as a sound editor is that by the time you get the picture, the director is gone, 99 per cent of the time. Notes usually come through the picture editor. I think something has to happen to rebuild that collaboration.

Panel 1: Recreating the Whole: Directors, Picture Editors, Sound Editors Moderator: Sudz Sutherland, director (Home Again, Guns) Panelists: Steve Munro, sound editor (Pontypool, The Sweet Hereafter); Don McBrearty, director (Boys and Girls, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town); D. Gillian Truster, film editor (Orphan Black, Degrassi: The Next Generation)

Don McBrearty: Fairly recently, I came into a show at the very last minute because the director wasn’t able to complete the project. I had half the prep time, then I had to shoot and go on to something else.

What happens in a case like that is you make sound notes as you go along and you hope that communication goes back and forth, but in episodic TV, the creative control is much more in the producer’s hands.

Sudz Sutherland: Steve, at what stage do you like to become involved in the process of making a film or TV show?

Sudz: You’ve managed to skip from long form to episodic quite well throughout your career. Can you tell us about how you do that?

Steve Munro: As early as possible. You should be involved in the budgeting process. You need to get your hands on the script and have a read, have a chat with the director or whoever’s in creative control.

Creatively the worst thing that can possibly happen is to get involved at picture lock. Sound is 50 per cent of the film experience. It is very much a part of the story-telling process so involvement early on is the best.

Don: With long form you tend to get involved earlier.

You’re much more intimately involved in scripting, in casting, in choosing crew and everybody in post, so it’s a wonderful and more satisfying experience.

When you switch to episodic TV you realize a lot of that work has been done and you focus on the things you can control. You have to find times to go in and sit with the DP at lunch or whatever. Drop in to see the editors as they’re working on some other episode. You still have to do a lot of the same work but you just have to steal time to talk to the people.

The metaphor, the image I’ve often used as an episodic director, is: You have to be like a comet coming into a universe. You enter, you burn brightly, you don’t bump into anything and you leave. The first thing you do is get as familiar as you can with the show. And the real relationship is with the head

Sudz: Do you find this happening in your feature work more or less as the digital takeovers happen?

Steve: I don’t think digital has much bearing on that.

The cool thing with digital is that it enables much more detailed sound work to commence during the picture edit stage.

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Sudz: That’s...crazy. In the production world, we’ll have meetings with all the keys and this is the sort of disconnect we need to begin talking about. The information flow is from the top down and then it spreads out. And any question should come back to the director. We’re making and building this whole thing as we move towards the day of shooting.

When we start a feature, we have a production meeting and then we try to involve the sound editors and the picture editors, because they’re hired at that time. Can we now make it a requirement at the DGC that we need to do this type of thing for television?

The culture has to spread from the production world to the post-production world.

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writer and/or showrunner. Just try to get them to articulate what the show is about, what’s important about the look and where they want input in certain areas.

Essentially you try to do your homework: read that script, go in and talk to the showrunner, and get feedback on the show. I don’t think you can direct a very good episode if the script isn’t good and I think if you have a great script, your chances of it being a really good episode are very high. Just be as prepared as you can by talking to all the crew. You’ve got your AD team—fortunately, they’re usually with you, they’re prepping with you. Then talk to everybody and prepare as best you can.

Sudz: Thanks. At this point I’d love to talk to D. Gillian Truster. Could you tell us about the post-production process on Orphan Black and if it differs from the other shows you’ve worked on?

Gillian Truster: Every show is a little different. Obviously one thing that’s different about this show is it involves clones. The process of cutting where Tatiana Maslaney is in scenes with herself is different. You have to create the master shots from different elements.

[Gillian shows a clip from “Effects of External Conditions,” Orphan Black, directed by Grant Harvey]. The way that this sequence was written, there was some crosscutting but far less than in the sequence you see. I cut it the way it was written and then realized that things needed to play much more simultaneously than written, because everything needed to be happening at the same time.

So I called Grant and said, “I’d like to see what this scene looks like if I really go to town intercutting it. But I can show you the other way, too—I have it already the way that it’s scripted.” To his credit, he said, “You know what, try it. Do what you think—try stuff.” And so he allowed me to do that and then we tweaked it together.

When I’m looking at footage, I want to be able to see it with the freshest, most unbiased eyes possible. I don’t want to go to production meetings, I don’t want to go to set and I don’t actually want to discuss what the director’s intention is or how to put it together. Initially. Because if the director tells me what they’re thinking or how to put it together, I will do that. I may not experiment with other ways of doing it. I want to be able to discuss it with the director and I want them to be able to discuss things with me.

I just don’t want specific notes at first.

Another thing I think is very important in terms of collaboration is that everybody should feel comfortable with saying what they’re really thinking. If I’m not doing something right, I want to know. And if I have an idea, I’d like to have the freedom to suggest it. It’s important to be honest with each other, but in a kind way.

Don: It’s funny what Gillian was talking about. It’s almost the same between a director and an actor. You have one opportunity for the key creative people to bring you gifts. The gifts of their ideas. And it starts with the actors. If you start talking to an actor before the scene starts, you’re never going to get that first performance that they’ve been thinking about giving.

As a director you have to find a way to have your vision, but also communicate in such a way that it is a jumping off point for the key creative people. And I think that, especially with editing, you desperately want that fresh set of eyes. You want them, as Gillian

Michael Kennedy displays a survey at the Creative Dynamic.

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fore we go into the studio with 60 players and every second counts. We don’t want to have any surprises when we go to the recording session. The doubleedged sword that comes with that is that Amin and I have to spend so much more time bringing everything we do past the level of demo. A demo doesn’t really exist anymore. Everything that we deliver is 85/90 per cent there.

Susan: What is the common language from the rest of the film team that’s really helpful to you?

Jeff: You speak to a composer the same way you’d speak to an actor. We want to talk in terms of the drama, and the filmmaking terms all apply. It’s our job to turn the filmmaking terms into musical terms.

said, to start without knowing anything about what your intentions were.

Panel 2: Emotional Connections: Directors & Composers Moderator: Susan Shipton, picture editor (Chloe, Being Julia) Panelists: Jeremy Podeswa, director (The Five Senses, Fugitive Pieces); Amin Bhatia, composer (Flashpoint, Power Play); Jeff Toyne, composer (Rogue, The Devil You Know) Susan Shipton: Amin, you were one of the composers on Flashpoint from the beginning, am I correct?

Was the tone and look of the show talked about before it was shot? How did your work evolve?

Amin Bhatiya: Ari Posner and I teamed up for Flashpoint. Ari has more of a songwriter kind of style to his music and I’m the orchestral side. We put a demo together for the show and we were told that we didn’t get the series. Then, a few weeks later, we got the call saying, “You’ve got four days to do the pilot.”

Susan: How much did that ultimate score resemble your original demo?

Amin: Between Episode One and the succeeding episodes, the style of the show really changed. Each episode is different. The police team goes through another crisis and they handle things very differently.

So each episode had a different musical signature.

There was a lot of co-ordination with our music editor, Joe Mancuso, the sound teams and the mixing team at Technicolor. All of us tried to keep in touch as much as possible on a per-episode basis and even sometimes on a per-scene basis.

As composers, we usually get the work prints.

We’re working with what we’ve got there and what inspires us to add to the scene versus overtake it.

Where can we come in? Where can we stay the heck out of the way?

We deal with lots of things: dramatic music in between dialogue scenes, music created for a scene, licensed music and songs the director or producers like that they want to have as part of the soundscape.

Susan: Jeff, I’m curious about how technology has helped you in realizing your creative vision for a score.

Jeff Toyne: It’s very expensive to record an orchestra.

So the technology allows us to hear it and vet it be-

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Amin: You don’t have to know musical vocabulary. In fact we’d prefer to discuss the emotion of the scene, the goal of the scene.

Jeff: One of the things that technology allows us to do is to point to something and say, “This works for this reason. This doesn’t work for this reason.” We can put up music on a scene and see how it plays.

Sometimes in a spotting session we talk about whether we’d like to get temp music or not. It’s very difficult for people, even for composers and musicians, to talk about music. It’s so much easier to hear it.

Susan: I’m always really curious about where the decision comes for the type of music, in a very broad sense. Is it orchestral? Is it period?

Jeff: One of the things we strive for is to create a musical world for a film to live in that is unique. On a television show, they call it the kitchen music. You hear the music in the kitchen and you know your show is on.

Susan: I saw all of Jeremy Podeswa’s feature films at various stages of edit. Jeremy, please talk about how the temp track evolved in the cutting room and about the difference in sound and music between the three films.

Jeremy Podeswa: I worked with different composers on each of the three features. I tend to be very loyal with crew people, but with composers, it’s not a matter of loyalty, it’s more a matter of trying to cast people who are in line with what I’m trying to do with that movie. And the three composers I chose for the movies successfully captured the essence of what I was looking for.

Temp tends to be a really important thing for me when communicating with the composer. The movies I made I’ve also written, and sometimes I’m listening to music as I’m writing and that music informs what I’m doing. With Fugitive Pieces, Anne Michaels, who wrote the novel, had recommended a Greek composer, Eleni Karaindrou, who had done all of Angelopoulos’s movies. She was going to do the movie but it didn’t work out. When it all fell apart, I thought, “Going with a Greek composer is still a really good idea for this movie.”

I found Nikos Kypourgos, a composer who was not exactly like Eleni but I could see he would have a sympathy with that kind of approach, and his music was the whole temp track. I think that was really difficult for him, coming into the project. We had to find a way that Nikos could do something that was him and still be true to my original conception of

what the score should be. And in the end I think he did a great job and it is very much him.

In TV I rarely work with the composer. TV movies, yes. Sometimes if I have a long association with a show I may meet the composer at a party and then we know each other and sometimes we may even communicate, but we’re never brought together. Producers seem to prefer not to bring people together, for some reason. But we do work a lot with cues from the show. So unless you’re doing the first or second show where there are no cues available, there’s a lot to work with. And the editors have everything available to them from every episode that’s been done. When we’re putting the director’s cut together, I’m concerned with making sure that the viewing experience is as close to the final as we can get. The sound design and music are complete in terms of what the emotion should be.

Susan: You’re such a musical person, from the way you’ve worked on your features. You must miss that relationship in television with a composer.

Jeremy: I do, a little bit, but I have to say that I work with so many good editors. They’re really sophisticated people and pull things that are really great for me to listen to. And sometimes, if it’s with licensed music, we have amazing post-production supervisors, music supervisors, who will find incredible things. My first experience doing a show in the States was Six Feet Under, and they had an amazing music supervisor. I would discover all kinds of great music through him and they had a pretty healthy budget so they could license almost anything.

