Montage -Spring 2015

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C E L E B R AT I N G T H E B E S T I N T H E I N D U S T RY MONTAGE

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CONTENTS

T hi s p a ge : E l e p h an t S o n g ( C h ar l e s Bi n a mé , 2 0 14 ) .

C ou r te s y eO n e Fi l ms . O p p os i t e : Vi ki n g s ( H is to ry C ha n n e l) . C ou r te s y S h aw M e d ia .

Phot os:

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

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S PR I N G 2 0 1 5, M o n ta g e

IN CONVERSATIONS WITH…

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Viewpoint

Listen Up!

Spirit of Place

Parting Shot

by Tim Southam

by Brian Baker Yes, We Do Want a Country The DGC’s response to the CRTC’s latest pronouncements on Canadian TV and film

by Steve Gravestock & Canada’s Top Ten Gravestock, TIFF’s expert Canadian-film programmer, recounts his love of Canada’s film culture and introduces the results of the festival’s oncea-decade poll of this country’s top-10 films of all time

Celebrating Atanarjuat, a Canadian classic

Editor’s note

by Marc Glassman

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DAVE FORGET: LEVELLING THE PLAYING FIE LD I n t er vi ewed b y TI M SO UTHAM Th e n ew d i rect o r o f p o l i cy a t the DGC, Fo r g et , d i s cu s s es h i s career and the c urrent s t at e o f t h e Can ad i an f i l m a nd TV industry wi t h G u i l d p res i d en t So u t h am

KEN GIROTTI: THE VETERA N I n t er vi ewed b y M AR C G LASSMAN Award - wi n n i n g d i rect o r G i rotti shares his film m aki n g p h i l o s o p h y wi t h M o ntage editor Glassman

J IM DONOVAN: CROSSING B OR D E R S I n t er vi ewed b y M AR C G LASSMAN Di rect i n g i n b o t h Fren ch an d English, Do n o van h as b ro ken t h ro u g h Canada’s t wo s o l i t u d es . He t al ks ab o ut L e C lan, his h i g h l y an t i ci p at ed R ad i o - Canada TV series, as wel l as h i g h l i g h t s o f h i s career

DAWN WILKINSON: RISING S TA R I n t er vi ewed b y M AR C G LASS MAN W i l ki n s o n can d i d l y t r aces h er dev elopment as a d i rect o r an d reco u n t s d etails of c urrent s u cces s es

CHARLES BINAMÉ, DANIE LLE LA B R IE E T XAVIER DOLAN : UNE DISC U S S ION AVE C TIM SOUTHAM Un e ren co n t re avec q u el q u es c réateurs d ’El ep h an t So n g , u n h u i s cl os réussi

FOCUS MOTIVE: THE PROCEDURAL b y DAVI D SPANER Ho w d o es an ep i s o d e o f a h it TV polic e series g et p ro d u ced ? Sp an er i n ves tigates

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DIRECTORS GUILD OF CANADA publisher

Tim Southam, 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

Deanna Wong content manager

Anne-Marie Stuart transcriber/proofreader

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 DGC ONTARIO 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 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

Tyler Prozeniuk photo research

Nick Gergesha advertising sales

Anne-Marie Stuart Directors Guild of Canada astuart@dgc.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

viewpoint Here we go again. That disheartening downdraft. That moment in Canadian economic history, which has struck with metronomic regularity since the fur trade, when someone somewhere decides that bigger is better, fewer is more, and someone, anyone, can build this thing called Canada better than the people who live here. It is a moment familiar to small businesses, Olympic athletes, artists, hockey teams, software designers, steel workers and farmers. A moment when just as the podium, the Cup, profitability, a worldwide hit, community pride and an actual country built from within is within reach, someone looking only at the numbers decides that the whole thing is a disappointing return on investment and walks away.

In Canadian feature film, it happened in 2002 with the introduction of strict box office targets just as theatrical revenues were becoming a minor revenue metric. Until the recent positive introduction of broader performance measurements, the decade following 2002 saw the withering of the Canadian voice on screens outside of Quebec with no compensating uptick in box office. While a heroic sliver of that film talent struggled on generating lower budget gems, a significant number of Canadian writers and directors gathered around television and gave us a new wave of outstanding productions.

Alas, now it appears to be 2002 for television. Couched in a major announcement about pick-and-pay for cable bundles, the CRTC has formulated a startling new definition of Canadian content, restricting it to the nationality of the production company, the writer and one actor. It is a bewildering definition, one that flies in the face of how the voice of a film is actually forged.

As the Internet wave threatens to swamp much of what Canadians have built in the broadcast sector the understandable answer has been to modify the ship so that it may surf the wave rather than founder beneath it. The less understandable thinking has been to lighten the ship by throwing most of the Canadian creators overboard. In our current zeal to keep the ship afloat we risk sapping the entire journey of its meaning.

TIM SOUTHAM PRESIDENT, DIRECTORS GUILD OF CANADA EDITOR

editor’s note This is a special issue of Montage that reflects the Guild’s concerns over recent policy shifts by the CRTC as they relate to the roles of the director and the overall creative community that produces media content in this country. As the editor, it is my role to work with the Guild to create a magazine that reflects its positions on many matters; obviously, I am not involved in the making of policy decisions. Still, as someone who is intensely Canadian and has worked diligently as an advocate for our cultural expressions in diverse areas ranging from literature to theatre, from music to film and TV, it is a great pleasure to work on an issue that advocates for our cultural nationalism.

“First, you’ve got to ask yourself: Do we want a country?” is a powerful question to address in an issue of Montage, but I feel our content offers some strong responses. We’ve bookended Montage with two pieces that address the question. In a far-ranging interview with Guild president Tim Southam, Dave Forget, the DGC’s new director of policy, offers a pragmatic yet sophisticated evaluation of Canada’s film and TV industry and suggests that the government’s policies need to be reevaluated to reflect the importance of media in this country.

The issue’s concluding “Spirit of Place” column by TIFF programmer and Canadian-film specialist Steve Gravestock is a funny and personal account of how our country’s films and literature helped to form his intellectual and aesthetic life. Gravestock’s account leads to the results of a new survey of Canada’s all-time top-10 films. There were more than 200 responses to the TIFF poll from filmmakers, festival organisers, film programmers, academics and critics—surely indicating the depth of interest in a cultural form that has been created and nurtured through cultural institutions ranging from the NFB to the CBC to Telefilm Canada. The playing field may never be level, but our country has produced works that can only be called classics.

This issue of Montage features interviews with top directorial talents Dawn Wilkinson, Jim Donovan and Ken Girotti, who talk incisively about their careers and working philosophies. Each has included a statement about what it means to be a Canadian director. We are pleased to include a fine piece by David Spaner on the hit TV show Motive and an interview in French about the new film Elephant Song. We look forward to new work from Wilkinson, Donovan, Girotti, the Motive team and the Elephant Song artistic crew—and to continued growth in our creative community.

It is my sincere hope that you enjoy this edition of Montage.

“First, you’ve got to want a country.”

Those words were spoken by a senior official when we at the DGC met with government personnel to discuss how to strengthen and support the mission of the Canadian filmmaker.

by BRIAN BAKER If only CRTC chair Jean-Pierre Blais had been in the room.

With the announcement of two major pilot projects last March, the CRTC made the stunning assertion that Canadian productions need no longer be made by Canadians.

In the Commission’s view, all that should be required for high-profile dramatic series, in addition to a 75 per cent overall spend on Canadian costs, is that the production company, the writer and one lead performer be Canadian.

Eliminating the director from the definition of a Canadian production betrays a profound misunderstanding of how storytelling on the screen actually happens. It suggests that directors and their key creative teams in no way inform a film’s voice or identity, and therefore their nationality scarcely matters. It prompts the question: ‘What exactly are we trying to build here?’

UP N E T S I L

It’s easy to agree with the objectives the CRTC outlined in its new policy: to introduce “measures to support the creation of content made

by Canadians for Canadian and global audiences.” The CRTC also notes that “Canadian creators are up for the challenge.” Indeed we are. Canadian directors are on the ground working every day on shows like Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, Orphan Black, Breaking Bad, Bates Motel, Arrow, Continuum, The Blacklist, 19-2, Fargo, The Strain, Call Me Fitz, Person of Interest, Nouvelle adresse, Motive, The Walking Dead, Lost, Rescue Me, The Odd Squad, Rookie Blue, Law

MARC GLASSMAN EDITOR

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and Order, Being Human, CSI, 24, Durham County, The Wire, Vikings, Flashpoint, House, The Borgias, Bones, Smallville, Falling Skies….

Yet despite its own encouraging words, in its bid to create worldclass Canadian hits, the CRTC proposes to bypass Canadian directors and key creatives with the proven talent, experience and skill required to create successful international productions.

Mr. Blais points to the success of distinctive, authentic productions from other countries, shows like Downton Abbey and Borgen, which resonate equally well with domestic and international viewers.

Not surprisingly, those shows are—virtually without exception— directed by nationals from their own countries of origin. Despite the highly national complexion of his own examples, Mr. Blais’ plan for propelling Canadian productions into the ranks of such distinctive international fare is simply to outsource them.

We all know, as the Commission suggests, that the environment supporting the financing and creating of content is changing, that audiences are more in control of the viewing experience and more engaged than ever before, as increasingly they access programmes on emerging digital platforms.

There is still a lot that we don’t know: which new business models will have staying power; how we will promote our talent and content effectively in an age of abundant choice.

What we do know is that we must produce high-quality drama in an extremely competitive market,

particularly in English Canada, where audiences already have an enviable diversity of choice.

This requires a critical mass of activity, as every new production involves a significant investment in R&D, and not every show will hit. High-quality productions are the result of healthy budgets and a climate that allows the key creative team the freedom to create. We can tilt the odds in our favour by empowering highly diverse teams of writers and directors from across Canada working on a broad array of platforms.

Just Results

It is now obvious that we have critical work to do within our own ranks. Every member of the DGC and the wider community must be encouraged to speak out on behalf of directors and their teams.

We cannot allow the bewildering proposition to take hold that directors are not essential to the telling of stories on the screen. Nor can we countenance the suggestion that Canadian directors are not qualified to tell Canadian stories when the evidence points so overwhelmingly to the contrary.

The CRTC has suddenly created a model where a founding ideal— that Canadian content is content made by Canadians—is now no longer the rule but the exception.

With Canadian directors, their creative teams and most actors now absent from the CRTC’s Canadian-content requirements for productions financed by Canadians, it is only a few short steps to the eradication of all Canadian voices from Canadian storytelling. The absurd and unacceptable paradox speaks for itself.

Yes, we do want a country, one defined by its stories: stories told by Canadians.

Sack Goldblatt Mitchell LLP Lawyers Toronto

Ot tawa

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JustResults Results Just

Numbers speak louder than words. They also whisper if you listen carefully.

• Ottawa • Ottawa www.sgmlaw.com Toronto Toronto

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It’s not about seeing the obvious. It’s about having the vision to see beyond.

To see both the obstacles and the opportunities. To recognize the risks and the rewards. As Canada’s leading independent actuarial consulting firm, Eckler has been helping clients — like the DGC Health and Welfare Trust — manage uncertainty for more than 85 years by providing informed, unbiased advice and member communication. It’s all about innovation and creativity — and the discipline to get the numbers to reveal the bigger picture.

Brian Baker is the national executive director of the Directors Guild of Canada

Visit eckler.ca — we’ll help you hear what the numbers are really saying.

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Montage: Tim Southam Dave: Dave Forget

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Montage: Please tell me your name and give me an idea of your journey in film.

Dave: Well, my name is Dave Forget, and my journey in film started when I graduated from McGill and moved to Toronto. I had studied film and was looking to get into the industry.

I had assumed that I would work in production, and I was looking for an entry-level position.

I ended up working for a distribution company, Astral Films, which led to what I would call my first real job, in theatrical distribution at the Canadian branch of 20th Century Fox in Toronto.

I ended up staying there for 10 years, and at Fox I got a bird’s-eye view of how the studios think about marketing and positioning films, how they handle distribution, what the business model is, as well as working with the creative side.

At a company like that, there’s an assumption they only distribute one kind of film, but in fact, when I was there, it ranged from Return of the Jedi to Barton Fink. Our job was: figure out who your audience is; become an expert in your own backyard; figure out what’s going to work or not going to work in Canada; and work with exhibitors and other partners to position the film. Then, if you get it right, do it all over again two weeks later. As a kind of boot camp for learning distribution, there’s probably not a better place than a big studio like Fox.

Then, I was approached by Alliance Films.

Robert Lantos and Victor Loewy, who at the time were gearing up their company to be the largest Canadian distributor, wanted to try to capture a significant portion of the national market. They had beefed up their company, and they were looking for the kind of expertise I could bring to complement the team already in place there.

From my perspective, it was an opportunity to get a lot closer to the key decision makers— there was an entrepreneurial spirit at the company, and there was a sense of working to create strategies for each film that we would acquire, including Canadian films and working with Canadian filmmakers. So I shifted to a relatively smaller company—very big for Canada, but small in the scheme of things—that was in ascendency and had a lot of really interesting ideas. What intrigued me most was getting closer to the folks who are actually making the films.

You know, every chef probably thinks at some point, “What would it be like to have spring 2015

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Photograph of Dave Forget courtesy Directors Guild of Canada

DAVE FORGET: GETTING CANADIAN VOICES ONTO THE SCREEN ith…

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It is said that Canada does not happen by itself.

Few could be more aware of this than Dave Forget.

As director of business affairs at Telefilm Canada, he was in a position to help design and implement several key mechanisms for public investment in Canadian screen productions. When Dave joined the DGC as its director of policy in February 2015, the timing could not have been more auspicious, as the Canadian regulatory environment was on the cusp of a seismic shift.

—TIM SOUTHAM

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Here are my two goals: first, to work closely with the creative community— you couldn’t get much closer than being at the DGC—and second, to continue to do work that helps individual producers, writers and directors to achieve their goals of making highquality Canadian content.

my own restaurant?”, and it was no different for someone like me. Fortunately, I got that opportunity when I went out to Vancouver with my partners to start Red Sky Entertainment, a small distribution company. Once again, the company got smaller, but the scope of what I was responsible for got that much bigger. Fox was one end of the spectrum, where the division of labour was very specialised— we hardly even talked to people who sold home video or television. We were so into our silo, and at some point it becomes kind of limiting. At Alliance, the overview was bigger, and I was part of a team that was not just distributing films but also acquiring and sometimes producing them. Then, with Red Sky, I was involved with running the company—raising venture capital and trying to make it into a going concern. It brought me that much closer to the creative community and I experienced firsthand what it’s like to run a small company.

Montage: How did you segue from the private sector to Telefilm?

Dave: Once I was in Vancouver, Telefilm approached me. What was attractive about Telefilm was that they were involved in what we then called new media, and that there was a whole television side. At that time, Telefilm was still doing equity investments in TV for all genres, and I thought it would be a good opportunity to learn that side of the business, as well as who was doing what in digital media and feature film. There is a lot of crossover that happens. That led to a series of positions within Telefilm—I ended up staying there altogether about 14 years, in the end working with a team led by Carolle Brabant, managing business affairs, including the CMF programmes and coproduction certification.

Montage: Do you see a through-line in your career?

Dave: The common denominator has always been the opportunity to work with Canadian talent—in all of these jobs, as I look back now from the perspective of being at the Directors Guild, what the through-line is in all of this is working with talent in a supportive role, whether it be at Telefilm or in distribution or now, at the Guild.

Montage: When did you become interested in the policy side of the business?

Dave: Focusing all of my energy on the policy side is relatively new. Of course, policy has always been a component, because it underlines everything that we do. We are in a regulated market; we have policies to stimulate activity, to lay the groundwork, to allow the creative side to happen, whether that is from a financial perspective, from an access perspective, from an audience perspective and so on. All through this, whether it has been marketing and distributing an individual film, or being part of

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the team that evaluated financing opportunities for Telefilm, there’s always been a sense of trying to relate to what the underlying policy is, and I’m one of those people who is always looking to see how something can be improved. Whether it’s a day-today operation or a longterm strategy, my natural inclination is to say, “Well, that works fine, but how could we improve it?”

That leads to an experience that I had at Telefilm—as you may know, the organisation recently embarked upon a complete review of its funding programmes, and our mantra was to respond better to the needs of our clients. Of course, that was a bit of a sea change in terms of how Telefilm saw itself.

As opposed to the tail wagging the dog, the notion now is that the programme exists for our clients: filmmakers, distributors and all the others who actually create the content.

I had the opportunity in that context to talk to a lot of stakeholders across the country while we thought about making changes. We included people who are in complementary businesses and who are doing interesting things, whether it is venture capital, digital media, broadcasters and so on. We engaged in discussions with other jurisdictions who have organisations that are similar to Telefilm and took a look at what the industry is doing outside Canada in places like Australia, the U.K., France and so on. In those conversations I got pulled deeper and deeper into the policy side of it: how to create a policy and a programme that better serves clients and achieves the policy goal; how to create highquality content that attracts an audience; [how to] achieve critical and commercial success.

You can see where it isn’t just about money; it’s about finding the right balance. The more I got into that, the more interested I got, and here at the Guild, I have the chance to do that full-time.

Montage: What do you hope to achieve at the DGC? Dave: Here are my two goals: first, to work closely with the creative community—I don’t know that you could get much closer than being at the DGC—and second, to continue to do work that helps lay the groundwork to allow individual producers, writers, directors and others to achieve their goals of making high-quality content that reaches audiences and allows us as Canadians to distinguish ourselves in a global market.

Montage: Where do you stand on the whole interaction between creation, the business of making that creation available to viewers and the regulatory or policy framework surrounding it?

Dave: We live in a country that is next door to a very prolific producer of high-quality content that happens to be 10 times our size and also speaks the same language as us. So it’s not a level playing field, by its very nature. We begin by saying that it isn’t a free market; it’s never going to be a free market, and if it really [were] a completely free and open market in the way that some people seem to be imagining, our voice would be crushed. It’s not a quality discussion; it’s about the scope and size of what can be produced here. From the beginning, whether it’s been around radio or later broadcasting or film distribution, or music or publishing, there’s been a recognition that in a situation like ours, there need to be measures that actually serve the purpose

of keeping our market as open as possible to the world, while creating opportunities for our voice to be heard.

Some would say, “Well, we need to make things simpler and have less of this regulation that’s getting in the way,” and I’m all in favour of that, but there is, when all is said and done, a policy direction that we want to pursue; we aren’t agnostic. You have to ask yourself, “What is it we’re looking to do here?” and then look through that filter to see if there is a process, a mechanism, an incentive or a regulation that is helping the industry to create.

