Montage Magazine Fall 2013

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The DRCC is currrently holding royalties for the following directors. Whether it is $5 or $5000 it is important to become a member of the DRCC to ensure that you are receiving royalties owed to you from foreign broadcasts. Please contact DRCC Manager Hans Engel at 416-482-6640 or [email protected].

Agala, JeffAbecassis, TallyAitken, SallyAlk, HowardAllen, RichardAllen, RonAllen, SteveAmar, GeorgesAmber Tang, ChristineAndersen, JonAndrews, AustinAnker, StevenAntier, PaulArthaud, SophieBahari, MaziarBaillargeon, PauleBaird, TabBarker, JordanBarnard, MarkBarry, MartinBarto, DavidBattle, MurrayBaumander, LewisBaxter, GregBeecroft, StuBehrman, KeithBelateche, IrvingBell, LindaBenner, Richard (Estate)Bennett, DavlinBennett, RickBergman, RobertBergthorson, BarryBerquist, DouglasBerry, MichaelBerz, MichaelBlaquiere, DenisBobbio, GianniBoivin, DenisBouchard, PatrickBouvier, FrancoisBoyd, RobertBritton, GeorgeBritton, GeorgeBrockoff, GeneBrown, TimBrowne, ColinBudgell, JackBunce, AlanBurdett, RichardBurke, MartynBurley, RayBurroughs, Jackie (Estate)Caine, RickCallan-Jones, ChristieCampbell, NicholasCarle, Gilles (Estate)Carpenter, PhilCarroll, PatrickCarvalho, PaulCemalovic, FarukCerminara, DonovanCernetig, MiroChabrol, ClaudeChang, YungChehak, TomChouinard, MarieCisterna, SeanCizek, KaterinaClark, Dan

Clark, Lawrence GordonClattenburg, MikeCloutier, ClaudeCobban, WilliamCohen, SheldonColdewey, MichaelCole, Frank (Estate)Collins, JesseCondie, RichardCooper, StephenCoppola, SandraCorsi, GioCosta, ItaloCote, ZabelleCottam, KevinCournoyer, MicheleCowan, PaulCrandall, SusanCristiani, GabriellaCummins, KathleenCutting, MichaelDaalder, ReneDaddo, CameronD’Aix, AlainDalpe, PierreDane, LawrenceDay, DennisDelaney, ChrisD’Entremont, PeterDesclez, HenriDeSerrano, MichaelDiaz, JamieDipelino, KarlDonnelly, EddieDonovan, RichardD’Ornellas, GianDowding, MichaelDowding, MichaelDrew, LesDucharme, CaroleDuchemin, RemyDuffield, BenjaminDufour-Laperriere, FelixDuke, WilliamDumont, BernardEllis, StephenEscanilla, Claudia MorgadoFan, LixinFazio, JeffFedorenko, EugeneFeiss, DavidFlacks, DianeForbis, AmandaForcier, AndreForestier, FredericForward, BobFoss, EricFoster, JanetFoster, JohnFountain, JohnFranchi, AlexandreFrancis, DavidFrank, RobertFreedman, IanFried, MyraFriedenberg, RichardFromm, ChristelGadziola, StanGantillon, BrunoGarneau, Kathy

Garrity, SeanGaug, John R. (Estate)Gaylor, BrettGedda, FranciscoGeorgiades, EvanGerretsen, PeterGladu, AndreGoldberg, HarrisGoldberg, SidGorinstein, EmmanuelGranofsky, AnaisGrant, MichaelGreco, TonyGreen, LaurenceGregg, AndrewGrimshaw, MikeGruner, MarionGrunstra, SebastianGudino, RodrigoGuerard, AndreGuzman, PatricioHabros, BobHaggis, PaulHalpern, EliottHansen, WilliamHarper, ScottHarris, HaroldHarris, JonathanHarrison, John KentHart, RobbieHayes, LisaHead, MartinHebb, BrianHebert, BernarHelliker, JohnHenault, StephanieHenricks, NelsonHenriquez, PatricioHeroux, DenysHobbes, H.P.Holden, PatHoss, GabrielHowald, BrianHunka, RyszardHutton, LoriHylands, ScottInch, KevinIngham, KeithIssermann, AlineItier, EmmanuelIvanova, JuliaJames, SheilaJarvis, MichaelJasny, VojtaJenkins, WaltJerrett, ShereenJobin, P.Kaczender, GeorgeKalina, JonKarvonen, AlbertKastner, JohnKaufmann, GiselaKelly, GregKent, LarryKernochan, SarahKerr, IanKhurana, KireetKlein, JudithKoenig, WolfKonowal, Charles

Koster, AndrewKove, TorillKroitor, RomanKuchmij, HalyaKuzmickas, NijoleLamb, DerekLambart, EvelynLamsweerde, Pino VanLandesman, FrancoisLandreth, ChristopherLandry, Jean-YvesLangan, GaryLaros, JohnLaure, CaroleLavis, ChrisLawrence, GregLea, RonLeaf, CarolineLeBlanc, LoretteLeblanc, NormanLeduc, JacquesLee, AllanLee, BrianLeichliter, LarryLente, Miklos (Estate)Leong, Po-ChihLester, MarkLewis, MaryLickley, DavidLightfoot, NormLinaae, KaretheLishman, EdaLoakman, JeanetteLock, EdouardLom, PetrLorenzi, Jean-LouisLundy, ThomasLunn, JohannaMabbot, MichaelMacIvor, DanielMackay, ClarkeMagny, PierreMajoury, SteveMaladrewicz, ChrisMalakian, PatrickMannix, Veronica AliceManske, AndrewManzor, ReneMarjanovic, DavorMarkiw, GabrielMarkiw, JancarloMartin, SusanMartishius, WalterMartyn, RichardMason, JamieMason, MichelleMaxwell, ClaireMayer, GeraldMcKay, JeffMcKenna, BrianMcKenna, TerenceMcLaglen, JoshMcLaren, Norman (Estate)McLeod, David AllenMcLeod, IanMcLuhan, TeriMcMahon, KevinMcNamara, MichaelMedekova-Klein, LubaMelnyk, Debbie

Meraska, RonMhyrstad, SteinMicale, MaryvonneMirman, BradMisserey, HerveMitchell, MonikaMitchell, PeterMitchell, PhilMolina, ClaudiaMomani, FirasMonfrey, DominiqueMoosmann, DanielMorris, MarylMorrison, JimMorrison, RichardMozer, RichardMuller, DieterMurphy, BrianMurray, AndrewMurray, DavidMuspratt, VictoriaMyhrstad, SteinNadler, EricNaim, OmarNewlove, RoseNiles, BenNisker, AndrewNovaro, MariaO’Grady, LauraOlder, JohnOlsen, StanPaperny, DavidPapp, SusanPappas, Alexander (1978)Parent, KarlPatel, IshuPearson, IanPeill, EdwardPelletier, VicPeperny, DavidPepin, RichardPerrault, Pierre (Estate)Peters, ScottPeterson, ToddPetrie, DorotheaPettigrew, DamianPhillips, RobinPiantanida, ThjierryPilon, VictorPilote, SebastienPincus, HenryPlaxton, GaryPodorieszach, StephanePoon, BrucePortman, BethPrevost, TaliPronovost, MichelProulx-Cloutier, EmileProwse, JoanPuchniak, TomPuerta, Ramiro (Estate)Purdy, JimPustil, JeffPuttkamer, Peter vonRadclyffe, CurtisRadford, TomRahme, JohnRanowicz, StefanRaouf, MaoudRashid, Ian Iqbal

Ratner, BenjaminRedford, RyanReeves, RichardReid, ErnestRichey, ChristineRiesenfeld, DanielRitchie, JohnRoberts, CynthiaRodman, HowardRogobert, ThierryRonowicz, StefanRose, LesRose, RichardRosensweet, JesseRosenthal, RickRowe, TomRowley, ChristopherRoy, PierreRuggi, SteveRuth, BillySafran, HenriSalfati, Pierre HenrySalvador, PaulaSalzman, GlenSarault, Jean (Estate)Sarwer-Foner, HenrySauve, PatrickSawa, TimothySchliesler, MartinSchorr, DanielSchroeder, TylerSchuster, AaronSchwartz, NadineSchwartz, RoslynSehr, KaiSeitz, DavidSekulich, DanielShah, SebastienShandel, TomSharp, PeterSherman, GaryShock, MichaelShuster, AaronSimmonds, GarnerSimmons, BlairSimpson, AlanSimpson, BrockSims, PatriciaSinger, GailSisam, PatrickSmets, ChristopherSmith, BobSmith, BruceSobel, MarkSpangler, BruceSpry, Robin (Estate)Stacey, BruceSteinberg, DavidSterk, ElaStevenson, AngelaStewart, BarneyStewart, Rob ThomasStoller, Bryan MichaelStoneman, JohnStrange, MarcSullivan, GregorySurnow, JoelSwan, JamesSwan, StanSweeney, Bruce

Sylvain, GuySylvester, GlennSzczerbowski, MaciekTaler, LauraTaliTaylor, AlanTerlesky, JohnTerry, ChristopherTeskey, SusanThiessen, JaysonThompson, Jack LeeTilby, WendyTorossian, GarineTravis, JamieTreibicz, DawnaTrent, John (Estate)Trevor, RichardTriffo, ChrisTroake, AnneTrudeau, AlexandreTrudeau, Pierre M.Tucker, Paul R.Turner, RobertUloth, GeoffreyUshev, TheodoreVaillot, BernardVandelac, LouiseVaucher, PhilippeVendrell, Michael M.Veron, NathalieVesak, A.J.Vidal, PhilippeVidal, PhilippeVigne, DanielVogler, PeterWahid, WahidaWalsh, BradleyWarwicker, JohnWasyk, DarrellWatson, WendyWeber, RossWehrfritz, CurtisWeldon, JohnWhyman, J.H.Wiener, CharlesWild, NettieWilliams, SteveWilliams, StuartWilliamson, NeilWinkler, DavidWintonick, PeterWithrow, StephenWolfond, HenryWong, GordonWood, AdamWurlitzer, RudyWyatt, AndyWyles, DavidWyman, J.H.Yates, Rebecca (Estate)Young, RobertZabranska, Michaela

www.dgc.ca

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6 Viewpointby Sturla Gunnarsson

Editor’s noteby Marc Glassman

7 Listen Up!by Gerry Barr Feature filmpolicy—the DGC perspective

10 Spirit of Place by Peter RoweIrreverent filmmaking moments from the ’60s

40In Appreciationby Kiva Reardon Lee Gordon, first womanin the DGC

CONT

ENTS

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DOUBLE JEOPARDY by MATTHEW HAYS The hottest Canadian director, Denis Villeneuve, premiered two films at TIFF, the Warner Brothers blockbuster thriller Prisoners and the Indie drama Enemy. How does the Oscar-nominated director of Incendies feel about his new status—and English language films?

SECRETS OF A PILOT WHISPERER by NANCY LANTHIER David Nutter tells all about directing 16 successful TV pilots and his career as a go-to director of everything from The X-Files and The Sopranos to Game of Thrones

SENDING IN THE CLONES: ORPHAN BLACK AND JOHN FAWCETTby JASON ANDERSON A close look at what Fawcett is accomplishing with Orphan Black—and a look back at his interesting and under-reported career, which includes the cult classic Ginger Snaps.

“THEY DON’T TAKE BBM RATINGS ON THE RESERVES”by ADAM NAYMAN Blackstone’s Ron E. Scott talks shop

PETER O’BRIAN, THE COMPLEAT F ILMMAKER by DAVID SPANER Profiling the legendary producer of The Grey Fox and My American Cousin and the director of Hollywood North

THE TRUTH ACCORDING TO GUILLERMO DEL TORONTO by SUZAN AYSCOUGH The Mexican-born director talks about his love of Canada and movie-making.

12

42 Parting Shot by MARC GLASSMANMichel Brault remembered

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FEATURES

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DGC NATIONAL111 Peter Street, Suite 600

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DIRECTORS GUILD OF CANADApublisher

Sturla Gunnarsson, president Gerry Barr, national executive director & [email protected]

associate publisherAlejandra SosaeditorMarc Glassmanart directorAlexander Altercopy editorJocelyn Laurence

photo researchNick Gergesha

advertising salesMerrie WhitmoreDirectors Guild of [email protected]

Montage is published twice a year by the Directors Guild of [email protected]

Undelivered mail returned to:Directors Guild of Canada, National Office111 Peter Street, Suite 600Toronto, Ontario M5V 2H1Tel. 416-925-8200. Fax 416-925-8400

Please direct all editorial inquiries and letters to the editor [email protected] 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 $39For subscription information or to order back issues, please contact DGC Montage.Subscriptions: [email protected]

All contents are copyright 2013 DGC.All rights are reserved and contents, in whole or in part, may not be reprinted without permission. Points of viewexpressed 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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Six months ago, elected representatives of the DGC from both the National Executive Board (NEB) and its seven District Councils met in Vancouver to set the course for the organisation over the next three years. This was our second strategic planning exercise; the first, in 2009, resulted in some of the most radical change our organ-isation had undergone since its inception. These all-elected meetings have become critical to our strategic thinking at the Guild, bringing together the entirety of our brain trust, including craft caucuses, District Council representatives and NEB Of-ficers. Given the diversity of this group—or perhaps because of it—I’ve been as-tonished and humbled by its collective wisdom: its ability to analyze the state of the Guild and articulate a collective vision for its future. The all-elected meeting, like a great production, is a living, breathing manifestation of our collective creative spirit.

Unlike the 2009 meeting, this year’s session articulated a need for for consolidation, not revolution. The three areas identified as priorities were: co-ordinated national collective bargaining; a coherent, vision-based national communications strategy; and a robust focus on membership services. The Strategic Planning Committee is currently working on fleshing out these three priorities in the form of a strategic plan, which will guide the organisation over the next three years, a period that will see a dramatic turnover of senior elected officials, including a presidential succession. It is my strong belief that the vision articulated by the membership through their leaders at the all-elected meeting will ensure a smooth and seamless transition for the new President, who will be elected at the 2014 AGM. My confidence in the future of the organisation is further bolstered by recent senior management ap-pointments made by the NEB, in response to the priorities articulated by the all-elected. As of October, Brian Baker will assume the position of National Executive Director and Gerry Barr will move to Ottawa to become our Senior Public Policy Advisor. The appointments recognise the impressive strengths of each individual and represent a maturation of our senior executive leadership. The establishment of a permanent Ottawa presence for the Guild is the next logical step for us, further recognising the importance of public policy to the well-being of our industry and our members who work in it. Brian Baker comes to the National Executive Director position with unique qualifications. For the first time, our senior staff position will be occupied by somebody who comes from production. He understands our culture, has impressive collective-bargaining credentials and is committed to establishing the DGC as the best membership service organisation in our sector. He comes to the top position with my full confidence.