Susan: Could Amin and/or Jeff talk a little bit more about spotting sessions? Just how important are they?

Jeff: People don’t realize how long it takes to spot a film. It’s not unreasonable to take eight hours to spot a feature-length film. But I’ve definitely heard, “Spotting session? We’ve done the spotting. We have no reason to talk about it.”

Amin: In today’s day and age, maybe the spotting session doesn’t have to be eight hours anymore.

But even if there’s a spotting session, which is the equivalent of a phone call, it’s our job to go, “Yeah, I see what you mean about that working really well.

We’ll be able to create something like it or stay with that mood.”

We both fight for as communication as early as possible. And not only with the filmmakers, the initial visualizers, but also the sound-design team and the dialogue team. We want to find out how we can use our bags of tricks to enhance the vision the director or the producer had at the very beginning.

Jeff: We’ve all been led down the wrong path by temp music and a conversation up front can help us. Temp music is exactly that: It’s temporary. And sometimes the reason that a piece of music is in a scene is not because it works on an emotional level, or has the right musical quality or tone. Sometimes it has the right length, starts and ends at the right time, and has a nice build.

Amin: Temp music is a necessary evil. There used to be a system by which once temp did its job, and everybody had a conversation as to, “Here’s why it’s working, here’s what we need,” then, for a few

Panel 3 of the Creative Dynamic. Left to right: Michael Kennedy, Robert Carli, David Evans, Geoff Ashenhurst.

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Right page: the Creative Dynamic crowd in the theatre Farther right, top to bottom The Creative Dynamic audience at lunch at TIFF Lounge (two shots) Directors Bruce McDonald and Jeremy Podeswa in a dialogue during lunch

weeks, back when things took a few weeks, temp was stripped away. And everybody worked with silence for a while, including the networks. Then when the new music came—our designed music—people could really look at it and hear it with fresh eyes and ears.

Susan: Jeremy, did you work with a temp track? You talked about Fugitive Pieces but maybe you could talk generally about scoring for features.

Jeremy: With my first two features, Eclipse and The Five Senses, I put in temp tracks mainly for audience response. I wanted to make sure people would read the film properly.

Jeff: It might be good to acknowledge just how powerful the marriage of music to picture can be when you put temp music on. I was in a situation on the last series I finished. The whole season opens with a four-minute montage, with almost no dialogue and a big music cue. I said, “Great, what song are you going to use?” They had temped it with the best that they could find but everyone agreed: Not that. We were told, “We have total faith in you, four minutes, just don’t do that song.” It didn’t help that they had cut it to the beat. We worked on it, and by the time it came to review, it was two months later. And the network said, “But it doesn’t sound like….” The thing that they, too, agreed they didn’t want! They’d been living with the song for two months and they had got used to it.

Panel 3: Future Tracks: Directors, Composers, Film Editors & Sound Editors Michael Kennedy, moderator Panelists: Robert Carli, composer (Murdoch Mysteries, Cracked); David Evans, sound editor (Batman Begins, Sweeney Todd); Geoff Ashenhurst, picture editor (The Samaritan, The Lesser Blessed) Michael Kennedy: What would you change, if anything, about the way we collaborate?

Robert Carli: That’s a big question, Michael. It seems the process is changing every two or three months.

I’m working on a show called Remedy in which the schedule was so compressed I thought we were going to break records. I’m hopeful that technology will reach a threshold where we will not be able to continue to advance the schedule, to a point where it’s to the detriment of the show or the film.

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Michael: We have the same problem in shooting TV movies in 10 and 12 days. We feel we’re way past the threshold. Please tell us briefly about the post-production process on Cracked.

tor, Alfonso Cuarón, about what he wanted to do with the movie. Then we came on just towards the end of the shoot. We were on all the way through the picture edit.

Robert: Cracked was produced and developed by documentary filmmaker Peter Raymont. Feature filmmaking is long, but documentary filmmakers often work on a project for five or 10 years, researching and building their story, so he’s used to slowing things down. Peter is coming from an older school of filmmaking where there was time permitted not only to create the score but also to experiment. I’m learning every day about how to write music for films and how to write music, period, because it’s so much about experimentation. And when you’re not permitted to try new things you do what you did before, and to me that’s not as interesting.

Michael: Can you talk about how to approach a film with the long takes you see in Children of Men?

Michael: What’s your experience on Cracked with regard to the temp music? Are you giving them stuff?

Do they use previous cues?

Michael: There’s good and bad in that challenge because you have to create the environment but there’s so much going on you have to be extremely selective. It’s fascinating to me how Cuarón’s directorial approach with those long visual takes had people talking about the visuals, but really it was the sound that was driving the story at that point.

Robert: Since it was a new series, they were looking for temp and there was nothing I could provide them with at first because I was still creating it. But after a few episodes, you quickly build up a library. The show I’m currently working on, Remedy, is the first time I’ve ever worked on a show where there is zero temp in the edit room. And it’s thrown the editors for a loop.

They’re finding it an adjustment. To me, temp helps everyone. It informs the composers, gives the director a feeling and helps the editors to get pace. But when you don’t have it, it’s refreshing and lets you rethink your creative process. It makes you think, “Do we even need music?” If a cut works without music, then what am I doing here?

Michael: David, you’ve got terrific experience, working on wonderful films. What would you change, if anything, about the way we collaborate in post?

David Evans: The film that I’ve chosen to talk about, Children of Men, had a very long post process. We started in February and finished at the end of August.

But in that period we did something in the order of 12 temp dubs. We all worked on the post-production sessions: music, Foley, everything. As a scene was cut, a new one was brought on, and we moved all the way through the process together. By the time we got to the dub, everybody was familiar with everything sonically that was in the show. It was hard, and it meant lots of repetition and amending as we cut, but we all got incredible feedback. As you sit in with the director and the editor, you’re in constant contact. Whether you work in the same place or not is irrelevant as long as you can have the Internet. We just kept amending. We’d cut the scene, they’d send it back and we’d redo it.

I hear people talk about dialogue, sound effects, music—they’re all components of a soundtrack. They shouldn’t drive their own path to the end of the movie without complete consultation on every other aspect of the film.

Michael: How simple, yet how radical. That’s a beautiful, cohesive view. How early were you involved in the film?

David: I knew that I was on Children of Men before the film was shot. We had discussions with the direc-

David: In a way, it’s easy. There’s a kind of documentary feel to it. Cuarón likes long, elaborate, choreographed takes. The idea was that he wanted to “mono” up the track so it felt like you were inside that guy’s [Clive Owen] head. So we played with that for a while and then discovered collectively that it didn’t work. What we wound up with was a radical use of the sonic space in the theatre, a lot of wild panning, but it was dictated by what you see on the film.

David: From my perspective, I love temp dubs. It’s a chance to go through the film with everybody else and play out ideas. That temp process can be as simple as a director calling up the sound team and saying, “I need a library. Here’s the script, here’s what we’re looking for. Can you give me a library of sound to work with and I’ll bring those into the cutting room?” I’ve never had an experience where I wouldn’t be willing to collaborate in that way.

Whether it’s two days, a week or a day, working with the sound team to come up with a program is a fine idea.

In the case of this film, the music editor was also sort of a composer, so there were a lot of different sources that the music came in from. It wasn’t just one entity that was providing the music. But in other projects that were more traditionally based, nobody really knew what the music was until we got to the end and then we had this kind of auditory argument about whose real estate is here and who had a better vision of what the scene is supposed to be. In this day and age, and with the level of technology we have, that’s a stupid argument we don’t need to participate in any more. But it also means everybody has to amend their process to get us to that point.

Michael: Lovely, David. Let’s move over to Geoff. I find shorts often allow for creativity that is sometimes stifled in the episodic box that some of us work in.

Geoff Ashenhurst: One director put it well. He said, “This is my last chance to do something and not be accountable to anybody. There’s not gonna be financier notes or network notes or studio notes.” It’s a bit more artist-driven.

Michael: And you’ve also done some music videos.

Geoff: I’ve done a bunch of music videos. They’re at the lower end of the budget level in this world, but they can be pretty gratifying creatively. They usually have a pretty tight schedule. Beyoncé Live at Roseland was a concert film, which took me about a month in New York, editing really long days with lots of different concert footage. It’s a whole other thing.

Michael: Having this background in shorts and music videos and now features, what’s your take on creative collaboration?

Geoff: I would echo what David said. That sort of process he had on Children of Men is kind of the dream. The way schedules are, you get the handshake once the picture’s locked and if you’re not doing anything you’ll come to the mix, but that’s several months later and usually you’re on to something else.

And then you have that experience of going to watch the movie if you’re not really able to be there for playback and it’s like, “Oh, man, we talked about so many things that never happened in the mix.” That’s the biggest thing, getting sound involved earlier.

Robert: Michael, do directors—with so much on their plate, what with casting and everything—put off decisions on composers and sound editors because they can?

Michael: I, as a director, would never discourage the idea of discussing composers early, but I find, yes, that many producers would probably discourage that idea because that would cost some money prior to the very last minute when they have to spend it.

Marc Glassman is a night owl. He likes to imbibe Earl Grey tea, soya sauce and Sauvignon Blanc, but not together. spring 2014

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KARI SKOG LAND i

“Don’t make me sound grumpy,” says DGCer Kari Skogland over the phone from her home in Toronto. Grumpy, however, would hardly be the word that comes to mind when describing the veteran director’s tone. Blunt, opinionated and passionate, but hardly grumpy. For 30-odd years, Skogland has been carving out a career for herself behind the camera, which involved breaking through the glass ceiling in the 1990s and handling less-than-supportive all-male crews in her mid-20s.

She started out in commercials before moving to music videos, and then eventually landed in the television and feature-film worlds, ultimately striking a balance between the latter two. Indeed, since working on Global TV’s Traders in 1996, Skogland has never left the small screen, having gone on to direct episodes of The L Word (2004), The Listener (2009-2012), Boardwalk Empire (2012), The Killing (2013), Neil Jordan’s The Borgias (2012-2013), and presently on The Vikings (2014), and The Walking (2014). Part of this was economic necessity. As Skogland puts it, television has given her the financial stability to pursue her feature-film projects, such as adapting Margaret Laurence’s novel The Stone Angel (2007) and the true story of IRA informant Martin McGartland in Fifty Dead Men Walking (2008).