Some of the questions around the desire to reduce certain regulations and processes, to make them simpler and more competitive, are actually sensible.

But then, you need to consider that while it may be a good idea, we may be in danger of moving too quickly, and some of the remedies are solutions to problems that are exaggerated. For example, with the recent CRTC announcements, the overall diagnostic is good, but where the DGC has intervened is to say that some of the remedies or changes that are being proposed are not the right ones or are moving too fast or, in some cases, are just wrong.

Montage: We are in a regulated market for very good reasons. As a country, we’re next door to an entity that will dictate all the terms to a small economy like ours, if we don’t have certain mechanisms in place.

Dave: That’s right; we’re not a big enough market.

But it’s still important to maintain market integrity.

We are part of North America, but Canada is a distinct rights market.

Even if we didn’t have the competition for the airwaves and theatre screens and so on, we don’t have the economy of scale needed to consistently create the content at the necessary level without some type of intervention. There isn’t a pure market here that can be completely self-sufficient. Other than the U.S. and perhaps India, I can’t think of any other examples of where this would be the case, or, for that matter, very many industries where there is no public support, either financially or through policy initiatives like tax breaks, R&D support and so on. One of the mistakes that we’ve made in the past has been to say, “We’re going to create initiatives to help the industry get on its feet and then one day we’ll take the training wheels off and the industry will be self-supporting.” I think it’s naïve to imagine that in a market the size of Canada, with the type of investment we need, we’re ever going to be able to make films and TV shows without some form of public support. The key is how well we leverage that support. We have a lot of competition and it’s becoming more global, so it’s getting heavier rather than lighter. It’s an interesting challenge: it’s a business, which adds to the economy and provides jobs, and we’re at the point now where our content is being sold and seen around the world, but there is also an important cultural component. There is no such thing as a community that doesn’t seek to tell its own stories and stake out its sense of time and place. I think of public support as a way of providing a base of consistency and predictability that happens to make Canada attractive internationally, leveraging private-sector investment and allowing for a critical mass of activity to continue to happen.

Montage: In your estimation, how has the Telefilm system helped creative communities like the Guild?

Dave: In Canada, we have a tiered approach that has functioned successfully. We have tax credits, both provincially and federally, and while the regimes are different from province to province, the concept is that there is a base of activity that you’re trying to create in your jurisdiction, and the production-service tax credit is an effective tool in encouraging economic activity in Canada. It has helped over the years to build an infrastructure. Many of our Guild members benefit from working on those productions, both in terms of their livelihood and as opportunities to hone their skills. We are at the point now where there is no longer the perception anywhere that there is a gap between what we can produce here compared to other countries.

In this industry, when you come to Canada, you’re getting crews and talent working on your film or TV content that are truly second to none. If the policy goal of tax credits was to build an industry, to build an infrastructure, to encourage investment in post-production and studios and other services, then it has been very successful—in places like Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, of course, but also now in some of the regions. In a tiered approach, that’s your first tier, and that’s the base of the pyramid.

Then there is Canadian content, which is riskier to finance in a smaller market and so the decision, from a policy perspective, was: “Let’s make those tax credits worth more to offset the risk.”

And then there’s a third tier, which is the most precious: direct financing in the form of equity. Here we ask, What is the decision-making criteria? In my experience, when it comes to feature films, the director is absolutely the key component. Not the only component, but it’s been the key that unlocks the door for a lot of the financing.

Montage: Do you see downsides to the existing process?

Dave: There is, quite naturally, tension between a creative vision and the means to finance that vision.

We’re in a world where it’s hard to raise money, particularly for independent films. Consequently, we focus a lot on the deal side. That tends to not exactly monopolize the conversation, but to become a bigger part of [it] as we go on.

Montage: Everyone knows that film and TV in Canada are perfectible. How can we optimize what’s already in place in Canada, and what can we bring to the table that would allow us to be better at what we do?

Dave: Something that is always lurking in the background is—if you’ll permit me to use a sports metaphor—that we’re a small-market team. There is this notion, from time to time, that if we just get some high-price free agents, it’s going to put us over the top and we’re going to have success. The reality of small-market teams is that what leads to success is building your own talent from within. So I think that, for starters—notwithstanding that from time to time this notion of outsourcing or bringing in talent from other places is attractive and gets some traction—in the long term, what we need to do is develop our own talent and provide opportunities for those talents to keep working here in Canada. Right now, while we are hearing that it might be a good idea to provide companies opportunities to allow in talent that is not Canadian, the reality is that we risk losing many top Canadian directors—precisely the people

who are in demand. To me, the challenge is to create an environment that allows Canadian talent to stay here and work on Canadian projects.

Montage: You mentioned that financing creative visions here can be difficult. What are other areas of concern for you?

Dave: Sturla Gunnarsson said to me a while ago, “As a country, we’re very good at making the first film—but not the second and third.” His point is that in an effective system, you need to have opportunities for filmmakers to break in and make that first feature, but then there have to be subsequent opportunities for them to make the second, third and fourth film.

In the past, often what’s happened is that someone made their first, low-budget feature, and it got some traction in festivals, and the next thing you know, the second film scales up to be 10 times the size, and the expectations are enormous. I think that, in some ways, we’ve been putting too much pressure on filmmakers to move too fast without having the benefit of that second or third film under their belts and gradually building a career.

It just occurred to me that so far in our conversation we have not been talking so much about individual films as about talent, and I think that’s exactly right. The theme is building careers and talent. Individual films get made and have their life— whatever your take is on the so-called ‘long tail’—but it’s the talent that stays, and the talent that moves into different creative choices and risks that lead to more compelling content.

In our system of decision making—we’re talking about the investment side, so it’s the highest end, the most precious dollars. Perhaps sensibly, we’ve had a project-oriented approach. But the creative team is what you are really investing in.

Montage: It’s harder now to build a career that’s recognised by investors as something that they can market, or something that is worthy of further investment, because we find that many of our members’ work, outside of Quebec, is fragmented across the broadest spectrum of platforms like TV or the Web, and so while there is proof of skill and vision, there is no longer this long list of feature films attached to their names.

Dave: The reality going forward is that most creators are going to be working in multiplatform; there are going to be fewer and fewer examples of people who work purely in feature film. We’re seeing it all the time, and I think anyone who is investing public dollars in feature film needs to be mindful of that. At the core, it’s storytelling, and someone who can pull that off on multiple platforms shows that they have a really firm grasp of how to organize storytelling to fit into the framework that they’re working in. As an example, I was talking to a filmmaker one day, about a year ago, and I shared with him some research that showed that up to six per cent of the time, audiences are watching films on devices like iPads. I asked him what he made of that. His reaction was, “Well, I need to be thinking about that when I’m framing my image, because six per cent of the people who watch my film are going to watch it on this format. I don’t need to be preoccupied [with it], but I need to be aware of it.” His reaction was interesting. “I want my image, and my story, to be as compelling as possible, whether it’s in an airplane or on someone’s home screen or in a movie theatre.” spring 2015

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opportunity to imagine new ways to connect.

Montage: Investment, I assume, would be a key part of that showcasing activity that all of these players in the screen industries should be encouraged to consider—particularly in feature films.

It’s also worth making a distinction here between different types of content. There’s a notion out there—putting aside the balance we’ve already talked about between business, regulatory and creative— that with the proliferation of user-generated content, there has been a blurring between what is professional and what is made at home. I want to be clear that when we talk about the creation of high-quality content, popularity is not the same thing as quality.

It’s not the same thing, and one is not a less sophisticated version of the other. They intersect sometimes but we essentially have two parallel lanes here. One is content that people create on relatively new recording tools, which can be popular and innovative and is shared on social media. But that’s not the same thing as what we’re talking about here, which is content— mainly dramas, but also docs—that is made in a more thoughtful way for an audience. When Google says, “Hey, there’s lots of Canadian content on YouTube” because a lot of people put up their cat videos, that’s not what we’re talking about with regard to creative content.

Montage: We have a framework now, based on our discussion, where we understand that we’re in a managed cultural economy, where filmmakers have both the challenge and the opportunity to tell stories, for Canada and for the world, on many platforms.

What do you feel, this year, are the practical challenges that the Directors Guild of Canada should take on, on the policy front?

Dave: Let’s start with the feature-film side. Here’s how I would summarize our priorities: our point of view is that feature film is a distinct format and allows for a type of storytelling that is different from what you get with other forms of media. That said, our take on the policy is that feature film shouldn’t be in a silo. We are in a world where most feature films aren’t viewed in a movie theatre, so while the theatrical experience is still the best way to see a film, if we’re talking about content on TV and not about feature film, we’re missing a big part of what is on TV. It’s content on TV, not TV content. With this in mind, we’ve looked at some of the mechanisms that have been put in place to support film on television, and we’ve found that the mechanisms themselves are sensible, but their implementation has not helped to achieve the stated goals. We’re looking at a more holistic view of all of the platforms on which feature films are being watched and asking what we can do to make sure that those players are more integrated into an ecosystem where feature films are more accessible, promoted and viewed. What’s important to us is that all of the players and stops along the way in the value chain, whether it be SVOD, broadcasting or other platforms, are all integrated and working toward the showcasing of feature films that are being made here in Canada. We are in a time of change— I’m sure you’ve heard that before—but change also represents opportunity and in this case it could be an

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Dave: Yes—there are three elements to focus on: investment, promotion and access. It starts with investments in Canadian films, from development through to production and marketing; then, we need to make sure that audiences actually have access to them. That’s another key component of our policy: to point out that the pay-per-view and VOD services, which are meant to be programming all Canadian theatrical films, actually do it. We think that’s a gap in the policy, which was intended to create easier access for Canadians to see the films that they’re helping to finance with their tax dollars. The extent to which those films aren’t available now is a problem, and we think that should be corrected. By the way, everything I’ve said about feature films [can be applied to] feature docs too.

On TV policy, there are some places where we just think that the CRTC got it wrong, and we want to engage in a constructive conversation about that. For the Guild, the idea that we are going to strengthen big-budget drama series by removing the requirement that they be made by Canadians—we think that’s a flawed policy. There are plenty of opportunities already in our system for collaboration.

However, the underlying policy has always been that Canadian content is content made by Canadians.

That’s the starting point, but it doesn’t end there.

We recognize the value of collaboration, so under certain circumstances, whether it be for creative or market reasons, there can be some flexibility, which, in a managed way, offers options for broadcasters, producers and others who are working on the deal side. There is already in our system a lot of openness to collaboration.

We have treaties with over 50 countries around the world that provide for access to each other’s markets as a basic principle, including a balance of contribution between the two countries. This presents opportunities to collaborate internationally, to pull from a larger pool of talent and to access a larger market. There’s a notion of reciprocity that makes this interesting—not in every case, but in the right circumstances. It is what allows people, in a relatively small market, to imagine projects that have a much larger scope.

Montage: What’s the difference between the paradigm we’ve known so far and what’s being proposed now by the CRTC? Dave: What’s different about the CRTC’s new pilot project is that there is no presumption that anybody other than the writer, one performer and the ownership is Canadian. It says that it’s unnecessary, full stop. We’re talking about the most prestigious type of dramatic content—TV episodes of more than $2 million—and I imagine any Canadian director and their creative team would love to work on a show that is resourced that well. [To them], the CRTC appears to be saying, “We don’t really need you,” even though they’ve honed their skills, reached a level of maturity and are likely already working internationally on similar shows. Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad—the list is long. It really makes no sense.

Montage: What the CRTC is saying to them is that as a Canadian director, production designer or editor, you are not needed.

Dave: No, no business case—we don’t even need to give a reason.

Montage: Yeah, we’re not obliged in any way to consider you for employment on productions that are being deemed Canadian and that therefore will qualify for all the public investment, all of the taxcredit treatments available to Canadian production.

You, as a Canadian director, production designer or editor, will not be necessary to that production.

Dave: Right. In the past, the Canadian talent, starting with the director, had a privileged position, inasmuch as the default was to say, “We will, to the extent that we can, work with Canadian talent,” which is only normal, given that we’re telling Canadian stories. However, under certain circumstances, there was flexibility on a case-by-case basis. We’re not talking about that anymore; we’re not even talking about a wider scope of flexibility versus a more narrow one. We’re saying that it’s entirely flexible, and that production companies don’t have to make the choice. And we’re wondering how that fits into the policy and the mechanisms that are in place to provide for opportunities to tell Canadian stories and to promote Canadian talent. How is it that this approach to making high-budget drama is going to help realise the policy that we have, which is building a Canadian industry of Canadian storytellers?

Montage: All of this in reference to the CRTC’s new March 2015 policy coming from the Talk TV hearings.

I want to make it clear that we’ve had a paradigm up until now that the CRTC is challenging 100 per cent.

Going forward, under the CRTC’s new policy, on any kind of productions with a budget over $2 million per hour, it would be possible to have these Canadian productions be directed, designed, edited, shot or even performed in all but one performer’s position by non-Canadians.

Dave: Yes—we’ve done a complete 180-degree turn here. What’s mystifying about it is the extent to which, even from a practical perspective, this approach would need to be reconciled with tax credits and other financial contributors, and I think it would be easier said than done. I think it’s going to create confusion in the industry, and we’re not sure to what end. What great potential is out there that justifies the gutting of Canadian participation in these key roles? This does not lead to better choices for audience, nor to better long-term growth for our industry.

Montage: It does beg the question of what is next.

There are a couple of Canadian elements left in the current definition of a Canadian production; one does wonder how long those elements will persist in future policies for Canadian production. Will it be, in the end, just the owner?

Dave: Not to be alarmist, but it’s actually further than what’s next. We have completely changed the paradigm here. Anything can happen.

Montage: It seems to me that what they’re saying is that these shows will be better if they’re not directed

by Canadians, or that they’ll be more attractive to

audiences if they’re directed by high-profile Americans or Brits.

Dave: It comes back to your question about the tension between the deal or business side and the creative. I guess in some cases it might make the deal side a little easier, but we think it’s a bad trade to empower the deal side at the risk of the removal of all of these key creative positions. And there’s no guarantee that any of this will make for better content.

Montage: You’ve just joined an organisation which has been—in recent memory, in any case—steadfastly non-partisan when it comes to Canadian politics, but fiercely vocal on certain issues that matter to our membership, like financing for films, regulations for supporting film on all platforms—anything to do with enhancing the prospects of creative personnel in the Canadian screen industries. In February 2015, the national executive board passed a motion endorsing the DGC’s taking a more partisan position in the upcoming federal elections. I’m wondering if you could comment on that and on strategies that we may consider, coming out of that resolution by the national executive board.

Dave: I think it’s only normal for an organisation like the DGC to review the landscape and consider that, in the context of being in a time of change, there is a connection between public policy and the well-being of our members and also, from a larger perspective, what we think are the components that contribute to a healthy industry. But there is a larger component too, keeping in mind that the Canadian-content proportion of what our members do day to day is a percentage of their overall work. We’re part of a larger industry, so Cancon may not be 100 per cent of what the members are working on, but I can tell you that 100 per cent of the members are nonetheless interested in ensuring that there is a public policy that supports the telling of Canadian stories.

In that context, we’ve looked at the landscape over the last few years and come to the conclusion that a couple of things are necessary. One is that the government do a lot more to both ensure a smooth transition as we move into a new paradigm of the way viewers are accessing content and the way content is created, and that we have a healthy industry.

We often hear discussions about knowledge-based industries, and this is clearly one. We think it’s important enough right now that we take a more active role, one that goes beyond disseminating information and actually advocates for policies that we think are more in keeping with where we think the industry is going and what’s beneficial for the Guild and the industry at large. .

Montage: Where do you see the Directors Guild of Canada being most effective on the policy front over the next two years?

Dave: It starts with building consensus. I think unless the industry speaks with one voice on key issues, we’re not going to be able to move the needle.

We need to inform our members, helping them to understand, when there is a policy change or when there is a change in the milieu around business models, how it may be directly related to their compensation, which is, in turn, a component of the value that is being created. We need to understand where that value is, what platforms or formats are gaining traction, where the revenues are and what the new

business models are. This helps to inform our position at the negotiating table. When we are engaging in collective bargaining, we need to understand where the value is going to be three or five years from now, and how to best ensure a fair share for our members, in exchange for the work that they’re doing.

There’s a lot of follow-up that’s going to have to happen as a result of Let’s Talk TV—there are also copyright and licence renewals for broadcasters and all sorts of things that will affected by the new policy.

The CBC/Radio-Canada is an ongoing issue for all of us in the industry; I think it’s going to be an election issue as well, so we need to be on top of that. When CBC reduces its production activity or its commissioning of content, it has a direct impact upon our members.

We begin

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They get to do things market; they’ve never done if it really before.” was

completely free, our voice would be crushed.

Montage: So is it fair to say that one of the best moves the Guild can make right now is to measure and analyse these industrial and policy changes in order to help our members see their way forward?

Dave: Yes, and we don’t need to do all of that from a standing start; there is a lot of that type of measurement happening. Our priority is going to be understanding the research and the analytics that are out there, complementing it with some of our own and helping to connect the dots. There’s a lot of reporting that’s happening, both in Canada and internationally, and, if we ask the right questions, we’ll be better able to keep our members informed.

Everyone is very busy working on the ground every day, and one of the things that DGC National can do for its membership, knowing that every Guild member’s time is precious, is to frame these issues in a way that allows them to complement what they’re seeing out there in the media with our take on things so they get a sense of where we’re coming from.

Montage: So, you’d say, a very strongly co-ordinated effort between policy in its pure form and communications, both internally and externally.

Dave: That’s a good way to put it—what’s our story and how do we tell it. spring 2015

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KEN GIROTTI: THE VETERAN i

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ds. I k their min als to spea ing to pursue u id iv d in ed d encourag for me decid lebrated an partially responsible unately, times have y ce t a th y tr n st at lea t territor s a cou ox. Unfort w up in wa of the country that’s director as my soapb rward and retake tha ding up re g I a d a n n ing a ly stan The Ca versio come fo it was that f heard. I chose becom needs its artists to tany of reasons, simp npatriotic.” k in th y ll a li “u el re a now to make mys anged. This country olitical interests. For ion or at the very least Canada of an avenue p it ch d n y ow io ll se by narr tile vers drastica n act of changed— pidly being destroyed e, in some quarters, a es even outrightly hos isagree and discuss. t. ra d , im ou ’s om et it en ec m st b se li so u s beca raged to sh t and ght to ind ha ld be encou ng one’s m e belligeren dividual’s ri and speaki n ever, this new, mor elp re-assert every in der that dissent shou a h lou Now more th ts to step forward to ifle that dissent, the Ken Girotti st rtis all of us. — needs its a powers that be try to g, if necessary—for e tin The more th be speaking—shou ld Artists shou MONTAGE

spring 2015

Montage: Marc Glassman Ken: Ken Girotti

In a directorial career that spans 30 years, Ken Girotti has worked in genres as diverse as psychological intrigue (Orphan Black), epic adventure (Vikings), the police procedural (Mayerthorpe) and science fiction (The Outer Limits).