Sincerely,

STURLA GUNNARSSONPRESIDENT, DIRECTORS GUILD OF CANADA

We’re pleased to be publishing a new issue of Montage at the time of the DGC Awards evening, surely the highlight of the Guild’s year. It’s the perfect time to be looking back on recent accomplishments in Canadian TV and film, which couldn’t have hap-pened without the creative input of DGC members. Our cover subject is a prime example of a talented Canadian whose work as a director, producer and writer has become increasingly recognised in recent times. Ron E. Scott’s show Blackstone is a signal success, a no-holds-barred First Nations drama supported, as it should be, by APTN (Aboriginal Peoples Television Network), which is rapidly drawing a wider Canadian audience as its third season is beginning to be broadcast. It’s appropriate and exciting to be featuring the charismatic and photogenic Mr. Scott on Montage’s cover—and to have Adam Nayman profile him.

Another hot TV series is the innovative sci-fi thriller Orphan Black, which is making Tatiana Maslany a star and turning director John Fawcett into one of the go-to figures in Canadian drama. Jason Anderson, a welcome addition to these pages, takes us on Fawcett’s journey from cult film favourite to a mainstay in TV. Completing our triumvirate of stellar Canadians on the rise is Denis Villeneuve, the eminently bankable director of U.S.-financed features Prisoners and Enemy. Montage’s Matthew Hays traces the rise of this Québécois auteur, who has moved from the tough but approachable successes of Incendies and Polytechnique to international acclaim. The Guild is honouring a number of key figures at the Awards ceremony and Montage is pleased to offer profiles on two of them. Kiva Reardon offers an empathetic account of the life and career of Lee Gordon, who will be acknowledged this year as the “first woman in the DGC.” Veteran Vancouver writer David Spaner presents a clear-eyed look into the filmmaking accomplishments of one of Canada’s pioneers—Peter O’Brian, the producer of The Grey Fox, My American Cousin and director of Hollywood North. As we know, it’s not just Canadians who love working in this country. Legendary film director Guillermo del Toro and TV hit-maker David Nutter also enjoy this land and its vastly experienced and dedicated DGC crews. Nancy Lanthier’s incisive examination of the “pilot whisperer” Nutter and Suzan Ayscough’s colourful report on del Toro’s visit to TIFF turn up one thing in common—huge respect for the Guild and its members.

Montage’s team of Alex Alter, art director, Nick Gergesha, visual researcher, and Jocelyn Laurence, copy editor, join me in saluting the DGC on another great year!

MARC GLASSMANEDITOR

editor’s note

viewpoint

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by GERRY BARRIt may not be Canada’s golden age for screen productions but it is pretty busy out there. Last year, the total volume of produc-tion reached a 10-year high of $5.9-billion, with the growth driven by increases in domestic television and film. The lion’s share of this activity is in television, with Canadian production hitting $2.6-billion, a 21.3 percent increase over last year and also a 10-year high.

Canadian television produc-tions are resonating both with domestic audiences and viewers around the world. In 2011-2012, 25 Canada Media Fund (CMF)-supported shows had aver-age audiences of over a mil-lion Canadians. Last year, 72 CMF-supported programmes were sold internationally across six continents. The system in place for funding and distribution of Canadian television programmes is clearly working.

LISTENISTEN

SOMETHING NEEDED

A STRATEGY FOR FEATURE FILMMAKING

8 MONTAGE fall 2013

cable and satellite services in exchange for providing access to the entirety of Canada’s film canon while spending the majority of its revenues on new Canadian films (eight-12 a year).

The cost to Canadians for this service? Roughly $11 a year, or less than the price of a single cinema ticket.

But it was a dead end at the regulatory body. The CRTC said Starlight’s channel proposal—promoted by multi-award-win-ning producer Robert Lantos and distinguished filmmakers like David Cronenberg, Deepa Mehta and Denis Villeneuve—did not demonstrate that Canadian feature films are unavailable in the broadcasting system, given that video-on-demand (VOD) and pay-TV services have obligations to air domestic films.

Unfortunately, this kind of availability limits access to do-mestic films to those Canadians who can afford to pay upwards of $15-$20 per month for pay-TV services such as The Movie Network or Super Channel, or anywhere from $4-$8 per individual film on VOD. A stark difference to the $11 per year for access to ALL Canadian films.

Canada is the third-largest movie-watching nation in the world, yet we have never been able to properly exploit Canadi-ans’ desire for film to build on and strengthen our domestic film industry to a level com-mensurate with this demand. Making access to new and old Canadian films restricted and/or expensive is counterproduc-tive to growing the industry.

The formula that has made the whole domestic screen industry grow is a classically Canadian mix that recruits all the players. It is partly organised around

But what about feature film?

While production of Canadian feature films also rose last year to a comparatively modest $381-million, the successes evident in Canadian television do not seem equally present for features. However, this doesn’t appear to be from a lack of interest.

A 2013 study from Tele-film Canada shows the film audience is growing, with 54 percent of those aged 15-17 and 38 percent of those aged 18-34 watching more films this year versus the previous time period. This demand is driven in part by the growth of new platforms and the increased availability of content. But for Canadian films to capitalise on this demand, audiences need to be able to access them in the place and manner of their choosing.

The Telefilm study showed that film viewing occurs primarily in the home (76 percent of the time) while a 2012 Department of Canadian Heritage study revealed that for 89 percent of Canadians, television was the most common way they watched film. Yet Canadian broadcasters prefer series pro-gramming over one-off films for branding and audience-retention strategies, resulting in fewer and fewer Canadian films airing on conventional television networks.

Earlier this year, a group of leading domestic producers and distributors combined with some of our finest filmmakers in an attempt to provide access for Canadians to Canadian film on television. The idea was to create a new television service called Starlight: The Canadian Movie Channel, devoted en-tirely to Canadian feature film. In their application to the CRTC (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commis-sion), Starlight sought manda-tory carriage on domestic

Top to bottom: Asphalt Watches (Shane Ehman & Seth Scriver, 2013). Photo courtesy TIFF. Gerontophilia (Bruce LaBruce, 2013). Photo courtesy TIFF. The Animal Project (Ingrid Veninger, 2013). Photo courtesy Alliance Films. The Grand Seduction (Don McKellar, 2013). Photo courtesy Alliance Films. The Art of the Steal (Jonathan Sobol, 2013). Photo courtesy TIFF. Wa-termark (Jennifer Baichwal & Edward Burtynsky, 2013). Photo courtesy Mongrel Media

9fall 2013 MONTAGE

regulation of private enterprise to ensure funding and access and partly through institutions like Telefilm Canada to admin-ister public support. It is also about thoughtful tax incentives and the entrepreneurial and creative skills of thousands of creators and producers who are more and more capable and whose reach is more and more global.

With the shelving of the promising Starlight initiative, it’s likely that a formula for promo-tion, production and access to feature film in Canada will have to involve a modification of this successful mix. But that is yet to be fully realised. There is no better time than during the current amped-up produc-tion season to put our minds to the future of Canadian features.

Gerry Barr is the CEO and Executive Director of the DGC

Top: The F Word (Michael Dowse, 2013). Tom à la ferme (Tom at the Farm) (Xavier Dolan, 2013). Pho-tos courtesy TIFF

A BAD PERSON EDDIE THE SLEEPWALKING CANNIBAL A LITTLE BIT ZOMBIEJOURNEY 2: THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND HOTEL CONGRESS DOPPELGÄNGER PAUL 388ARLETTA AVENUE TAKE THIS WALTZ PASSIONFLOWER THE PIN I PUT A HIT ON YOU HOTEL CONGRESS A BRAND NEW YOU BEN’S AT HOME STRESS POSITION OSTOCK DIRTY SINGLES ANTIVIRAL CRUEL & UNUSUAL EMPIRE OF DIRT PICTURE DAY HAUNTER THE ANIMAL PROJECT ENEMY THE CONSPIRACY WHAT WE HAVETHE LESSER BLESSED SITTING ON THE EDGE OF MARLENE STORIES WE TELL BERKSHIRE COUNTY I’M YOURS THE ABC’S OF DEATH I AM A GOOD PERSON/I AM BAD PERSON A LITTLE BIT ZOMBIE EDDIE THE SLEEPWALKING CANNIBAL JOURNEY 2: THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND DOPPELGÄNGER PAUL 388 ARLETTA AVENUE TATHIS WALTZ PASSIONFLOWER THE PIN I PUT A HIT ON YOU HOTEL CONGRESS A BRAND NEW YOU BEN’S AT HOME STRESS POSITION OLD STOCK DIRTY SINGLEAT CRUEL & UNUSUAL HAUNTER THE GRAND SEDUCTION THE ANIMAL PROJECT ENEMY EMPIRE OF DIRT PICTURE DAY MOLLY MAXWELL ANTIVIRAL THE CONSACY THE LESSER BLESSED WHAT WE HAVE SITTING ON THE EDGE OF MARLENE STORIES WE TELL EDDIE THE SLEEPWALKING CANNIBAL THE ABC’S OF DEATH JOURNEY 2: THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND DOPPELGÄNGER PAUL I AM A GOOD PERSON/I AM A BAD PERSON 388 ARLETTA AVENUE TAKE THIS WALTZ PASSIONFLOWER THE PIN I PUT A HIT ON YOU HOTEL CONGRESS A BRAND NEW YOU BEN’S AT HOME STRESS POSITION DIRTY SINGLES A BRAND NEW YOU GRAND SEDUC-TION HAUNTER THE ANIMAL PROJECT MPIRE OF DIRT PICTURE DAY MOLLY MAXWELL ANTIVIRAL THE CONSPIRACY WHAT WE HAVE THE LESSER BLESSED SITTION THE EDGE OF MARLENE BERKSHIRE COUNTY I’M YOURS THE ABC’S OF DEATH I AM A GOOD PERSON/I AM A BAD PERSON A LITTLE BIT ZOMBIE EDDIE THE SLEEPWALKING CANNIBAL JOURNEY 2: THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND DOPPELGÄNGER PAUL 388 ARLETTA AVENUE TAKE THIS WALTZ PASSIONFLOWER THE PIN I PUA HIT ON YOU HOTEL CONGRESS A BRAND NEW YOU BEN’S AT HOME STRESS POSITION OLD STOCK DIRTY SINGLES CRUEL & UNUSUAL THE GRAND SEDUCTIOHAUNTER THE ANIMAL PROJECT ENEMY EMPIRE OF DIRT PICTURE DAY MOLLY MAXWELL ANTIVIRAL THE CONSPIRACY WHAT WE HAVE THE LESSER BLESSED SITTING ON THE EDGE OF MARLENE STORIES WE TELL BERKSHIRE COUNTY I’M YOURS THE ABC’S OF DEATH I AM A GOOD PERSON/I AM A BAD PERSON A LITTLE ZOMBIE EDDIE THE SLEEPWALKING CANNIBAL JOURNEY 2: THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND DOPPELGÄNGER PAUL 388 ARLETTA AVENUE TAKE THIS WALTZ THE CONSPASSION FLOWER THE PIN HOTEL CONGRESS A BRAND NEW YOU HOTEL CONGRESS BEN’S AT HOME STRESS POSITION OLD STOCK DIRTY SINGLES CRUEL & UUSUAL THE GRAND SEDUCTION HAUNTER THE ANIMAL PROJECT ENEMY EMPIRE OF DIRT PICTURE DAY MOLLY MAXWELL ANTIVIRAL THE CONSPIRACY WHAT WHAVE THE LESSER BLESSED SITTING ON THE EDGE OF MARLENE STORIES WE TELL BERKSHIRE COUNTY THE ABC’S OF DEATH I AM A GOOD PERSON/I AM A BAPERSON A LITTLE BIT ZOMBIE STORIES WE TELL DOPPELGÄNGER PAUL EDDIE THE SLEEP WALKING CANNIBAL JOURNEY 2: THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND PASSION-FLOWER THE PIN I PUT A HIT ON YOU HOTEL CONGRESS A BRAND NEW YOU BEN’S AT HOME OLD STOCK STRESS POSITION DIRTY SINGLES THE GRAND DIRTY SINGLES THE GRAND SEDUCTION HAUNTER THE ANIMAL PROJECT ENEMY EMPIRE OF DIRT TAKE THIS WALTZ ANTIVIRAL PICTURE DAY MOLLY MAXWELLTHE CONSPIRACY WHAT WE HAVE SITTING ON THE EDGE OF MARLENE STORIES WE TELL BERKSHIRE COUNTY I’M YOURS THE ABC’S OF DEATH SITTING ON I AM A GOOD PERSON/I AM A BAD PERSON A LITTLE BIT ZOMBIE EDDIE THE SLEEPWALKING CANNIBAL JOURNEY 2: THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND DOPPELGÄNGEPAUL 388 ARLETTA AVENUE PASSIONFLOWER PICTURE DAY THE PIN I PUT A HIT ON YOU A BRAND NEW YOU OLD STOCK DIRTY SINGLES STRESS POSITION THE SLEEPWALKING CANNIBAL BERKSHIRE COUNTY I’M YOURS STORIES WE TELL A LITTLE BIT ZOMBIE BEN’S AT HOME THE ANIMAL PROJECT THE GRAND SEDUCTI

Connecting with the Industry’s Brightest

CFC ALUMNI HAVE DIRECTED AND EDITED MORE THAN 30 FEATURE FILMS IN THE LAST TWO YEARS.