The issue of finance and financing is where Skogland’s concerns over being perceived as bad-tempered emerge, for she knows first hand how difficult it can be to get films off the ground through national funding channels. Frustrated with this reality, she has chosen to work overseas. This has afforded her many great opportunities but, as she says, it is hardly the ideal scenario for a national cinema. Skogland’s observations—and pointed critiques—regarding how feature films are funded north of the 49th parallel feed into a larger question concerning the schisms between what funding bodies, distributors, directors and audiences want from our domestic stories. It is something of an eternal question in Canadian film, and in an era of co-productions the issue is only going to become more complex. Add to this the increasing power of television—what Skogland calls the “Netflix fissure”—and the hope of resolving the issue any time soon seems impossible. Skogland, however, is hardly giving up or turning her back on working in Canada. Instead, she suggests new and bold ways in which our national cinema might be reinvigorated and even redefined. Like we said, she is blunt, opinionated and passionate. —Kiva Reardon

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Photo: Chris Chapman photographed @ Toronto Tattoo and Body Piercing Parlour Shop | Adrenaline

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Top: Skogland directs Peter Sullivan (front, left) and Colm Feore (front, right) in The Borgias. Bottom: Skogland on the set of The Borgias.

Both photos courtesy Take 5 Productions Inc. Top to bottom: On the set ot The Borgias.

All photos courtesy Take 5 Productions Inc.

Montage: Kiva Reardon Kari: Kari Skogland Montage: Was there a particular moment when you realized you wanted to work in film?

Kari: I think the seminal moment was at the young age of 12. I went to see Ryan’s Daughter with a girlfriend at the Mount Pleasant theatre.

Watching that film, I just said, “You know what, that’s what I want to do. I want to make movies.”

Which was great, as I had a clear path when I was very young, whereas most people go searching for a few years before they find theirs! From then on, basically, every decision I made was for that endgame, which worked out.

Montage: How did your studies inform your filmmaking?

Kari: Back then there weren’t the fancy schools there are now for filmmaking. There was NYU, but that was way out of my league financially.

So I studied economics at Western, of all places, if you can believe that! I was also working at the same time. At around 18, I got my first job at a film company. It was the classic trajectory: I started as a receptionist and worked my way up in the postproduction department to assistant editor. I was working in the commercial world, but kept doing part-time studies in all my other interests, like writing and acting. I didn’t act, but I did a lot of classes to see how to speak to actors and what that world was like. Then I opened my first company in the late ’80s or early ’90s.

Montage: This is all before you’re 30, if I’m doing the math right.

Kari: That was all before I was 25! I opened my first company when I was 24. It had a focus on commercials. I started getting noticed and another company called to see if I was interested in directing music videos. The timing was perfect and I went for it. After that, some people came to me from a show called Catwalk, which needed retooling. I worked on it with a guy named Alan Taylor, who has gone on to do great things like Thor [The Dark World]. I cut my teeth in this crazy world of television and thought, “Oh my god. This is a wild ride.”

At that time, as a woman, I was still up against the glass ceiling. It was bad enough in the commercial world, where I was one of only a few women directors, but in television, women just weren’t directors. You couldn’t even count them on one hand. This meant crews were a little unused to women being in charge. It was a constant navigation of these crusty old guys—grips and gaffers who were really weren’t very supportive of the idea of a woman being the boss. Well, I’m not really sure they weren’t supportive, but they were grumpy about the whole idea of change. It was all a bit surprising to me, but it didn’t take me long to figure out this new world, how to navigate it and not suffer fools.

Montage: Your first big break was with Global TV’s Traders, which was set in the world of Bay Street bankers.

Kari: I think by then I had done my first movie, which was The Size of Watermelons with Paul Rudd and Donal Logue. That was a blast of a shoot, down in Venice Beach. I’m probably one of the only Canadians who has shot a Canadian production in California. I hired every Canadian I could find! Traders approached me after that. My background in economics helped on that show, and the fact I was also taking my stockbroker’s licence didn’t hurt either. I did it because by then I owned a company, and I wanted to understand more of the financial side of things—how it all worked. I already knew enough about that world, so I could get in there and take it head on.

In those days, television shows didn’t really have producing directors like they do now—showrunning directors. But that’s what I was. I created the look and the style and directed the first five episodes. We had a great time. I had tremendous support behind me, too—people like Seaton McLean really wanted to create cutting-edge stuff. And it was. The show won a lot of awards because the production had a take-no-prisoners attitude.

Montage: Can you talk about the changes you’ve seen in the TV landscape?

Kari: I often heard criticisms from producers: “Well, your television work looks too much like film.” At the time, I really couldn’t differentiate between the two and now that’s almost a given.

Things really started to change when television started to embrace strong writing and strong writers, people like Michael Hirst on The Tudors, who earlier wrote the Cate Blanchett film Elizabeth.

The Sopranos obviously is another one that was a game-changer. You had Terry Winter-types, writing TV and creating characters that people wanted to follow. And at the same time, the independent feature world really started to struggle. I was fortunate enough that I had kept my TV career going amongst all this. I still have to pay the bills, quite frankly. In 2011 or 2012, I was asked to meet with Neil Jordan about directing The Borgias. Suddenly I was in the premium entertainment world. I was like a kid in a candy store. It’s TV, but on the level of making movies.

Montage: Plus, you had a six-episode arc on that show. So it wasn’t like popping in for an episode and trying to make 42 minutes your own.

Kari: Exactly. What’s also wonderful about that [TV mega-series] world, particularly in Europe, is they hand you the keys and say, “Go!” They respring 2014

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ally expect you to bring your filmmaker abilities to the table. You’re working with Oscar-winning actors. It’s a whole different experience. Suddenly I could blend my sensibilities and make a nice living.

And I really had an amazing time on The Borgias. I was working at the scale of a $100-million movie but in a $60-million environment. A typical day for me was dealing with 400 extras, horses, battles, sieges, you name it. I blew up castles!

Montage: In another interview, you said that you never thought you would work in the action genre.

Why is that?

Kari: I started out with the sensibility, “Oh my god, violence is terrible. Why would we promote violence via entertainment?” It was a noble thought.

Then one of the first movies I made was called Men with Guns. The producers approached me and we ripped up the script and started again. It was all improv-style, shooting from the hip. And it was full of action. I hadn’t done anything where guns were being shot and this movie was all about sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll. It was a kind of Tarantinoesque storyline and off-the-cuff quality—this was ’96, ’97. Suddenly, I embraced it. Not only could I get inside a story with violence but I could tell it in a different way. My position on violence and entertainment didn’t really change. But I realized I could layer in the reality and the horror as part of the message within my work.

“I feel Canada doesn’t really have the guts to tell bold Canadian stories.” — Kari Skoglund Montage: The question of violence is also central to Fifty Dead Men Walking.

Kari: The point in that movie was not to be gratuitously violent but to say: When you’re in an extremist situation, innocent people, or even not innocent people, get hurt in ways you can’t fathom.

That was the point of Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, too, and people had all kinds of issues with it. That’s sort of in the same wheelhouse. There’s a scene in Fifty Dead Men where we shot the knees out of a young man, which is a typical IRA retribution for thievery. As we were filming, we were running out of time and I had to make a choice: Do I do a close-up or do I do a wide shot? I couldn’t do both, because we didn’t have time to do the reset. I took five minutes and talked to the team and said, “We’re having trouble deciding because the people who are going to be selling this movie want more action, meaning more gore, more inyour-face stuff. But we don’t have the money.” In the end, we only used the wide shot because we thought it would be more chilling to see this violent scene unfold from a distance. I think it worked far better. If I had gotten involved and cheesed it up with a bunch of editing, it wouldn’t have been so poignant. That’s a case where sometimes financial problems, or other challenges, actually force

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you into a more interesting and introspective intelligent way of solving a story issue. You’re forced to go at it from a hard left instead of straight on.

Montage: 50 Dead Men Walking wasn’t the first time you had adapted a book for the screen either.

The first was The Stone Angel.

Kari: The Stone Angel was a book I had always loved but it turned out to be pretty tricky to get the rights. Alliance had them, and Michael MacMillan and Seaton McLean had tried to bring it to the screen a couple of times. But I knew I wanted this project. Right around the time I discovered I was pregnant with my second daughter, I went to this big Alliance party during TIFF and pitched Michael, saying, “I’m the one to make this movie.

This is my movie. I just know it’s my movie. You got to let me have the rights.” He drank the Kool-Aid and it went forward. We started to develop it together. I had produced movies before but this one was by far the most challenging and presented every possible upside-down scenario you could be faced with. I had to mortgage my house. But the reason I wanted to do that movie was because I was getting known for doing all that hard-assed action stuff and I wanted to prove to people that I could direct drama and not have to trick stuff up with style over substance, or any of the things I was being accused of. I was doing a straight-on drama.

Montage: The trajectory of The Stone Angel, Fifty Dead Men and then Bloodletting & Other Miraculous Cures (2010) is an interesting triptych in terms of the idea of Canadian stories. The first and third seem evidently Canadian but it was Fifty Dead Men that was included in TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten. This raises the tricky question of what is a Canadian story.

Kari: I don’t want to be too controversial, but I feel Canada doesn’t really have the guts to tell bold Canadian stories. We have a financing body that is ultimately a gatekeeper with a bit of a political agenda. In terms of Fifty Dead Men, at first Telefilm turned me down because it wasn’t a Canadian story. Eventually we did get money through an envelope. But it was international story told by a Canadian, and it has Canadian actors in it. So by virtue of it being a Canadian who was telling that story, my feeling was, “Well, that makes it Canadian, because it’s a Canadian perspective and I’m bringing it back to Canada and I’m making it through Canada.” It comes down to defining what Canadian is. Is it a Canadian exploring the world? Are the movies that David Cronenberg is making Canadian? Is Eastern Promises Canadian?

Montage: In an era of co-productions, is the idea of a national cinema even relevant any more?

Kari: It’s not only relevant, it’s crucial. You don’t have a culture unless you tell the story of the culture, and you keep retelling that story, and you keep looking for those stories. The problem is getting these stories told. I guess Canada doesn’t really want me as a filmmaker because they don’t want those stories. I guess I’ll go elsewhere. That’s what’s happening, which is bad. I think it’s happened to a number of Canadian directors, because the gatekeepers are not embracing the filmmaker.

They’re thinking the filmmaker is more of a gun for hire, to just tell the story unless somebody else wants to tell it. That’s not who I am.

Montage: It’s a brain drain of sorts, where Canadians head to Hollywood.

Kari: That’s right, because nobody trusts the filmmaker. In French Canada, they trust the filmmaker. In English Canada, the focus is on the producer, not the filmmaker. I don’t see the success ratio of that at the moment. I don’t see we’re making internationally viable films via producers.