Incredibly prolific, he’s shot pilots, TV movies, a feature film and hundreds of hours of episodic television. A fine director of performances, he’s worked with a wide range of actors, including Vincent Donofrio, Henry Czerny, Tatiana Maslany, Dennis Leary, Peter Outerbridge and Roberta Maxwell.

Girotti’s Mayerthorpe won the Gemini for best TVmovie and he garnered the best direction prize at the DGC awards in the same category.

—MARC GLASSMAN

Montage: Why don’t we start at the beginning, Ken? Your first directing credit is back in ’84. What got you started as a director?

Ken: I went to a film school, but I think what taught me more about directing than anything else was my early life in the theatre. I started out wanting to be an actor; then I wrote a few plays and got them workshopped. A few of them went up here and there, and I started directing plays and quickly realised that I was still going broke, even though I was working my ass off.

Montage: The life of theatre.

Ken: Indeed. So I ended up taking film and television at Niagara College, but I really focussed on a writing class and film-editing course. There was one person there, Alan Cullimore, who was pretty inspirational to me. Alan was in the advertising world and a creative guy. Instead of going to classes, I spent all of my time picking his brain and sitting in front of an editing machine. These were the days before Avid or Final Cut or even Lightworks. I was cutting on a Steenbeck. I ended up cutting nearly everybody’s film.

The combination of editing film and acting in theatre really got me interested in working on film and TV. I started out in the assistant-directing department and worked as an AD for a few years under a number of directors who were influential. The filmmakers I worked with were amazingly generous and really kind.

I like to think I try to do the same thing with young, upand-coming filmmakers now, which is to try to make sure they get the time of day with somebody who’s been through a few war zones in this business. When I started out, I’d say to a director that I wasn’t sure I could do what he did and I’d get as a reply, “Yeah, you can.” Every once in a while somebody would give me a scene to direct, even though I was the AD—and that was amazing. Finally, I stopped AD’ing and refused to work again until somebody gave me a shot at directing. When it happened, there was a long, hard transition; then I blinked and 30 years had gone by.

Montage: As a director, what did you bring to play early on? How did you prep—did you do shot lists?

How did you mentor yourself?

Ken: I did lean on a few of the directors who were supportive of me, but that’s an interesting question, because having not formally trained at the UCLA film school or the BFI in Britain, I had to figure out my own way. Yeah, I made exhaustive shot lists and stole liberally from filmmakers that I admired—Hitchcock, Coppola, Kurosowa, Carol Reed, Kiarostami, Scorsese, Visconti and even Brian De Palma, whose work at times has been remarkable. spring 2015

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Courtesy Ken Girotti

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Montage: Technically, yeah.

Top: Orphan Black (Space).

Courtesy Bell Media.

Below, left and right: From Orphan Black episodes directed by Ken Girotti.

Courtesy Bell Media.

Ken: No question about it. But as much as I was always trying to learn something technical in cinema, I was really trying to find a new way to tell a story with pictures. What interests me more and more is performance. You know, you can see a film or a television show where they put the 14-mm lens on, then drop the camera on the floor and create a really low, wide graphic shot with hard slashes of source light and it evokes a mood, but at the end of the day, it always comes down to whether or not you can believe the characters. The older I get—and I used to be like, “God if I don’t get that crane I’ll go crazy”—the less interested I am in the tricks and the toys, and the more interested I am in the personal process of filmmaking.

As a director, that’s not just the process with an actor; it’s also the process with the production designer and the cinematographer and with the crew on the set, where you are actually trying to create an environment in which everybody is reading from the same hymn book. I think if time in the business has taught me anything, it’s that those things are more valuable than the biggest crane, or the most expensive visual effect, or the flashiest little editing trick. If you can get, first, an actor’s trust, and a cinematographer’s trust, and a production designer’s trust—and hell, a camera operator’s and a grip’s trust—if you have a positive, or at least deeply collaborative environment supporting you, you’re going to be a great director.

That’s the most important thing I’ve learned: that the process is only as good as the pieces that are there to support it. So, yeah, a shot list; yes, storyboards; yes, deep planning, but through those processes, it’s so important to be able to vividly communicate what’s in your head. It’s not about “I want a shot that’s really cool”, it’s about “This story is about that, and in a story like that, I want to feel this when I’m watching it.” You have to be able to distill your thoughts into something about the essence of the drama, not into technical gobbledygook.

I’ve been directing long enough that I can look at a shot in my head and know what lens the camera’s going to need, but that’s not really all that useful a tool, at the end of the day. The tool that’s most useful is one’s perception, one’s ability to communicate, the desire to re-create that perception, and one’s ability to elicit and bring out of people the thing that will most faithfully satisfy that perception or that point of view.

Montage: That’s a great philosophy. Can you tell me more about your process?

Ken: I try to communicate everything that I can, do my homework as fervently and deeply as I can, and be as prepared as I can: revisit, revisit, revisit, not only the locations, but revisit the ideas with the actors; revisit the designs, the colours, the look and the feel with the cinematographer and the production designers.

I hope that through that rigorous preparatory period I’ve communicated what’s necessary for the shoot.

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And of course, in discussing all this stuff, I’ve jumped right past the process of actually finding what you want the film or TV show to look like. That’s its own kind of process, and I think the most solitary process of directing. I don’t know how you learn how to do that; I have no idea.

at the centre of it there isn’t really much difference between what everybody wants. Boom, here’s the solution.” That’s part of directing too—finding solutions, solving problems. You hope that you have as few problems as possible, but that’s a huge part of what we do as directors.

Montage: It’s got to come to you, I suppose. I love it that you can figure out what lens should be in a scene.

And I know you can do it; I know you’re not bragging.

Montage: How tough is it directing television?

As you know, with film, there’s more time to shoot, while with television, you’re often in a situation where things aren’t going the way you want them to, and the hours are burning away.

Ken: Well, yeah, but I just don’t think that stuff is that important.

Montage: But it is, because that has to do with the look and the mood, and isn’t that what directing is?

Ken: If a person can communicate to you and has a really singular and finely hewn point of view as well as a really good story sense, I’m convinced that person can direct. Yes, it really helps to know and be deeply and intimately involved in the technical side. But like anything—like the shot list, like the storyboard, like all of the rehearsals you have with the actors, like knowing your lenses—when you get there in the moment, I think the fundamental question that you have to ask, if you’re working with a script that’s up to the job, is “What is the truth?” What is the truth of the scene; what is the truth of the moment, because the truth today might not be the same as it would have been yesterday or will be tomorrow. So that’s what you’re living on. You take all of that stuff that you’ve got, all that knowledge you’ve accreted over time, and throw it away. Because it just gets in the way. Having a whole lot of predetermined notions about what you want to do is a good thing, but you have to be willing to just toss them into the toilet and flush if something new and interesting comes along.

That’s the stuff you start with, but the more I direct, the more I want to control everybody without them having the slightest notion that they’re being controlled. I think that’s what really good directors do—and I’m not saying I’m one of those guys; I aspire to be that guy—you know, to be able to have everybody collaborate and contribute and think, “That was my idea; I brought that,” while the little puppetmaster on the other end of the string has just turned the wind ever so slightly to the east to make them lean in that direction. “Yes, got it; that’s what I wanted them to do.” The lightest touch, I’ve found, is often the best touch. And sometimes the lightest touch necessary to get the job done is a punch in the face— metaphorically, because some people need a heavier touch than others, so for them, that’s a light touch. It’s all about trying to read the signs.

Montage: Talking about confrontations, have there been times like that for you with actors, the DOP or a crew member, right on set?

Ken: Sure there have. You always want to try and make sure that doesn’t happen, but yeah, sure, there have been confrontations. Early on, in situations like that, I would take it deeply personally and get emotionally involved in it, and while I think that’s healthy, I’ve learned to bring a little bit of perspective to the argument. At the end of the day, we’re making a movie; we’re not fighting ISIS or curing cancer. The few times it’s happened to me, something good has always come of it, because if you can step outside of the hot spot, you realise, “Oh, everybody is just advocating for something that’s really similar, and

Ken: I would say that’s changing. Unless you’re shooting a $25- or $30-million moderately big-budget film or a massive tent pole, you don’t really have a lot of time. In fact, there are some TV shows where I’ve felt I’ve had more time than I did on a pilot, a TV movie or a movie.

Montage: How does it work on Vikings? I was thinking that maybe they gave you a little bit more time on that.

Ken: They give us a little more time. That’s in the Irish and British tradition I suppose. What’s really wonderful about the way they work over there is that the showrunner, Michael Hirst, is a really amazing collaborator. He’s become a good friend as well. It’s just such a joy to work with someone like him. He writes the scripts and has a very strong and firm hand in terms of casting and all that, but when it’s time to make the show on the set, he leaves it in the hands of the director. I guess it relates to that ‘trust’ thing I was mentioning before. He’s there, and then he’s gone.

He goes back to Oxford and he continues to write.

The horse’s mouth on the set of a Vikings is the director. Not to say he’s no longer involved, but he leaves the directing side of the process to his directors.

The pattern for the show is 10 days per episode, plus second unit. That might expand and contract based on the demands of the script, whereas in North America, the script expands and contracts based on the budget and the schedule. It’s a whole different approach. That’s not to say the producers will do anything a director asks, but we make those decisions in preproduction, so, if it’s really too big for the show to handle then some accommodation will be made—by production, by me or by Michael Hirst.

Once we hit the floor we shoot 10-hour days, don’t break for lunch, don’t really do any overtime, and we do that for 10 days. That part of the process is a dream—almost no overtime! Hello, life. Generally, on a two-episode block we’ll shoot for between 20 and 24 days, plus you’ll have a few days of second unit, which is a great luxury. Orphan Black, for example, in the first year, were mostly eight-day shows I think; once they realised that the show was demanding too much of the schedule and even more from Tatiana, they expanded a bit. That was smart: let the creative drive the machine, not the other way around. My last Orphan Black was a nine-and-a-halfday episode, more or less—almost 10 days. But I was picking up scenes from other episodes, which is one thing you have to do in television as well.

With a TV movie like Mayerthorpe, which is a few years old now, I had 19 days to shoot, which is not a lot of time, but we were out in a small town in Alberta, and the network executives in Toronto left us to our own devices. Nobody really bothered us. We got to do what we wanted to do, which was really great, and the producers out there—Tom Cox and spring 2015

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Jordy Randall, and Jon Slan here in Toronto—were just so supportive of the process and of me that it was a joy to make the film.

Montage: Mayerthorpe deservedly won the Gemini for best television movie and you won the DGC award for direction of a television movie. I think it’s a fantastic work, Ken, and have always felt it should have been a feature film.

This page and opposite: Copper (Showcase).

Courtesy BBC America.

Ken: Yeah, it kind of felt like that. We were all very proud of it. It’s funny, when I heard about the project, my reaction was, “Are you kidding me? You want to do a story about the murdered Mounties? I’m not sure I want to be involved…” and then I read Andrew Wreggitt’s script, and it was just amazing. Obviously I gave him notes, but still, he had just found a way to make that story work. And I ended up getting the cast that I really wanted—I had to fight pretty hard, but I got it.

Montage: Henry Czerny as the good cop, helpless against an ineffective justice system, was great.

Ken: And Brian Markinson as the killer James Roszko was fantastic. At the time the network wanted Henry to play the bad guy, because he’d been playing tough guys in films with Harrison Ford (A Clear and Present Danger) and Tom Cruise (Mission: Impossible). But we won that battle.

Montage: As the director, how closely did you work with Czerny and Markinson to achieve the tension and hostility between them?

Ken: That was a matter of Brian, Henry and me putting the script on the table and reading it, and then going out, having dinner and a few drinks for about five consecutive nights and just talking it over. By the time we got to the set, I had told them I wanted to distill it down to a fight between good and evil. It was really about, How does a man like James Rozsko get created; what’s the environment that created him, and where is the humanity in a man so many see as a monster? The environment was hugely important to the visual storytelling of the film as well. Michael Storey [cinematographer] and I tried to do that by making the skies really big. Every wide shot is filled with sky and the horizon is right near the bottom of frame. As a city guy, I had just decided that too much sky could drive you nuts. In Henry’s case it was: How bad does a good guy need to get to get the bad guy?

I thought about it and said to them, “Well, if this good guy was a good guy in Chicago or Toronto or New York City, he’d take Roszko into an alley, put a bullet in his head and put his fingerprints on the gun, end of story.” Crisis averted; bad guy is dead.

But there’s a whole different ethos out in the rural areas of North America, or anywhere with a small population, for that matter—or at least I had decided there was—so as much as it was a movie about a failure of

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the judicial system to properly prosecute this guy, for me it was a story about the ethical dilemma good people have when they’re confronted with something that appears to them to be evil. How far do they go; how far do they push the ethical line that they spend their lives supporting? That became the story for us. Discussing that on a philosophical level for many days, I like to think that we were all on the same page in terms of where their characters were going to go. And when we got to the set, except for a few choice moments, I printed second or third take almost every time—it was like, “bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.” We’d set it up; we’d rehearse; we’d shoot—it was painless.

For the Alberta crew, this was a huge story. I suppose they felt it was their story, and now here comes this sort of fast-talking guy from Toronto to tell that story. So it was important to me to win their trust. I remember standing up at the production meeting and saying that this wasn’t just an issue for Alberta and it wasn’t just an issue for that town; it was an issue for all of Canada.

I said, “Some of you might be thinking that I’m from another planet. How could I possibly relate to this place and this story? I want you to rest assured that we shared as much shock and sorrow and horror about these murders as you did.” Those were the days before the constant media-fed fear complex we have now, with the government stoking the flames.

the first season and said, “Will you come and direct for me?” And I said “Of course I’ll come—as long as you come and do one of mine when I get my show.”

So in the second season, John and his partner Graeme Manson came back and I said, “How many do you want me to do?” and they said “We’ve only got one!

That’s all you can have. Now everybody wants to work on it.” [Laughs] No, she’s remarkable, and the whole situation there follows a little bit more of the North American paradigm, where the showrunners definitely have a hand

Montage: You said that you sent notes to Andrew Wreggitt. Did you make substantial changes?

Ken: Oh no; fundamentally his script was very sound, just a few changes. But there is one scene in the movie that comes to mind. Henry Czerny’s character had finally convinced one of Rozsko’s victims, a young man whom he had abused when he was a kid, to testify against him in court. Since so many years had passed and there was no physical proof, the court was lenient with Roszko and gave him a light sentence. So this salt-of-the-earth man’s man with a wife and a family, who had dug up a part of his own personal past, gone to court in support of it and been outed as a guy who had been sexually abused as a child, and it was crushing to him—confronted Czerny.

I said to Andrew, “Wouldn’t it be better if, instead of hearing what is being said, we were with one of the characters inside the police station looking out the window, and actually just seeing this man vent his anger at Henry’s character, not hearing it? Would that have more power?” And Andrew agreed. It was a very simple scene, just a point of view through a window with this guy pulling his truck up, cornering Henry and just screaming at him, and you can barely hear anything, but it was enough to make you go, “Oh my god.” That was Andrew helping me tell the story visually, because I think that had a lot more power than it would have, had we heard what he was saying.

Montage: Yeah, that was a really good note, and I noticed it again when I was watching it. Should we talk a little bit about Orphan Black? I guess the obvious question is: working with Tatiana Maslany, is she really as good as she appears to be?

Ken: Oh yes, she’s pretty talented. [Laughs] I had actually worked with her years before Orphan Black. I did a pilot with Tatiana just before Mayerthorpe, out in Saskatchewan, called Sabbatical, which was written

by Peter Mitchell. I was very proud of that, and Tatiana was really remarkable in it; she had a really juicy role.

It was nice to get back with her on Orphan Black, and that came about because John Fawcett called me in

in everything. But, again, Graeme and John are very collaborative, very open guys who just want the best for the show, so, whatever you bring to the table, it’s the best idea that always wins. In fact—I’m not supposed to say this, but—their code name last year was “No bad ideas.” But don’t tell anybody that. [Laughs] Montage: It does lead us to an interesting point, and one that I’ve heard you talk about before. It’s kind of germane to everything that’s going on now in the TV world. We still have the showrunners, but we have more and more really talented directors out there working in television. Should the system change? Is the system changing so that directors have a little bit more power in terms of working on television?

Ken: I think it is changing. David Fincher’s a perfect example of it on House of Cards. I think he’s really trying to push it completely over to the other side, where the director is the prime motivator, and the writer serves at the pleasure of the king, which is actually the way things were not that long ago in Britain and still are, to a certain degree. Not too long ago, shows in the U.K., as I’m coming to understand it, were not run by writers.

They were run by producers, and the producer put together the writers and the directors to make the show.

Somewhere in all this I think there’s a happy medium.

Graeme Manson and John Fawcett as a team are a really good example of that: co-creators, one a writer, one a director. It’s happening more and more—shows are hiring producing directors, and I think shows that don’t do that suffer for it, or at least don’t maximize their potential. I think shows that have a visionary presence, a director’s voice, whose concern is how the stories are told with images and sound, rather than just how the stories are told with words, are making better dramas.

Montage: Is it frustrating for you when you come on a show and you see that there’s more that can be done with the story and characters, but you’ve only got your allotted time to do the one episode? spring 2015

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This page: Stills from season two of Vikings (History).

Courtesy Shaw Media.

Opposite page: On the set of Vikings (History).

Courtesy Ken Girotti.

Ken: Yeah, for sure. But I think that’s changing too.

There was a time when you’d go on a show, and the overriding vibe that you got from the production side was, “How do we prevent this idiot from destroying our [show]?” Now, I don’t think it’s like that. If it is, it’s few and far between. I think now, really good and intelligent showrunners—whether they be writers, directors or producers—want to know what the new director’s point of view is. They want to hear another idea; they want to collaborate. And that’s refreshing.

So when it comes to television, yeah, as a director you’re obviously going to be, to a degree, telling someone else’s story, but within that paradigm you can bring your own music to the party, and sometimes you can even direct the dance a bit, and on rare occasions you can really make it your own. And those rare occasions are coming along more and more often.

Montage: Did it happen at all with Orphan Black, on the episodes you’ve done?