Accepting Applications: January 2014To learn more about the Cineplex Entertainment Film Program, visit: cfccreates.com/film

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era and editing gear, buy film from Kodak and send it all off to Film House for processing and printing—and to send all the bills to the student council. John convinced us it was much easier to ask forgiveness than to ask permission. As he was not even an officially reg-istered student at the school, he needed a proxy to help him develop his grandiose plans. I was appointed first President of the new Film Board, al-lowing him to spend his time coming up with ambitious and provocative scenarios to shoot while I would be officially responsible for trying to con-vince the student council and administration to allow us to bring underground filmmaking to Hamilton. John directed our effort—originally titled Black Zero but for reasons now forgotten renamed Palace of Pleasure. I photographed it and cast as the leads my girlfriend, Michaele-Sue Goldblatt, and a guy I had just hitchhiked around America with named David Martin. It was a nutty shoot, with no real script but lots of late-night improvisa-tions, consisting of moody shots of Michaele-Sue and David smoking cigarettes. John

convinced the two of them and another student actor we found to climb into a bed together. Sexual adventure was de rigueur for ’60s underground filmmaking but John found the results a little tame and determined to add some bare skin (specifically, of course, bare breasts) to the scene. By then we were linked to other student filmmakers, mostly in Toronto, and John convinced our pal at York University, Michael Hirsh (who would in a few years found and lead Nelvana), to film our pal at the University of Toronto, David Cronenberg, in bed with a York coed willing to bare all for our McMaster-piece. Matching of the faces or other body parts didn’t really matter, as both shoots were done with deep green and magenta gels on the lights, and in any case, the whole film was going to be run through a mirrored kalei-doscope contraption before release so it would become quite abstract. Before we ever got there, though, someone at the lab we were using saw the foot-age and decided to call in the Toronto Police Morality Squad to review it. Although in the end the cops didn’t seize the film, the threat was quite real. When word got back to Ham-ilton that “Mac coeds” were being filmed in a ménage à trois for a university-sponsored film, the student council, the administration and self-righ-teously pontificating scribes in the student newspaper all went on the warpath. One columnist claimed that the school’s Baptist forefathers would be “spinning in their graves” as the image of the school turned into one of “dirty movies, and pot-smok-ing, acid-dropping, bearded protestors.” The story spread from the McMaster campus to The Hamilton Spectator, then on to The Globe and Mail, where their humorist, George Bain, filled his column with a collection of limericks that he claimed had been penned by his alter-ego, Saskatchewan yokel Clem Watkins Jr. Here’s one:

Said the film-man, “How gay, having three. Two-to-one is quite best, you’d agree?” Said the girl, “This lark here would play hell with an arc But by George, it’s just dandy by me.” Just as the story was going national, Hofsess complicated the issue by getting himself arrested over the film. In those days, and for the next 10 years or so, most film cameras, lights and other equipment in Toronto were rented out of a house opposite Maple Leaf Gardens by a wildly colourful old broad named Janet Good. Janet was a hilariously profane Scottish woman of consider-able girth, who presided over her notoriously unreliable cameras and harem of young filmmakers and cameramen who came in to rent them.“John focking Hofsess!” she would tell you, if she were still around. “Focking bugger rented two of me best projec-tors, went down Church Street and pawned them in focking McTamney’s!” Since the student council was no longer accepting bills on behalf of the Film Board, John needed some cash to get our rushes out of the lab. Unfortunately, his solution re-sulted in him getting charged with theft over $50. Not only had Janet’s projectors been pawned but their original rental was charged to…the McMaster Student Council. It was getting harder and harder for me, as President of the MFB, to defend his activi-ties to the student authorities. Rumours swirled around the school that I was going to be fired. Even the CBC got into the fun, pulling reporter Larry Zolf off the Gerda Munsinger scandal and sending him down the QEW to ask stu-dents and faculty what they thought about the fact that, as he put it, “Hamilton has replaced Ottawa as the sex capital of the country.” It became way too much for the administration—and the council. On January 13, 1967, the Student Executive Council held a six-hour (!) meeting about Black Zero, the McMaster Film Board and me. On January 20, the McMaster

paper, The Silhouette, blared a headline that I was out as MFB President. Inside, the editorial page cartoon showed me, hands tied behind my back, my head on a chopping block, surrounded by the parapher-nalia of a movie set, a guy with a giant cleaver about to chop my head off. An excited director, personifying the stu-dent council, gesticulates from his chair, bellowing, “Cut!” In truth, I was not unhappy losing the mantle of MFB Pres-ident. I didn’t really want to be a student-film administrator—I wanted to make films. I had supporters who felt I had been railroaded, and as I left they managed to get my pal, David Martin, in as the new Presi-dent. One of his first moves was to approve the new film I wanted to make, inspired by my activities the previous year when I was instrumental in bringing Nico and the Velvet Underground to Hamilton. I also parlayed my new connec-tions with Larry Zolf and his producer, Steven Patrick, into a summer job in the editing department at CBC. From there, and with my new film in hand, I was able to springboard into a position with Allan King Associates. It was an extraordinary place, not just for the many films we made there through the ’60s and ’70s but also for the opportunities that King and his partner, Richard Leiter-man, gave many of us to learn and practise our craft. It offered no diploma in film, but was where I really began to instigate and experience a lifetime’s worth of adventures in filmmaking.

Excerpted from Peter Rowe’s memoir, Adventures in Filmmaking, available as a paperback and ebook from amazon.ca, ibooks, kindle, kobo and from Theatrebooks, TIFF Bell Lightbox and other bookstores.

By Peter Rowe

Although my final yearbook claims I had high school ambitions to become a film director, there was very little opportunity to practise, or even learn about it, in Canada at the time. There were no film schools in Canada and only four I knew of in the world—UCLA, USC, Lodz in Poland and NYU—and since it wasn’t in the cards I was going to any of them, I ended up at McMaster, then still emerging from its Baptist roots and definitely no film school. Once enrolled, though, I was determined to see how that might change. While the idea of student and independent underground filmmaking was starting to take hold in 1966, the practice of it was limited and sketchy. I joined a group of fledgling film enthusiasts who decided to make it happen on our campus by dint of ramming forward until someone told us to stop. That winter, we arbi-trarily created what we called the McMaster Film Board, and among the interesting group we assembled was a wild character hanging around the school named John Hofsess. Nobody authorised us to set it up, go out and buy a cam-

Previous page,Top: on the set of TV series African Skies. Bottom: Peter Rowe filming a storm on the set of Lost! (1986)

Top: shooting crocodiles on the set of African Skies. Bottom: Rowe wearing snow goggles in the Arctic. All photos courtesy Peter Rowe

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by MATTHEW HAYSDenis Villeneuve offers one of those warm, gener-ous interviews that tend to make a journalist hap-py. He’s smart, reflective, articulate—in English or en français—and usually tells you something you haven’t heard before. But this time around, he says something not too terribly surprising: “Yes, this has been quite an intense time,” he concedes.

Not a shocker, given that Villeneuve has just come off a Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) bender in which he premiered two feature films at Canada’s most prestigious film event. And the double whammy was a rather intensely speculat-ed-upon follow-up act. These were the first films audiences and critics would be seeing since Incen-dies, Villeneuve’s celebrated 2010 stage-to-screen adaptation, a wrenching family melodrama that would earn an Oscar nomination. On top of that bit of double jeopardy, consider that the films are in English and both featured an outstanding A-list Hollywood talent.

Villeneuve can now take some pleasure in the fact that the films, Prisoners and Enemy, received good-to-great reviews at TIFF. (Distributors intend to capitalise on the buzz, with both titles slated to open this season.) Prisoners, the bigger budget of the two ($55-million), stars Hugh Jackman, Jake Gyllenhaal, Viola Davis and Maria Bello in a taut suspenser about how one father (Jackman) goes mad when his daughter is abducted.

OSCAR-NOMINATED QUEBEC DIRECTOR DENIS VILLENEUVE BREAKS OUT WITH TWO MAJOR FILMS, PRISONERS AND ENEMY

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Opposite page:Jake Gyllenhaal in Enemy (2013).

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today. “The guy I was really impressed with dur-ing the ’90s was François Girard, as he was one of the only young Quebeckers who was working then. But the goal at the end of the day is to be yourself. I am always impressed by filmmakers who have their own planet, their own universe.” And that’s something Villeneuve most definitely has. He got his start in 1990 when he won a Radio-Canada competition to co-host an international travel show, La Course destination monde. The program gave him and several other young Que-beckers cameras and travel money—Villeneuve went to Europe and Asia. They had to send back the short films they made about their adventures, which would then be broadcast weekly. Villeneuve directed one of the most audacious segments of the Roger Frappier-produced anthology film Cos-mos (1996), which would get a special citation at Cannes. His first feature, Un 32 août sur terre (1998), had Quebec mainstay Pascale Bussières grappling with an existential crisis after a near-fatal car accident. By this point, Villeneuve had established himself as a confident director with a unique vision. But then he hit a true landmark with his 2000 feature Maelström, a striking, unique film about a woman (Marie-Josée Croze) who is confronted with the Big Life Questions after a watery car accident. Just to prove he could do it, Villeneuve punctuated the ac-tion with a crazy bit of surrealism: Maelström was narrated by a talking fish. Formally invigorating, loaded with a serious, dark streak, Villeneuve’s film brought him a Best Picture Genie and made nu-merous critical top-10 lists. Villeneuve proved he could write strong parts for women. He was also part of a quirky Quebec trend—young directors who seemed fixated with water. Along with André Turpin (Un crabe dans la tête, 2001) and Manon Briand (La turbulence des fluides, 2002), Villeneuve formed what was then dubbed the Quebec New Wave. A critical darling, awards in hand, with all the signs of one of the most promising careers, Villeneuve was, as they say in the business, at the top of his game. And then he did an amazing thing, something that proves beyond any reasonable doubt that the man doesn’t shy away from risks. He walked away from it. For almost a decade, he didn’t make a fea-ture film. He did it for the best of reasons: being a parent. “I had young kids at the time, and I really did not want to be absent for those years. And that break was the best idea I ever had. Sometimes you need to stop. It was something I deeply felt was important. It was a deep, deep, deep feeling. Because I took that break and studied movies on my own, I had my own private film school. I took time out of the world of cinema. I shot the odd commercial to make money, but other than that it was a break, and that’s an important thing to do. I have never regretted that move.” When planning his return to feature filmmaking, Villeneuve didn’t shy away from risk-taking. Que-bec actress Karine Vanasse felt that the story of the 1989 massacre of 14 women by Marc Lépine had left a scar on the Quebec psyche. The story was horrifying. Lépine walked into an engineer-ing classroom at Montreal’s École Polytechnique, armed with a rifle. He ordered the men and wom-en to separate into two groups. He opened fire on the women, killing 14. Then he took his own life. From the start, the film was fraught with contro-versy. One SODEC (Société de développement des

Typical of Villeneuve, the film is far from a typi-cal genre caper. It’s an intimate look at the trauma from the perspectives of a series of characters, awash in a post-9/11 hue. Then there’s Enemy, a lower-budget but equally effective film in which Gyllenhaal plays a man obsessed with tracking down an actor who bears an eerie resemblance to him. Rounding out the cast is Isabella Rossellini, Melanie Laurent and Tim Post. Both films deliver the sweaty-palms-and-knotted-stomach tension one hopes for; even if he’s acquired bigger budgets and bigger stars, the projects are decidedly Ville-neuvian. They are gorgeous aesthetically and give great surface, but far from being superficial, offer complex emotional journeys for their characters. Villeneuve acknowledges he has just been through something of a dream—a director from Canada heading south of the border to work on a significant budget with star actors. “The biggest surprise is that at $55-million, you’re still not really working at 55. Above the line is massive—most of the money goes to the actors. To work with seven major Hollywood stars involves a lot of entourage and perks. So there’s a lot of money that doesn’t end up in front of the camera. Basically, Prisoners is a very intimate movie. It’s a small big Hollywood movie, if you understand what I’m saying.” But Villeneuve does describe a shift in vibe, one that has everything to do with budget. Since all Canadian cinema is basically independent pro-duction done on a tight budget (at least by Hol-lywood studio standards), he noticed that “There are things you can afford to do when you’re mak-ing an American film that you can’t in Canada. You have such control over everything. If I make a scene on the street with a car in Canada, I’ll have one car and I’ll have the street blocked off for two hours. If I need another car, I’ll have to ask the producer to bring theirs. But in the States I have hundreds of cars, 45 stunt men and as much equipment as I need to film the scene. It’s a to-tally different ball game. I can control what’s in the frame and make the shot as I want. That freedom is quite exhilarating.” Villeneuve has some happy news to report to Canadians. Despite all the stress, and in contrast to all of the horror stories he’d heard and rumi-nated about before diving into two major films in as many years, the experience in Hollywood was not hellish. “I knew all those stories, and I wasn’t sure of what to expect. I was very afraid of that, but I said to myself, ‘Experience it once, then go back home.’ I wanted to have the chance, at least once in my life, to work with artists who are not accessible back home.” But he cautions that it could have been dif-ferent. “It’s entirely a matter of who you work with. I was very, very, very lucky. The producers’ main goal was to make me happy. They gave me freedom, they gave me final cut, they really, re-ally trusted me. The more the project went on, the more freedom I had. I was just very lucky, and I’m aware of that. You have to be careful who you sign on with. Because it so easily could have be-come a total nightmare. Sometimes on Prisoners there were producers on the set. Seven of them! But they never interfered. If I had been with crazy people I would be dead right now.” Getting Villeneuve to describe his formative in-fluences is tricky. As he puts it, he’s influenced by just about everything, an “entirely eclectic” series of films that have made him the filmmaker he is Ph

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Jake Gyllenhaal and Hugh Jackman in Prisoners (2013).

Opposite page: Paul Dano and Jake Gyllenhaal in Prisoners (2013).

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have to have the humility to recognise that. A good director is able to listen to everyone’s ideas and choose the best ones.” And no, he insists, what he’s saying is not coun-terintuitive. You can be in charge and still collabo-rate. “I point to the direction I want us to all walk in, but people bring in their ideas. Actors often bring in their own thoughts, and oftentimes these ideas are stronger than my own. It’s very hard to work this way because you get tired. You have to be on the edge all the time. It’s much easier to be a total dictator. But I don’t feel I’m losing my identity by listening to others. The ultimate goal is to make a great film.” Making plenty of great films is precisely where Villeneuve says he sees happening in Quebec. He is proud of the sheer diversity of work generated by his peers. “Monsieur Lazhar and C.R.A.Z.Y. did so well internationally. They were made with hu-mility but with their own strong style. We have to have the drive and ambition to conquer the world, and these filmmakers—Falardeau and Vallée—did. That’s how we have to make movies.” Villeneuve stands by his staunch criticism of Telefilm’s envelope system, in which producers were given access to additional funds in the wake of a commercial success. “It’s impossible to predict the success of a movie. If we were able to predict the success of a film we’d all be filthy rich by now. Even Spielberg can’t—every two movies, he makes a mistake. The problem with the envelope system is that we were trying to predict the success of a movie and a lot of mistakes were made. “It’s vital for Quebec cinema to have films like Bestiaire, by Denis Côté, because it keeps the ex-perimental part of cinema alive. It’s important to

have films that are more accessible too, but it can’t just be that. Cinema is an art form. If you try to make products, you kill cinema.” And while cinema often seems to take on reli-gious overtones in Quebec, in the rest of Canada filmmakers still struggle to gain traction in the pub-lic imagination and at the box office. “I think this is something about identity. It’s not the filmmak-ers, because there are clearly good ones in [English] Canada. The media in Quebec, when a film comes out, even a small one, it’s seen as an event. I know there’s lots of coverage of TIFF in the newspapers in Toronto, but there’s even more coverage in the Quebec papers, and Toronto isn’t in Quebec. I was surprised to pick up a copy of The Globe & Mail during TIFF and there was an article about pump-kins in the arts section. TIFF is the biggest festival in the world, second only to Cannes—it should be all over the fucking place! “I know there is a love of art in Canada. But it is different in Quebec. It seems like it’s a bigger part of our identity.”

Matthew Hays has written for The Globe & Mail, POV, The New York Times, The Guardian, Vice, The Walrus, Maclean’s and Cineaste. He teaches cours-es in film studies at Concordia University

entreprises culturelles) producer walked away from a script meeting in protest, never to return, insist-ing this was a film that should never be made. Va-nasse approached Villeneuve because of his strong track record writing insightful roles for women. The idea was to focus on the impact the shootings had on the victims, rather than on Lépine. The result was Polytechnique, which won huge critical accolades and had the blessing of family members of the victims of the ’89 massacre. Vil-leneuve shot the film in black and white, in part to avoid the possibility of sensationalising the colour of blood. It also provided him with his first chance to work in English. Polytechnique was made in a double shoot, filmed in both French and English simultaneously so the film could be released in two languages. Not only did the film win over skeptics, it again marked Villeneuve as a force to be reck-oned with. Polytechnique swept the Genies, win-ning in nine of the 11 categories in which it was nominated, including Best Picture and Director. Villeneuve would again prove his versatility with Incendies, taking a play by Wajdi Mouawad and putting it onscreen, making what many long to do but rarely manage: a seamless cinematic adap-tation of a work of theatre, one that never feels stagey. That harrowing family drama led to more Genies and a coveted Oscar nomination, and that, as expected, changed everything. Villeneuve confirms there were plenty of offers. And to take on two may seem crazy, given the pressures and the long stretches away from home. “My kids flew out to see me sometimes on the set, but I haven’t been home much for about a year and a half. I won’t be away for such a long stretch again.”