Should there be a national cinema? Of course there should. Who do we think we are without it? Nobody. But you can’t do that if the distribution company is not in the business of making and distributing Canadian films. That’s not their business; that’s the albatross. Maybe we’re not thinking outside the box enough. Maybe we have to go out into the world and find international success and absorb an international sensibility in order to discover Canada from the outside by looking in.

Having said that, how many people even go to theatres any more? Maybe this new television window is going to change things, and maybe direct connectivity to investors via the Internet means new things are coming. That’s my hope. In the meantime, I’m off telling big-budget stories elsewhere, because my small-budget stories are too scary for the Canadian market. I think this new world we are jumping into, the so-called Netflix fissure, is going to be a really big opportunity for Canada to reinvent how it wants to tell its stories and how we filmmakers are able to tell our stories.

Montage: You once said you’ve been lucky to make your living as a director. Given your gender, “it’s been kind of against the odds.” Could we talk a bit about how you’ve seen the industry change in this respect, or if it even has?

Kari: Canada seemed to be much more friendly towards the idea of a female filmmaker than the U.S. I did a lot of advocacy work with the DGA in Los Angeles, working with getting more women behind the camera. But where I see real opportunities are in the independent world. There you can make a movie and sell your movie—you’re steering the ship a little bit more. My swan song to the DGA was heading up the committee that threw an 800-person party for Kathryn Bigelow when she won the Oscar, because that was a game-changer.

I was always concerned about getting more women working in Hollywood and suddenly, they were visible. Part of that does have to do with advocacy work and making proactive changes in the industry with hiring practices. But yes, suddenly, I noticed female directors and showrunners were getting more and more interesting credits. And the credits do count, and they do accumulate. Me getting the Boardwalk Empire credit opened the doors to all kinds of work. If you can land a couple of good ones, the glass ceiling can be penetrated, just like I penetrated it with commercials. They keep saying the number of women working in film is the same, but just anecdotally, from what I see, there are more women in my peripheral vision. I’m pretty sure it’s changing.

Kiva Reardon is the founding editor of cléo, a journal of film and feminism. Her work has appeared in Maisonneuve, Cinema Scope and POV.

Left, top three photos: The Vikings (Kari Skogland, 2014). Left, bottom two photos: The Stone Angel (Kari Skogland, 2007).

Centre, top to bottom: Behind the scenes on The Stone Angel.

Top to bottom: on the set of Fifty Dead Men Walking (Kari Skogland, 2008).

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Continuum. Courtesy Simon Barry

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In case you haven’t met them already, it’s about time you introduced yourself to the heroines who have become the faces of Canadian TV to millions worldwide. Say hello to Kiera Campbell, a police officer in Vancouver of the year 2077, who is teleported 65 years into the past with a group of terrorists bent on shaping the future to their needs in Continuum. Over on Lost Girl, there’s Bo Dennis, a bisexual succubus who has both the ability to draw the life force from her human lovers and a pivotal role in the power struggles between fantastical creatures that may control the fate of the world. Then there is Sarah Manning and her posse of doppelgangers out to find the truth about the cloning program that created them in Orphan Black. As for this gang’s most recent addition, Elena Michaels just happens to be the last living female werewolf, a status that comes with considerable complications, judging by the sexy and scary twists on Bitten.

Together, they comprise a kick-ass crew by anyone’s standards. They also reflect a new level of smarts, slickness and world-class cool for a television category that didn’t used to enjoy this kind of heat. While there’s a rich history of American genre shows shooting in Canada, starting with The X-Files and The Outer Limits in the 1990s and continuing into the present, the current wave suggests homegrown productions have truly come into their own.

“We’ve gotten much better in this country producing genre television,” says Christine Shipton. As the vice-president of original content at Shaw Media, Shipton helped turn Lost Girl and Continuum into hits for Showcase. “Some of the shows in the last 10 or 20 years were really hokey stuff. That’s because we hadn’t done very much of it. Now we put the right dollars and elements into the productions and we really get how to show action.”

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Top: Lost Girl. All photos courtesy Shaw Media.

Bottom: Orphan Black.

All photos courtesy Bell Media.

Three DGC members—Simon Barry, Pat Williams and Jay Firestone—have played a huge role in turning this country into fertile territory for the sometimes strange but always exciting characters and stories that audiences crave. Barry and Williams serve as the creators and executive producers (among many other duties) of Continuum, a mix of crime thriller and time-travel mind-bender that began life as a concept by Barry that his director friend Williams successfully pitched to Shaw Media. Shot all over Vancouver, the series is now in its third season on Showcase in Canada and Syfy in the U.S., as well as over 130 more countries worldwide. “We’ve got everyone from eight-year-olds to 80-year-olds into the show,” says Williams. “We had no idea how broad the demand would be.”

Meanwhile in Toronto, producer Jay Firestone and his team at Prodigy Pictures are preparing for the fifth season of Lost Girl, the sometimes salacious supernatural drama that also airs on Showcase and Syfy and has become a firm favourite all over the planet, judging by the abundance of conventions clamouring for visits from cast members. (Lately, they’ve been everywhere from Brisbane, Australia to Kansas City, Missouri.) The series’ most recent honours at home include two Fan Choice awards at this year’s Canadian Screen Awards.

As a co-founder of Alliance Communications and founder of Fireworks Entertainment before starting Prodigy in 2006, Firestone was a prime mover behind shows like La Femme Nikita, Andromeda and Relic Hunter. He began developing Lost Girl after he and his friend Paul Rapovski started riffing on what a show with a bisexual superhero might be like. While Firestone notes that the Canadian industry has hosted plenty of co-productions in the genre category in the past, “it didn’t really get the profile for the Canadian writers, producers and directors involved.” Moreover, American networks often relegated the shows they acquired to non-important timeslots. In Firestone’s opinion, what really changed the game was the decision by Syfy to put Bo in primetime. Kiera and Elena have since followed her, Continuum and Bitten having also scored high-profile slots on the Syfy schedule. Meanwhile, Orphan Black, whose co-creator, John Fawcett (DGC Ontario), also directed Lost Girl’s pilot, has been a breakout hit and critical darling for BBC America and Space.

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It was not so long ago that genre shows occupied TV’s furthest periphery. Now, thanks in large part to the monster-sized success of The Walking Dead, American Horror Story and True Blood, they’re at the front and centre of popular culture. One key to their success lies in what they offer to viewers. With its serialized storylines and complex mythologies, this new breed is geared to sate the demanding appetites of today’s generation of bleary-eyed Netflix bingers and costume-wearing fan-convention attendees.

“Viewing habits have shifted, especially in genre,” says Chris Regina, Syfy’s senior vice-president of programming. “People are more interested in getting into a more immersive environment and spending more time with the characters. They get hooked.”

The fact that Canadian talent is enjoying this new prominence in the world(s) of genre TV may not surprise viewers used to spotting B.C. locations in forerunners like The X Files and the Stargate TV franchise.

Yet Barry understandably believes there’s a key difference between Canadians fully generating their own shows instead of providing services to American productions or taking a secondary role on co-productions.

“When I think back on the other shows that came before us,” he says, “I don’t really think of them as Canadian shows. I think of them as shows that shot in Canada. Even though Stargate was really driven by Canadian creative, it always felt like it was developed in and aimed at the American marketplace.”

At the same time, he’s well aware these series are where much of the Continuum team cut their teeth.

“Pat and I are both former assistant-camera guys,” says Barry. “It’s such a head-turner for us because half the people we’re working with used to be on sets with us in the trenches on these American shows.

Here we’re not only trying to do something that’s 100 percent Canadian and made in Vancouver but we’re also trying to foster an environment where the people we’re working with get to extend their experience and horizons in whatever department they’re in.”

Indeed, the new Canadian genre shows hugely benefit from the talent pool that has been developed here in the days since Scully and Mulder could be spotted in Stanley Park. “The talent is ridiculously deep,” says Barry. “There’s such a tradition. We have people who have a master’s-level education in the sci-fi standard. Because they did shows like Battlestar Galactica or movies like I, Robot where they really pushed the level of creativity and craftsmanship, we get the benefit of all that experience and all that knowledge on a show that doesn’t have the same budget.”

Indeed, the makers of Continuum and Lost Girl have discovered other ways of contending with the budget disparity they may face with their American brethren, many of whom may happen to be shooting right around the corner, like Almost Human in Vancouver or Hemlock Grove in Toronto. (Defiance, Being Human and Helix are three more U.S.-produced Syfy series that shoot in Canada. All are DGC shows.)

“That’s one of the conflicts we’ve always had in the Canadian production industry,” says Firestone. “I was having a conversation with CAA the other day where they were talking about American shows with budgets of $4-million or $5-million an hour and we were dealing with two. How do you compete when you only have two? You compete with story.”

Barry would agree. In fact, he wonders whether that’s why people like himself and Orphan Black’s Graeme Manson have embraced the big themes of science fiction. “Our ideas have to be big because our productions can’t,” says Barry. “So we have to ask ourselves what are the mythologies that could make us

feel like we’re in a larger world than we are. Clones are one idea, for sure, and time travel is another. These are things you can execute on a budget and make it feel bigger than the money we’re allowed to spend.”

Stories and characters also benefit from the increased level of attention, which pays dividends in terms of the viewer engagement it fosters. “People get dedicated to the characters because you’ve concentrated so much on them and their relationships,” says Firestone. “That’s what we did on Lost Girl, which I think is a big difference with many genre shows.”

Not that the shows themselves feel like they have any lack of action or digitally generated dazzle. Christine Shipton thinks the teams on Continuum and Lost Girl have been very savvy about where they “want the big bangs” in their scripts. As she says, “You don’t have as many resources but you can have just as much of an impact by doing it here in Act One and here in Act Three rather than doing it all the way through the episode. They’re really smart about it.”

Another boon for the genre-TV boom is the range of fresh opportunities it’s created for Canadian directors. Pat Williams is one of them, having racked up DGC team awards on shows like Instant Star and Degrassi: The Next Generation before leading the Continuum team with Barry. He likens the process of creating a season to making “a 13-hour movie,” especially since he and Barry (also the showrunner) are closely involved with every step, from brainstorming in the writers’ room to the last tweaks of post-production.

The director of five episodes in season three, he keenly appreciates the uniqueness of his position.

“When you’re a director for hire for television, you come in, do your days and do your cuts and that’s kind of it,” he says. “You’re usually out of the process from that point forward. But as an executive producer and director, I get that second chance to elevate the material. I can constantly reimagine things and have those moments and beats play better through score, effects and everything else that goes along with creating the tone and the feel of the show. That’s an important part of the process that, as a television director, you don’t always get to be part of.”