Ken: Sure. I would say that was definitely the case with the episode I did in season two, which was very much a comic episode. I was really left to my own devices. I recall going to John Fawcett and saying, “I’m pushing this… We’re right on the edge, comedically…” And John would shrug and say, “Push it.” And so we went out there, and Tatiana and I had a blast doing this kind of fall-down, slapstick comedy on a show that really is a psychological thriller. And it worked, I think. It was all rooted in reality; we weren’t reaching for jokes, but if they were there for the taking, or if there was a specific camera angle or lens choice that would provide something a little bit more humorous—like something ridiculous going on in the background while you’re in an out-of-focus close-up with somebody talking in the foreground—then we just did it.

Montage: Ken, you’re one of the main directors on Vikings. There are some shows coming out now that feel completely cinematic—and this is one of them.

Can you tell me about working on the show?

Ken: You’re right, the approach is cinematic. When you go to production and ask for the things you need to tell the story, the first answer is almost never “No” on Vikings. Often it’s “Okay,” and sometimes it’s “Let’s look at that.” And even when it’s “Let’s look at that,” it often turns into a “Yes.” It’s amazing. You never feel like you’re being kneecapped right out of the gate.

Every request gets due consideration.

You feel like they’re there to serve the director’s vision of that particular episode. And, if push comes to shove down the road and they can’t provide something because they just don’t have the wherewithal financially or whatever, then they come back to you and say, “We need some help—can you rethink it?” and I’d rather have that than “No.” You just want to know that somebody sat down, went back into the room, crunched the numbers and said, “We can’t do

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it.” Or they went back in the room, crunched the numbers, and said, “Well, we have this set to build and we just can’t afford to create that marine environment for you.” And then you go, “Instead of doing the new build, why don’t we just take the scene and shoot in one of the tents, because then we can have that marine set that I need.”

That’s the kind of environment you’re in, and that builds your confidence in the show. There have been times in the past when those kinds of decisions get completely wrested from your hands, and when they come back and land in your lap, you think, “There was a better solution that would’ve had more visual impact.” Not to say that you’re always right about it, but if you put enough people in the room, with the director being one of them, sometimes good things can happen.

for eight days—for the first three days, you just screen and give notes, and then you get in there and take the X-Acto knives out and start burnishing the work.

That’s another thing I guess I’ve learned: just how important editing is, and how important it is to follow the work through as far as a production will allow. I always learn; the more I cut, the more I learn, always.

I’ve never not learned something in the cutting room, or on any set, for that matter.

Montage: Have you been in that situation working on pilots previously where you did feel that creativity?

Ken: Oh yeah. I did it on Cra$h & Burn, the show with Malcolm MacRury, which was called “Lawyers, Guns, and Money”; the pilot I did with Pete Mitchell called Sabbatical was like that; Mayerthorpe was definitely like that, where I was left to my own devices; and there have been a lot of times on television shows. Years ago, I did The Outer Limits, which was an anthology series—every episode was different—so there was a little bit of that going on there, although they had pretty rigid budgetary constraints.

But at the end of the day, things got built for your show [even though] they weren’t going to be used again. It was nice, because after I did the first couple, I would always get contacted well in advance of my next episode to be able to put in my two cents if they were starting to build stuff they had to get out in front of. So, it has always happened—but it’s getting different and better and seems to take place more often these days.

Montage: What’s your feeling about the director’s cut for TV shows? Are you given enough time to express yourself?

Ken: This whole business of getting two days to edit is a bit ridiculous. If I had a few more days to be able to go into the cutting room and hand the producers an episode that was as close to their final cut as they could get, wouldn’t that make everybody happy? If they’ve effectively communicated to me what they want me to deliver in the episode, there’s no reason why I can’t give that right back to them. Then an executive producer doesn’t have to spend eons of time in the cutting room trying to make it fit.

Montage: Is that even true for Vikings?

Ken: On Vikings they give us four days per episode.

Montage: So you’re pretty happy by that time?

Ken: Well, you’re certainly much closer. I still almost always feel like I could use more time. I’m not talking about a lot, but it always feels like I’m one day short.

Again, I think that what makes the most sense to me is how it’s done in other parts of the world, where, if your show has an eight-day shoot, you also get eight days to prep it and eight days to cut it.

Montage: Yeah, it doesn’t work out that way.

Ken: No. It doesn’t mean you have to be in the room

Montage: What do you see in the future for you?

What would you like to be doing in five years?

Ken: I want to take a greater creative stake in the stuff I’m doing. I have some things in development.

We’re putting together the financing for a low-budget feature I want to do, and I’m co-writing two projects and collaborating creatively on two more, all for television. The potential looks quite good for a couple of them…at the moment, at least.

At the end of the day, it’s all about being a director who brings more than just, “Give me a 35-mm lens, plop it here and pan him into the room.” That’s not directing. Directing is bringing all of the elements to bear: being there when the sets are designed and the colour palette is decided upon; being there when the visual look is being concocted; being there for camera tests and at the colour timing; being there at the sound-spotting session and the mix and the playback.

That’s what directing is, and the more we can get back to that, the better. spring 2015

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JIM DONOVAN: CROSSING BORDERS ersa

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are. Filmus who we stories and ke a m t a g s th e difference nd protectin hout having it nd value th l value in nurturing a a w ty ce ti a en sp id ve Canadian rly there is a cultura international creati y m ese things th to d n ed a me, clea om attach ader, I feel quite extension of this, and g further into the bro what has meaning to fortunate to benefit fr . d n n lt es n ri a a fe ic tu is n vo ve g om I’ ve n n fr e ki ia er e ma nad agin com care . I can’t im e of true Ca m, where I ughout my perspective the nature of who I a uebecois roots. Thro at recognize the valu Q d th d first explore to my Canadian an uarters of our society ture. —Jim Donovan q fu ack throw me b e receive from all the ourselves and for the r tw fo or r, p p fo g su n e ti th gh ing worth fi It’s someth

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Jim Donovan is a unique individual in the DGC, a director who is just as comfortable working in French as in English. While many directors can function bilingually, few have been able to forge careers in a country that still has “two solitudes.” For Donovan, a director who has made music videos and commercials as well as television drama series, documentaries and feature films, it means that he’s platform-agnostic and happy to work in either language. A veteran cineaste, Donovan, a Montrealer now living in Toronto, has recently gone from directing “A Day in the Life,” an awardwinning episode of Flashpoint, to making Le Clan, an SRC (Radio-Canada) six-part series set in the French-speaking Acadian area of New Brunswick. Should Le Clan hit big when it’s broadcast in the fall, Donovan is likely to be found deciding whether he should be working in English or French and what part of the country is best resourced to pay for his directorial services. —MARC GLASSMAN

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a good chance we’re going to do another run, and so you have that perspective of the entire story, which is a bit of a throwback to my roots as a filmmaker—having that vue d’ensemble, the entire landscape in front of you. It’s a stretch of the creative muscle, there’s no doubt about it, and it’s a lot of responsibility.

Montage: Were you in fact one of the showrunners as well as the director?

Montage: Marc Glassman Jim: Jim Donovan

Montage: I’m really interested in Le Clan. It’s a major TV series for Radio-Canada, and I’m wondering about the challenges that you faced. I can see that you’re bilingual, and I’m wondering if you can talk to me about your challenges, linguistically but also directorially, in terms of handling a major production that’s in French.

Previous page: Camera cranes over a crowd on the set of Pure (Jim Donovan, 2005).

Photo: Chris Kralik.

This page, top to bottom: On the set of Pure (Jim Donovan, 2005).

Photos: Chris Kralik.

Jim: Well, in reality, my mother tongue, what we spoke at home, is French. And what I would speak in the street, the minute I would cross the door, was English. And that’s been my life, from day one. I’m always amazed at how you just find the language that you need to find when you’re working with artists and people. I was concerned that I wouldn’t remember what to call a long shot or a medium shot in French.

And of course, to add to that, we were shooting in Shediac, New Brunswick, for 80 per cent of our time, so you have all these Acadians on set. By the end of the shoot, the entire crew was speaking our own version of Chiac, which is a mix between English and French, so it was actually quite the adventure on the linguistic level.

Montage: Were you using a Quebecois team and crew or people from New Brunswick?

Jim: It was a healthy mix. I managed to get to work with my longtime collaborator, DP Jean-Pierre Gauthier, and the keys were predominantly from Montreal—my art director, the first AD, the producers and most of the actors. Part of the mandate was for us to blend and make use of the palette that exists in French-speaking New Brunswick, so we wound up getting some of the actors in that area, and also some of the crew. It was a new experience for me that way, to come into a region in such a way as I guess being an American coming to Montreal would feel like. There was a sense of mentorship, I think. A lot of the people we were working with, in some departments—they were learning a little bit as we were moving forward, which was cool.

Jim: I was very creatively involved, as was the writer, Joanne Arseneau, who wrote on the hit Quebec cop show 19-2. The producers, Cécile Chevrier, Marc Poulin and especially Joanne Forgues (who was acting as script editor), were close creative partners throughout and would be on set every day representing our writer, Joanne. So they were the de facto showrunners. However, I acted as what would be termed here a directing showrunner, like you see on shows such as Orphan Black. But in Quebec this concept is considered a director’s job, and most shows are helmed by one director. So it’s a different way of defining and labelling the work.

For me it began with casting, and it continued into every single creative decision—you’re involved all the way. They look to you and they want to have not only your opinion but your leadership. There’s a lot of value placed on that. For the first time in my television career, I was invited to go present the show to the execs at Radio-Canada. In fact, I was a little bit intimidated by presenting the entire show, and at a point when we didn’t even have all of the scripts.

They really value your take on tone, style, story.

Montage: That is very different.

Jim: Quite frankly, up until Le Clan, I had worked exclusively in the other system. For me, we are there to serve the process. We are there to provide creative leadership. But I did find it equally challenging to come into an episode of Flashpoint or Cracked, where you’re given a story, a certain set of rules and a style that’s established. There’s a certain liberating quality to having just to think about directing, because then you’re free to explore and you have to challenge yourself in a different way creatively. Constriction gives you an opportunity to dive deeper into the many other details that are your responsibility.

Montage: It sounds in a way as if there is a bit more of an acceptance of the director as a kind of auteur in Quebec. Is that your impression?

Jim: Perhaps. I’m going through editing right now, and it’s no different than what I’ve experienced elsewhere in Canada, except that I’m involved in every single edit.

what was it like to be working on Le Clan? Here you are, with some crew that you knew, and some crew that I guess you were getting to know—what was it like; what were the challenges for you creatively?

Jim: Well, again, I was fortunate enough to be working with a DP with whom I had done two features before, and a television movie, so that was wonderful.

I worked with the poduction designer, Dominique Desrochers, who I had known for many years. What was fun was that there were some new people who I didn’t know and who I learned to appreciate.

Mona Medawar, my script assistant, for example, had worked with Jean-Marc Vallée, and she was wonderful to work with. So was the costume designer here, Josée Castonguay.

Montage: How did you prepare for Le Clan?

Jim: I started thinking about references and, of course, before I got the job, I had prepared a six-page treatment that summarized my approach, and referenced other shows, films, photography and music. And I’d made a mood video that drew from things that I felt were important to talk about to Radio-Canada and to the producers.

I had to think about what the material meant to me; how would an audience connect to it; what are we developing? To give you an example, because this story takes place in New Brunswick, I started to explore Southern Gothic as a literary form, so of course True Detective came to mind, Angel Heart came to mind, and when you think about it, the Deep South includes New Orleans and the French reality of Louisiana, and there’s a direct link to Acadia. So I moved forward on that idea.

I started thinking about something that I dubbed Shediac Gothic. For example, the first thing we did was hire my good friend and musician Simon Wayland, and we started looking into music and came up with a mashup between late-'90s trip hop like Portishead and something roots country like Johnny Cash or Ry Cooder—that kind of sound. We created a playlist, and I’d play that for the production designer and the location scout and say, “I want to find the grit in this place.” I wanted to find a way to inhabit the series with this spirit of something that’s different for a Quebec audience. And, of course, all of that led to images coming from the art department, so we started researching photographs with a certain colour style and palette, which then bled into the wardrobe and found its way into the cinematography.

Comparing it to making films, all my keys, all the people who were my right hand, my left hand, every finger on my hands—these people came back to me with ideas that echoed from the first ideas that I had come up with.

Montage: That sounds like a director’s vision, Jim.

Montage: Having worked a lot on sets in English, did you find that there was a difference in how your crew worked?

Jim: I would say there are profound differences in the processes that are at work here. To begin with, the Quebec model is very streamlined and intimate. There are fewer players and, of course, less money.

For Le Clan, the feeling I got, honestly, was like being on one of my independent films. You have this intimate relationship with the writers, the actors and the producers, which resembles the environment of making a film. So by the end of it—this was a six-episode run—it felt like making a six-hour movie. There’s

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Montage: Well, that’s major.

Jim: But what I mean is that there are notes coming from all of my creative partners and from the network, and we have to compose with that. It was the same during casting. It’s a collaborative process—I guess the big difference is that you’re there from the beginning to the end. You are made to feel responsible, and you have to accept that responsibility. You’re the ringbearer, if this were The Lord of the Rings. You still need the fellowship to follow you on the quest to succeed, though….

Montage: Absolutely. So take me on the set then—

Jim: That’s what directors do; we are like curators of reality. You’ve got this landscape now where content is all-pervasive. Everyone can have their own YouTube channel. My kids watch online user-generated content constantly; if they’re bored, they’ll just go and find some kind of content that interests them. In that kind of a context, if you don’t have a specific voice, if you’re not extremely present and refined with your creative choices, then you’re basically making something that’s beige and is going to get lost in the signal-to-noise ratio. So we have to be good—we have to be better than we’ve ever been. That’s the spirit we have to have as directors. spring 2015

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zone. It’s crucial that the actors buy into the scenes and the overarching concept.

Montage: Can you tell me more about Le Clan? Why did you shoot in New Brunswick?

This page: Donovan with crew on the set of the upcoming series Le Clan.

Photos: Julie D’Amour Léger.

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Jim: In Le Clan, a big part of the story happens in Acadia. It is the story of a guy in the witness-protection program who lives a double life. A part of the life he left behind, his criminal past, is in Shediac and around there. I don’t know if you’ve ever spent any time down there, but the locals have such colourful accents, which I picked up on right away. I wanted to hear that, and many of the characters in the show speak with a Chiac accent, with an Acadian accent.

Ultimately, it’s fascinating, and it’s a struggle. There are concerns about whether or not people will understand what they’re saying. I kind of pushed in the direction of capturing that colour, that richness. If you see a show set in Louisiana, when the Cajuns speak there’s a certain style to it. It’s like when Drake raps on one of his songs, half the time maybe you’ll get it and sometimes maybe you won’t, but it all sounds beautiful to me.

We had a very small crew, and we made the decision very early on to go handheld for about 80 per cent of the show. We were running and gunning all the time. We actually surrendered the dolly fund to make ends meet. We’ve got a Steadicam available at all times, because my DP also operates [one], so we’ll go to the tripod and the slider, but very simple gripping. We rarely put down tracks unless we absolutely have to; the only thing we haven’t done is go on Rollerblades, but maybe we will. I’m extremely focused on the actors’ performances. Every actor is truly invested in this show. There are guys who turned down films to do it—one of the leads, Pierre-Yves Cardinal, turned down a fairly major production in France to be with us and to do this part. He’s one of the most colourful characters in the series. So every actor came to it extremely gung-ho, and it’s so much fun. Of course, when I say we had a light crew, it’s obviously up to professional standards.

We did a couple of action scenes on the first run last summer that were quite important. In certain cases I had my stunt coordinator come in from Montreal to choreograph, when there were things like combat or a car stunt. There are certain things you can’t get around and that you really have to think through, but in general what I prefer for action right now is more organic. It has to be completely believable.

Paul Greengrass comes to mind as an influence—you never doubt that it’s real, and that’s probably a lot of work. In this show, it’s gritty realism, so you have to work hard to make sure it feels that way.

Not to be underestimated is the work of the actor in a show like this. It’s very involved, technically, and we always wish we had three times more hours to shoot but in the middle of this sort of running-andgunning, you do spend a lot of time going through it with the actor, making sure it does feel real, so it will feel plausible to an audience. You’ve got enough creative partners on set to make the technical aspects work and to make it visceral once you get in the

Montage: As much as we talk about action, there’s mood, and there’s dealing with characters. I was struck by “A Day in the Life,” the award-winning show you did for Flashpoint, particularly the sequence where a guy is proposing to a woman he has been harassing and she knows that at any second he could possibly be taken out by the special police crew. The acting is incredibly intense, and it really worked for me. Am I right that that’s a scene you’re proud of?

Jim: Oh, absolutely. When the producers gave me that script and I read the scene, I was touched. I had gone through some things in my own life and somehow, the image of the guy on bended knee who is so in love with this person who just can’t love him is so powerful—and he’s proposing with a gun in his hand—that I knew we could make something powerful. Of course it begins with the script—you felt it on paper; you knew this was special. And it’s motivating: when you see a good story, when you see something that just grabs you and you know that it’s good, you feel compelled to bring it to life and just make it right.

So that was the first thing. That particular episode has three storylines, and that last storyline—I mean, this was a Valentine’s Day episode—was so profound. It had all sorts of layers to it. It was a lot of fun; I was really happy to get that.

Montage: Working with the actors on a scene like that, what do you bring to it, and what do they?

Jim: I sit actors down as often and as much as I can, and the first thing I tell them is, “There will be no mistakes. There are no mistakes.” And every actor, when I’m done a show, thanks me for telling them that, because it means that we can’t go wrong. Whatever happens is going to happen for a reason—it came from somewhere and there is some truth to it. For me, in my way of doing things, there is no right and wrong. There can only be what’s true to the idea that we’re trying to accomplish here. Every serious actor brings that, and every serious director brings that to the table as well.

So you come in with your ideas, and they come in with their ideas. I used to come in with much more rigid notes about what I thought was the right way to do something, and the more the years went by, the more movies I made and the more experience I got, I finally realised that you have to come in with a good idea of what you see and what it means, and then you don’t talk about that. You give people the space to create and steer them as best you can, and you are a butterfly catcher. You’re running through a field of flowers, making all of the butterflies fly, and you’re trying to catch as many as possible in the net.

Montage: Without damaging them, right? I guess that’s the butterfly part—let it fly, but keep them alive.

So I think that’s where the metaphor really works, right?

Jim: You’re not going to catch a butterfly with a hammer, so you can’t beat people over the head with your genius vision of what this is and how it should be. But generally speaking, when you talk about that whole sequence in Flashpoint that we were discussing—it was truly collaborative, and we rehearsed details such as how he would hold the gun and present the ring. It’s hard to remember exactly all

of the micro-details of how it happened, but I do know that I had notes on every single scene as I always do, but I don’t necessarily always talk about them. I keep those to myself, and I’m interested in what everyone has to offer, from the actors to the props person to the scriptwriter to just about everybody. And that’s the concept of the butterfly catcher: everyone’s a butterfly.