But one thing he learned over the years was just how collaborative a process filmmaking actually is. “One of the things I love about cinema is the ability to share creation. I love to be with a film crew, with everyone working so hard to make poetry togeth-er. Working with Matt [Hannam, Enemy’s editor] was really rewarding.” Villeneuve is the very definition of the word “auteur,” a director with a distinctive vision. But while the definition is the basis of film studies and mainstream journalism (not to mention film festival catalogues), the idea that it’s possible to attribute an entire film to one person has proven very con-troversial over the years. Villeneuve appears to be lending credence to the auteur theory’s most stri-dent critics, who argue the director’s role all too often eclipses the roles of others. “It’s a very collective thing,” he confirms. “It’s like a film crew is a living organism with lots of cells. Of course I’m the director; they do what I want. But you have to surround yourself with people who are better than you. As a director, your ultimate goal is to protect the movie, not your ego. When I worked with Roger Deakins [cinematographer for Prisoners], he deeply influ-enced me. I was a 10,000 times better director than I would be working with someone else. I

“I was a 10,000 times better director than I would be working with [Roger Deakins]. A good director is able to listen to everyone’s ideas and choose the best ones.” —Denis Villeneuve

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by NANCY LANTHIERThis past summer, B.C.’s most respected television directors, about two dozen of them, gathered in a tony Vancouver hotel to hear one of the world’s most sought-after masters of the trade talk shop. American director David Nutter has helmed vir-tually all of TV’s finest shows—The X-Files, The Sopranos, ER, The Mentalist, Game of Thrones (including last season’s notorious red-wedding finale) and, most recently, Homeland, to name a few. The director’s specialty, though, is the pilot. He directed 16 pilot projects in a row, and every single one of them became a series—breathtaking success, considering that fewer than one in six pilots are picked up. What’s more, many of Nutter’s biggest pilot successes were made in Vancouver, including the Chris Carter mystery Millennium, Jessica Alba’s series Dark Angel, the long-running Smallville and Supernatural shows and the recent superhero mystery, Ar-row. Indeed, the L.A.-based Nutter was in Vancouver that early summer day to receive the inaugural Stephen J. Cannell Friend of B.C. Award—essentially a big thank you for providing millions of dollars of work for Vancouver crews—at B.C.’s Leo Awards that evening. The DGC, in turn, arranged an elite but informal brain-picking session with the guru that morning that lasted five solid hours—when’s the last time you’ve seen a director sit still for that long?—and it could have gone longer (except, perhaps, the lunch was too much fun). “I would very much like that whoever asks the most questions wins,” said the af-fable, soft-spoken but fast-talking Nutter at the start. So his appreciative audience, including Simon Barry, Gary Harvey, James Marshall, Mina Shum, Lynn Stopkewich, Al Harman, Crawford Hawkins and Mike Rohl, as well as cinematographer Rob McLach-lan, who later joined Nutter to discuss their red-wedding shoot, fired questions at him, seeking secrets about every aspect of his career, from choosing scripts to casting, from editing to post and from inspiration to work politics. Not that, at this stage, Nutter need trouble himself with the latter, or the political quagmire often involved in heeding the requirements and whims of producers and executives, which can be especially gruelling while making an expensive pilot. “Right Ph

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When he directed ER, it was averaging 40 million viewers. “I felt I needed to do the best episode of ER ever. So I watched the best episodes, found the best voice of those shows and followed that line.” To prepare for Game of Throne’s “Rains of Casta-mere” episode, featuring the shocking red-wedding scene—arguably one the most remarkable episodes of television ever (even a shoddy video that simply showed fans watching the climax has been viewed nine million times), Nutter set up a big board “like a football coach,” with a layout of the play-by-play. He’d point to the board and tell the crew, “Here’s where the actors are going to go, here’s where we’re going to do this. I had to show them four or five times. Some people didn’t know what I was saying or doing. Once in a while, people would get it. You can do anything before the shoot. That’s where you need to find the answers.” This keeps crews busy during production. Don’t leave them idle, says Nutter. They must always feel you know what’s next. “If you don’t know the answer, fake it. And then figure it out very quickly. It all falls back to preparation. That’s all I do. When I’m working I’m always preparing.” With episodic work, Nutter prefers to be “more of a chameleon” rather than opting for bold choices that might shake up the crew. “Ultimately, I don’t want to be noticed. I don’t want people to say, ‘Oh, what a great shot that was.’ It has to support the narrative, support the characters.” Later he says, “I try not to have style because I do so many types of projects.” But with his pilots, the director puts his stamp on virtually every aspect of the show. He reviews the script with writers “scene by scene, line by line, moment by moment. It’s all about talking and tone and rehearsals. My attitude is, by the time we start shooting, every-thing that has to be said has already been said. I’ve figured it out as much as I can, so production is basi-cally, ‘Let’s just do the dance we’ve already rehearsed.’ And that’s why it’s gone well, I think.” Following the shoot, Nutter always ensures his cut looks polished, working closely with editing and post-production teams. “You can go shoot the shit out of something, and get butchered. Unless they see the best version, they’ll never see the best of you.” When the product is buffed with great editing and sound work, he says other concerns “can slip right by.” This completist style served him well working with James Cameron, who co-created the sci-fi series Dark Angel just a few years after Titanic made him, as Nut-ter puts it, “king of the world. All I cared about was that James Cameron had to like my pilot.” But the editor Nutter worked with didn’t cut music, an unac-ceptable omission for the former music student, who compares directing to “conducting a symphony in which all the notes must flow together.” With only five days allotted to cut the two-hour show, Nutter worked alongside the editor all day and spent the night add-ing a temporary score. “It was five days of 24-hours-a-day,” he recalls. “Then Jim looked at it—and we’re on pins and needles, of course.” Cameron, notorious for taking great swaths of time to get things done, was full of admiration. “How did you guys do all that in five days?” Nutter recalls him asking incredulously. “So it’s about polishing,” he repeats, “making it as neat as possible. I think that’s the most important thing.” Given the steady rise of Canadian-made pilots for both domestic and American networks, several of the B.C. directors were well versed in pilot production. But a general frustration over lack of control of their proj-ects was apparent. They rarely work with editors on sound and music choices and are almost never party to the final cut. Nutter admitted that occasionally, he

now, I have the most charmed existence of anyone in Hollywood or in Vancouver,” admits Nutter. “I get to choose what I want to do.” This means he works only with teams in which the trust is mutual—”I cast the producer as much as I cast the script,” he says—and he selects only those projects that “I can simply fall in love with.”

Nutter first studied music at the University of Mi-ami until he realised he wasn’t the second coming of Billy Joel and switched to film. His thesis feature, Cease Fire, starred a then-unknown Don Johnson, whose im-minent Miami Vice stardom launched the solid flick in theatres around the U.S.—a huge success for a film grad. Nutter moved to L.A. but he couldn’t get a job. Unemployed for a year and “a little bitter,” he was playing golf in 1980 when he met Patrick Hasburgh, who had just created 21 Jump Street. They played 18 holes, and next day, Nutter got the call to direct the program in Vancouver.

Since then, he has won a Best Director Emmy for Steven Spielberg’s miniseries Band of Brothers and earned Best Director nominations for X-Files and The Sopranos. His credits include directing 45 different television shows, as well as the feature film Disturbing Behavior. In 2010, after his 16th consecutive success-ful pilot, Jerry Bruckheimer’s Chase, aired on NBC, Nut-ter told a reporter that his success boils down to just two things: hard work and working closely with writ-ers. “It’s nothing magical,” he said. “It’s about being lucky, in some respects, and being pragmatic. But it is also about working hard, hard, hard to get to where you need to be.”

Those same principles came to light as he answered the B.C. directors’ questions, especially his capacity to work the extra mile. We learned that after 10-hour Game of Thrones days, he’d meet with the first team of actors for hours to rehearse the next day’s work; that he slept in the Dark Angel’s editing studio so he could add music to his cut; and that early in his ca-reer, when he didn’t have much money, he slid $500 to an editor of 21 Jump Street to work with him on a holiday. Tellingly, Nutter didn’t push this work ethic. Those examples were mingled with plenty of fun, such as when his nervousness on the first day of 21 Jump Street immediately dissolved upon hearing Johnny Depp and Peter DeLuise arrive on set joking about lighting each other’s farts on fire. “Okay, I’m good, I’m in,” Nutter recalls thinking.

If the directors gleaned any more secrets about di-recting winning television, it was that, when Nutter says he’s lucky, it’s actually that he is extremely intui-tive, especially when it comes to reading actors, crew and executives. And the chief focus for his hard work is “preparation, preparation, preparation.

“Tomorrow I’m off to direct an episode of Home-land,” he says. “I’ve never done it before.” So he met creator Alex Ganza for lunch and asked him key ques-tions concerning his view of the screenplay’s “most important emotional beats, and the directorial styles he likes and doesn’t. I like to be very blunt about ask-ing these questions.”

NUTTER’S GAME OF THRONES

David Nutter spoke to the B.C. directors just days after his beautiful and ghastly Game of Thrones season finale rocked viewers to the core. Naturally, the direc-tors wanted to know how he pulled it off. “So much detail is involved,” Nutter said of the $50-million-per-season show. “You walk into the costume, props, set-design departments, your jaw drops.” It was mostly a matter of “being able to balance all those amazing elements.” A sword-fight scene, for example, saw him work with Ridley Scott’s swordsman to come up with blocking and camera posi-tions. Then he sent him away to rehearse with fencers on a tennis court in Morocco. “It was kind of crazy, but we got a pretty good swordfight.” A triumph of the red-wedding scene was the way expectations of the bleak-ness to come was thwarted by the lightness that preceded it. Here, Nutter credits director of photography Robert McLachlan, who flooded the scene with hand torches that were then carried out by attendees before the dark climax. The Vancouver-based cinematographer, who had joined Nutter on stage for this segment of the talk, recalled, “I really wanted viewers to get the happy ending they were all desperate for. So I made the wedding prettier than the art department and David would have had it.” The wedding scene was shot in five days in sequence. “It actually went faster that way,” Nutter said. “Less blood to clean up. And to me, the last shot needed to be her death. It carried the crew on a trajectory, too. By the end, everyone was in tears.” Key to managing the shoot was be-ing certain of the shots his three cameras needed to capture. He keeps his shot list to himself in his pocket. “You’ve got to know what pieces you’re going to need. It’s about knowing about editing, which is everything. If you don’t know how to edit, then you shouldn’t direct.” When Nutter is on top of his shots, he doesn’t grind out his actors. Known for working up close with his cast using his own portable monitor, rather than directing from the video village, Nutter always lets actors know wide shots from close-ups, “when that moment is every-thing.” And his constant proximity lets them know “I’m there, focusing on what they’re doing, which is really important.” When the show wrapped, Richard Madden (Robb Stark) and Michelle Fairley (Catelyn Stark) sent Nutter a note, thank-ing him for overseeing what they called a “ballet.” For the soulful music man who happens to conduct and choreograph television, it was touching compliment.

Left column, top to bottom:Allan Harmon and David Nutter. David Nutter with Tim Southam. Robert McLachlan and David Nutter

Right column,top to bottom:Allan Harmon and David Nutter. Allan Harmon and David Nutter. Director Da-vid Winning, production manager/pro-ducer JP Finn, director Terry Ingram at the conference

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But his perception was apparent on Game of Thrones’ red-wedding set. “I remember talking to the actors about love, and all the women in make-up and costume were weeping, I was so into it. Even the script supervisor was crying. It was a situation where it was really important to give it all I had.”

Asked about key quality he wants his actors to bring to the set, he immediately answered, “Confidence. Acting is like standing naked in a room full of people and turning around very slowly. When they do that, they have nowhere to go. I want them to know that they can dance and fly in the air and I’ll catch them.”

Yet he frequently tells actors, “‘It’s about not act-ing. Just say the words. Let the words do the work for you.’ And if there are any problematic areas, I never talk to them in front of crowds or groups. I make it personal. I have tried to erase the word ‘ego’ from my lexicon. I’m there to pick up the trash. It’s only about making it better.”

Making the show the best it can be is the direc-tor’s forte. When he tried to go beyond that and create his own show, several years back, it didn’t pan out. Roughly based on the life of the actor A.J. Buckley, who starred in the only feature film Nutter has direct-ed, the poorly received Disturbing Behavior, the series dealt with foster families. “I tried to get that going for a long time, but it never really happened. I realised I’m a better fixer, someone who can help great material blossom rather than developing something from an initial stage.”

The charismatic director shared more than a few self-deprecating comments. He called himself “a blind artist with no hands, because it’s really all about the people who support you.” He also admitted he is never certain of himself or his ability to succeed when he takes on a new project. “From the first day I’m di-recting to the last time I call ‘Cut,’ I’m terrified. I’m afraid and scared and nervous, and worried all the way through the process. But I try to embrace it now. I need that juice to keep me going. It shows that it mat-ters. Too many times you see people not into it. I don’t know how to do that. I love what I do too much, and I love the people I work with too much to do that.”

The critically acclaimed show The X-Files saw the words “quality television” and “Vancouver” in the same sentence for the first time. Nutter’s work on it led him to direct his first-ever pilot for Millennium, for which he used all his Vancouver colleagues. Only hours after landing the Smallville pilot, he had his entire crew from Dark Angel hired. “A great, talented group of people is everything you need,” he said. No matter where he shoots, Nutter depends on Vancouver cast-ing directors Coreen Mayrs and Heike Brandstatter.

And though Warner Brothers pushed for a big name for the role of Clark Kent’s girlfriend for Smallville, he insisted on casting Vancouver’s Kristin Kreuk. They’d also wanted to film Smallville in the U.S., but Nutter sold them on Vancouver, where it lasted for 10 years. More recently, Nutter used Vancouver cinematogra-pher Rob McLachlan to film his episodes of Game of Thrones. And McLachlan has stayed on the show.

“There’s no place in the world I’d rather work than here, you can tell that to anybody. Your crews are my shining armour,” Nutter said to his DGC audience. “You definitely taught me how to be a director. Taught me how to be a man, I think, taught me a lot of life lessons. Vancouver’s a magical place.

“I will be back, that’s a promise.”

Nancy Lanthier is a freelance writer and part of the staff at The Vancouver Sun, where she writes for the Arts section.

too has ceded control of the final edit. “I can be very pliable when the material is good,” he said. “Warner Brothers knows that if something touches me, I’ll be involved.” The studio sent him Jack and Bobby, Greg Berlanti’s faux documentary series set in 2049. With the editor Paul Karasick set for final cut, Berlanti said, “David, just walk away.” So Nutter shot the project “without any bad stuff in it. So the producer’s cut came out great. Again, it all starts with preparation.”