That’s why he encourages the show’s roster of directors, which includes DGC members such as David Frazee, William Waring and Amanda Tapping, to participate as much as they can. “As a director, I don’t want to get in their way,” says Williams. “I want them to have as much fun as I’m having.”

Directing the show’s many action sequences obviously demands a special level of care. Williams will first talk through his plans with fight co-ordinator Kimani Ray Smith and determine the “hero moments” he hopes to include. Then Smith and his team rehearse with the stunt team to figure out how the sequence will go. Says Williams, “What we do—and what a lot of shows fail to realize you need to do—is allow the stunt team to figure out the fights, the beats and the moments so they can then show it to the actors and say, ‘Do it like this.’ That’s opposed to figuring something out with the actors on the set on the day, which takes a lot of time. They’re going to hurt somebody if you don’t give your actors the opportunity to learn in advance.”

He’s particularly proud of a grueling stairwell fight in the third season’s first episode between Kiera (Rachel Nichols), nemesis-turned-ally Jasmine Garza (Luvia Peterson) and a pair of baddies. Both actresses—who, like the rest of the cast, are able to do most of their own stunts due to the show’s preparation methods— kept at it despite suffering cuts and bruises. “They just want to get mopped up,” says Williams. “Rachel has

surprised me again and again at how many times she’s been working with me on a sequence, taken a hard hit and immediately shaken it off. At one point on episode two, I had to hold up two fingers and ask her to count them! She said, ‘No, Pat, I’m good!’”

Another of the show’s directors, Barry has also appreciated the opportunity to occasionally step away from his writing and supervisory roles and get on the set. “I’m constantly juggling 13 hours’ worth of scripts at various stages and matters of production, editing, mixing and visual effects,” he says. “So to check out for those two or three weeks is in a weird way a mental break from the overwhelming responsibilities as showrunner. It’s a way to focus in on the show in a very deep and detailed way that I love.”

When it comes to Lost Girl, Firestone fervently believes the wild and often wildly varied nature of his show brings something special out of his directors. “If they’re on a cop show and it’s the case-of-the-week, I don’t know if they get as inspired as they do when they come to us and it’s ‘Boom! What’s the monster gonna be?’”

“The directors are like giddy kids on set.

They get to do things they’ve never done before.”

The show’s unique mix of drama, action and cheeky humour is another selling point, especially for directors who may not have done genre before. “They’re like giddy kids on set,” says Firestone. “They get to do things they’ve never done before. I had one director who read a script and had a question about a scene in which a character falls off a building before getting up again. ‘How are we going to do ‘splat’?’ he asked. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ the producer told him.

‘We won’t have to actually shoot the splat.’ ” With Continuum in its third season and Lost Girl entering its fifth, there’s obviously a growing pressure to keep those binge-happy viewers engaged and eager for more. Williams credits part of Continuum’s continued vitality to Barry’s ability to “turn it on its ear every year” with the kind of developments and revelations that not even the most hardcore fans expect. Indeed, with their continued eagerness to confound expectations without skimping on excitement or production values, Continuum and Lost Girl have helped set a new standard for genre television in Canada.

Alas, Firestone says there’s a downside. “There are so many genre shows now, everyone’s fighting for everybody,” he says. “When I started Lost Girl, there was no Continuum, no Bitten, no Orphan Black, no Hemlock Grove. Everybody was jumping up and down to get into a genre show. Now we have to fight for writers and directors and first ADs.” He laughs. “It’s great for the country but it makes our show harder.”

Jason Anderson writes about film for The Grid, the Toronto Star, Cinema Scope and Sight & Sound. He teaches film criticism at the University of Toronto and is the director of programming for the Kingston Canadian Film Festival. spring 2014

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MICHELLE MACLAREN: BREAKING GOOD 32

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If you’ve heard of Michelle MacLaren, it’s likely due to her bravura turn directing “To’hajiilee,” the brilliant final-season episode of Breaking Bad where (spoiler alert) Walt surrenders to Hank in the desert and then the Nazis arrive for a shootout. She wrung such armgnawing dread out of those scenes that you can see why the show’s creator, Vince Gilligan, calls her “Samantha Peckinpah.” As Gilligan told Montage, “She has an eye for composition and a choreographer’s feel for rhythm and movement—and with those tools, she’s able to create scenes of violence that are gripping and visceral, yet strangely beautiful. If Hollywood ever remakes The Wild Bunch—which it shouldn’t—I believe Michelle would be more than up to the task of directing it.”

If you haven’t heard of MacLaren, it’s time to do so now. TV critics are so enthralled they dream of seeing her name in lights. As HitFix’s Alan Sepinwall wrote in his “To’hajiilee” review, “Tell me she’s directing a big-budget action movie, and my ticket is purchased within seconds.” Not bad for a former production assistant from Vancouver.

Born in 1965, MacLaren was raised partly in Alberta, and educated at a boarding school near Victoria.

After getting a degree in film and drama at Queen’s University, she travelled for a year, then came home to pay her dues as a P.A. “As I always say to film students, I got my film degree and I started pouring coffee, sweeping cigarette butts and holding a stop sign in the rain for 14 hours,” she says with a laugh. She moved up to working in Locations, became an Assistant Director and then a Production Manager, but at that point what she really wanted to do was produce.

“By the time shows got to Vancouver, they already had producers, so I moved to L.A.” This was in her mid-20s, and she’s lived there ever since.

MacLaren was able to work in the U.S. thanks to a production company that sponsored her H-1B visa and set her up producing MOWs (Movies Of the Week).

She also co-wrote one, A Song from the Heart, in order to be perceived more creatively in the industry.

“Writing is really hard!” MacLaren says of that experience. The scripts at the bottom of her drawer are staying there. Eventually she obtained a Green Card and U.S.-Canadian dual citizenship.

Her big producing break happened on The X-Files, which had also migrated from Vancouver to L.A. She had begun dreaming of becoming a director by then, so she quietly studied directing and acting in L.A. and shot second-unit whenever she could.

When her turn to direct The X-Files came up, she left for a week-long, intensive film-directing course in Rockport, ME and came back as ready as she’d ever be. “I remember being absolutely, positively terrified but I worked really hard. I was very, very prepared,” she says. Her episode, “John Doe,” was written by

Opposite: MacLaren on set. Courtesy Michelle MacLaren.

:

by KIM LINEKIN

Breaking Bad. All photos: Ursula Coyote/ AMC, Frank Ockenfels/ AMC

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Doe.” For the second part, she taught MacLaren how to copy her E.R.-style steadicam coverage.

Those experiences all laid the foundation for MacLaren’s creative blossoming on Breaking Bad. Gilligan wanted MacLaren to direct in the show’s first season, but then the writers’ strike happened.

That ended up being for the best. When MacLaren got a chance to direct a show in the second year, she decided to “just go for it” in her episode, “4 Days Out.” Gilligan was so impressed with her work, he brought MacLaren back to executive-produce the series and direct a few episodes a season.

Since MacLaren’s directorial style was forged on Breaking Bad, it’s a good place to start delineating it. It must be said she is surprised to learn her style has been pegged. “I don’t think of myself as having my own style,” she demurs, “because I do so many different things. Although a lot of people tell me I do.”

Top row: Jordan Gavaris in Orphan Black Second row, left to right: Tatiana Maslany: as Beth in Orphan Black as Cosima in Orphan Black as Alison in Orphan Black Bottom: Dylan Bruce as Paul in Orphan Black

Behind the scenes on The Walking Dead. All photos courtesy Gene Page/AMC.

Gilligan, who vouches for MacLaren’s diligence.

“She’s one of the most prepared directors I’ve ever worked with. She burns the midnight oil like nobody I’ve ever seen.”

MacLaren credits Gilligan with giving her the confidence to see her plans through. “I was shooting a big action sequence”—Agent Doggett drives a school bus out of a barn to flee a Mexican ambush—“and I wanted to mount a camera on the hood of the bus so it was looking through the windshield at Doggett as he was backing up. And the camera department said no.” She walked over to Gilligan, defeated. “I told him I really wanted to put a camera in this position and they’re saying I can’t but I think we can. And Vince said, ‘Well, go tell them you can then.’ It was a really good lesson because it’s a choice whether you want to push and say, ‘This is an important shot. I want to take the time to do this.’”

After The X-Files, MacLaren directed one-offs of procedurals like Law & Order: SVU and Without a Trace. “I knew I needed to get as much experience as I could, so I would direct anything that anybody would hire me for,” she explains. “And I learned so many different things. I learned how to prepare a script, how to deal with different types of actors, different looks of shows, how to be a good guest on somebody’s show. I learned from so many different cinematographers and from watching other directors work.” One was Mimi Leder, who helmed the first of a two-parter on the short-lived “John

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UNSETTLING CAMERA ANGLES “4 Days Out” finds Walt and Jesse’s mobile meth lab breaking down in the desert. As the duo bake in the sun, Walt hunches over his chair and coughs violently. MacLaren’s camera stares from the ground at Walt. It’s almost like he’s spitting on us. In another scene, the camera peers down on Walt and Jesse arguing outside their motor home at sunset. In both shots, the camera’s POV seems imperious, pointing out harsh realities a casual observer wouldn’t see.

MacLaren describes these choices as subjective storytelling, something she learned on The X-Files.

“One of the things that was really ground into us on The X-Files was always make sure the camera is telling the story. The first time that was told to me, I didn’t know what it meant and I had to really think about it,” she says. She came to understand the camera as “the audience’s eyes into the story” and, crucially, as “a tool to help the feeling of the scene. So you put a camera down low when it’s a scary moment and you want the audience to feel uncomfortable.”

She also uses a low angle to make a character look cool—or a jerk. “Let’s say two people are having an argument but one person is clearly dominating the other person. I would put the camera a little bit lower on the jerk’s coverage. It gives that character more strength.” She did this in “Buried,” when Hank tries to manipulate Skyler into ratting out Walt in a diner. On Skyler’s coverage, the camera sits above the tabletop. In Hank’s, it sits just below.

As Skyler gains the upper hand by saying she wants a lawyer, the camera briefly shows Hank from above. This move underscores his vulnerability. MacLaren got the same effect using a ladder pod to peer down on Walt and Jesse in the desert in “4 Days Out.” “What I wanted for the whole episode was to feel that those guys are two tiny figures and there wasn’t anything to help them for miles. And so by going high there, it made them look smaller and more vulnerable.”

VOYEURISTIC CAMERA DISTANCE MacLaren often pulls back in the middle of the scene to show what’s happening from a distance.

Not a respectful distance—a voyeuristic one.