But still, even though you want everyone’s creativity, the truly tricky part is having to say no to possibly 90 per cent of everything and saying yes 10 per cent of the time. It’s still extremely difficult to keep people motivated to come back with their ideas when you can’t take every single idea. You do put yourself in that deciding position.

Montage: With Le Clan, there’s a lead who has had two identities in his life, and part of the drama has to be him playing the duality of the two individuals that he has been—and, as you say, it’s also a family story— so how do you work with an actor who has to play that role? You do have the advantage of working with the same actors over and over again, over a period of six episodes at this point, so how does that relationship develop—how do you work with them so that they’re able to get into their characters in a deeper and more complex way as the episodes go along?

Jim: We began our relationship by doing rehearsals, and I insisted on getting as much time as I could possibly get. I had picked out scenes to workshop with them—of course you can’t rehearse every single script, so you have to come up with a rehearsal plan.

We did talk at length about the main character with Sebastien Ricard, who plays the lead, and who is an accomplished actor in Quebec but is not known in television, having done mostly features. He’s an extremely organic guy—he works in much the same way as I do, so with him my dynamic is different than with Louis-Philippe Dandeneault, who is an extremely technical actor. He’s got a lead part in 19-2, on the French side. And Louis-Philippe brings a very specific thing to every scene. He’s got ideas that are extremely well thought out, and they tend to be 99 per cent perfect—I’ve got almost nothing to give this guy. But, if I ask him to, he’ll explore anything at all; he’s open.

And, ultimately, cultivating that openness is the key for this particular cast. Coming to set with ideas is important, but so is having their confidence and their trust.

It’s such an organic process, and again the tricky thing for me as a director is to realise that every single actor has different needs, and you have to harmonize every single one of those needs. I learned this a lot on my feature Trois Saisons, where we basically improvised the dialogue in 80 per cent of the scenes because we had a script which was dialogue free, and it was a strategic decision to use improv to make the actors 100 per cent invested in the character. So with Le Clan, the character of Zach, who is played by a 12-year-old, Alex Richard—the needs aren’t the same as for Sebastien Ricard, who is a real-life musician in his late 30s, who is quite confident with improv, and who is used to riffing and working organically. And it’s different for him than it is for Louis-Philippe Dandeneault, who is extremely confident and who comes to the role having done some work at home. So, your part to play, for me anyways, is that you have to own the story—which of course will have to be shorthand for you, and that has its own challenges—and you have to cultivate a set where people are feeling that you’ll protect them, and that they are free to try things, because I think that’s ultimately why we all do this thing. We’re all like spring 2015

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had met so many people who wanted to come back to work with me, including the DP and people at various levels of production that I had worked with on Pure or on commercials.

Montage: Trois Saisons has the feeling of real independent film, concerned with relationships and, as the title says, the passing of seasons. Why did you choose to make it?

children playing in a playground, let’s be honest—not everyone has this job.

Montage: Let’s go back 25 years ago—when did you graduate university? You went to Concordia, right?

Jim: Class of ’89.

Montage: And had you decided already that you wanted to be a director? When did you decide that film was it for you?

This page, top to bottom: Stills from the set of Trois Saisons (Jim Donovan, 2009). Photos: Kiran Ambwani.

Opposite page: Donovan with actors on the set of Cracked (CBC). Photos: Stephen Scott.

Jim: I had already starting shooting little industrial shorts and whatnot to pay my rent while I was at Concordia, and I would have gladly been a sound engineer or a cinematographer or anything they would pay me for—I was looking for PA jobs—but I couldn’t because I wasn’t in any union and there were no openings. So at some point I got a job in a local TV station in Quebec City. It was in the middle of summer, and the guy liked my attitude, I guess, and he said, “Listen, why don’t you take this local commercial and go into the editing room, because it needs to be recut.

It’s from last year and he’s got a new phone number and it needs a new tagline, so just go record a voiceover and I’ll give you 200 bucks.” And that was it—I never looked back. I just started from something as banal as that, just gradually getting into commercials and music videos, which were pretty hot back then—just one thing after another. Gradually, I started making money doing international commercials, and winning some awards. Eventually, I started coming back to directing short films, because at some point I realised, “This is not what I really want to do. I want to be telling stories; I want to go back to making films.”

Montage: You made a feature film when you were quite young called Pure. How did that come about?

Jim: Pure came out of the relationship with my producer Marcel Giroux. I was really into electronic music, and I approached Marcel with this idea to make a film about that scene. I also approached another friend of mine from Concordia, Eugene Garcia, who agreed to write the script with us. Somehow Marcel managed to convince Telefilm that it was a good idea to make a film like this. I think there’s so much creativity in electronic music.

Montage: Was Pure made with a low budget? Did the experience of making Pure help you create Trois Saisons?

Jim: Yes, for Pure, we had a small budget; it was below a million, and of course we learned a lot.

It did kind of set me up for Trois Saisons, because immediately afterwards I decided I wanted to make another independent feature, and this time around I wanted to be more involved in the writing. I started writing a project based on my own ideas and got a grant from Canada Council to develop a script. Also I

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Jim: I was inspired by the French nouvelle vague, the fact that those guys—Godard, Truffaut—would just make movies with a van and a couple of people and then go to Cannes and win awards with films that were completely different than anything that was being made anywhere else. And that was inspiring, to go back to that spirit of “Hey, we can do this—we don’t necessarily need a lot of money; we just need to get some really good people together and a good idea.” The budget for Trois Saisons was $35,000. It’s one of those credit-card movies made for nothing and pure passion.

I used improv in a scene that I thought was not working. I rolled the cameras and then told the actors, for example, to use swear words as much as they wanted, until they were ready, and then to stop using them and get into the text. And oddly enough, it freed them up.

We would do an improv pre-scene, on camera. What I’m trying to say is that experience of doing some experimental work in Trois Saisons actually transferred at some point into my work in television, even though it’s very limited. It’s when you get stuck—it’s good to have some tools to dig yourself out of a hole.

Montage: It’s very impressive. That must have been a very small crew.

Jim: Yeah, it was about 12 to 15 people, and some people were rotating because they had jobs—we couldn’t pay anybody; it was all deferred. It was a great experience. The core group of people stayed together for the entire thing. We also shot over nine months, literally through the three seasons, so we would shoot 10, 12 days, over weekends, take a break, edit, rewrite and shoot another 12 days, take a break and finally in the spring of 2008, we finished. And then we edited.

The way we looked at it was like shooting, let’s say, six music videos—that’s the way you had to look at it.

Because it was hard, without any real money, to count on anything happening the way you thought it would.

You had to be flexible; you had to find original ways to convince people to do stuff. Closing down Ste. Catherine Street for a day in front of the Bay, for example: I think we spent 25 per cent of our entire budget on that one day of shooting. Otherwise, we were cooking spaghetti at home and bringing it to set for the crew meal. It was a tremendous learning experience, because that film turned out to be more successful than Pure, in terms of the critical response.

Trois Saisons won festival awards both here and internationally. And we were nominated for best picture at the Genies. That was a huge deal for us— we were up against Polytechnique and Fifty Dead Men Walking. We didn’t win, but it was so gratifying for everybody that gave time for the film to see us up there.

Montage: In terms of that kind of filmmaking, obviously that must be very different from working for television—you may be working long hours, but I imagine that there’s a fair bit of improvisation that has to happen, scene by scene, in a film like Trois Saisons.

Jim: Yeah. It was a very different film from anything I’d ever attempted. You know as well as I do that when you’re shooting TV shows and you’ve got seven days to make an hour, you don’t always have time to to run a script change up the flagpole to see if everyone agrees.

I was craving an experience where I could experiment a bit, and Trois Saisons became that film. I certainly learned a lot by the end about how to use improv— though I actually have used improv in television. I did so even on Flashpoint, the one that I won the CSA for.

Montage: How do you see your role as a director evolving? What excites you most about your métier?

Jim: I am excited by the continuing prospect of developing story worlds from the ground up, working closely with core creative teams. Storytelling platforms are constantly evolving, yet we all get hooked by compelling stories, no matter what the form. Working on Le Clan has enriched my experience and fanned the flame that I hope will keep burning for years to come.

I think what nourishes me the most is the collaboration with artists from all quarters of our business. Currently, I seem to be able to build bridges between Quebec and the rest of Canada, and I’ve managed to connect several people across the country as a result of my background. Carrying forward, I would like to explore relationships further afield, a process that began when I moved to Toronto five years ago, and sought out new collaborations. Later this spring, Le Clan has been invited to compete in a Séries Mania, a television festival held in Paris, France. I can’t wait to see who I will meet there! spring 2015

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Montage: Marc Glassman Dawn: Dawn Wilkinson

DAWN WILKINSON: RISING STAR

t nded my firs r the Arts fu first network to fo l ci n ou C nada as the experiand the Ca The CBC w orporation] s CFC Directors’ Lab. e to the diverse on-set ng C t en m op ei el u m b ev io r, D ed ig ke os st ia a p re [Ontario Med ped me get into the p roduction in Toronto ex p me become a filmm ere are you el The OMDC h ries. P ich hel h se w a n system h y, delions, “W m ed ra d m the Canadia films. As I say in Dan short co hour-long id d t ly ec ir on d ot to ke N approve me to develop my craft. ty and a reason to ma ti n ed ence I need ve me a voice, an iden e.” —Dawn Wilkinso a om g h n y ia m d is a n Ca this born here, from? I was

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Dawn Wilkinson is one of the rising stars in Canadian television and film.

A graduate of the Canadian Film Centre and University of Toronto, she has directed the awardwinning feature Devotion, such shorts as Dandelions and Instant Dread and television shows Sunnyside, Republic of Doyle and Single Ladies. She was nominated for a DGC award for the Degrassi episode “Better Man.” —MARC GLASSMAN

Opposite page: Director Dawn Wilkinson behind the camera and looking over shooting scripts on the set of the television series Remedy (Global).

Courtesy Rayne Zukerman and Dawn Wilkinson.

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Montage: When did you decide to be a director?

Dawn: I made a documentary in high school about a vintage clothing store that I had upstairs on Queen Street West. I did it for Grade 10 English at my high school in Brampton, and I videotaped it—I rented a video camera—and edited it with two VCRs. Then I went to U of T after a brief stint in fashion design—didn’t work out—and I ended up in one of Kay Armatage’s women and representation classes. She showed lots of films by female directors and experimental filmmakers like Joyce Wieland and Maya Deren. I saw individual artists making films, women making films, and all different kinds of films. So it was then that I got the idea, “Oh, this is a thing that you can actually do.” I went to Phil Hoffmann’s experimental filmmaking retreat— it was the beginning of the Film Farm—and I made a short film there called Dandelions, and that was it. It was decided. I didn’t know how to do it, but in terms of my personal feeling of what I should do with my life, it was very clear to me at that moment.

I knew what I wanted to do but I didn’t know what it involved, so I thought I should get experience and try different things. I worked on some music videos at that time, and I actually used Dandelions as a sample in order to get a grant to write this other short film, which was a comedy, called Instant Dread. That was my first scripted, shot-listed, directed-with-a-crew short film, and I got a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts for that.

Montage: In your personal documentary Looking for Dawn, you interview a number of multi-talented biracial women. Is this a way for you to locate your own position as an artist and your interest in colour-blind casting?

Dawn: Part of my personal interest in the situation for bi-racial and mixed-race actors came out of experiences I had at the Canadian Film Centre in the Director’s Lab, because Instant Dread and Dandelions were both my own thing. I didn’t even differentiate writing, directing and producing at that time; it was all what I had to do to get the thing done, and going to the Directors’ Lab changed that. One of the things there was casting. It was one thing to write the project and be able to say, “Okay, this is how I see it; this is what the characters should look like; this is who they should be,” but as solely the director, to come in and put someone else’s vision on the screen was new to me: it’s not my original idea, but I’m going to bring it to life, and I picture it in this way. That was the first time I had conversations about the race of characters, and whether or not they’re written for a specific race, or if it’s not specific.

One of the short-film projects that I did as an exercise was Thankful, a family drama, and there was probably

that element of wanting to impose my identity on this piece, but I felt like this is part of the reason I’m here.

Not in such a way that it’s going to take away from the story—the story is the story. In this case, the story is about a brother and a sister who find out that their mother has had an affair, and it’s going to break apart the family, and I felt like there was no reason why it couldn’t be a mixed family: black dad, white mom, mixed kids, in this case. I don’t go into the details of what specifically their cultural background is but you get the racial variety on screen. I remember a lot of discussion around, “Why is it necessary, and what does it mean…” and me being like, “Well, isn’t this my job as the director to bring this to life how I see it?”

I was at the Film Centre in 1999, and things are different now, 15, 16 years later, in terms of the approach that’s taken. Now casting directors will sometimes say for certain characters, “Do you want diverse casting for this?”

Montage: You came out of U of T, which really doesn’t teach production at all, so where’d you get it?

Dawn: In the trenches. I took workshops where I could, so right out of U of T I went to LIFT (Liaison of Independent FIlmmakers of Toronto), Charles Street Video…I went for whatever workshops I could take.

I did a short stint at the New York Film Academy; I started a master’s programme at New York City College in media arts. I started working on set in lots of different departments, but always very indie, so I did craft service; I was a camera assistant on a kids’ show called Zoboomafoo—I would just go where I could get the experience. I was so thirsty to understand the different departments. I understood even then—if I’m going to be directing this larger thing, I need to know what people are doing. Probably for about two years, I would just try different things.

Then, I became an apprentice to Norman Jewison on The Hurricane. I had promoted Instant Dread like crazy—you would have thought it was a major motion picture. Norman saw the short film, as it had been recommended to him by Women in Film and Television, and I got the job. I got to see a big set of a major motion picture in action, and my job was to watch—he took that seriously and wanted to help a young filmmaker. I was there for everything shot in Toronto, so all the big fight scenes—you know, the four cameras on the boxing, the prison stuff—I was there for it all. I did learn from doing that, but that’s one way of filming. With no set, just a small location and a few people is totally different—there are big differences in how things are done, even if there are some similarities, especially with the performances.

But with The Hurricane I got to see, if there were four takes or six takes—there was never really more than six—but what are they like? How are the takes different? With someone like Denzel Washington, what’s different between take three, four and five? I can tell you there are differences; it’s fascinating to see somebody at that level acting, because it’s different every time, and it’s good every time.

Montage: And Norman’s interacting with Denzel?

Dawn: Yeah, and I’m watching. So that contributed to my seeing how it could work between an actor and director, and what kind of conversations happen about character. The other person I shadowed early on was Ernest Dickerson. He did a TV movie here called Our America. It was so different from the way Norman worked, but I didn’t get to see Norman in prep. And it spring 2015

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Left, top to bottom: Wilkinson with Yannick Bisson on the set of Murdoch Mysteries (Bell Media); directing Scott Thompson on the set of She’s the Mayor (both courtesy Afterlife Films); on the set of Degrassi: The Next Generation. Courtesy Stephen Scott for Epitome Pictures Inc. and Afterlife Films; on the set of Make it Pop (Nickelodeon). Courtesy Dawn Wilkinson.

was location shooting: how do you turn Regent Park into Chicago? Ernest took a lot of pictures and would storyboard every day—he would sit and draw all of his shots. He would just sit and draw, whereas Norman had storyboards for one or two sequences in the film.

Montage: What else did you do then?

Dawn: During that time, I also worked for the producer Peter Starr at the NFB on community and youth outreach projects and made my very lowbudget feature Devotion. Then, I had a son, and all of a sudden it had been years, maybe five years, since I had worked with actors. I was trying to get into television, and the Directors Guild had an award for an emerging television director, which I won. I had a couple of meetings, and then Eleanor Lindo came forward and said, “Next time I’m on something, just come and shadow me.” Within a couple of months she got a three-episode block of Degrassi and had me shadow her. She had the style, which is common on TV, of working with two cameras all the time. She was actually the first person who I had watched who worked like that, because even though The Hurricane had four cameras on the fight sequences, all the drama was single-camera style. Even Ernest’s movie was single-camera.

I noticed right away how much faster it moves on TV shoots. I did a lot more shadowing with other directors to get into TV. Initially, I didn’t understand the value of it, relative to shadowing Norman Jewison or Ernest. My attitude was, “But I know how to direct.

Why do I need to shadow?” But I learned a lot, the more I shadowed.

Montage: Can you tell me about directing Degrassi?

Dawn: About five years after I shadowed Eleanor, I got on a four-episode block of Degrassi that ended up being nominated for a DGC Team Award. I got lucky: they were developing an arc for one of the main characters, Alli Bhandari, in which she falls in love with Leo, a boy in France who comes back to Toronto to be with her. He has a very abusive relationship with her, which builds, and my episodes showed the escalation of that violence. In one of my episodes, Alli experiences the first real physical violence at his hands. It’s funny because part of me is with the seriousness of the content— you know, all the women’s studies courses I’d taken, and this is violence against women—but then another part of my thinking, directing-wise, is like, “Oh, I get to stage violence; this is so exciting!” It’s so much fun, which is not how you should think about violence, because it’s serious.

Montage: But in the moment, I think you kind of

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have to, don’t you? As a director, you have to love every scene.

Dawn: You have to get right into it. What I’ve learned with series is that you have to choose the scenes that you need lots of time to work on, because there’s not the opportunity to spend a lot of time on every scene.

It’s partially choice—is this a turning point or a climax, and it’s partially realising that coverage is required to tell an important part of a story or to show all the emotional beats that are there. In any case, you know it’s going to take longer. That’s really what prep is about, and I’m constantly learning this. Prep is about repeating the requirements for the sequences that need more work and what those requirements are, so that when the time comes and everybody’s looking at their watches, they know that this was the sequence that was always going to take more time. The assistant director schedules accordingly; everybody’s aware, because that’s the main issue really for a director on set in a series—are you going to make your day?

Montage: In the 2014 Degrassi shows “The World I Know” and “Better Man,” there’s a huge emotional arc that happens, and of course it does really seriously deal with the question of violence against women.

What was the key scene for you?

Dawn: It’s funny, as much as I think about the violent sequence and how excited I was to put the camera over the car, so that when she falls out you see her hit the ground—after making it, the scene that I realised “This is the heart of the story,” is when Alli’s in the bathroom with her girlfriends, and Leo’s outside the school, and she’s scared. They want to help her, and she’s afraid. Something that they say about Degrassi is that the love story is about friendship, and in that scene, you feel her shame in caring for someone who could be abusive toward her. It’s not that she doesn’t trust her friends, but Alli has to tell them that she needs help, and she feels shame that she’s allowed herself to get into this situation and needs them to help her overcome it. So for all of the fight staging, and the stuff that I fought for time-wise, when I watch it, the bathroom scene is really emotionally successful because it gets at those feelings of what it would be like to be in an abusive situation and how you would find your way out of it.