Same with Game of Thrones, whose brilliant editor, Oral Ottay, always liked his director cuts. “You give them just as many options as you want to give them,” says Nutter. “But you know, I say that now, but I cover the shit out of it. There is never a situation where I hold stuff back. I remember we did 75 set-ups on The X-Files in one day. It was the most the show had ever done. Hopefully what I gave them worked.”

For the most part, though, Nutter accepts a pilot only when he has control of the three Cs: the crew, the casting and the cut. “If we can all agree on those three things, we’re golden. So it’s really about suc-cess begetting the ability to ask for more stuff. When I didn’t have all that stuff, it was mostly about whom I was working for. It’s all about personalities and read-ing people, about their attitude or tone.”

The B.C. directors expressed keen interest in his casting techniques—how he selects the right ac-tors and how he interacts with them. While Nutter’s casting success is commendable, sometimes he, too, can’t convince an executive to approve a certain actor. Nutter admits that on many occasions he has found himself “rooting for specific actors,” and he has spent time winning over producers and agents because the key to a successful series is choosing the right talent from the beginning.

Smallville’s Clark Kent proved a particularly time-consuming challenge. “We were frustrated. ‘How are we going to find him?’” Waiting for yet another meeting in the casting room, Nutter started looking at pictures on a desk and found one of Tom Welling. “Honest to God, I said, ‘Who’s this?’ They told me his manager didn’t want him to come in because it could hurt his features career.” Nutter called the manager immediately and described young Clark’s unusual, emotionally charged character. “‘This could make Welling a feature career. It’s a wonderful script. Please at least read it because it’s like nothing you’d ever think it’s going to be.’ And he came in and read it and that was that.”

Nutter certainly has a gift for communicating, often getting what he wants through the power of articulate persuasion. He clearly enjoys words to clarify the pas-sions and sentiments of his actors’ characters. “During shooting, I always tell them, ‘Walk right up to me and let’s talk about it.’” He recalled a day on the set of Arrow when he convinced star Stephen Amell “of the validity of the emotional journey of his scene while I was vacuuming part of the floor.” Then he admitted, “I don’t really know how I do it.”

Top row, left to right:Stephen Amell as Oliver Queen in Arrow

Willa Holland as Thea Queen in ArrowJohn Barrowman as Malcolm Merlyn in Arrow

Second row, left to right:Robin Tunney and Simon Baker in The MentalistRobin Tunney as Teresa Lisbon in The Mentalist

Simon Baker as Patrick Jane in The Mentalist

Third row, left to right:David Duchovny as Fox Mulder in The X-Files

Gillian Anderson as Dana Scully in The X-Files

Fourth row, left to right:Nutter and Emilia Clarke on the set of

Game of ThronesNutter with Peter Dinklage on the set of

Game of ThronesNutter with the cast of Entourage

Nutter in a crowd during a Game of Thrones shoot

24 MONTAGE fall 2013ORPHAN BLACK & JOHN FAWCETT

After weathering the highs and lows of a career as a director of film and television,

Orphan Black’s John Fawcett is now a proud parent of TV’s coolest new show

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by JASON ANDERSONNot long after casting actress Tatiana Maslany in the sci-fi thriller Orphan Black, John Fawcett and his creative partner, Graeme Manson, promised their new show’s leading lady that

they’d take her somewhere special. “Graeme and I had always wanted to make a show that we could take to Comic Con so Orphan Black was made with that in mind,” says Fawcett during a break from his duties in the writers’ room in a building in Toronto’s east-end film district. “After we made the decision to cast Tatiana last August, we went out to lunch with her and said, ‘Hey, next July, we’re gonna go to Comic Con!’” The note of exuberance in Fawcett’s voice implies they’d have made the trip any way they had to. Perhaps all three of them could’ve dressed up as Klingons, X-Men or Princess Warriors, just like many of the 130,000 fans who converge on the San Diego fan convention every year, making it one of the entertainment industry’s most unique and influential events. But fate had something else in store for the team behind Orphan Black, the enthralling and ever-more-ingenious saga of a group of suspiciously similar-looking young women who discover they’re the products of a shadowy human-cloning program. Coming to Ph

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phan Black team. Besides being superior genre fare by the standards of any self-respecting pop-culture nerd, both projects were “driven by absolute love and passion,” Fawcett says, “and reflect a lot of who I am as a filmmaker and storyteller.” As has been the case for so many directors, it’s not been easy for Fawcett to get the opportuni-ties to make work that feels personally fulfilling. In fact, his experience of making his third feature, the 2005 thriller The Dark, was gruelling and disap-pointing enough to pretty much extinguish those ambitions for several years. “I felt like I didn’t even want to be a filmmaker again,” he admits. Then again, there was probably no other path that this self-described “lifer” could have taken. Born in Edmonton and raised in Calgary, he started shooting short films while still in junior high. Then came Eye of Acerik, a two-hour, Goonies-inspired “epic” that he shot on VHS during his three years in high school. “I received credits for the project,” says Fawcett of this early effort. “I think it was the only way I managed to graduate.” A 16mm short that he made while taking class-es at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology earned him an invitation to attend the directors’ lab at the CFC, precipitating a move to Toronto in 1991. The list of emergent talents who Fawcett would meet at the CFC includes Vincenzo Natali, Don McKellar, and Peter and David Wellington, as well as Manson and Walton. (The CFC would play another key role in Orphan Black’s development, but more on that later.) “The most important thing the Film Centre did for me was it landed me in the Toronto scene at a fairly high level,” Fawcett says. “Rather than being a total no one, at least I had some access.” While there, Fawcett got the chance to make a few more shorts. (One was co-written by future Mad Men scribe Semi Chellas, a high-school friend from Calgary who’d also come east for the CFC.) Then, at the age of 26, he directed his first fea-ture from a script by Peter Wellington. A drama about three teenage boys who have a fateful en-counter with a wounded fugitive played by Chris Penn, The Boys Club was an early indication of Fawcett’s prowess with actors and his emphasis on tautly constructed narratives. Alas, issues over the movie’s distribution limited its exposure upon its re-lease in 1997, a problem that would dog Fawcett’s filmmaking career more than once. First conceived by Fawcett and Walton in 1995 and finally released in 2001, Ginger Snaps was not without its share of production woes either. It caught flak even before it was made, due to a Toronto Star story that castigated Telefilm Canada for funding what it described as a “teen slasher film.” Thankfully, a good many viewers recognised the movie for what it was: a sly allegory about adolescence that equated the changes of puberty with something rather more monstrous. After its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2000, where it won a special jury citation, Gin-ger Snaps gradually earned a fervent cult of admir-ers internationally and spawned two sequels, for which Fawcett served as executive producer. It was while working on Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed that he first met his future Orphan Black star, Tatiana Maslany, then an 18-year-old from Regina making her big-screen debut. Unfortunately, Fawcett’s career as a maker of feature films suffered a hard blow with his third feature. A British-shot ghost story starring Maria

Comic Con a few weeks after the first 10-epi-sode season had finished its run on BBC America and Space, where it quickly became the specialty network’s second-highest-rated show after Doc-tor Who, they arrived as conquering heroes. “It was bananas,” says Fawcett. “For the panel on our show, we were in a 500-seat room and there were probably a good thousand people who were turned away. The fans there were very vocal, really excited and super-enthusiastic.” Despite the acclaim and awards Orphan Black had generated since its debut in late March, in-cluding a Critics’ Choice Television Award for Maslany’s incredibly dexterous performance(s) as seven characters with wildly diverse personalities, Fawcett hadn’t seen the impact the show was hav-ing in such a visceral way. “Of course you look at the Twitter flows and Tumblr artwork and that’s one thing,” he says. “But it’s a whole other thing to be there and think, ‘Oh my god, there are peo-ple dressing up in clone costumes and chanting and loving it!’ It was pretty cool—we felt like rock stars.” That excitement is not likely to fade any time soon for Fawcett, who’s enjoying the highest point yet in a remarkably varied career as a direc-tor of film and television, with credits that range from his Gemini-winning work on Da Vinci’s In-quest to many episodes of The Border, Rookie Blue and The Bridge. One suspects the ego boost will also come in handy as he faces the many demands of Orphan Black’s second season, which is slated to air in April 2014. Besides sharing creator credit and respon-sibilities as showrunner with Manson—a veteran screenwriter (Cube, Rent-a-Goalie) who’s been Fawcett’s friend and collaborator since they met at the Canadian Film Centre (CFC) in the early 1990s—Fawcett also directed four episodes in Or-phan Black’s first season and plans to do more in the second. Fans are understandably eager to find out what comes next in the show’s ever-knottier narrative, which began in a suitably startling manner when Maslany’s main character, Sarah, a British con artist, sees her doppelganger jump in front of a train. After assuming the dead woman’s identity and job as a police detective, Sarah discovers there are more versions of herself, ranging from a high-strung soccer mom to a dangerous psychopath. All are being monitored and potentially threatened by the shadowy people who created them. Orphan Black has been all-consuming for Faw-cett, but judging by the intelligence and panache that the series has demonstrated thus far, the team’s “astronomical amount of work” has been worth it. Yet Orphan Black’s success also marks something of a personal vindication for Fawcett. That’s because the show represents the renewal of the creative ambitions that got the 45-year-old excited about filmmaking as a teenager in Calgary and that originally culminated in Ginger Snaps (2000), the whip-smart werewolf movie that he developed with Karen Walton, another screenwrit-er he met at the CFC who’s now part of the Or-

Bello, The Dark was badly hampered by a case of creative differences. As Fawcett says, “I was trying to make a twisty, plot-driven, atmospheric, super-natural thriller and the studio was making a cheesy, scare-a-second horror movie. We definitely were not seeing eye to eye.” Though given a theatri-cal release in the U.K., it went straight to DVD in North America and garnered precious little of the love and attention bestowed on Ginger Snaps. “The Dark bit me in the ass,” Fawcett says frankly. “It wasn’t just that it didn’t get anywhere. It was the way things went down. I didn’t have a good experience and I was licking my wounds for a couple of years. Honestly, I didn’t think much about my own creative ideas—I just directed other people’s stuff.” However much the experience of making fea-ture films had taken out of Fawcett, it certainly didn’t hamper his productivity or proficiency as a director of television. The Bridge, The Border, Heartland and Being Erica would all benefit from his efforts as a gigging director. He singles out his efforts on the Spartacus shows—whose producer, Rob Tapert, gave him an early break when he en-listed Fawcett as a director on Xena: Warrior Prin

cess)—the pilot for Lost Girl and the 2002 sci-fi se-ries Taken as especially satisfying experiences in the TV side of his career. Television also turned out to be the place for Orphan Black, which Fawcett and Manson initially spent several years trying to develop as a feature. “It was just an idea that wouldn’t go away,” says Fawcett. “Even though we had shelved it as a feature possibility, every time we got together we would end up talking about the ideas because they were so fun to talk about.” Five years ago, Manson proposed that they try rethinking it as a TV series. “By that time the land-scape had changed big time and we realised that’s how it should be,” says Fawcett. They got even more excited about the possibilities after Manson workshopped the series with students during his time as showrunner-in-residence at the CFC. Da-vid Fortier and Ivan Schneeberg at Temple Street Productions soon got on board, but even with their collective pedigree, Fawcett laments, “We couldn’t get anyone interested in Canada, period. We couldn’t even get a reading at CTV.” Several meetings in Los Angeles had more positive results, and Fawcett credits the fortitude and dedication of the Temple Street team for getting a green light from BBC America. While he’s still shepherding some feature-film projects, Fawcett’s own shift of allegiance from movies to TV reflects the extent of that change in landscape. “Since we started developing it as a se-ries in 2008, every year there’d be more and more places to pitch—like, how many different places are there to get a show made? So many places Ph

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Top row:Jordan Gavaris in Orphan Black

Second row, left to right:Tatiana Maslany:as Beth in Orphan Blackas Cosima in Orphan Blackas Alison in Orphan Black

Bottom:Dylan Bruce as Paul in Orphan Black

like Netflix are saying, ‘Hey, we’re gonna make our own shows.’ I’m more interested in watching cool new series than I am watching feature films. I am inevitably disappointed when I see feature films. There’s just nothing interesting any more.” TV, he adds, “has these cool niche audiences that are into smart filmmaking and storytelling.” And Orphan Black certainly boasts the same spark of vitality as many of the best shows to emerge in recent years. It’s no wonder Fawcett treasures the show’s creative freedom. “There was something crazy and new every day on Orphan Black,” he says. “Yes, it was my own material, but I also felt it wasn’t like any other show I’ve ever gigged on. Tonally, it’s so different—because there’s so much comedy, we would laugh our guts out.” He’s similarly thrilled with what each of the show’s directors—David Frazee, Grant Harvey, T.J. Scott, Brett Sullivan and Ken Girotti—have brought to the table. “The great thing about my being a director and showrunner was I got to hire all my friends,” Fawcett says with a laugh. “I knew they would all be really creative and visual and great with my actors and responsible with my schedule. And man, oh man, every single one of them killed

it. They came onto the show and they owned it. I like there to be some competitiveness, too. I like for a director to look at another director’s stuff and say, ‘Whoa, you got that!’ and then think about how to one-up it the next time. That’s been a fun, competitive little thing.” It may be hard to top some of the first season’s wildest moments. Just as much fun to watch has been the seemingly infinite number of ways the show has fit multiple incarnations of Maslany into the same scene. It’s no wonder Orphan Black has already inspired so much loyalty among fans and critics alike. But Fawcett will do his best not to let the chanting fans in clone costumes at Comic Con get to his head. “People have asked me if all the success so far is putting more pressure on me,” he says. “I feel like I put enough pressure on myself already so I just want to put all that stuff aside, put my head down, make the show again and not worry about what people are necessarily going to think about it. If Graeme, Tatiana and I are all doing what we believe the best thing is for the show, I think it’ll be good. We’re lucky,” Fawcett adds, “because it doesn’t often happen like this.”

Jason Anderson is a film critic and columnist for The Grid in Toronto and writes regularly about movies for the Toronto Star, Cinema Scope and Artforum.com. He teaches film criticism at the University of Toronto and is the director of programming for the Kingston Canadian Film Festival.


“THEY DON’T TAKE BBM RATINGS ON RESERVES”

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by ADAM NAYMANThe opening title sequence of the Aboriginal Peo-ples Television Network’s (APTN) hit series Black-stone unfolds to the rhythm of a children’s chant: “One little/two little/three little Indians.” The im-agery is sinister: vintage black and white photo-graphs of Aboriginal Canadians, overrun by creep-ing graphic overlays that suggest the landscape has come to life to swallow the people whole. This is “Ten Little Indians” by way of Agatha Christie, or maybe David Simon, rather than Mother Goose: a nursery rhyme reconfigured as a nightmare.