A striking example is in “Gliding Over All” when Walt meets Lydia in a café and she offers to distribute his meth overseas. The camera suddenly jumps to the back of the café. It’s a high shot that fore-

grounds a busgirl and other patrons while Walt and Lydia’s conversation continues in the background.

MacLaren says she was going for “a sense of gall. It makes you wonder the next time you go into a café: What are those people over there talking about? It makes Walt that much more lethal and scary that he would have this conversation right under our noses.”

She adds, “I love using wide lenses and I think if you go really wide and then you go in tight, it helps put the audience into the scene with the characters.” Her jolts of geographical reality accomplish that better than the false intimacy of over-theshoulder shots.

SPARING CLOSE-UPS MacLaren seems allergic to close-ups. “You want to save the close-up for when you really need it, when you want to make a statement or be in that person’s face.” Many of her close-ups are in profile, which is another way of getting around false intimacy. “I think that using a profile can remind you that you’re being privileged to a secret,” she says. “You can use a close-up profile more than a straight-on one to keep an audience intimately involved in the scene.”

“but it just got in everybody’s bones. I’m convinced even the dolly was moving to the beat.”

When MacLaren really wants to get a viewer’s attention, though, she uses silence. As Walt surrenders to Hank in “To’hajiilee,” there’s no music, no eerie sound effects, nothing. “Those moments of tension when you have to wait and wonder what’s going to happen next—you don’t need music to tell the audience how to feel,” she says. “It’s like if you’re in your home at night and you hear a noise. What do you do? You turn the music off and you listen. And in that silence you’re terrified because you’re waiting for that sound. Did I hear something? A creak? So I think that tension is a tool to put your audience into the moment with your characters.”

FUNKY FILM SPEEDS For a sequence in “Shotgun” when Jesse accompanies Mike on a series of boring drop pick-ups, MacLaren made the tedious passage of time hilarious. Using a motion-controlled time-lapse shooting technique, she directed Aaron Paul to scratch his bum, hit a car with a stick and smoke a cigarette, holding each position for 30 seconds because the still camera only took a picture every four seconds.

“It was a fun way to change it up and do a different montage with a new tool,” she says of the herky-jerky sequence.

ACTION AND ACTORS Considering MacLaren’s a master at directing action—Gilligan says he dubbed her Samantha Peckinpah after the “ballet of mayhem” she crafted when Hank was attacked in a parking lot in “One Minute”—it’s surprising that action isn’t her favourite thing to direct. “There’s a lot of minutiae with action,” she says. “It’s almost mathematical.

I break it down into every single beat, like a thousand puzzle pieces that you put back together. It’s really challenging in a fun way because it’s so intense and detail-oriented.”

In fact, MacLaren’s favourite thing is simply working with actors. “The thing that took me by surprise when I first started directing is the wonderful relationship you can have with actors, that you could actually collaboratively create something,” she says. “That is just the most amazing thing.”

When asked for an example of “invisible directing” she’s proud of, where she got out of the way and just let the story unfold, MacLaren points to the scene in “Buried” when Marie confronts Skyler and tries to take off with her baby. “There are a number of very quiet, intense scenes in Breaking Bad that are all about the writing and performances and we, as you say, get out of the way and let them do their thing.”

The actors still credit MacLaren with helping them “do their thing.” Dean Norris, who plays Hank, praises MacLaren as “uniquely talented in that she was not only a visually brilliant director but she also knew how to work with actors and to draw out of them great performances. Often directors are one or the other, but rarely both.”

Gilligan concurs. “Some of my favourite moments of Breaking Bad were the quiet character beats she gave us,” he says. ”She’s marvelous with actors, she’s wonderful directing children, and she always puts servicing the story ahead of wowing the audience, yet often she manages to do both simultaneously.”

MUSIC AND SILENCE MacLaren’s signature montages are Walt building his meth empire, set to “Crystal Blue Persuasion,” and the prison executions, set to “Pick Yourself Up,” and both in “Gliding Over All.” The former song was chosen in advance; Gilligan picked the latter in post after MacLaren couldn’t find a contemporary song that fit. Wherever possible, MacLaren prefers to shoot a montage with the song playing on set.

She managed that in “4 Days Out” for the methcooking montage set to “One By One” by The Black Seeds. “I think I drove everybody nuts,” she laughs,

ZOMBIES AND SEX MacLaren has other impressive credits besides Breaking Bad. She directed three episodes of The Walking Dead, including the second-season stunner when the missing girl, Sophia, is revealed as a “walker” as she stumbles out of the barn (“Pretty Much Dead Already”), as well as the fourth-season finale. She took a less-is-more approach to shooting the undead. “When a zombie’s biting something, you do quick cuts or you cut away to people’s reactions. If you linger on a zombie too long, it’s eventually not going to work.”

IMPOSSIBLE POVS MacLaren wasn’t the first Breaking Bad director to put a camera where a camera shouldn’t be. But when she broke the fourth wall, it was memorable.

Think of “Thirty-Eight Snub.” We see the aftermath of Jesse’s party from the POV of the Roomba vacuuming it up. Her first stab at this directorial flourish was the bowl-cam in “4 Days Out,” born from Gilligan’s request to show Walt and Jesse finally working as a team. “I thought, how fun would it be to end the meth-cooking montage looking up through the table and through a glass bowl to the two of them pouring their finished product into a dish,” MacLaren says. “The table is solid; you shouldn’t be able to see through it. But because that shot told the story, we were given creative licence.” She was strict about not using cool shots just to be cool, though. “They had to drive the story.”

On Game of Thrones, she directed two episodes in each of the third and fourth seasons. They included some intense sex scenes, and she did let the camera linger. Take “The Bear and the Maiden Fair,” when Theon is seduced by two women and then castrated. “The thing with Theon needed to be really erotic and messed up,” she says. “It was a torture sex scene. And those actresses were totally open and comfortable and going for it. And you want a scene like that to be uncomfortable. You want your audience to be going, ‘Oh my god!’”

MacLaren doesn’t think anything she did counts as “sexposition,” though. “I’ve never heard that expression,” she says of the term critics coined for scenes where characters explain plot points while having sex. “To me it’s the same with violence. I try not to be gratuitous. I try to make it about telling the story.”

Now that MacLaren’s established herself as a TV director, she’s taking time off to read scripts and contemplate her next move. “I’m looking for things to develop. I would love to do a pilot. That would be great,” she says.

The epic scale of Game of Thrones whet her appetite to direct a feature but she’s realistic about pursuing that career path. “It’s a hard world to work in, in that not a lot of features are being made,” she says. Besides, she thinks TV can be just as cinematic, “especially with the size of people’s television screens.”

MacLaren is not aiming to branch out in terms of genre. “I like the genres that I’m doing. I wouldn’t tell you to hire me for a comedy. Unless it was a dark comedy,” she says. Same goes for romance. “If it was a thriller romance or a very dramatic piece, maybe. But I never say never. It comes down to good material and finding something that excites me.”

Despite the hopes of TV critics, she’s not in any rush to put something out there. “Look, I’m very spoiled. I just came off working on one of the bestwritten shows in television history. It’s a challenge finding something.”

And despite the hopes of some female directors—see Lexi Alexander’s incendiary blog post about Hollywood’s unwillingness to hire them: http://www.lexi-alexander.com/blog/2014/1/13/ this-is-me-getting-real—MacLaren isn’t up for challenging sexism in the industry. She’ll talk about how hard it was to make the transition to being seen as “a director who produces instead of a producer who directs,” but she doesn’t think sexism held her back. “I see myself as a director, not as a female director,” she says a few times. “I’m very fortunate for the opportunities I’ve been given and I’m very grateful to the wonderful female directors who opened those doors.” MacLaren doesn’t actually know any female directors besides Leder.

“Nah. I mean, I have people I admire. I think Katherine Bigelow is amazing. But I’ve never met her.”

MacLaren only wants to look forward to her bright future, not sideways at what other directors are doing. Gilligan wants that for her, too. “If there’s any justice in this world, she’s got a huge career ahead of her directing pilots, limited event series and movies,” he says.

Kim Linekin is the national pop-culture columnist for CBC Radio and chair of the Vancouver Film Critics Circle spring 2014

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HOT DOCS 2014: SHIFTING GEARS. ARE DOCS MORE PERSONAL THAN FICTION FILMS?

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by ADAM NAYMAN

On the surface, it would be difficult to think of three Canadian filmmakers more dissimilar than Vic Sarin, Julia Kwan and Reg Harkema. A 69-year-old industry veteran born in Kashmir and trained in Australia, Sarin made his mark Down Under as a cameraman before becoming one of Canada’s most decorated cinematographers. From there, he turned his hand to writing and directing features, including Partition and A Shine of Rainbows. Contrast this with the comparatively compressed career of Julia Kwan, who graduated from Ryerson University, studied at the Canadian Film Centre and quickly produced award-winning short and feature fiction films, most famously 2005’s lyrical Eve and the Fire Horse, which showed at Sundance and copped the prestigious Claude Jutra Award at the Genies. Then there is DGCer Reg Harkema, an ace editor for the likes of Don McKellar and Mike Dowse who has also carved out a niche as a writer-director of propulsive, idiosyncratic cinematic features like Monkey Warfare and Leslie, My Name is Evil.

To try to reconcile the respective aesthetics and approaches of this trio would seem be an exercise in futility, but the announcement of this year’s Hot Docs selections has created a unique opportunity. Not only do Sarin, Kwan and Harkema each have a new full-length documentary in this year’s program, they’ve all recently specialized in narrative films—in fact, neither Kwan nor Harkema had made a documentary before. With this in mind, it’s a great time to investigate how these three distinctive and talented filmmakers approach documentary and narrative filmmaking, and to ask them if one is any less personal or artistically rewarding than the other.

JULIA KWAN Everything Will Be In her short, Three Sisters on Moon Lake, and her award-winning feature debut, Eve and the Fire Horse, Julia Kwan distinguished herself as one of Canadian cinema’s emerging stylists: a filmmaker with a distinctive eye. It was evident that despite her youth, Kwan was working with a sophisticated cinematic language. In fact, that sense of assurance is precisely the reason why the director felt apprehensive about beginning a non-fiction production. Without the ability to wrangle every inch of the frame to her whims, she felt incapable of working to her strength. “It was a gearshift, for sure,” she says. “In fictional films, you have control over every aspect of the production. So in the beginning, I really tried to impose a structure on the film. I even handed a script to my cinematographer. He said I was the first documentary filmmaker who ever gave him a complete script on the first day of shooting.”