Montage: Did you talk to the three actresses in advance about the scene? How did that scene actually come off?

Dawn: As a director-actor thing, we worked that out, and also the staging around the bathroom mirrors, because sometimes it’s technically time-consuming to make sure there’s no light-stand or crew member in the reflection. For me that moment of seeing yourself or seeing someone see you—there’s just lots there visually and emotionally. Something interesting that I know we added had to do with the sunglasses, because Alli was wearing sunglasses to school in order to hide her bruising, and one of the friends knew but one of her friends didn’t. It was scripted that Alli had her sunglasses in her hand during that scene, and I asked Sarah Glinski, the showrunner, if I could have Alli wearing them until one of her friends removes them. She said yes and I worked it out with the actors.

It made sense for Claire [Aislin Paul] to remove them because she is the one who didn’t know and we used the mirrors and the glasses to reveal the bruise—it’s as if Alli’s not hiding anymore. Something that was

unique about that episode was that prosthetics were done to create that bruising—you don’t need that very often for Degrassi. I always go for being as realistic as possible. So I enjoyed that because it added a little extra to the drama, to design the bruising.

Montage: On Degrassi, would you have storyboarded the entire show?

Dawn: I’m sure I storyboarded that sequence with the fight in the car. One of the interesting things about Degrassi is that it’s all in the studio, even the exteriors— there’s a backlot. There are a lot of floor plans, which meant I had the time to be in the sets prior to shooting.

It’s something that you don’t have the advantage of on a location show to the same extent. When I’m on a location show I use a lot of photographs, and I draw floor plans, and I manage, but when you can be in the set, you can actually walk through and look at it. The other thing they do at Degrassi is rehearsal, which is not very common in TV series, where you rarely get to see most of the actors prior to the day of shooting.

You’re not necessarily in the set that you’ll be using, although occasionally, if it’s free, you can go there— usually it’s just in the board room—but you can discuss the scenes with them. So I would videotape and photograph the actors rehearsing. Or I videotape the rehearsal and then capture stills from it, and those are my storyboards.

Montage: I’m guessing, from what I’ve seen, that directing actors is one of the prime things for you.

Dawn: That is true. I like to look at the character’s perspective in the scene: what are the beats that they’re going through. It’s different with comedy, because with comedy it’s ‘where are the jokes or gags?’, but either way, for the actors, it doesn’t matter if it’s comedy or drama, they need to know where they were before the scene started and where they’re going after the scene ends. A rehearsal is ideal, but we don’t usually get that, so I try to talk to the actors at one point before we start shooting, and I’ll try to address any issue—kisses, violence, anything special that I might be thinking about shooting in a certain way.

Montage: You worked on Republic of Doyle, which must have been different, because you have to go all the way to Newfoundland for the shoot.

Dawn: Oh yeah, that was different. I basically just got off the plane and went to the set and saw what was happening. The series had been going on for years, so I was walking into a situation where things have been figured out, to a large extent.

Montage: What’s your contribution in that kind of situation? You obviously want to walk in there and feel like, “Hey, I’m Dawn, and I’m here, and I want to do something good with your show.”

Dawn: I immerse myself in episodes of the show so that, in an episode I’m directing, it looks and feels like a great episode of the show. In that case, we were on location in and around Memorial University, because the setting was about a robbery and hostage-taking, so there wasn’t a lot of unit moves. We were in one location, but we played it like several locations. We did a lot of scouting. I had done a lot of studio shows up until that point, so that was the first time I did a lot of location scouting as part of my series prep—it takes time, but ultimately it determines how the thing

looks, because you have to choose locations that are appropriate to the story and also in close proximity to each other.

Montage: What’s the process like when you arrive on set for the first time to direct an episode of a TV series?

Dawn: It’s more collaborative. It’s funny because on the one hand, as the director, you need to be the vision and the voice and guide the thing, but at the same time, there’s a showrunner who knows what happens after this episode, and what happened before this episode. The best feeling on set is having a good relationship with the showrunner, because then you can talk to them about the creative decisions that you’re making, and you have someone who is the perfect sounding-board. I talk about my process while I’m working, and it can be a lot of fun if the collaboration is going well. If they aren’t around I make sure I get all the answers I need during prep.

Montage: Besides the showrunner, who else do you talk to?

Dawn: In series, especially when the first AD has been around for previous episodes or seasons, he or she can be a fantastic resource for understanding not only the scheduling issues and logistics, but often they are tuned into the show style and can be a great to talk to during prep. Something I try to do is figure out how to best work with the AD. Do they like to see a shot list or do they prefer to walk through the shots in studio? Do floor plans help them best see where I want to spend the most time? I look at it like this: the better I can communicate with the first AD the more time I have on set for performance and the more elaborate set-ups I can execute. I do the creative prep I need for myself but I also pay attention to the way the first AD works. We are always under so much time pressure, I want to make it easier for them to have my back on the floor.

Montage: How about other members of the key creative team?

Dawn: They’re all important, of course. I have a very specific visual design and approach to performance when I approach a scene, and the ideal collaboration is when the keys offer up ideas that contribute to my vision, and so I try not to stifle that though I am very specific about what I need when setting up shots. I have an edited version in my mind, though I often shoot for more options on the floor so it’s not too locked in.

I spend a lot of time with production designers, usually in prep. On studio shows, they’ll show you which walls move. Also they usually say, “Oh, but we haven’t tried this before,” or “This is an angle we haven’t seen,” and it depends if it works for the story or not, but that always gets my attention, even though that means it’s going to be hard to get the shot. There was an episode of Murdoch Mysteries where I showed the perspective in a morgue from inside, where a dead body comes out and you see the feet. It was an angle that hadn’t been tried, and so I was all game to try it, because it was called for in the script but it was unique. It has to be called for in the script.

If the editors are there, and they’ve been on the show before, I usually go to them with my most complicated sequence—the thing I’m storyboarding—and I put it in front of them and they are great at saying, “Oh, you know what else you should shoot?” Then I can make the most of the time I spend shooting it the way that

I want to shoot it but I have the coverage the editors want.

And then I usually talk to directors of photography about anything that’s going to involve special equipment, or take a long time to light, because we have to choose where the time is being spent. We’re talking about people who are artists, essentially, so if they can get that idea a day or two in advance, and just have it in their head, they have time to think about it before you say, “Okay, we have 45 minutes to shoot this scene.”

Montage: Do you gauge your success in the end on how close your director’s cut is to what gets broadcast?

Dawn: It’s a good question. I haven’t had a dramatically different cuts broadcast than what I delivered. I judge my success by, when I’m cutting it, if it’s cutting together exactly how I planned it and I feel the emotion or laugh at the jokes. I’ve never been short, in terms of under the minutes that you need for the show. I’ve been very close and tight to the delivery time, but I’ve never been short. That’s because I always add stuff, like a camera movement where I can, and that tends to take time, and I add cues.

That said, sometimes the producers will say, “Cut it to time,” or close to time, or just, “Make the show the best show you want—just cut it.” Other producers will say, “Don’t cut content. Give us every line that we’ve scripted.” And I understand that, because if it was my script, I’d want to see the whole thing.

Montage: You’ve been working on a new show, Single Ladies. Can you tell me about that?

Dawn: Single Ladies is about three friends who have different backgrounds, and they’re all sort of navigating love and romance and their careers. There’s a six-episode order that BET has financed for its new network Centric, which is the first network designed for black women. The show was previously on VH1 in the States, so it’s an interesting case of new network, new showrunner, same characters—a kind of reboot.

Felicia D. Henderson [Soul Food] is the showrunner and I’m a new director on it. One of the main characters in Single Ladies, also called Felicia, and played by Letoya Luckett, is a professional black woman who owns a music management company and she’s a tough boss. So it was just interesting to see the arc of Felicia, because I directed two of the episodes, so I see initially how she looks from the outside, and then we kind of get to see her from the inside, and how she’s created a kind of exterior in order to be successful, and yet there’s a lot more than that. It’s fun to bring out a character like that. I also enjoyed staging and shooting the musical performance of girl group Triple Threat; my music-video background came in handy.

Montage: Do you have some thoughts about where you’d like to be five years from now?

Dawn: By then, I will have made another movie. I would definitely like to be involved in a series from the beginning, as the director-producer-writer, because I have some concepts that I’d like to develop. But, at the same time, I like working in different genres, and going from one series to the next is a creative challenge I’m not about to give up.

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Le lundi 9 février dernier a eu lieu au Cinéma Ex-Centris la grande première montréalaise du film Elephant Song, tiré d’une pièce de théâtre éponyme écrite en 2004 par Nicolas Billon, qui en a aussi fait l’adaptation cinématographique. Charles Binamé a réalisé ce huis clos avec brio, en s’entourant de vieux complices comme Pierre Gill, toujours innovateur à la direction photo, Claude Beaugrand, astucieux concepteur sonore et Danielle Labrie, qui a fait un travail extraordinaire à la direction artistique pour créer un univers d’institution psychiatrique des années 1960. La riche musique de Gaétan Gravel contribue aussi beaucoup à l’atmosphère du film.

Enfin, Xavier Dolan a mis de côté

UNE RENCONTRE AVEC QUELQUES CRÉATEURS D’ELEPHANT SONG, UN HUIS CLOS RÉUSSI.

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son chapeau de réalisateur pour prendre à bras-le-corps et maîtriser intelligemment le personnage de Michael, un patient qui se distingue par un rare talent de manipulateur dont tout le monde fait les frais, et particulièrement ses médecins. Dolan livre une performance forte et crédible.

*

See English translation of article at www.dgc.ca

La Guilde canadienne des réalisateurs a profité de cet événement pour organiser simultanément, dans une petite salle du Cinéma Ex-Centris, une projection de ce film pour ses membres et la faire suivre par une discussion avec Charles Binamé, Danielle Labrie et Xavier Dolan. Tim Southam, président national de la Guilde des réalisateurs, a animé avec verve cette conversation au contenu enrichissant, en donnant un ton direct et teinté d’humour aux échanges, en particulier ceux avec Xavier Dolan. D’ailleurs, à la toute fin, on a entendu ce dernier déplorer que cette conversation n’ait pu se prolonger, ce qui semble avoir été l’opinion unanime, à en juger par les commentaires de l’auditoire à la sortie de la salle.

TS: Bonsoir et merci d’être ici avec nous. Nous avons 20 minutes pour vous présenter quelques créateurs principaux du film, dont le réalisateur, Charles Binamé.

Si vous avez des questions, faites-moi signe, nous essaierons d’y répondre à la fin de la rencontre. Sans plus attendre, je vous présente l’équipe qui nous parlera du film : Charles Binamé.

CB: Salut.

TS: Danielle Labrie, directrice artistique du film, conceptrice visuelle et metteure en scène, et Xavier Dolan, qui incarne Michael…

Comme nous sommes à la Guilde des réalisateurs, je vais commencer en parlant tout de suite de la forme, comment vous avez fait le film. Nous pourrons parler du fond vers la fin, mais j’aimerais commencer en parlant d’abord du choix du lieu. J’aimerais citer Alejandro González Iñárritu qui a dit récemment à Los Angeles que, finalement, au fur et à mesure de la progression de sa carrière, les détails relatifs à la façon de faire un film commençaient à compter plus pour lui que le fond ou même l’histoire. Je pense qu’il a exagéré un peu par rapport à sa propre démarche, mais il est vrai qu’en regardant Elephant Song, on ne peut s’empêcher de réfléchir tout de suite au déploiement, à l’accumulation et à l’agencement des détails qui font le film. Et donc, avant même de parler du lieu, j’aimerais parler, Charles, de cette question des détails qui sont imbriqués dans la fabrication du film, mais aussi des astuces que déploie Michael pour mener à bien son complot vis à vis du Dr Green. Alors, est ce que tu aimerais dans un premier temps nous parler de cet agencement des détails et de ce que cela peut représenter ?

CB: Je vais faire un peu de millage sur la boutade d’Iñárritu.

C’est sûr qu’un film est réussi à partir du moment où ses composantes sont dûment recherchées et que l’ensemble se tient, est cohérent. Un exemple d’un détail qui pour moi était absolument important, c’était de comprendre qui était Michael. J’ai eu accès à une amie psychiatre de Nicolas Billon, qu’il avait consultée pour écrire ce rôle, pour qu’il soit sans faille. Je l’ai appelée, on s’est parlé, je lui ai demandé de m’expliquer

le syndrome de Michael, comment il voyait le monde, ce que cela voulait dire dans sa tête. Et elle m’a expliqué une chose, c’est que ce type de personnage a une espèce de psychose douce, un peu bipolaire. Il divise les gens pour les contrôler, pour mieux les contrôler…

C’est un détail qui n’est pas un détail de décor, ni un détail technique, mais qui est un détail diablement important dans l’élaboration d’un film comme celui là, pour que je comprenne le personnage. Donc, elle m’a envoyé plusieurs articles sur ce type de comportement, ce type de maladie ou de manifestation psychologique.

Après, c’est une construction de tous les instants avec tous les secteurs, que ce soit la direction photo, la direction artistique. Moi, je suis un peu un maniaque. J’ai fait beaucoup de films d’époque, alors je me suis intéressé à la fabrication de choses qui ne m’appartiennent pas, d’univers qui ne m’appartiennent pas. J’ai fait un film sur le hockey, et je ne suis pas du tout un amateur de hockey. Chaque fois, il faut aller à la rencontre du film un peu comme un touriste qui va lire ses almanachs, ses manuels, ses trucs, l’histoire du pays, sa culture, ses habitudes etc. Donc, approcher un film, dans mon cas en tout cas, c’est comprendre le plus possible la somme des détails qui en assureront ultimement l’étanchéité ou l’intégrité.

TS: On va revenir aussi à certaines composantes, dont la direction artistique, mais on constate aussi le travail d’un très grand concepteur sonore, Claude Beaugrand.

CB: Oui, tout à fait.

TS: Et aussi, le travail de Gaétan Gravel au niveau de la musique.

CB: Et de la direction photo de Pierre Gill.

TS: La direction photo. Mais avant tout ça, je vais souligner la présence de Nicolas Billon qui a écrit le film, et de Richard Goudreau qui a produit le film.

On sent effectivement un travail d’équipe très soigné, très rigoureux, parce qu’on parle déjà des détails, et ce travail ne se fait pas tout seul. Pour revenir un peu à Iñárritu, dont la boutade nous un peu a provoqués, il parlait aussi du fait que, dans un certain contexte, tout le monde dans l’équipe est un acteur, tout le monde joue en même temps. C’est à dire que tout le monde doit être sur le qui vive de tout ce qui se passe dans le film. Donc, le plan de route commence à compter beaucoup, beaucoup.

Xavier, tu me disais que pour appréhender ce film, tu venais de l’extérieur, comme dans tous tes films, tu apprends, tu avances en apprenant. On est tous là pour comprendre, on connaît un peu ton parcours…

Il s’agit quand même ici d’une thématique qui te ressemble, ou, disons-le ainsi, dont les échos se retrouvent aussi dans tes films. Est-ce que ce personnage de Michael, pour toi, est une manière d’avancer dans cette thématique, de faire encore d’autres découvertes ? D’abord bien sûr, sur la relation avec la mère, les parents, mais aussi sur un personnage qui est en dialogue avec sa mère, même dans le contexte de ce film ?

XD: Pas vraiment. C’était l’occasion de travailler avec Charles, de découvrir son univers. Je n’ai jamais fait d’association immédiate avec ce que moi, j’avais fait avant, ni avec le personnage de Michael, parce que je n’ai jamais essayé de construire Michael en le définissant par les problèmes qui ont traversé ou qui ont spring 2015

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ment, il a un beau passé trouble qui l’habite. », plutôt qu’on s’attarde sur le fil narratif du film et sur l’arc psychologique de Green. Tu sais, la façon que Michael a de mentir, je voulais juste qu’elle soit totale. Donc, peu importe ce qu’il cachait, je ne voulais pas qu’on le voie. Je ne voulais pas qu’on y ait accès. Est ce que ça a du sens ?

de Nadon (NDLR : Guy Nadon joue le rôle du Dr Craig Jones), témoignait d’une espèce de complaisance dans l’approche médicale, dans le secret d’une faute médicale. Et aussi parce que c’est un lieu dont l’ambiance, dans les années 60, m’apparaissait plus prégnante de ce dont...

TS: On parle des années 60 ?

TS: Oui. D’ailleurs, ça m’amène à ceci, et c’est peut être aussi brillant que ma dernière question...

XD: La barre est haute !

Opposite page: Charles Binamé.

Photo: Lina Binamé. Left, top to bottom: Stills from Elephant Song (Charles Binamé, 2014), starring actor and fellow director Xavier Dolan.

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troublé son enfance, donc par sa relation avec sa mère.

J’ai toujours pensé que Michael était assez intelligent pour ne pas dévoiler aux gens ses faiblesses et ses traumatismes parce que s’il le faisait, forcément, son plan ne pourrait pas aboutir. J’ai tout le temps pensé qu’il agissait en fait comme un acteur. Quelqu’un qui joue. On ne sait pas quelle scène, on ne sait pas quel personnage, on ne sait pas quelle émotion, mais c’est quelqu’un qui joue, c’est un acteur. J’ai vu Elephant Song comme une occasion en or, une espèce de vaisseau d’or pour un acteur. Tu sais, un rôle comme celuilà, une partition comme celle-là, c’est particulièrement excitant, puis, l’idée de travailler avec Charles, dans son univers…

TS: Oui, c’est ça, merci. Ça nous amène à l’iconographie du film, aux lieux. Le passé de Michael est filmé, et ces moments sont les seuls où l’on sort réellement du lieu de l’hôpital, à part ceux dans la maison du Dr Green, mais on ne sent pas vraiment qu’on sort du monde du Dr Green quand on va chez lui. Donc, il y a ce presque huis clos, mais un huis clos un peu à rebours, avec cette lumière en contre jour qui vient habiter le lieu, qui vient l’alimenter. Tu parles de la bulle de Michael, du fait de le contenir.

Danielle et Charles, pouvez-vous nous parler de la façon dont cet espace s’est présenté et comment, bien sûr avec Pierre Gill, le directeur photo, vous avez songé à créer finalement ce huis clos, qui par la suite va être très difficile mais très intéressant à découper ?