“Some people love ‘Once upon a time,’” says Ron E. Scott, Blackstone’s executive producer, writ-er and director. It’s unclear if he’s referring specifi-cally to ABC’s hit prime-time series, which offers a glossy take on historically Grim(m) myths, or the general appeal of fairy tales, but watching a few episodes of Blackstone confirms that the Edmon-ton native isn’t much for glass slippers or Prince Charmings. Shot on location in Alberta, Blackstone is a rugged little beast of a series about the fic-titious Blackstone First Nation, whose reservation is a hotbed of corruption, collusion and barely re-strained violence. The well is contaminated, both literally and figuratively. Not only is the environ-ment rotting but so are several of the characters.

Blackstone isn’t the first Canadian series to de-pict life on a First Nations reservation. CBC’s The Rez adapted W.P. Kinsella’s short-story collection Dance Me Outside into two seasons’ worth of award-winning television. But Scott sees his show as part of a different tradition. He isn’t taking up the mantle of Canadian lit but rather trying to re-trieve the gauntlet dropped by the heavy-hitters of American premium cable. He says his three biggest

inspirations are The Wire (for its complex narra-tive), The Sopranos (for its willingness to present audiences with anti-heroic characters) and Friday Night Lights. “That one,” he says with a laugh, “at least has an aspect of hope.” It’s possible to see those little glimmers of hu-manity amidst the misery on Blackstone, which has the heightened pace, and modest production values, of a soap opera but makes an admirable attempt to remain rooted in reality. Season one revolves around a skewed tribal election; season two has an environmental focus. Alcoholism, drug abuse and child molestation are depicted, but nev-er sensationally. “I don’t think anyone has taken the risks we’ve taken with Blackstone,” says Scott. “No other storytelling has been this aggressive. It’s all ripped from the headlines. All of the arcs and themes are based on true stories.” The show’s detractors might argue that, rather than cutting too close to the bone, Blackstone misses the mark entirely. In an article published in The Winnipeg Free Press after the series’ premiere on Showcase and APTN in late 2010, Colleen Si-mard describes the complaints of various First Nations leaders that the show “reinforces stereo-types: the lazy drunken Indians, the easy women, the corrupt chiefs and councils.” “Someone might watch half of the show and write an editorial about the whole series,” offers Scott in response. “On the surface, it’s easy to criticise but if you watch the whole show it might change your mind. The CEO of APTN was at a con-vention with a lot of chiefs, and they either liked the show because it was promoting conversation or they didn’t like it because it challenged them.

BLACKSTONE’S RON E. SCOTT TALKS SHOP

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Blackstone as weekly appointment television and who’s binge-watching it, but such is the nature of 21st-century entertainment. (For example, Or-ange is the New Black is getting reviewed as one of “the best shows on television” even though it’s only available on Netflix.) Scott says he trusts the word on the street when it comes to Blackstone’s popularity. “I can guarantee you if you go onto a reserve, nine times out of 10, they know what the show is all about.”

The mainstream has taken some notice. Michelle Thrush, a Cree Native who appears in French direc-tor Arnaud Desplechin’s TIFF 2013 selection Jimmy P: Psychotherapy of a Plains Indian, was a surprise winner of the Best Actress Gemini in 2011 for her work as a woman coping with the death of her daughter. “We’ve been nominated for 25 awards and we’ve won 22,” says Scott proudly. He knows his show is a cruiser-weight next to other, more top-heavy network dramas, and he likes it that way. “We are a small show,” he says. “We don’t hide the fact that we have budget challenges, but we do what we can and I think we’re putting out a strong product.”

At the same time, Scott says he hopes the next set of episodes will find Blackstone branching out a little bit, especially in terms of its narrative. His model may be The Wire, but the show has a long way to go before it reaches that sort of head-spin-ning cause-and-effect complexity. “Season three has been crafted a little bit differently. It has a big-ger feeling to it. Season two dealt with foster fami-lies and water problems on reserves. Now we’re moving into corruption in the police department and city hall. We want to offer some commentary on how criminal justice works in the Native com-munity. I think we’re asking some big questions.” He admits that it can be difficult to balance the quest for realism against the template of steadily escalating drama that makes a show like The So-pranos so addictive. “We’ve had political consul-tants for the first two seasons, and we’ve always made an effort to be as authentic as we can. At the same time, it’s a fictional show on a fictional reserve. It’s not a documentary.”

As Blackstone’s creator-writer-producer-director, Scott is accountable for more than the series’ repu-tation. He’s involved at every level of the produc-tion. “The term I use is ‘Blackstoned’ because I’m in so deep, it’s scary,” he says. “For the duration of the shoot I’m consumed with every aspect of pro-duction. We block-shoot a serialised series so ev-erything ties to everything, and it’s so layered that focus and detail are critical. What always fascinates me is on a serialised TV series you create these in-tricate and dimensional characters that arc over several episodes on the page, but when you add the talent—‘the skin’—they inspire and expand in ways I could never imagine.”

Scott says that making Blackstone is a physically draining experience, not that this stops him from getting his reps in at the gym beforehand. “I wake up two hours early and have a short workout to prepare for the day. I’m mostly focusing on exe-cution and what scenes are being shot, and also where I can gas and brake to get the day. So much of a shoot is based on weather, which actors were up and how big the scenes are. In my trailer I polish every scene and if necessary rewrite or rejig, based on what happened earlier or what we planned later in the story world. On the day, the actors are free to discuss and workshop anything they feel is

critical in their world. It’s an aspect of Blackstone I really appreciate.”

One of the most notable things about Black-stone is its commitment to using local and indig-enous actors. “We do that as much as we can,” he says. “During a season we have as many as 70 or 90 cast members. This year, we used 12 Native ac-tors with no previous experience. I want Blackstone to give people hope, the feeling that if they want to be an actor, they can get on the show.”

The cast includes its share of familiar faces. The great Gary Farmer (who also was on The Rez) plays transplanted university professor Ray Lalonde, while Hollywood vet Eric Schweig brings his usual gravitas to the tricky role of Blackstone’s dubious chief, Andy Fraser. Season one also featured a plum role for the late Saskatchewan icon Gordon Tootoosis, to whom season two was affectionately dedicated.

That Blackstone occasionally feels like an ac-tor’s showcase may have something to do with its creator’s own thwarted thespian background. “I started as an actor in Vancouver,” says Scott. “I was there for years but it never really clicked for me. I did film school in Vancouver, where I was able to learn the craft. I produced a feature, directed some shorts and music videos, but I just sort of hit my stride with scripted shows. I created four scripted series, but Blackstone was the pinnacle for me. It was an hour-long drama with some creative latitude. As a writer-producer-director, it’s just been a dream.” Scott’s previous series, Mixed Blessings, was about a romance between a Ukrainian man and a Cree woman living in Fort McMurray—a comedy predicated on culture clash. The tone was much lighter than Blackstone, but Scott can see a con-nection between the two shows, and also a theme that runs through his work in general. “Because I’m Métis, I think I have a desire to comment on the idea of two worlds at once,” he says. “I have green eyes but I’m Métis and also part Cree. I think the ability to see two sides of something at the same time is important to me, and something I like to re-flect on. There is a non-Native aspect to Blackstone as well. I want to have some insight into that split.” Identity crisis is, of course, a major theme in Ca-nadian arts and entertainment—every year a new movie or book comes along to analyse our two sol-itudes—but Scott seems to have a pretty good idea of who he is and where he belongs. He wants to keep working in Edmonton, and not just because he “bleeds Oiler Blue.” He simply doesn’t think that a show like Blackstone could work if it were produced in one of Canada’s industrial epicentres. “I’m regionally challenged,” he says with a laugh. “But I understand what’s going on out there. I read the rags. My family is here, and happily I’ve been able to keep doing what I’m doing out here.”

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

It’s led to discussion within reserves about chang-ing bylaws. I’m shocked when I hear stuff like that, that a television show is contributing to social change in a system that’s flawed even at the best of times.”

Blackstone is also a product of a flawed system: the Canadian television industry, which hasn’t al-ways had a place for this kind of programming. “There’s been a shift in the broadcast world,” Scott says. “Nobody is taking risks. They’re playing it safe with their shows, so they can air on five networks and be repurposed. We’ve discussed the show with all the usual suspects—CBC and CTV—and they respect what we are but it doesn’t line up with their mandate.”

Scott says it took nearly 10 years to get Black-stone made. “It started as a movie of the week [MOW] that was being developed by Gil Cardinal. He came to me as a content creator and said he had a movie to get done. I knew that MOWs were sort of dead in the water in Canada after 9/11, so I said I’d be more interested in trying to develop it as a television series. From there, we shot the pilot and APTN said, ‘Yes.’ I started to put my finger-prints on it.”

APTN obviously liked the idea of a show featur-ing primarily Native characters, and the fact that Blackstone had a little bit of edge to it augured well for its popularity on a network whose shows could sometimes be blandly affirmative. The darker qualities also appealed to Showcase, which Scott recalls as being “the leader at the time in sort of in-die, edgy television.” And then? “And then Show-case moved away from that and APTN stuck with us. And it’s been their top-rated show since then.”

Ratings are a difficult thing to talk about with a show like Blackstone because, as Scott says, “They don’t take BBMs on reserves.” The fact that the series’ first two seasons are also available to stream online on APTN’s website (aptn.ca) similarly complicates the question of who’s actually treating

“The term I use is ‘Blackstoned’ be-cause I’m in so deep it’s scary.”—Ron E. Scott

Opposite page: images fromBlackstone

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Left to right: Writer/pro-ducer Courtney Smith, Pe-ter O’Brian and producer Michael Lebowitz on the set of David Cronenberg’s Fast Company (1979).

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Left: O’Brian on set in 1987. Above right: Phillip Borsos, Gary Basaraba, Frank Tidy and Peter O’Brian on the set of One Magic Christmas (Phillip Borsos, 1985).

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by DAVID SPANERBabz Chula couldn’t stop talking about My Ameri-can Cousin. When the Canadian film opened in 1985, the late Vancouver actress was working on the shot-in-B.C. American movie The Accused and was vocal about her great experience working on Sandy Wilson’s also shot-in-B.C. Canadian film My American Cousin. Moved by Chula’s enthusi-asm and the honours My American Cousin was receiving, a group of Americans working on The Accused, including director Jonathan Kaplan, went to a downtown Vancouver theatre to catch the Ca-nadian picture.

“They didn’t get it,” Chula told me years later. “They thought it was hokey. They ranted about how unprofessional it was and, you know, ‘What’s the big deal?’ and ‘It was like a coming-of-age movie.’ They couldn’t believe it had been the best film in Canada, winning the Genie—or ‘Whatever that award is you people have.’ They said it was slow, they thought it was amateur.”

My American Cousin producer Peter O’Brian remembers an entirely different response when the film premiered at what was then Toronto’s Festival of Festivals. Set to open the Perspectives Canada section, My American Cousin had trig-gered a major pre-screening buzz. So the theatre was packed when the film opened to a beatific wide shot of Lake Okanagan and a ranch house at summer sunset, then cut inside the house to find teenage Margaret in her bedroom with her diary. “She writes, ‘Nothing ever happens,’ and the place erupts in laughter,” O’Brian recalls. For

90 minutes, the audience were enthralled. “Just unbelievable.”

Wilson recalls the story. “The opening shot is there because Peter insisted we grab it before we wrapped out of the ranch location. I was in a hurry to shoot the dance scene that night but he insist-ed.” To get the shot, Wilson and a skeleton crew drove in reverse down a narrow path to the edge of a cliff. “Peter inspired me to do my best,” Wil-son says. “Together we made My American Cousin and even now, almost 30 years later, lots of people feel a great affection towards the movie. So I have to thank Peter for his bravery in signing on to the project.”

My American Cousin would win almost every major Genie Award and play month after month on Canadian screens. It would also be well received outside Canada, including the U.S., but the dispa-rate responses at its Toronto premiere and from Chula’s Accused co-workers is telling. It shouldn’t be assumed that Canadian and American audienc-es always have the same perceptions about what it is that a movie should be. My American Cousin was an engaging teen movie with a brain, and for many Canadians it captured that often-ambivalent relationship we have with our southern neigh-bours. “Anything you want,” asserts Margaret’s American cousin, “you get in the U.S.A.”

O’Brian was drawn to Wilson’s spin on American culture. “I think most stories I’ve made have had the cross-border element,” O’Brian says. “I always have liked that element of being Canadian in an American world. And it’s funny. It’s probably part of our identity to not be American.”

It’s part of our identity, too, to be attracted to American culture, especially when it comes to the movies, with some 90 percent of Canadian screen time occupied by Hollywood studio fare.O’Brian’s defence of quality Canadian film and his admiration for directors led the Directors Guild of Canada to give him a Honorary Life Member Award at its annual gala on October 26. Over al-most half a century, O’Brian has produced arguably Canada’s best Western (The Grey Fox), best teen movie (My American Cousin) and best gay picture (Outrageous!). Besides working with many of Can-ada’s notable filmmakers, he has spent a great deal of time considering policies that might create an audience for independent Canadian cinema. He is also a producer who does not intrude on his di-rector’s creative vision. “Directors make the film, producers get the film made,” he says.

Peter O’Brian’s Canadian parents were married in war-time England. His father was in the Royal Air Force, stationed in England, when his mother crossed the Atlantic to be married—a romantic but dangerous proposition—in 1941. They returned to Canada in time for O’Brian’s birth in 1947 but were soon back in the U.K., where he would spent his formative years. It was there that he saw his first movie (Modern Times) and fell hard for rock ‘n’ roll.

In 1959, the family returned to Toronto, where his father became an executive at the Southam publishing company. “For me, it was, ‘We’ve come home,’” says O’Brian. “All the time in England, I dreamt of coming home to Canada.” It was a funny time to be leaving the U.K., what with Britain’s im-pending musical invasion of North America, along with a working-class film wave and other cultural stylings that were having a major impact across the Western world. Not long after seeing the Beatles

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In 1977, he started his own company, Independent Pictures, which produced films with Wilson (My Amer-ican Cousin), Phillip Borsos (The Grey Fox) and Gordon Pinsent (John and the Missus).

O’ Brian was initially reluctant to work on the groundbreaking Outrageous! “The director, Richard Benner, had asked me to produce it because I had done some low-budget films,” he says, but O’Brian was doing another film at the time so he said “no.” Eventually, he wound u=p as the film’s assistant pro-ducer. “It was made for $165,000. It was just full of life. A joyful appreciation of gay culture. The timing of it was great.”

O’Brian made the most of the tax-shelter era. “The critics were saying, ‘Where are the Canadian films? Where is the quality?’ It was over so quickly,” says O’Brian. The tax-shelter period did result in a slew of bad Canadian imitations of bad American movies and many an unwatchable, unreleased production. O’Brian, though, had a knack for navigating the era to find funding for some quality works. His tax-shelter productions included Fast Company (directed by David Cronenberg), My American Cousin and The Grey Fox. “I thought, ‘This is what we’re talking about. This is what the tax shelter is about.’”

It was on a Vancouver tax-shelter shoot (Mr. Pat-man) that O’Brian met Phillip Borsos. O’Brian was line-producing when Borsos showed up during pre-production as the Directors Guild’s on-set observer. “In comes this tall, intense kid,” says O’Brian, “with all kinds of hair.” Young Borsos was a passionate aspiring feature filmmaker. “I was delighted by him. It’s not as if we had things in common—but he wanted everything to be done really, really well and I liked him a lot.”