The film Kwan envisioned was very different from the one she ended up making, even if the subject matter never changed over the course of the shoot. The film is set in Vancouver’s historic Chinatown district, a tightly knit subculture that’s recently been penetrated by condo developers bent on gentrifying it beyond recognition for visitors and residents alike. “I was approached by my producer, David Christensen, who gave me a theme: greed. I started to ruminate on this theme, which had been on my mind. But since then, the film has evolved. It’s less about the greed and more about the longtime merchants and residents [of Chinatown], and about a community in flux. It

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Top to bottom: Everything Will Be (Julia Kwan, 2014). Super Duper Alice Cooper (Sam Dunn, Reginald Harkema, Scot McFadyen, 2014). The Boy From Geita (Vic Sarin, 2014). All photos courtesy Hot Docs.

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turned out for me to be a meditation on change and memory.”

Some of the memories are Kwan’s own. She says she was only able to gain access to her subjects because of her family history, which makes Everything Will Be a personal film even as the director effaces her own presence. “My father was a manager at one of the biggest Chinese restaurants in the city. I said I was his daughter and they all knew my dad. I was a kid from that community, and the people I met could see my love for it. But they didn’t always understand what I was doing. I would try to explain it to them, either through my interpreter or myself. The recurring answer was always, ‘We’re not interesting. We’re ordinary people.’”

That sense of the quotidian, and the fragility of day-to-day familiarity, is what Everything Will Be is ultimately about. In lieu of an aggrieved screed about capitalism edging out community, Kwan creates a work of portraiture where the neighbourhood itself becomes a character and the various figures in the landscape all get their turn to carry the narrative. Kwan says she drew on her experience with ensemble casts to make the film, but that she had to tweak her thinking a little bit as well. “When you’re working with actors, you have rehearsals,” she says. “My DP said what we were doing here was more like ‘observing wildlife.’ We’re listening and observing. I came to realize how fictional filmmaking is more about ego. As the director of a documentary, you’re sitting back and trying to watch something in process.”

This doesn’t mean that Kwan didn’t try to give Everything Will Be a distinctive look, in line with her previous work. “You can do a lot more with digital than in the past,” she says. “The imagery in the film is really influenced by street photography from the 1970s. It has that Kodachrome texture. That’s something we were able to do in post, but you also have the option of doing it in camera now as well.” Despite working with a small crew of five people, Kwan was able to give the film a real sense of scope and texture to go with its underlying compassion. “They’re real people, so I feel like I had a more personal connection to them than to characters played by actors. And more of a responsibility to them as well. I’m wrestling with the question of what to include and to not include. I don’t want to break their trust. It’s a whole other level of trust, and respect.”

VIC SARIN The Boy From Geita “I started out in documentaries and I’ve been at it for a long time,” says Vic Sarin over the phone from his home base in Vancouver. He means it, too. Sarin’s credits date back to the 1960s when, in his words, “There was not a feature filmmaking industry in Canada. The country was known for the NFB and the CBC, which produced wonderful documentaries. I was fortunate to get into the CBC. That was my starting point. Non-fiction has always been in my blood. I think those years led me to see the world on a very practical and realistic level.”

Besides TV docs, Sarin did so much work shooting for feature film and episodic television, both as a director and a cinematographer, that he cultivated a genuine visual facility. His visual talent peaked with his cinematography for two keynote Canadian features: Whale Music and, especially, Margaret’s Museum, with its elegant framing and painterly colour palette. So when Sarin made his feature directorial debut in 2007 with the Indian historical drama Partition, he was far more experienced than the vast majority of first-time filmmakers.

Sarin believes that making the switch from nonfiction to fiction filmmaking was not a matter of making his work more personal so much as developing his creative point of view along parallel tracks. “I always though that doing documentaries kept you grounded. It let you see the honesty of life. And I think you can transfer that to fiction, with the help of actors and scripts.” Sarin doesn’t believe he directs differently in the two formats, although he acknowledges there are different elements in play. “When you do fiction, you know the story and where you want to go with it. But within that confinement, because of my documentary background, I try to do spontaneous things with the actors. I tell them not to worry about the camera. My job is to guide them to show how honesty can come through them, and to not be bogged down in technicality.”

Sarin’s talent in this area served him well on The Boy From Geita, which premieres at Hot Docs in the Canadian Spectrum program. Shot over two years in Tanzania and Canada, it’s a sobering account of prejudice with life-and-death-stakes. The film’s protagonist is a preteen boy named Adam.

He has been rendered a social outcast in his village because of his albinism, a genetic condition that causes a lack of skin pigmentation and carries a special and long-standing stigma in an African country whose inhabitants are predominantly black. The film is a companion piece of sorts to Sarin’s other new film, Hue: A Matter of Color, which focuses on the issue of “colourism,” a phenomenon where people in the same ethnic group discriminate against one another based on skin tone.

The Boy From Geita deals with the same scenario but by focusing intently on Adam and his tragic past, which included a vicious machete attack at the hands of his fellow villagers, it takes a social problem and makes it intensely personal.

“It was very important to connect with Adam but that turned out to be difficult,” says Sarin, who learned about his subject from fellow Vancouverite Peter Ash, who brought the boy to Canada for reconstructive surgery. Ash, who is also an albino, is a businessman-turned-activist committed to helping kids in Adam’s situation. Gradually, he emerges as the film’s other lead and arguably its heroic figure as well.

“Going in, I knew it was going to be hard, due to the trauma of the attack and the neglect he suffered from his parents, particularly his father,” says Sarin. “I was sure that with time, Adam would open up but it didn’t happen. I had several sessions, and I was patient; I tried different venues each time. Each session was about two hours, and the breakthrough, when it came, was very short— and still I was grateful.”

In terms of its construction, The Boy From Geita is fairly straightforward, although Sarin does pace things dramatically around his reticent protagonist.

He says he didn’t want the film to seem too bleak, despite its subject matter, and that even though he’s trained and experienced as a documentarian, and thus keenly aware of how infrequently life supplies anything like a happy ending, his practice in both fiction and non-fiction filmmaking is primarily informed by a sense of optimism. “We all have glasses that we wear,” he says. “One can analyze why their glasses are a certain colour. It’s all due to your background. I’ve always thought the only thing that’s certain for all of us is that we’re going to be gone in the end. But the journey has to be celebrated and enjoyed. I make films that reflect reality, but there also has to be some hope.”

REG HARKEMA Super Duper Alice Cooper One doesn’t have to look too deeply to see that rebellion is a big theme in the work of DGCer Reg Harkema. His features Monkey Warfare and Leslie, My Name is Evil both concern (very different) subcultures that lure members away from the mainstream. And anybody with an ear can hear that the Vancouver-raised, Toronto-based filmmaker has a rock ‘n’ roll sensibility, cramming his soundtrack with vintage tunes. It’s not all that surprising, then, that Harkema would be attracted to the story of the ultimate musical iconoclast: Alice Cooper (Vincent Damon Furnier), who emerged out of the nascent garage-rock scene of the late ’60s to essentially invent the heavy-metal dress-up genre.

“He basically stuck a stake in the heart of the love generation,” says Harkema, who co-directed the new “doc opera,” Super Duper Alice Cooper, with two veterans of the rock-doc format: Scot McFayden and Sam Dunn, best known for 2010’s hit Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage. “With Alice Cooper, you can mark the transition from flower power to ’70s glam. And I know that Tom Morello [the guitarist from Rage Against the Machine] said ‘School’s Out’ is the most political song he’d ever heard.”

Figuring out exactly how to angle a movie about Alice Cooper—not only the individual but also the band, which ceded the moniker to Furnier and watched as he basically became the sole public face of the group—was not an easy task. Despite having access to Cooper’s collaborators and archives, as well as the man himself, Harkema and his co-directors had to figure out a way to shape this very rollicking story. “You have to go out and collect the material and ask questions,” he says. “I did all the research and came up with a treatment.

Then I sat with Sam and we went through it paragraph by paragraph and came up with the right interview questions. Scott was sort of our David O. Selznick overseer figure.”

Harkema’s reference to classic movie history is in line with Super Duper Alice Cooper’s cinephile aesthetic, which interweaves clips of Cooper on stage

and television with selections pulled from a number of other sources. One of the major through-lines is footage from the silent John Barrymore version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, an inspired choice that addresses both the dichotomy between Cooper’s ghoulish public persona and almost bookish comportment in private and also the rocker’s struggles in the ’70s and ’80s with substance abuse. “I wanted people to see Alice as a product of all of these influences, starting with silent cinema,” says Harkema. “There’s an evolution there, from vaudeville and silent films to horror cinema. One big influence on me was Julien Temple’s The Filth and the Fury, where it’s constantly referencing Richard III.” If the use-your-allusion style feels derived from Harkema’s fiction work, Super Duper Alice Cooper is also something of a departure. Its no-talkingheads style is formally radical but also accessible and crowd-pleasing, in the same way as Dunn and McFayden’s previous work. “Scott told me he wanted something like The Kid Stays in the Picture, with those same graphic elements, so I took that idea and ran with it. My experience as an editor told me we’d be able to do it. We wanted it to feel like we were in the present tense, and always in this sort of visual moment.”

Harkema says the biggest adjustment for him was not the move from fiction to documentary but directing as part of a collective. “As a director, you’re always hanging on to stuff. And with three directors, it can become a negotiation: ‘I’ll give up this if you give up that.’ When you talk through it, though, you realize what you’re holding on to doesn’t always need to be there.”

“Alice Cooper stuck a stake in the heart of the love generation.”

—Reg Harkema PERSONAL DOCS Super Duper Alice Cooper is a profile piece, but with its fast and furious references to pop culture, it’s also a custom-made vehicle for co-director Harkema’s magpie sensibility. Everything Will Be treats a serious present-tense issue while also opening a window on Kwan’s childhood, while The Boy From Geita makes a plea for tolerance that’s at once deeply specific and more generally connected to Sarin’s own career-long fixation on social justice.

In none of these three films is the director the star, à la Michael Moore or Morgan Spurlock, but the three are personal works all the same—not selfportraits but vivid reflections of the people behind the camera.

Adam Nayman is a Toronto-based film critic for The Globe and Mail and Cinema Scope. He is a regular contributor to Montage, POV and Cineaste. spring 2014

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DGC PROFILES: TWO FROM QUEBEC

top to bottom: C.R.A.Z.Y. (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2005).

Dallas Buyers Club (JeanMarc Vallée, 2013). Both photos courtesy Jean-Marc Vallée.

The Young Victoria (Jean-Marc Vallée, 2009).

Courtesy GK Films

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Top centre: Jean-Marc Vallée.