DL: Bien, à la base, c’était très difficile. On s’est posé beaucoup de questions sur ce que ce huis clos était vraiment… On était hanté par ça, et il fallait le rendre vivant. Il fallait que tout fonctionne avec le découpage et, en plus, il fallait tourner… je ne sais plus combien de pages dans le bureau.

CB: Quatre-vingt pages.

TS: C’est vrai que Michael est un acteur et ce qui est fascinant, c’est que c’est un personnage absolument émotif, qui fait preuve d’une grande retenue pour mener à bien son plan, pour rester très en recul et pour attirer vers lui le Dr Green et le séduire. Michael ne va pas chercher le Dr Green; il le fait venir tranquillement, par l’agencement des indices, si l’on veut… l’armoire, le tiroir, etc.

DL: Quatre-vingt pages dans le bureau. Alors il y avait un grand défi pour Pierre Gill, il y avait un grand défi pour Charles, pour Xavier, pour moi, pour tout le monde en fin de compte, pour rendre l’image intéressante et pour qu’à chaque scène ou journée de tournage, il y ait de nouveaux axes, pour aider aussi.

Parce qu’on est quand même dans une pièce pas si grande que cela.

XD: Oui.

TS: Vous êtes dans une pièce, c’est ça ?

TS: Pour toi, cela a dû être assez intéressant de contenir toutes ces émotions, de devenir un peu le réservoir étanche de toutes les émotions qui animent réellement Michael, pour qu’il puisse mener à bien son plan. Est ce qu’on peut parler un peu de ce plan, mais aussi de la psychose du personnage, celle qui lui permet de pouvoir calculer comme il le fait, en étant très passionné ?

DL: Oui, on a carrément transformé un étage de l’hôpital Hippolyte Lafontaine (NDLR : à Montréal). On a pratiquement tout arraché pour reproduire les années 50, parce que là-bas, il n’y avait pas vraiment ce dont on avait besoin : le bureau de Lawrence, tous les corridors, etc. Et on n’est pas sorti beaucoup de l’hôpital psychiatrique… Je pense qu’on était pas mal tous ensemble dans notre bulle.

XD: Quelle question profonde…Bien oui, c’est complexe, mais en fait, je pense que ma réponse est moins intéressante que la question. C’est vrai que Michael ressent des choses. Il veut mener à bien un plan et il a une stratégie, il veut convaincre quelqu’un. Il a ses troubles du passé, ses traumatismes, sa mère, tout ça.

Pour moi, jouer avec toutes ces éléments sous-jacents, avec le passé, les non dits, les sous textes, je pense que cela aurait été de vendre la mèche par rapport à Michael.

J’ai essayé de faire une performance qui est plus au service de l’intrigue qu’au service du passé de Michael.

Je trouvais plus important que tout le monde monte en bateau avec Michael ou qu’on se dise « Ah, il

TS: On perçoit l’époque, qui est une époque reconnue pour être aussi dans une bulle, alors que les contraintes sociales jouent beaucoup. Explique-nous un peu — et peut être Nicolas (NDLR : Billon) va soit acquiescer, soit dire non — comment l’époque compte beaucoup dans la création du Dr Green et de sa mentalité, qui l’amène à être un peu déjoué par Michael. Comment avez-vous abordé l’époque pour raconter l’histoire ?

CB: À l’origine, ça se passait dans les années 80, puis une des premières choses que j’ai demandées à Nicolas, c’est de reculer dans le temps, parce que je trouvais que la composante, justement, de contraintes, de secrets, de tout ce qui est véhiculé par le personnage

CB: Oui, je l’ai ramené dans les années 60, parce que justement, je trouvais que cinématographiquement, il y aurait davantage de signaux qui diraient qu’il y a un enfermement et qu’il y a un secret possible. Au théâtre, c’est différent parce qu’on est dans un espace, d’une certaine façon, plus abstrait. Au cinéma, on est obligé d’avoir des accessoires, des voitures d’une certaine année. On est davantage captif d’une époque, et je trouvais que les années 80 ne me satisfaisaient pas beaucoup en termes des signaux que j’avais pour enfermer Michael. Dans les années 80, il aurait probablement été libre... C’était le début d’une désinstitutionalisation dont on voit les effets aujourd’hui.

Certainement que dans les années 60, on était cloîtré, enfermé, on était contraint. Ça, ça m’apparaissait important, alors Nicolas a révisé un grand nombre d’aspects qui n’étaient plus possibles, qui n’étaient pas envisageables à cette époque-là. La grande difficulté évidemment comme réalisateur, c’était de faire vivre cela dans un seul lieu, pendant 80 pages. Je revenais souvent avec ça avec mon producteur en lui disant : « Il faut vraiment que cette pièce vive, qu’on investisse beaucoup d’argent à la rendre possible et à la rendre intéressante, parce que c’est un personnage. » Alors, Danielle devait avoir une palette de couleurs, des formes, de la lumière, une façon de créer une bibliothèque qui serait éloquente, qui ne serait pas seulement des murs... empiler sur un mur.

TS: Est-ce toi qui as fait le cadre ?

CB: C’est Pierre (NDLR : Gill).

TS: C’est Pierre, donc ça, c’est un dialogue intéressant.

CB: Pierre Gill a pris une décision capitale. Tout de suite, dès qu’il a eu le projet, il a dit : « On tourne en anamorphique. » C’est important de le savoir pour ceux qui voient le film, parce que l’anamorphique nous a donné une proximité aux personnages que les sphériques ne donnent pas. Je parle à un public...

TS: Averti.

CB: Averti. Donc on pouvait être comme cela sur Michael, puis il sortait de la page.

Chaque fois, il faut aller à la rencontre du film un peu comme un touriste qui va lire ses almanachs, ses manuels, ses trucs, l’histoire du pays, sa culture, ses habitudes etc. Donc, approcher un film, dans mon cas en tout cas, c’est comprendre le plus possible la somme des détails qui en assureront ultimement l’étanchéité ou l’intégrité. —Charles Binamé

DL: L’aquarium.

CB: L’aquarium auquel elle a pensé, et toutes les autres choses.

TS: … qui jouent au son aussi, en filigrane.

CB: Qui jouent au son; la position du canapé, l’utilisation que je voulais faire de cette image un peu archétype du patient, donc du jeu que Michael aura à faire pour amener le psychiatre à croire qu’il est en train de réfléchir à quelque chose, de comprendre quelque chose de Michael, alors qu’à ce moment-là, Michael est totalement en contrôle. Donc, tous les éléments constitutifs de ce lieu devaient être impeccables. Ils devaient offrir un espace dans lequel on pouvait bouger, qui était ni trop grand, ni trop petit pour pouvoir se dépatouiller, puis ils devaient offrir un entertainment visuel, parce qu’il y va de ça aussi.

J’ai travaillé souvent avec Danielle, on a quand même fait quelques films ensemble. Je savais qu’elle pourrait arriver avec des choses qui seraient diablement éloquentes et qui nous permettraient d’être satisfaits dans nos déplacements, moi comme réalisateur pour regarder cette mise en scène-là, ce combat, cet échange, ce mensonge déployé. Je pense qu’on a passé trois semaines là dedans. Trois semaines, Xavier s’en souvient, il y avait beaucoup de texte. Trois semaines où on a eu la chance de tourner en continu, dans la chronologie, donc c’était formidable. Et au bout de trois semaines, j’étais même heureux de savoir cela, j’ai dit à Danielle : « J’aurais pu tourner encore quelques jours, je n’avais pas fini d’exploiter ce que tu m’avais donné comme décors. »

TS: Et tu pouvais travailler en profondeur les plans à deux qui marchent superbement bien, qui juxtaposent les deux personnages au fur et à mesure qu’ils se séduisent mutuellement. … J’ai menti! Finalement, on n’avait que douze minutes pour la rencontre…

Avant de se laisser, je veux quand même poser une question à Xavier : en regardant ta filmographie d’acteur, je sais que tu as joué en anglais, dans le film de Jacob (NDLR : Good Neighbours, réalisé en 2010 par Jacob Tierney), mais est ce que c’est la première fois que tu abordes un défi de cette taille ?

XD: Oui, oui.

TS: Je trouve que ça s’est bien passé. Et toi ?

XD: Moi aussi.

TS: Tu as très bien fait ça, merci.

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the uniqueness of shooting in 21stcentury Vancouver, while drawing on classic TV cop dramas of the 1970s and noir movie stylings that go back to the 1930s and ‘40s. “A lot of that is Dennis,” TV and film director Sturla Gunnarsson says of the show’s noirish texture, “and I take my lead from him.”

by DAVID SPANER

MOTIVE: THE PROCEDURAL t is in e work tha notion of th f standards of beauty e th t u o b do tic a ly e same kin and roman rk so close d nostalgic have to adhere to th n actor to get to wo an and a n a l ta en m ’t ti m sa I feel I don tremely sen between a g for me a I still feel ex only in Canada where It’s certainly satisfyin —powerful intimacy . ip ’s rs Canada. It s of female characte nal friendsh Lehman e nconventio or archetyp rreira and craft an u ’t romantic. —Kristin n Fe with Louis re that relationship is e h w n a wom

It’s an October afternoon on a November evening and the Motive ensemble has assembled to shoot noir in colour. Motive breaks rules and bends expectations, but there is a dialectic at work here that has everything making sense by the end of each episode.

Opposite page: The cast of Motive.

Courtesy Bell Media.

Motive is also the latest in a tradition of high-profile TV series shot in west-coast Canada. Some of those series have been American (The X-Files, 21 Jump Street, The L Word), others overtly Canadian (The Beachcombers, Da Vinci’s Inquest).

Motive, though, is a North American series—a mix that’s mostly Canadian (the series stars, directors, crew and showrunner, airs on CTV) but with considerable American lineage (the series creator Daniel Cerone, NBCUniversal funding, aired first two seasons on ABC).

As with many mixed marriages, there is an element of agnosticism in Motive. What it clearly is, though, is a hospitable place for Canadian talent, with an uncommon give-and-take nexus between showrunner Dennis Heaton and Motive’s directors. Talk to most anyone involved in Motive and within a few minutes the word of choice is collaboration. “It’s a personal taste of mine that I really enjoy collaboration,” says Heaton.

“I see my responsibility on the show as being the sieve of the ideas. So it’s not just my ideas that I want to see brought to fruition.”

Heaton’s cooperative approach to showrunning has veteran directors relishing the independence that comes with working on Motive. The visions of Heaton and the directors, along with heavily experienced writers, actors and crew, embraces

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Heaton, who grew up in suburban Vancouver and the B.C. Interior, was a writer and producer on west-coast TV series, including Motive, before being named showrunner this season. He is the perfect showrunner for the offbeat criminal goings-on in Motive, having grown up loving TV’s Columbo and The Rockford Files, then falling hard for “B” noir pictures. “One of the things we realised really quickly during the development of the series in season one was the fact that revealing who the killer and victim are has a noir sensibility to it. When we were in script development we went, ‘Yeah, we really have to embrace noir sensibility—just embracing mystery and police procedural isn’t enough.’” Once Heaton gets rolling in conversation, he’s delivering the smart patter of a private dick straight out of low-budget noir, circa 1950. (When asked for tips on how directors new to Motive might ingratiate themselves with the showrunner, Heaton snaps with a laugh: “You could always bring me a bottle of bourbon at the start of preproduction.”)

As for TV cops of the 1970s, there is, for instance, the scene in Motive’s “They Made Me a Criminal” episode (title lifted from the 1939 John Garfield picture), when guest star Jennifer Beals, magnificently cast as the owner of a dance studio (it’s her Flashdance character all grown up), is investigated by Detective Angie Flynn, played by Kristin Lehman, who actually was a dancer in an earlier lifetime. When Lehman arrives at Beals’ studio, she skulks ever-so Columbo around the perimeter of the building before making a self-consciously awkward entrance.

By revealing the killer’s identity early on like Columbo, viewers are swept up in a roller-coaster backstory. “Every episode has a little bit of splatter, but basically it’s about figuring out why people do what they do,” says Gunnarsson, “and I think that in its essence makes it feel Canadian to me. There’s a kind of gentleness to it. We don’t have stock villains. We don’t have stock

heroes.” They do have an abundance of fine acting, with its police unit—Lehman as Angie Flynn, Louis Ferreira as Oscar Vega, Brendan Penny as Brian Lucas and Warren Christie as Mark Cross—joined by Lauren Holly as medical examiner Betty Rogers, and a coterie of guest stars, ranging this season from Ally Sheedy to C. Thomas Howell.

Lehman’s Angie and Ferreira’s Oscar constitute the core relationship.

Ferreira sort of looks like Columbo.

Lehman is Columbo. Like the lead in another renowned Vancouver cop show—Nick Campbell’s rumpled anti-hero of Da Vinci’s Inquest— Lehman’s character owes her existence to Peter Falk’s Columbo.

“The thing I really enjoy about this show is that the chance to play the fool is there and really freeing, and by fool I don’t mean one that’s out of control,” says Lehman. “It’s a ruse that encourages people to underestimate how edgy the character I play is. I feel a lot of really strong power in being able to embody the looseness that encourages, both physically and character-wise.”

*** Motive, like Vancouver itself, has a perpetual autumn look. Vancouver’s a great place to live if you like the month of October. It’s October nine months of the year, with one or two months of summer, one or two of winter. The show’s venerable first assistant director Rachel Leiterman notes that Vancouver doesn’t only have a persistent time of year. It also has a time of day. “I feel that the difference with shooting in Vancouver as opposed to L.A. is the quality of the light, and those days that never really quite reach full days,” says Leiterman. “Especially in the winter, it’s 4 p.m. all day long.

You wake up and the headlights are on and you go to sleep and it’s just that same kind of intense, shiny, wet, foreboding-sky weather.” Vancouver is almost always an October day at 4 p.m.

The noir-in-colour Motive motif draws on a few other unusual things about Vancouver. Motive’s city looks like Vancouver but unlike any other depiction of Vancouver— urbane and contemporary, glass and cement. Director of photography Mathias Herndl has had a formative impact on Motive’s good looks, which, he explains, rely on “aggressive lensing and a shooting style

that allows for a lot of coverage. The emphasis is on very shallow depth of field so our show is entirely shot at 1.3.” Medium shots are avoided.

“We shoot very wide and we shoot very close.” Cameras are in constant lateral motion, handheld veritestyle, often shooting wide-angle shots from down low. “Actually, we call them Heatons,” says Herndl.

“They’re named after our showrunner. He actually coined that phrase.

They’re called Heatons because they’re low, wide and sexy. And he said that refers to him.”

“We have a very off-kilter framing style,” says Heaton, “Really playing with head space and negative space in the framing. In season one, we’d get notes on the edit like, ‘Can we get into some standard medium close-up here because we’re on this odd, low-angle shot of the two leads for a long period.’ And we resisted that because we all really love that visual style.”

Mathias Herndl is quick to question visual tropes. “The ‘rule of thirds’ is something I’ve been fighting on the show consistently,” the show’s DOP says. Instead, the entire top half of the screen might be a textured ceiling. “We have to use some nontraditional methods on Motive because we don’t have the luxury of the traditional drama setup in terms of beginning, middle and end. For that nontraditional story style, it’s very important to keep emphasizing the place in life that people are in and therefore we make sure that we always have a sense of scope and place around the actors. That’s why we shoot a lot of wide shots and head room.”

Motive directors work seven days of preproduction, eight days production and four days editing. Casting “Reversal of Fortune”—Gunnarsson’s eighth Motive episode—was one of the director’s central preproduction tasks. “The casting sessions are how I internalize the script when I hear it read,” he says.

“I’m looking at the actors, I’m looking at the locations, and I’m talking to the production designer and the DP and it’s that process where the screenplay meets reality.

Sometimes I’m seeing strengths in scenes that [Heaton and the writers] didn’t know were there; sometimes I’m seeing weaknesses. Dennis has an open and respectful relationship with the directors he works with, so that preproduction process is about spring 2015

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***

me going out into the real world and reporting back, and based on that Dennis continues to massage the script.” Meanwhile, Heaton is also fine-tuning the script from notes he receives from CTV and NBCUniversal.

Left, top to bottom: Stills from Motive.

Coutesy Bell Media.

Above, top to bottom: Showrunner Dennis Heaton (on right); director Sturla Gunnarsson (on right).

Courtesy Bell Media.

Far right, top to bottom: Showrunner Dennis Heaton (fourth from left); director Andy Mikita (second from left). Courtesy Bell Media.

“Dennis and I have a shorthand,” says Gunnarsson, who grew up in Vancouver, too, and has directed many of the city’s better-known TV series (Da Vinci’s Inquest, Intelligence, The Beachcombers).

Heaton adds: “There’s a trust I like to develop with directors because I want them to have that freedom to produce the episode they see in their mind. There’s several examples in ‘Reversal of Fortune.’” Heaton points to the murder flashback in Act 6, which in the script occurred in a single-storey house. “Sturla went out and found this beautiful old two-storey house with the wide stairway and the foyer. It had a previously-grand, in-a-little-bit-of decline aura to it. Sturla had photos and he walked me through a fight down the stairwell, all shot from an overhead angle, and it was just absolutely do it that way. It would not have looked the way it did if it hadn’t been Sturla going to that location, looking at the scene with the script and saying, ‘If we do it like this it will look awesome.’

That to me is the perfect kind of collaboration.”

“The chain of communication is much simplified from previous years,” says Gunnarsson. “Dennis reports to the producers but the producers don’t feel obligated to get involved in a lot of the creative decision-making that they used to be involved in. It’s because there wasn’t a designated showrunner.

So there’s a lot of clarity this year.”

Heaton’s new job isn’t the only change at Motive. “Season one was much more episodic—contained, singular stories,” Heaton says.

“There wasn’t a season arc. There’s been a shift from the episodic to the serialized, as well as [toward having] more defined interpersonal relationships.”

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It’s a November afternoon at cavernous Bridge Studios, where sections of the Lions Gate and Golden Gate bridges were constructed long before its transition to sound stages.

Over at the Motive set, in the “Reversal of Fortune” scene being shot, someone from police internal affairs is asking questions about an investigation Angie’s conducted.

Gunnarsson and crew huddle before a monitor, watching Angie engage in a sharp exchange with the intrusive cop. When the action stops, Lehman approaches Gunnarsson to suggest a different way she could play the scene.

spots on several U.S. TV series starting with The X-Files, she is contented, some 20 years after leaving to be back home starring in a Canadian series. “When I started my career, all I wanted to do was be on the CBC, and I still feel extremely sentimental and nostalgic and romantic about the notion of the work that is in Canada. It’s only in Canada where I feel I don’t have to adhere to the same kind of standards of beauty or archetypes of female characters. It’s certainly satisfying for me as an actor to

been doing before. That’s what her instinct was telling her and she was right.”