Not much else about that shoot delighted O’Brian. “It should have been like a small British movie starring Tom Courtney, but it turned out to be James Coburn with the guy who directed King Kong.” At logger-heads with director John Guillermin (“He used me as a whipping boy”), O’Brian was done before shooting started. He had, however, been introduced to Borsos. “Phillip and I had a spark between us when we met, so the following year, he came to see me in Toronto. He wanted to make this film about [the famous B.C. outlaw] Bill Minor. Phillip grew up in the Okanagan Valley and later in Maple Ridge, close to Minor’s rob-beries, so the legend had been part of his growing up. He wanted me to produce it.”

Like almost any boy born in 1947 in Toronto—or anywhere in North America—O’Brian grew up on Westerns. He was infatuated with Borsos’s idea for The Grey Fox, a movie that would recreate Canada’s Old West and the outlaw life of Bill Minor. Borsos wanted O’Brian to help produce and was on his way to Swe-den to ask Jan Troell (The Emigrants) to direct.

“I was in Florida that winter,” O’Brian recalls. “On the flight back I saw Phillip’s short, Spartree. It was so good. When I found out he directed this, I couldn’t believe it. He was so young. So I said, ‘Why don’t you direct this film? I’ll produce it if you direct it.’”

Troell also urged Borsos to direct it himself. Eventu-ally, Borsos came around, and the result was a fistful of Genies, including Best Picture, Director and Screen-play. The Grey Fox screenwriter, John Hunter, who ear-lier had worked with O’Brian on the wrestling drama Blood & Guts, says, “Peter’s great to work with. He’s the best kind of producer for a writer because he gives you encouragement to go forth, which we needed on that project. He lets you be, then responds to what you turn in.” It’s a refreshing way to go about produc-ing, says Hunter. “The problem with Canadian film is there’s so much interference. You might be surprised

at Maple Leaf Gardens in 1964, O’Brian was playing guitar for the Whiskey Sours, which, along with original material, cov-ered the British bands.

Focused on his rock group, O’Brian unceremoniously dropped out of the University of Toronto. His parents, however, held out hope for him to be-come a lawyer or stock broker, so when, in 1966, all of the band’s equipment was stolen, it was time for a heart to heart talk. O’Brian agreed to return to univer-sity, but he had fallen for the movies—especially the art-house variety—and

wanted to attend film school. Accepted into Boston’s Emerson College in film

studies, O’Brian also found time for anti-Vietnam War protests and attending great music venues whose of-ferings ranged from the Velvet Underground to Dave Brubeck. In school, O’Brian had little interest in direct-ing. “When we made films at Emerson, I found ev-erybody in the class wanted to be the director. I was the guy talking film stock and locations—the producer guy.” At the college, there was a film professor who loved Canada’s National Film Board, so if British cul-ture seemed to follow O’Brian when he returned to Canada, Canada was now following him to the U.S.

Moving back to Toronto after graduation in 1969, a screening of Goin’ Down the Road at the New Yorker theatre provided new purpose for O’Brian. “When we left the theatre, I said to my friend Chris Dalton, ‘Let’s make movies about Canada, in our own voices.’ And I’ve never wanted to do anything else since.”

So began a career that—sometimes carefully planned, sometimes fortuitous—would have O’Brian collaborating with half the legendary Canadian artists of the 1970s and ’80s. O’Brian and Dalton Productions would make Me, an adaptation of Martin Kinch’s play, financed by a low-budget fund offered by Telefilm’s predecessor, the Canadian Film Development Corpo-ration. He also found work on other producers’ proj-ects, starting with a second assistant director gig on Ivan Reitman’s first movie, Foxy Lady.

Top: The Grey Fox (Phil-lip Borsos, 1982). Photo courtesy TIFF

Bottom: O’Brian doubling in David Cronenberg’s Fast Company. Photo courtesy Peter O’Brian

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by how they impose their own ideas. That’s why they make so many bad movies.”

Sandy Wilson met O’Brian through Borsos, who grew up not far from her in the Okanagan. Besides The Grey Fox, O’Brian produced and Borsos directed One Magic Christmas and Far From Home. After read-ing Wilson’s My American Cousin screenplay, Bor-sos helped to arrange a meeting between her and O’Brian. When Wilson opened the door to O’Brian’s offices in Toronto, she was greeted by Borsos’s future wife, Beret, who was working the desk at Independent Pictures.

Beret Borsos says O’Brian and her late husband had an unusually close director-producer working relation-ship. “He and Phillip shared a bond in filmmaking and friendship that made something about the projects they made together indivisible between the two of them. They had a great partnership.”

For O’Brian, it came down to trusting the talent he had found. “Phillip was an inspired visual talent. Sandy was going to have wonderful performances and prob-ably it was going to be funny. I wanted to let them do what they could and have a real chance to realise the film as they saw it.”

One reason O’Brian has been so liked by his direc-tors is that he fully buys into the auteur theory of ar-tistic autonomy popularised by the French New Wave. “The author of the film has to be one person and that is the director—in independent films especially,” says O’Brian. “My approach to all of that is they know what they’re trying to do and have the talent to do it.” On occasion, he may notice something gone awry and notify the filmmaker. “Mainly not,” he says. “For me, it’s all about supporting them to realise their vision, to make their dream come true.”

O’Brian mentions Borsos’s ill-fated Bethune, which was undermined by conflict involving the director, pro-ducers, screenwriter and star. “They [the producers] re-edited it. They did all this stuff. How could that film come to life?” His support for auteur directors isn’t the only thing that distinguishes O’Brian from so many producers. He also has a passion for Canadian cinema that isn’t confined to his pictures and their profits. He wants to know the answer to our national query: How can Canadian film come to life?

It’s a question that’s preoccupied O’Brian, leading him to other pursuits such as the director of the Ca-nadian Film Centre (CFC) for three years, the chair of TVOntario, sitting on the boards of numerous film or-ganisations (Toronto International Film Festival, Acad-emy of Canadian Film and Television) and, eventually, his directorial debut, Hollywood North.

Wayne Clarkson found a lot to be happy with when he followed O’Brian as director of the CFC. “He had done a very impressive job of getting it established. I kept in touch with him and relied on his expertise.” Clarkson has deep personal ties with O’Brian that go back to the 1970s. (For one, O’Brian’s wife, MP and MD Carolyn Bennett, was the Clarkson family doctor.) “The man has integrity,” says Clarkson. “The films he’s produced in this country are second to none. He’s a committed Canadian producer who places talent—writing, directing, performance—above everything else.”

For O’Brian, The Grey Fox and My American Cousin were everything Canadian film should be. “A creative cinema of personal expression, and also a popular cin-ema,” he says. “My ambition for us, for our cinema, is that. With exceptions, we didn’t accomplish that. And we never will in the way that I hoped.”

So, after a lifetime of making Canadian classics, O’Brian is not confident about the future of his coun-

try’s movie-making. “There has to be a relationship between the filmmaker and the audience. Ultimately, at the receiving end there has to be an audience that really wants it,” he says. “Our popular cinema in Can-ada has been Hollywood. We could never get anything going that could compete with its films and its fan-tastic promotion.” The occasional breakout English-Canadian film “had to exist on its own,” O’Brian says, never getting the momentum that comes with a wave of popular movies. “To break the Hollywood grip on Canada’s audiences has been impossible.”

This, of course, has been different in Quebec. “They want to see their own films in their own language. The French audience wants it.” That’s because Que-bec has a de facto quota system called the French lan-guage. Whenever quotas or other strong film policy have been raised in English-language Canada, though, politicians have caved before the tough opposition of Hollywood’s studios and their Canadian reps, backing away from such tried-and-true options for defend-ing a domestic cinema such as South Korea’s screen quota system, Norway’s community control of theatres or France’s 11 percent solution, where much of every ticket sold goes to French filmmakers.

“I hope something like that happens. We have nev-er had the political will to do that,” O’Brian says. “Ev-ery film initiative starts as a cultural or even a national initiative and very quickly becomes an industrial and economic initiative about making money.”

O’Brian’s one directorial turn, Hollywood North (2003), a satirical look at the tax-shelter era, addresses some of the continuing woes of Canadian filmmak-ing. He started on Hollywood North as its producer, but after several directors fell by the wayside and the script’s main character shifted from an actor to a pro-ducer, O’Brian signed on as director. “It was about my experience as a producer, and it occurred to me one day, ‘Maybe I can get this made if I direct it.’ I loved it and I’m proud of it. I would like to do it again. I had not enough time [17 days] but wonderful actors.”

Despite its great cast—Alan Bates, Lindy Booth, Matthew Modine, Deborah Kara Unger, Jennifer Tilly, Saul Rubinek—it faced the usual problems for Cana-dian filmmakers. “We don’t know whether people might have been moved by it,” O’Brian says. “It wasn’t promoted. I was thrilled to be able to do it, but it didn’t spark the conversation about Canadian film that I wish it had.”

Still, it’s never too late to start that conversation again. Never too late, also, to create a body of work as a director. “There are new projects I would like to do,” O’Brian says. “One I would like to, and expect to, direct. As you go along, I think you are more comfortable about the truth, about being relentless and say-ing it.”

David Spaner has worked as a feature writer, fillm critic and editor for numer-ous publications. His latest book is Shoot It! Hollywood Inc. and the Rising of Inde-pendent Film.

Top: Peter O’Brian accept-ing a Genie award for The

Grey Fox. Photo courtesy Peter O’Brian

Bottom: Peter O’Brian at the TVO headquarters.

Photo courtesy Peter O’Brian and TVO.


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by SUZAN AYSCOUGHThe man is the stuff of legend—a novelist, graphic art-ist, producer, actor and, of course, director of Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy and Pacific Rim.

Yet the mighty Guillermo del Toro has chosen To-ronto as his new home, and added another house to his collection. He made it official with a place in the Beaches, not far from work at Pinewood Studios.

Fresh off his $400-million box-office hit Pacific Rim, del Toro and producer Callum Greene spoke unguard-edly with Academy chair and producer Martin Katz at the 2nd annual In Conversation, a private, one-hour talk during TIFF.

Del Toro’s colourful storytelling captivated a group of some 250 Academy members and Pinewood guests with vivid accounts of everything from lost socks and a passion for goat-cheese ice cream to his disastrous turn as a used-car salesman. The common thread in all the tales was: No matter the outcome, he believes in “telling the truth.”

“The first job I had was as a used-car salesman,” he says with a chuckle. “And I’m the worst car salesman in the world. Number one they asked me, ‘Is this car good?’ I would say, ‘Not really.’” Everyone laughs. He continues wryly, “I would immediately come clean and tell them what was wrong with the car.” He pauses. “That’s not a good feature.”

People start laughing out loud. Del Toro’s a prime candidate for honourary Canadian citizenship just be-cause of his super-self-deprecating stand-up comedian style. He’s humble. He’s funny. It’s an endearing com-bination. In one short hour, it becomes hard to believe that del Toro creates mesmerising monsters in block-buster movies yet seems so indelibly human.

“The second thing I would do is always give them the best price, right away,” he continues. “So my fa-ther employed me for two years and I had sold no cars. Zero cars.”

Del Toro preferred his second career in real-estate sales, back in his native Mexico. “I liked it because you could be honest and work hard and actually create good places for people to live. So I worked and I really enjoyed it. Not that different from producing.” (We’ll get to that.)

The point is that the story—a humble confession, if you will—makes it easy to see how this astonish-ingly creative filmmaker from Mexico quickly gains people’s trust in the smoke and mirrors world of show business. He and Callum Greene both exude the rare quality of honesty.

That’s especially lucky for Canada. When del Toro raved about how much he loved

Toronto—from its world-class studios and crews to bookstores—it clearly came straight from the heart. “Every time I can, I will shoot in Toronto,” he said. “Very good, very good crews, very good food, very good bookstores and great studios.”

Born in Guadalajara, del Toro has lived in Los Ange-les, Wellington, Austin, Madrid, Budapest and Prague, among other places, but today he calls Toronto his home. And he’s on the lot at Pinewood Toronto Stu-dios, working with Greene in various stages of pre-production on four or more projects, including a pilot for a TV series, The Strain, and Crimson Peak, a feature for Legendary Pictures.

Guillermo del Toro

Top, left to right: del Toro, Academy Chair Martin Katz and producer Callum Greene

BelowMartin Katz (left) and Callum Greene

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It is also gratis Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros.’ confidence in the duo shooting the $190-million (ac-cording to Wikipedia) Pacific Rim at Pinewood Toronto Studios that this major Hollywood studio has developed the confidence to shoot tent-pole pictures in Ontario.

Del Toro’s great experience on Mimic in Toronto was partly the reason to come back and hire the same team. “Most of my crew on Mimic returned on Pacific Rim,” del Toro recalls, praising them lavishly. For Pa-cific Rim, he and Greene hired 2,000 Canadians—in-cluding notable professionals such as Laird McMurray (SFX) and Robin Cook (casting), many of whom are also working on the new projects.

Callum Greene takes the time to explain the evolu-tion of their relationship in Toronto: “Pacific Rim was a large movie and needed a lot of stage space,” he says. “Ironically, Universal had put down a deposit for the stages at Pinewood for a film that was cancelled. Universal had faith; it had just done The Thing. It had a relationship up here; Warner Brothers hadn’t been here for years.

“Universal also liked it because it got its deposit back,” Greene continues, “because suddenly there was someone coming in, and Pinewood worked very nicely with

us to let that transition be as smooth as possible. What I found is Universal invested in the filmmakers and the continued relationship—which is why we’re back.”

Another reason is the price was right. “We came in a day under schedule and about $1-million under budget, two years later,” Greene says of the Pacific Rim shoot. “So it was great, and now Warner knows Toronto is an entity and something to be looked at. For Crimson Peak, for us it was a no-brainer—we’re going to come back.”

On Pacific Rim, the duo used every stage at Pine-wood Toronto Studios. “We filled up the whole thing,” Greene says. “In fact we took one stage and split it into two. That was the first thing we did, six months before filming. We had one, two, three, four, seven, eight, nine, jumbo, and then Studio 54 picked up, I think in the spring, so we immediately booked that, put a helicopter in it, did some stuff there. And across the way, they’re building three new stages now, which we’ve seen go up and we’ll probably take them on the next one. It’s great, it’s a home base from which to strike out to locations.”

Del Toro picks up where Greene leaves off. “What was great was we were producing Pacific Rim and Mama at the same time. We literally would roll down the corridor to Mama in the morning. It’s what I’m also doing right now. I go in the morning to Pinewood to talk about Crimson Peak for two hours and then I go to The Strain.” (Del Toro is making The Strain with lo-cal producer J. Miles Dale, who also produced Mama.)

Del Toro’s abundant praise of Toronto later ignited a spontaneous proposal from the audience. “In rec-ognition of the obvious mutual affection between To-ronto and you, and with the utmost respect for your Mexican heritage, I would like to propose that you henceforth be known as Guillermo del Toronto.” The Trump ballroom exploded with laughter and applause; del Toro took the bait. “I like that,” he said playfully.