Courtesy Jean-Marc Vallée

JEAN-MARC VALLÉE: THE ACTOR’S DIRECTOR

by MATTHEW HAYS DGC veteran Jean-Marc Vallée sees it as one of his main strengths as a filmmaker. “I’m an actor’s director, you’re right,” he says, on a break from a Hollywood editing suite. “I focus on performance a lot. How do you capture the human spirit on screen? It’s something I’m quite meticulous about.”

And that attention to detail has led to an impressive track record of brilliant casting for the 51-year-old filmmaker. He is still glowing after the Oscars, at which two of the actors in his most recent feature, Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto of Dallas Buyers Club, took home Academy Awards for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor. “I was so happy for them,” Vallée says. “It’s a beautiful film that we did on a very low budget and in not much time.”

Vallée’s expert casting calls were not lucky moments. The director has a history of choosing his actors well and collaborating beautifully.

It was in 1995 that he made his first feature, Liste noire, which became Quebec’s box-office champ of the year and garnered nine Genie nominations.

The film starred Michel Côté as a judge caught up in a prostitution scandal. The film proved a boon to Côté’s career, as the actor showed an uncanny ability to convey a complex range of emotions.

But it was a decade later—after a couple of features in Hollywood—that Vallée would make C.R.A.Z.Y., one of the most successful films in Canadian history. And that made its star, Marc-André Grondin, a household name in Quebec. “We had actually known each other since he was eight,” Vallée recalls. “I had made a short film with him

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then. And I’d become friends with his parents. Our birthdays are both in early March, so we celebrate with his parents at a Lebanese restaurant every year. When I was auditioning for C.R.A.Z.Y., I was so happy to see him walk in the door. He had the whole package I was looking for: the talent, the look, the spirit of the character, the charisma and sex appeal.”

Vallée’s instincts were again correct. Grondin captured the intensity of a teenager coming to terms with being gay beautifully. It remains one of the most touching and nuanced performances of the past decade. And notably, Côté co-starred in the film as Grondin’s father, who eventually comes to accept his son for who he is.

Vallée says McConaughey didn’t instantly strike him as perfect to play the lead in Dallas Buyers Club. “I had my doubts initially. I think of him in romantic comedies. He’s so handsome. But then we had our first meeting and the way he was talking about the material, he really understood the character. I think he could also see that I was this French-Canadian making a film about a part of America that is far away from me and who I am.

But he had seen my films and trusted me. And I trusted him.”

McConaughey, says Vallée, is much like Grondin in that “he never went to acting school. His is a very instinctual approach to the material. He works to find the emotional centre of that character and his situation. And he did it brilliantly.”

A casting agent recommended Leto. “Jared is very masculine, but is also very beautiful, like a girl,” says Vallée. “We had a Skype call that lasted 20 minutes. He spent the entire time in character, as the trans woman, Rayon. He wore lipstick and a dress. He had Marc Bolan music playing in the background, which was a nice detail, because I’d already included that in the script. When I hung up, I said, ‘We’ve found our Rayon!’”

Leto remained in character from then on. “I finally met Jared Leto when we premiered the film at TIFF. I had only met Rayon before that. He was that dedicated to the role.”

Vallée is now in the cutting room with his latest feature, Wild, a based-on-a-true-story film about a woman’s 1,000-mile trek across hazardous terrain, starring Reese Witherspoon. “I’m getting the same feeling I got when we were cutting C.R.A.Z.Y.,” he says. “I can feel another fantastic performance coming, this time from Reese.”

DGC PROFILES TWO FROM QUEBEC

DGC PROFILES TWO FROM QUEBEC

Top to bottom: Whitewash (Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais, 2013).

All photos courtesy André Turpin.

Top centre: Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais.

Courtesy Michel Tulin

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EMANUELHOSS-DESMARAIS: THE WEATHER MAN

by MATTHEW HAYS Emanuel Hoss-Desmarais has advice for aspiring filmmakers: Go commercial. Advertising, that is.

“A lot of directors here and abroad shoot TV commercials in between features,” he says. “You get to shoot, you get to experiment, you get to have fun playing with the equipment. And you meet a lot of other people in the business.”

Hoss-Desmarais is now developing several projects, picking up on the strong critical response to his first feature, the suspense film Whitewash, which took its bow at TIFF in September. The film stars Thomas Haden Church as a man drenched in guilt after he kills someone with his snowplow during a harsh winter. The film won critical kudos for its sheer genre defiance. “I really like the idea of searching for a unique tone or a new blend of genres. With Whitewash, I was walking a fine line between drama and comedy. I like the idea of having fun and surprising an audience.”

Hoss-Desmarais says there were two main challenges in getting Whitewash in the can. “This being my first film, funding was an issue. I was trying to get about $3-million to $3.5-million for the budget. That’s a good amount of money for a first feature. And the script was peculiar.”

Luckily, DGCer Hoss-Desmarais was working with micro_scope. “They are well known, and I feel they’re confident because of their successes.

They’ve been working with Denis Villeneuve and Philippe Falardeau, so they’ve been having a good run.”

The other roadblock? “Snow. I needed lots of snow. People’s memory of winter can be very short indeed. The past two winters have been intense,

but when we shot, there was practically no snow.

On January 1, there was no snow on the ground!

Winter itself is an important character in the film, so we couldn’t do without it. We had to use all the tools on set and in post-production to keep things snowy.”

The snowiness pays off, as Hoss-Desmarais realizes something very true of the white stuff: It can be very creepy to be in a snowstorm. Whitewash becomes one of those strong, low-budget Canadian features, in that it uses the landscape and weather to evoke the script’s existential, grim themes.

Hoss-Desmarais also managed a casting coup with his lead actor, Church, famous for roles in Sideways and Spider-Man 3. “He was a real trooper. He got the script. The first phone call we had, he said, ‘I’m in.’ I said, ‘Tom, you have to realize, this role is going to involve a shoot throughout a Canadian winter.’ He replied, ‘Oh fuck, don’t worry, I’m fine with that. I’ve spent some time in Vancouver.’

I had to explain the difference between Vancouver weather and the rest of Canada.”

While cost is always an issue while shooting a feature, Hoss-Desmarais made a crucial choice early in production: to shoot on film. “We took out two cameras and shot the same banks of snow.

There was way more definition and a greater range of it with film. I needed the texture of the snow. It’s basically the lead character of the film. The producers saw the logic immediately. They also knew it’d probably be one of the last times they’d be producing something shot on film.”

Hoss-Desmarais says his working relationship with Church required a good deal of trust. “There was one scene we were filming where he’s in his snowplow, and he’s realising the man he killed could have had children. We set up the shot, started the camera rolling and then left him alone. The reel lasts about 10 minutes, so Thomas began improvising. First he made jokes for a couple of minutes. Then he was completely silent. Then he ad libbed this really heartbreaking moment, which is what we kept in the cut. That was a really big moment of trust, to leave him alone for 10 minutes. It worked beautifully.”

Matthew Hays writes for The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, Maclean’s and Cineaste. A contributing editor for POV, he teaches courses in film studies at Concordia University., spring 2014

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by MARC GLASSMAN Sturla Gunnarsson is such a commanding, lively presence that it’s hard to imagine him departing anything. But it’s important to know when you’ve accomplished enough, leaving new tasks for other comrades in arms.

After 12 years of hearty service to the DGC, first as the spirited head of the NDD (National Directors’ Division) of the Guild and then as its President, the man they call the Viking or simply Sturla, is ready to take on new challenges as a filmmaker.

He leaves a Guild that is stronger economically and more focused organizationally than it was a decade ago. Sturla and his colleagues have made the Guild a more vibrant player than ever before in the changing Canadian media landscape.

Sturla was encouraged to give so much of his time to the Guild by former Presidents Alan Goluboff and Allan King. Thanks to both, he took the calling seriously—to make the Canadian media industry a better place for its artists and craftspeople and, just as importantly, to create an environment where great personal films and TV programs could be made.

Like Allan King, Sturla is a compleat filmmaker. As directors, both have made superb docs, important fiction features, and strong MOWs and episodic TV shows. Lovers of Canadian cinema always point to Who Has Seen the Wind and Such a Long Journey as two of the finest examples of narrative films made in this country. Their contributions include such TV movies as Allan’s Red Emma and One Night Stand and Sturla’s The Diary of Evelyn Lau and Scorn.

For both—and I’ll go out on a limb on this—their best form has been the documentary. It’s part of Allan’s legend that he returned to the form decades after Warrendale and A Married Couple to make Dying at Grace and Memory for Max, Claire, Ida and Company. Sturla’s story is less dramatic. He’s been directing such fine docs as Final Offer, Gerrie and Louise, and Force of Nature, as well as features and such shows as Motive and Intelligence throughout his career.

No doubt, slightly unshackled from his DGC duties, Sturla will continue to direct in all forms. But with the upcoming poetic documentary feature Monsoon due out soon, it seems clear to me that his best and most personal work may well be in documentaries.

In any case, with Sturla, one can say, “The best is yet to come.”

Photo: Vick Wall

PARTING SHOT

There Goes the Viking

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“The Actors’ Fund’s support came at a time when we were very close to the edge” On September 20, 2009 our son Benjamin Waterhouse-Currie was born at 24 weeks and five days, weighing 1lb 6oz. He spent 11 months in hospital, had many surgeries, endless medications, a breathing apparatus and oxygen for two years, and a feeding tube for three. And yet, we’ve all been incredibly lucky. At four, he doesn’t need oxygen, a feeding tube or any medications. He’s smart, funny, and fairly obnoxious. Other than slightly weaker lungs, he’s doing great.

Hardship always comes with these stories.

‘How did you get through it?’ was the question most often asked. But, you quickly realize the answer is that you do. We had amazing support from friends, family and people we hardly knew.

The Actors’ Fund’s support came at a time when we were very close to the edge, early in Ben’s life, when we were at our most vulnerable.

To use a driving metaphor, we were on a high mountain road, a steep cliff on both sides. It was dark, and raining, and we were really tired. It’s not that we needed anyone to drive the car, we just needed someone to take the wheel for a while. Our friends and family, and the Actors’ Fund, did that for us and for that we will be forever grateful.

Donate now actorsfund.ca 1.877.399.8392

Andrew Currie: Writer/Director Mary Anne Waterhouse: Producer/PM Benjamin Waterhouse-Currie: age four

THE FILM AND TELEVISION RELIEF PROGRAM IS A PROGRAM OF THE ACTORS’ FUND OF CANADA THAT PROVIDES FINANCIAL AID TO INDUSTRY MEMBERS IN CRISIS. Charitable Registration 118777457RR0001

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