The artist-driven sensibility pervasive on Motive starts with Heaton’s loyalty to recurring directors such as Gunnarsson and Andy Mikita.

Talented crew members are also encouraged. In season three, Leiterman was given second-unit bits to direct (“It was lovely to have the opportunity”) and Herndl directed an episode (“Really, really enjoyed myself”).

“The other way doesn’t bother me,” she says.

“You want to try that?” says Gunnarsson. “I really liked it, but if you have a hunch….”

“Well, you decide,” Lehman says.

“I’ll do this. You decide which one you like better.”

Motive’s directors appreciate the freedom they have and in turn welcome input from actors. “Dennis and our directors are collaborative storytellers,” says Lehman, “and that’s the thing on this show I’ve really gotten to experience. One of the reasons what you witnessed between Sturla and me worked was because we are both fully available to each other—me saying, ‘But then there’s this idea,’ and him saying, ‘Okay, let’s try it.’ Dennis is a really good listener. I think they trust that I’m not flippant about coming to them with an idea. It’s grounded in something real when I come to them.”

Lehman is more rock ‘n’ roll than movie star, with her throaty Janis Joplin voice and physical resemblance to Courtney Love (the relatively sane, attractive Love of, say, The People vs. Larry Flint, not that other Love). With her charisma and smarts, Lehman is a major factor in Motive’s success. “And she cares,” says Gunnarsson. “Like today, I don’t know if you noticed, but at one point she did a costume change and didn’t go back to the costume trailer—to keep things moving.

She’s a real trooper.”

She grew up in Vancouver suburbia and, following successful turns in Toronto and L.A., including regular

get to work so closely with Louis Ferreira and craft an unconventional friendship—powerful intimacy between a man and a woman where that relationship isn’t romantic.”

*** During the “Reversal of Fortune” post, Gunnarsson helps to establish the rhythm of the episode’s editing.

“I make sure it’s put together as conceived by me, then I hand it off to the producers and usually it will undergo some change, but if I’ve done my job well when I hand it over it’s pretty close to what it’s going to be.”

So, which of Lehman’s reactions to the investigative cop will Gunnarsson select? “I don’t think it was an either-or. I actually think there was a synthesis because what she said was, ‘Maybe I should play it like I don’t care about him,’ but really where she got to was that she played it like she was more focused on the task than on him. It wasn’t that different from what she had

“I don’t sit at my desk and say, ‘This is the way it has to be. No, I want you to shoot in this house,’” says Heaton. “The directors are the guys and ladies who have to shoot this stuff, so I want them to bring as much to the table as they want to bring. If it’s going to make the show better, by all means, we’ve got to do it.”

David Spaner’s feature writing and film reviews have appeared in numerous newspapers, magazines and books. He is the author of Shoot It! Hollywood Inc. and the Rising of Independent Film and Dreaming in the Rain: How Vancouver Became Hollywood North by Northwest. twitter.com/davidspaner

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The movie itself was disappointing on a variety of levels, but mostly because of the conclusion. Inundated even then

by American success stories, I couldn’t wrap my head around the ending. I had never seen a movie where the hero lost. Billy’s only choice at the end is to get out and play the pivotal final game of the season (which he joins in the final period) even though it would take a near Herculean effort to even get the Leafs back in the contest. The credits say the movie was written by George Robertson, but it could easily have been penned by Margaret Atwood, who had recently published her influential text Survival, which argued that Canadian literature wasn’t about triumph but getting by.

by STEVE GRAVESTOCK

SPIRIT OF PLACE & CANADA’S TOP 10

Canadian films weren’t very easy to find when I was growing up, in the paleolithic times before Beta, VHS, DVDs and the Web. In those days, you could only see movies in a cinema or on television. But I’m pretty sure my first date movie was George MacCowan’s Face-Off (1971), starring Art Hindle as the Toronto Maple Leaf rookie sensation Billy Duke; Trudie Young as Sherry Nelson, a hippie folk singer with the emotional durability of a hothouse flower; and John Vernon as the nasty, Machiavellian coach who cares only about winning. It played at a magnificent new kind of shopping centre called a mall, the only one in Mississauga at the time. The movie also boasted cameos from real NHLers like George Armstrong, Jim McKenny (Hindle’s body double), Ron Ellis, Paul Henderson and Derek Sanderson.

A few years later, at the height of Canadian cultural nationalism, I spent an entire high school term immersed in Canadian studies, where the reading list included Who’s Afraid of Canadian Culture?, Susan Crean’s angry and convincing tract about cultural colonialism. We were also presented with a pedagogically inspired double bill of two movies about rootless losers confronting the big city, one from the U.S. (John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy) and one from Canada (Don Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road). I think all of the kids in the class, including me, preferred Cowboy, but the Canadian version stuck with me, and I was amazed to find out a few years later, probably via New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael, that some people not only preferred Shebib’s film, they thought it was better. The notion that we might have bested Americans at anything other than hockey seemed impossible to say the least, but once tabled, it simply wasn’t going to go away.

It was so long ago that the Leafs were only four years removed from a Stanley Cup. In a bravura feat of stunt casting, the Leafs’ soon-to-be-incarcerated owner, Harold Ballard, played the team doctor. The movie ended with the young heroine dying of a drug overdose because she couldn’t bear to be separated from Billy—and because the worlds of pop music and hockey didn’t mix, at least according to the movie. Since then, Canadian pop music has become very successful while the Leafs have been almost as successful as Ballard’s legal team. (He was convicted on 47 charges.)

of which I bought remaindered at Leonard McHardy’s Theatrebooks’ location on Yonge, south of Bloor, in Toronto. Fulford’s book outlined in sometimes hilarious detail the failings of the tax-shelter system, a still-timely warning about trying to simply copy other countries’ cultural efforts. (It also featured his infamous piece vilifying David Cronenberg’s Shivers.)

Harcourt’s book was especially edifying, talking not just about the quality of movies but also what they said about the culture itself, introducing the notion that a country that didn’t want to see or know about itself was neither stable nor healthy. Plus, it gave me a vastly more interesting shopping list of movies to track down than Fulford’s book did, including Frank Vitale’s Montreal Main, which I found, along with The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, late one night on Global Television— something which, frankly, would be inconceivable now. (Later on, Martin Knelman’s This is Where We Came In and Jay Scott’s Midnight Matinees would be equally important.)

The first time I saw a seminal Canadian film in actual theatrical release was in 1977. Scholars like Harcourt, filmmakers like Don Owen and programmers like TIFF CEO Piers Handling have written about the shock of seeing your own culture onscreen, but I had already seen that, sparingly. One of the most important turning points for me was finding a movie that presented Canada as a place where you could do more than just survive.

That was brought home when I trekked into Toronto to watch Outrageous!, a new Canadian movie people were raving about that was produced My modestly burgeoning cultural naby Bill Marshall, Henk van der Kolk and tionalism was buoyed by the discovery Peter O’Brian—the first two being part of two books—Marshall Delaney at the of the triumvirate who had the audacMovies, Robert Fulford’s book of film ity to start a film festival in what many criticism; and Movies & Mythologies people considered the stodgiest city in

by Peter Harcourt, the late, influential the country. (They were also aided by meridian-dgc-spring-issue-2015.pdf 1 2015-03-20 PM dean of Canadian film studies—both the7:22 indefatigable Dusty Cohl.) I headed

into town to see Outrageous! and then Iggy Pop. Utterly unfamiliar with Toronto geography and frankly feeling uncertain at best about the subway, I figured I could walk from Union Station to the York at Eglinton near Yonge, where it was screening. Several hours later, I finally made it to the theatre, too late to actually watch the movie and catch the concert, but at least I knew where it was.

Outrageous! wasn’t exactly brilliantly directed but it featured two great leads in Craig Russell and Hollis McLaren, memorable supporting performances

by Allan Moyle and Richert Easley.

It had a compelling story, characterized by what Robert Fulford called “romanticized insanity”—making it automatically appealing to almost any adolescent. Suddenly, Toronto was a city where differences could exist, maybe even be tolerated.

Celebration was still inconceivable, of course—at the end, the principals can only express themselves by escaping to New York. For that I would have to wait for Ron Mann, Bruce McDonald and the Toronto New Wave. Mann’s documentaries Imagine the Sound and Poetry in Motion made Toronto seem cool, hip even, boasting some of the most adventurous artists of the time.

(I actually went to the Toronto shoot where John Giorno, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Michael Ondaatje performed at a local club.)

McDonald’s Roadkill (partially based on the experience of my brothers’ former bandmate) and Highway 61 made me see the city and the province in the same way as Mann’s films—as a place that could be genuinely exciting.

on Canadian and American relations, Partners—Allan King’s amazing early docs like Warrendale and his great TV work, Larry Kent’s portraits of 1960s Vancouver like The Bitter Ash and Tomorrow Never Comes…all sought to capture the way we lived, and showed an excitement about doing so.

Those films and others inspired TIFF to conduct Canadian all-time top-10 polls every decade or so, which is one of the events that makes what I do interesting. For me, it’s not just about discovering current films (which is more than exciting enough), but also about finding out how and why we got here.

Steve Gravestock is a senior programmer of festival programming at TIFF and an expert on Canadian cinema. He has written for the Toronto Star, POV magazine, NOW Magazine, Cinema Scope and Festival magazine, and is the author of Don Owen: Notes on a Filmmaker and his Culture.

With the advent of VHS and DVD (and working at TIFF, where we have one of the best collections of Canadian material), I was able to find that these films weren’t the first films to try to do that. Don Owen’s early work— particularly Toronto Jazz and Nobody Waved Goodbye and his rumination

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10 (tie)

CANADA’S

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(1974)

Michel Brault, director As startling and audacious now as it was when the October Crisis was still fresh in Canadians’ collective memory, Michel Brault’s docudrama remains a chilling demonstration of just how swiftly (and efficiently) a country that prides itself on its good sense can descend into a surreal nightmare of Kafkaesque dimensions. It’s impossible not to share the same feelings of shock and bewilderment we see in the faces of the film’s quintet of ordinary Quebecois—fictional composites based on Brault’s interviews with real-life detainees—as they are rounded up, processed and imprisoned in the name of national security. Les Ordres preserves a shocking moment in which Canada became another country, one very different from the place we want or assume it to be.

—Jason Anderson

10 (tie)

Stories We Tell

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(2012)

Sarah Polley, director A profound exploration of family history and, ultimately, of personal identity, Stories We Tell is Sarah Polley’s most transcendent film. It is a richly built essay in which the filmmaker’s personal reality extrapolates to the universal quest for the understanding of roots. She has accomplished with an omnipresent sense of involvement the nearimpossible feat of conveying on screen the complicated nature of memories. Stories We Tell is a defining moment in Canada’s already rich documentary history, one that is as propelled by its discoveries as by the overarching humanity that transpires through its very making.

—Magali Simard

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(2007)

Guy Maddin, director Guy Maddin has made a career out of mining the poetic possibilities of half-forgotten, mashup genres like the mountain movie or the half-talkie, so it may be logical that his most beloved movie, My Winnipeg, is a faux documentary, though it seems horribly wrong to call it that: Maddin himself prefers “docu-fantasia.” His unforgettable masterpiece (to date) is dizzyingly ambitious, alternately despairing, enraged, giddy, forlorn and awestruck by the glory, spectacle and tragedy of his Winnipeg. A commentary on our vaunted documentary tradition and gullibility (you’re asked to swallow preposterous events but some of them, like What If Day, when Winnipeggers acted out what would happen if the Nazis had won World War II, actually occurred), My Winnipeg half-lies the honest truth.

—Steve Gravestock

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(2005)

Jean-Marc Vallée, director Jean-Marc Vallée’s international breakout film C.R.A.Z.Y. is a still-startling and intensely moving depiction of a young gay man’s melodramatic difficulties in coming out to his family and friends in the late 1970s. Set in Quebec and structured around a series of family Christmas parties, the tale of Zac’s (Marc-André Grondin) gradual liberation from the strictures of Catholicism, the patriarchy and heterosexual mores is related in often hilarious and definitely sensual details. Careening between lushly obscene fantasies in church, lusty hard-rocking parties full of misunderstood desire and luridly dramatic clashes between an increasingly panicked Zac and his homphobic father Gervais (Michel Côté), the film’s style evokes the frenzied dramatic sincerity of a young Martin Scorsese. Winner of multiple Jutras and Genies including best picture in both, C.R.A.Z.Y. won TIFF’s CityTV prize for best Canadian film at the 2005 festival.

—Marc Glassman

Dead Ringers

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(1988)

David Cronenberg, director Dead Ringers is one of the decisive films in David Cronenberg’s career. It definitively moved him away from his early genre origins into the realm of art-house auteur. Its struggle between two brothers had been mapped out in Scanners, and the war between the rational and irrational was a staple of most of his earlier films, but this film was made with a newfound control, precision and authority evident in every frame. The twins, eminent gynaecologists fascinated with the same woman, become involved in a profoundly moving filial struggle that ends with their utterly ordered existence descending into absolute chaos.

—Piers Handling

Ken Woroner, courtesy National Film Board of Canada

Courtesy TIFF Film Reference Library

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C.R.A.Z.Y.

My Winnipeg

All images courtesy TIFF Film Reference Library

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Les Ordres

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CANADA’S

Don Shebib, director Goin’ Down the Road was a significant and totally unexpected achievement in the development of Canadian filmmaking and will likely remain a work referenced not only by historians of a national cinema but also by practising filmmakers.

Its independence, its fresh interplay of stage and improvisation, its melancholy inflected by an absurd optimism, its seamless, generous and collaborative making by those major talents both behind and in front of the camera—all made the film a radical work that age has made both exemplary and influential. Shebib changed the title from the prosaic The Maritimers to the lyrical yet cautionary Goin’ Down the Road, suggesting for the first time that there was a road to go down in Canada, which only detoured in the tarnished but ostensibly shining city of Toronto.

—Lawrence Kardish

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5

Léolo

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(1992)

Jean-Claude Lauzon, director A cause-célèbre from its debut at Cannes, JeanClaude Lauzon’s uninhibited and ferocious remembrance of his Montreal childhood unsorts itself in achronological episodes of intensely re-experienced family incidents. Quickly discarding the notion that a single Madeleine is enough to sate a yen for flashback, Léolo so violently tastes youth’s torrent of forgotten hyper-flavours that the viewer fears for the director. Lauzon seems to feel too much as the adult filmmaker recollecting his earliest years: so full of hate, lust, love and humiliation is his boyhood of boners and bathroom smells, of damp girdles and secret crawl spaces—and of dawn’s pink nipples!

Perhaps like the director, this is a movie at war with itself: lyrical, yet preposterous; effortlessly honest (especially about a child’s sexual preoccupations), yet pretentious; hilarious, yet shot through with shock effects. The resultant collisions produce one of cinema’s great awkward-age autobiographies.

—Guy Maddin

4

Jesus of Montreal (1989)

Denys Arcand, director With the Oscar-nominated, Genie-winning Jesus of Montreal, Denys Arcand made his masterpiece, an ambitious and acerbic riff on the Passion Play, with the cultural capital of Quebec serving as a New Jerusalem. The parallels are drawn with subtlety, and it is an angry, moving and supremely compelling film. In France, swear words derive from sexual or bodily functions, while in Quebec they’re often a corruption of church terminology. It’s in this tradition where Arcand’s allegory works best; he twists the words and images of religious and aesthetic doctrine until they place a dark mirror on themselves, showcasing the hypocrisy and foibles of artist and clergy alike.

—Jason Gorber

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3

The Sweet Hereafter (1997)

Atom Egoyan, director Rarely in the history of Canadian cinema has there been a better match between an original filmmaking voice and literary material than The Sweet Hereafter. Atom Egoyan’s brilliant adaptation of Russell Banks’s novel about a town devastated by a tragic school bus accident that wipes out most of its children finally gave a name and a face to the existential angst that had defined many of the characters in Egoyan’s previous work. Anyone and everyone could relate to the sense of helplessness and anomie that hangs like a cloud over a small town in mourning—for who cannot relate to the loss of a child?

With memorable performances

by Ian Holm, Sarah Polley, Bruce Greenwood and Gabrielle Rose, The Sweet Hereafter remains the most emotionally resonant and fully accomplished film in the Atom Egoyan canon.

—Paul Gratton

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2

Mon oncle Antoine (1971)

Claude Jutra, director Canada’s answer to Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, Claude Jutra’s Mon oncle Antoine (1971) is the film of the Quiet Revolution. Looking back into the past and forward to Quebec’s future, the film is divided into two parts. In the first, set in a northern mining community in the days before Christmas, a humorous coming-of-age story emerges that follows young Benoît as he assists in his uncle’s general store. In the second part, in an extended bravura sequence set in a moonlit, snow-covered forest, we see Benoît furiously reject his uncle (who has fallen into a drunken stupor while transporting a coffin back to town) and all the uncle represents: reaction, deceit and moral turpitude. True to the comingof-age trope, Benoît has seen the limits of the adults around him, and in their place we see a modern, secular Quebec emerge.

—Alexandra Anderson

All images courtesy TIFF Film Reference Library

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(1970)

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All images courtesy TIFF Film Reference Library

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Goin’ Down the Road

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“We were living on the land traditionally, like our forefathers.

I thought we were the whole world out there.”— Zacharias Kunuk Canada’s Top Ten #1 film Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2001), Zacharias Kunuk, director A story of love, power and revenge, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner is as compelling an action epic as any ever produced in Canada. Based on a classic Inuit tale and adapted within the community by Kunuk and his collaborators, Atanarjuat is the defining feature film of the Indigenous New Wave, a film far removed from the colonial history of Indigenous stories on screen, which richly blends widescreen beauty with traditional storytelling. An award winner at Cannes, it remains a truly important and glorious film. —Jesse Wente

“In 2013 I had a really tough year full of medical problems. The Actors’ Fund of Canada stepped in when the options were running out. It’s an incredible resource for all of us working in film and television.

I really wanted to help pay it forward, so I organized a fundraising drive for the Fund on set this past holiday season. Every little bit helps!

The Actors’ Fund provides emergency financial aid to all entertainment industry professionals facing illness, injury or other crisis situations.

Thanks so much to the DGC and everyone who helps support the Fund. The Actors’ Fund is the lifeline for our community, so let’s pay it forward!”

Lucy MacLeod, Production Manager

Donate now actorsfund.ca

Photo: Sydney Sharpe

PARTING SHOT

#1

“Let’s pay it forward!”

1.877.399.8392 THE ACTORS’ FUND OF CANADA IS PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY THE DIRECTORS GUILD OF CANADA. Charitable Registration 118777457RR0001

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