“Hey listen, I second that notion. I love Canada be-cause we have truly Mexican-like crews. We will kill or die for the movie we’re making. You find that passion with Toronto crews. It really is very similar. And, you become a family.

“When we were shooting Pacific Rim, we truly had that type of experience, and it’s rare, it’s rare,” he continued. “I’ve shot everywhere in the world. To-ronto is really one of the few places where you find that people in the crew are enjoying life on the set. They don’t say, ‘Oh, my family life’ and ‘My life is over there, and I’m here working for this movie.’ Working on the movie is the family. And it becomes a beautiful endeavour, so I would gladly accept a change in my passport. Del Toronto is good.”

Del Toro’s connection to Canada actually runs deep-er. He has helped several Canadian filmmakers, includ-ing Vincenzo Natali who made Splice. “The case of Vincenzo is the only time when somebody has called me and said, ‘Can you come on board as producer to help the financing?’ I did it because, when I met with Vincenzo in Portugal, Vincenzo had had Splice for years and he couldn’t get it made.

“I said, ‘Yes, but only if it is the movie you really really really would die to do.’ And he said, ‘This is the one I would die to do.’ I was reading it and when the monster gets into the intestine with Adrien Brody, I went, ‘Oh my God.’”

The talk turned to exemplary filmmakers such as Al-fred Hitchcock—an avid storyboardist who imagined a film in his head—versus a director like David Cronen-berg, who tries to forget everything he ever thought about the movie when he shows up on set with the actors, and how control and creativity compete.

Del Toro says he falls “between the two. No matter how precise you are, part of your craft is dealing with accident and compromise. As powerful as a director can be, sunset is sunset, I mean it happens at 7. You know what I’m saying? You can be ‘I am Kubrick!’ Yeah, well, goodnight.

“The sun is going to set,” he continues. “Your day is going to be over. How you deal with that is your part of your craft. You can be a director who says, ‘I need another day, OK?’ or ‘I’m going to make it a night scene’ or make them turn on a flashlight or whatever, but you’re dealing with compromise.

“I always quote a famous anecdote about Kubrick, which shows him as the epitome of the controlling filmmaker and control master. When Kirk Douglas had an accident on set and the insurance started paying Kubrick for him to stop the clock, Kubrick wrote to Douglas and said, ‘Could you please stay in bed an-other week? I’m just figuring out the movie.’ So that means they had been shooting, and some portion of the movie was still unfinished. So, yes, there are the poles between control and impulse, and I think film-making cannot be entirely just one thing. The freest filmmaker still has a schedule. He or she still has to do seven days, or eight days, whatever the shoot is, so it’s always a fight between those two.”

Greene says it’s also a matter of keeping it simple and dealing in the moment. “I think you just approach it with honesty and it is that balance of how much planning you can do, but you also want to give free-dom from the moment you arrive on set. And as long as enough pieces are there, then that freedom is pro-vided,” he says. “It’s definitely easier when the rela-tionship keeps going, to know what a filmmaker likes. Guillermo likes that—it’s good to know. Sofia [Cop-pola on Lost in Translation] liked things a completely different way. They’re just different shades of ap-proaching the same subject matter. Guillermo works

one I would die to do.’ I was reading it and when the monster gets into the intestine with Adrien Brody, I went, ‘Oh my God.’”

The talk turned to exemplary filmmakers such as Al-fred Hitchcock—an avid storyboardist who imagined a film in his head—versus a director like David Cronen-berg, who tries to forget everything he ever thought about the movie when he shows up on set with the actors, and how control and creativity compete.

“Toronto is one of the few places where you find that people in the crew are enjoying life on the set.”—Guillermo del Toro

in a particular way; it’s his movie. My job is to sort of put pieces together to give him as much as he wants, so when he arrives, there’s also the flexibility to have fun and muck around and be creative.”

Greene also says that del Toro is both an ace pro-ducer and writer. “He wears the producer hat really well, and the writer hat, and knows when to put them on and off, which is very helpful.” He offers an ex-ample. “Today we met for budget conversations and approaches on Crimson Peak and we can jump from post-production to prep, across the board, because I stay on for the whole project with him. That’s also great. And I don’t like lying; neither does he. That helps. The price will be the price.”

Honesty is rare in the film business, but Greene says lying doesn’t help get the job done. “It doesn’t help me, so we’re honest,” he says. “We try, and we also say where we hope we’re going to do better, but it’s the same in our relationship as well. When I was start-ing out, sometimes I tried to keep things from the di-rector. ‘Maybe he won’t notice that we didn’t get that piece of furniture,’ and then, in their mind, he or she has planned the entire scene around the piece of fur-niture, and if it’s not there, that doesn’t help anyone.”

Started by three of Mexico’s most successful and ac-claimed directors, Cha Cha Cha, del Toro’s company with two of his closest friends, Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu, is also based on tight, honest relationships, in this case lifelong ones.

“I talk to Alfonso as much as I talk to my mother,” del Toro says. “We’re really, really good friends. And I talk to Alejandro as much as I talk to Alfonso. And it has come to a place that I think a real friendship is, when you embrace your vulnerabilities and you forgive your successes. When you love someone and they’re successful and you don’t feel that horrible pang of envy, you feel joy for their success, that’s a real friend. When you can be yourself with that friend, that’s the crowning glory. Because I think we’re all human.

“You can be the legend outside,” he said. “You can be Orson Wells, and Orson Wells was Orson Wells. Hitchcock was Hitchcock, but when Hitchcock was home, Hitchcock had to ask where his socks were. ‘I can’t find my socks!’ I’m sure Orson Wells had equally domestic necessities. That’s the tenor of a friendship. Directorially, I can ask Alfonso, ‘Where are my socks?’ And then Alfonso can admit he has not washed the dishes and can I help him. We can be vulnerable with each other, and that’s huge. You need that possibility in a business that is compiled mostly of people that will say they love you and then screw you to the ground. You need to find people who truly love you and allow yourself the luxury of vulnerability.”

Del Toro says the need for humanity and trust is a big part of his work, including Pacific Rim. “Each char-acter comes to that realisation,” he says. “Charlie Day [playing Dr. Newton Geiszler] has to trust the other scientist [Dr. Gottlieb], whom he hates profoundly. And when he says, ‘You’re going to do this with me, for me,’ and they have to drift together, the father has to trust the daughter. Pentecost [Idris Elba] has to trust not only that his daughter is capable but that she needs to guard him, protect him. It literally is themati-cally what the movie is about. There’s not a man or a woman that stands alone.

“When we trust someone else,” he says, “is the best moment of our humanity.”

Suzan Ayscough writes freelance feature articles through her company OnCamera3000. She is also the Director, Communications at the Academy of Cana-dian Cinema & Television.

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Left, top to bottom:Academy of Canadian Cinema & Televi-sion members with del Toro. Martin Katz and Callum Greene. Katz and Greene share a laugh.

Right, top to bottom:Pinewood CEO Blake Steels and Academy CEO Helga Stephenson. A full house for del Toro’s In Conversation With.Guillermo del Toro speaking with Martin Katz.


LEE GORDON

FIRST WOMAN IN THE DGC

IN APPRECIATION

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by KIVA REARDONIt says something about Canadian film history that a Google search of “Lee Gordon” brings up few results. Even a visit to TIFF’s Film Reference Library yields little information, beyond short mentions in industry periodicals. This doesn’t suggest that Gor-don is not worthy of remembering. Like much of our national cinematic heritage, people and films that broke new ground tend to get overlooked, slipping

through the historical cracks. (The National Film Board’s digital archive is actively working to counter this.) Of course, undervaluing national works is by no means a purely Canadian characteristic, and as art is said to expand horizons, it’s perhaps natural that we tend to look beyond our own borders for inspiration. While this can counter an insular mind-set, in this outward-looking quest there is the risk of failing to recognise what is taking place at home. Which brings us back to Gordon.

Gordon’s career spanned an incredibly rich period, from the 1940s to the 1980s. Over those 40-odd years, she became one of the few female producers working in Hollywood in the late 1950s; co-founded the production company Westminster Films; became a founding member of the Directors Guild of Canada; and produced over 200 films. Summarising her career, then, is no easy task, and as such it seems easiest to begin with the basics.

Gordon was born in Saskatchewan in 1926 and was, by all accounts—at the time of printing she was too ill to be interviewed—interested in the arts from an early age. Working as a high school teacher while still a teen, Gordon first took to the stage in school productions. It was thanks to her stage presence that she met Don Haldane, who would later become her business partner and husband. In his memoir, A Kid From Olds, Haldane recalls seeing Gordon in a play in Stroud, Ontario, when he was stationed nearby at Camp Borden during World War II. “I saw her perform in her high school play,” he writes, “thought she was outstanding and went backstage to tell her so.”

Haldane and Gordon began a relationship while she continued her studies, which laid the groundwork for her transition from theatre to film. In the 1940s, Holly-wood had yet to see its post-war boom, and at home, the NFB had only just been founded (thanks to John Grierson and the 1939 National Film Act). A career in film—now an established vocation, with numerous colleges and universities offering courses on the sub-ject—was hardly a common path to take, especially for a woman. So Gordon pursued theatre, maintaining her passion for the performing arts at Iowa State Uni-versity in the drama department. After convocation, she went on to Columbia University’s writing program, studying there from 1946-1947. Tying the knot with Haldane after she finished at Columbia, the pair re-mained in New York while he finished his courses at New York University (NYU).

Though this was long before cinema studies was considered an area for academic pursuit, NYU already had a core group of people interested in the medium. One of them was Haig Manoogian, the professor who would go on to establish the school’s film studies de-partment and teach the likes of Martin Scorsese. Gor-don and Haldane became close with Manoogian who, on the cusp of a new decade, founded the production company Films for Children. It was there that Gordon would truly begin her film education.

With no formal training, Gordon learned the trade the old-fashioned way: starting at the bottom. She began as production assistant with Films for Children in 1949, soon moving up to script supervisor and film editor, eventually acting as associate producer on Man Against Crime, a television series starring Ralph Bel-lamy. By 1957, she was managing the production of the NFB’s Perspective series, which was shot across Europe and Canada. This bottom-up trajectory served her well. Years later, she said, while doing press for

The Last Act of Martin Weston (1970), “I’ve done the whole route, starting as a production assistant through script and editing up to associate and now producer. That’s the only way to understand this business.”

Gordon’s climb to the top also points to her tenac-ity, an essential quality for a producer and one that she exhibited on her first major Hollywood production, the United Artists (UA) sci-fi thriller The Lost Missile (1958). During her time on Man Against Crime, Gor-don had forged a strong relationship with director and producer William Berke. Admiring her work, Berke took Gordon back with him to Los Angeles in 1958, hiring her as an associate producer on the UA project he was helming. In a turn of events that was suited for the screen itself, Berke died on the third day of shoot-ing. Within days, Gordon made the call to keep the film going. “I stepped in as producer,” she recalled in 1970 in the Toronto Star, “and nixed the idea of stop-ping production and going for insurance money.” This steadfast determination was not only useful on set but also illustrates how, well before the Equal Pay Act (1963) or the powerful feminist voices of the 1970s, Gordon became a female producer working in Hollywood. Newspaper profiles of Gordon around the release of The Lost Missile spoke to what an incred-ible feat this was, although their tone exemplified the ingrained sexism she was up against; one headline reads, “Move Over, Men, You’ve Competition.” The authors of the pieces, all male, marvelled at how she managed to make it in “a man’s world” but subtly undermined her professional achievements by empha-sising she was “a warmly attractive lass” with a “trim and attractive” form. And yet, Gordon forged on. Following The Lost Missile, Gordon returned to Canada, where she, Haldane and Roy Kroft founded Westminster Films in 1959. Canadian Anglo cinema was struggling at the time, but the three carved a place for themselves as industrial filmmakers, shoot-ing films for Noranda Mines and INCO Industrial while also working with the CBC and Disney (Nikki, Wild Dog of the North, 1961). (It was around this time Hal-dane and Gordon separated, though they continued to work together for years.) Westminster also made charitable films for the Hospital for Sick Children, the Canada Cancer Society and adoption agencies, the latter earning Gordon some of her highest praise for the short film A Way Out (1972). As Haldane says in his memoir, the company’s eye for talent “enabled us to sometimes take on dry subjects and turn them into works of art.” In this way, Gordon embodied the ideal of the cre-ative producer: one who sees beyond the finances, call sheets and organisation, giving active input into the project’s creative vision. This big-picture thinking is further reflected in her involvement in the founding of the DGC. The only woman in the room—nothing new for Gordon—on that day in 1962, a group of 18 created what would become a cornerstone not just of the Canadian film industry but also an important part in recording its history. Given this, it is fitting that Gordon is receiving the Don Haldane Distinguished Service Award this year. She is finally getting the pro-file she deserves.

Kiva Reardon is the founding editor of cléo, a jour-nal of film and feminism, and the staff film writer for TheLoop.ca. Her work has appeared in Cinema Scope, the National Post, Maisonneuve, POV magazine, NOW magazine and others.

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Below: Lee Gordon film-ing on the set of The Lost Missile (William A. Burke, 1958). Photo courtesy the

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Michel Brault (1928-2013)By Marc Glassman

I don’t know what truth is. Truth is something unattainable. We can’t think we’re creating truth with a camera. But what we can do is reveal something to viewers that allows them to discover their own truth. —Michel Brault

In a career that stretched over more than half a century, Michel Brault created indelible images and scenes in some of the finest films ever made in Canada. His roving cam-era captured wrestlers at Montreal’s iconic Forum, snowshoers racing in Sherbrooke, Quebec and the denizens of the Ile-aux-Coudres’ delight at catching their first whale in a generation.

Brault was a great collaborator, renowned for his work with Claude Jutra and Pierre Perrault and many others. With his old friend Jutra, his sensitive camera work was instrumental in the creation of the acclaimed features A tout prendre, Kamouraska and, most famously Mon oncle Antoine. With Perrault, he co-directed two of the most remarkable documentaries produced by the NFB in the tumultuous ‘60s, Pour la suite du monde and L’Acadie, L’Acadie.

The latter, about French student protests in New Brunswick, was a precursor to his masterpiece, Les ordres, a drama based on the rounding up of Québécois intellectu-als, artists and workers during the October Crisis of 1970. Robert Fulford wrote about it: “Brault’s direction is so involving, and his use of actors so skillful, our identification [with them] is complete.”

At the 1975 Cannes film festival, Brault won the Best Director prize. It’s one of many accolades—including the Governor General’s Award and the Prix Jutra—that this great director and cinematographer garnered in his lifetime. He truly was an “homme de cinéma” and will be greatly missed.

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12th Annual DGC Awards Saturday, October 26, 2013

For a complete list of all nominees please visit www.dgc.ca

CONGRATULATIONSTO ALL DGC AWARDS NOMINEES!

T H A N K Y O U T O O U R S P O N S O R S

P A T R O N S P O N S O R S

G O L D S P O N S O R S

C O N T R A S P O N S O R S

B R O N Z E S P O N S O R S

S I L V E R S P O N S O R S

P L A T I N U M S P O N S O R

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Montage Magazine Fall 2013

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