Montage Magazine Fall 2014

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6 Viewpointby Tim Southam

Editor’s noteby Marc Glassman

7 Listen Up!by Brian Baker The 1% SolutionHow to fund authoredwork in Canada

10 Spirit of Place by Kendrie Upton Growing Into ItAn idyllic childhoodin the country inspiresa top location manager

50Parting Shot by Tom McSorleyPeter Harcourt1931-2014Remembering an iconicCanadian film teacherCO

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IN CONVERSATION WITH…TIM SOUTHAM by MARC GLASSMANThe career and thoughts of the new chair of the DGC are discussed in this far-ranging interv iew conducted by the editor of Montage

LA COLLABORATION ENTRE LE RÉALISATEUR ET L’ASSISTANT-RÉALISATEURTIM SOUTHAM INTERVIEWS ARCAND, S IMONEAU AND FALARDEAU ON ASSISTANT DIRECTORSedited by MARTIN DELISLE

CLEMENT VIRGO’S THE BOOK OF NEGROES by ADAM NAYMANVirgo’s adaptat ion of Lawrence Hi l l ’s award-win-ning novel i s an eager ly ant ic ipated TV ser ies

CREATIVE SASKATCHEWAN? HOW MUCH IS GOING ON IN A PROVINCE WITHOUT A TAX CREDIT?by CARLE STEELE The making of WolfCop means some f i lms wi l l be made in Saskatchewan. But what k ind of an industry wi l l develop in a province that doesn’t i ssue tax credits?

GO GREENEby ANN ELLE Justis Greene has produced films such as A History of Violence, The Time Traveler’s Wife and Snakes on a Plane. Montage’s Ell caught him on the set of the TV series Bates Motel and found out more about this veteran B.C. producer

I AM TRACEY by SUZAN AYSCOUGH Prof i le of Tracey Deer, d i rector, wr i ter and f i lmmaker

ROLLING ON THE ROCK by JASON ANDERSONAs Republic of Doyle enters its final season on CBC, Allan Hawco and four DGC members from the mainland relate their experiences working in Newfoundland on this long-running series

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DIRECTORS GUILD OF CANADApublisher

Tim Southam, president Brian Baker, national executive director [email protected]

associate publisherAlejandra SosaeditorMarc Glassmanart directorAlexander Altercopy editorJocelyn Laurencecontent managerAnne-Marie Stuart

photo researchNick Gergesha

advertising salesAnne-Marie StuartDirectors Guild of [email protected]

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

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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 2014 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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As editor of Montage, I’m pleased to thank Tim Southam for his gracious “view-

point” on the DGC’s magazine and staff. We enjoy the challenge of putting out

a publication that reflects the goals and concerns of a Guild that advances the

cause of media culture—and, of course, the needs of its members—in our coun-

try. It’s our job to advance the Guild’s positions on policy issues while offering in-

cisive pieces about important DGC-staffed films and television productions being

made here. As a corollary, we write about Guild artists who are making an impact

through their work. It’s an exciting time to be making work in Canada and I hope

we convey some of that enthusiasm in Montage.

This being the first issue with Tim ensconced as president, it makes sense to have our regular interview feature “in

conversation” with Mr. Southam. The Guild’s membership will be keenly interested in its new leader; this is clearly the

time to find out more about him. In our conversation, interested Guild members and general readers will discover much

about Tim’s work, which, like that of past presidents Allan King and Sturla Gunnarsson, has traversed the terrains of

feature narrative films, documentaries and television dramas. That diverse background has served the Guild well before

and it’s clear Tim Southam intends, as King and Gunnarsson did, to take on a strong leadership role, aided by extensive

experience in many genres of media work.

We were lucky to have Tim involved as the moderator/interlocutor of a panel discussion with Denys Arcand, Yves

Simoneau and Pierre Falardeau about the relationship between directors and their assistants. The conversation was in

French and is published in its own language in this issue—a breakthrough for Montage. We are publishing an English

translation of it on the DGC / Montage website. This is a new initiative that we will continue in future issues.

Our cover story is on veteran DGC director Clement Virgo, who is just completing a dream project, the adaptation

of Lawrence Hill’s excellent novel The Book of Negroes. Appropriately, he was photographed in one of the few remaining

antiquarian bookshops in Toronto, David Mason Books. As a former owner of an independent bookstore, Pages, I am

personally very pleased to see Clement’s love of literature reflected beautifully in the environment of such a great shop.

Adam Nayman’s profile of Clement Virgo ushers in two other fine portraits of DGCers, Justis Greene and Tracey Deer.

It’s a pleasure to acknowledge their work in these pages. Finally, Carle Steel offers a hard-hitting look at what’s hap-

pening in Saskatchewan—a province without a tax credit system—while Jason Anderson celebrates Newfoundland and

Republic of Doyle.

We hope you enjoy this issue of Montage—and please join us in welcoming on board Tim Southam.

MARC GLASSMANEDITOR

editor’s note

viewpoint

by BRIAN BAKER

Call it a bend or shift in ideology or an excellent business move. Either way, a 1% realignment of the existing Canadian funding system would see a boom for our talent, our culture and our economy.

In the last issue of Montage, it was argued our industry needs to gener-ate more work that puts Canadian creators on the crest of production. Television series provide opportuni-ties to a variety of DGC members. For director members, high-level series work brings acclaim and significant income. But if we are to advance our talents, develop our voices and express our culture, we need every industry stakeholder to get behind Canadian-authored work. Directors who also write or writer-director teams need their nar-rative feature films and documenta-ries to be supported and financed. Their work, their success and their talents will then migrate to, and generate success at, the television level. By doing this we will create global hits and ensure our own future viability.

The Canadian Media Land-scape’s Major IssueCanada is ranked as the third-largest movie-watching nation in the world, yet we have not built the feature film side of our industry to match this demand. Canadian films make up only 6% of the sec-tor’s overall production. This is due in part to the risk associated with feature films in the market, a risk largely manufactured via ever-changing policies and support mechanisms for producers and distributors. The Standing Com-mittee on Canadian Heritage had

identified an absence of broadcast-ing policy to support the promotion of Canadian feature films.

A 2009 Telefilm study notes, “Un-like the situation in Europe, the Canadian broadcasting system has not supported Canadian filmmakers to the degree that is necessary. In that sense, the government’s feature-film policy is operating in a silo of its own, instead of being integrated and supported by our broadcasting system. This needs to change.”

Canada’s relatively small population and proximity to the United States necessitate safeguards and support mechanisms for cultural industries like the feature-film sector. The conventional broadcaster business model favours simulcasts of U.S. TV series and Canadian versions of reality shows over original fiction or documentaries made by Canadians. In Europe and elsewhere, broad-casters and distributors provide this support.

Canada’s broadcasting regulator, the CRTC, has made several deci-sions aimed at promoting Canadian film and greater access to Canadian content. These measures have all failed in their implementation.

There is a solution to the problem, one that does not rely on new, ad-ditional sources of taxpayer dollars. It relies instead on common sense and the simple modification of ex-isting arrangements. Broadcasters’ support can be gained with new spending representing 1% of their overall revenue on feature films and documentaries. The resulting boost to Canadian filmmakers and writers would be astounding. The crest and the wake of this decision are directly linked to how the CRTC works and enforces its mandate and how the big stakeholders interpret that mandate.

Programs of National InterestIn 2010 the CRTC adopted a policy–later to become a condition of license for major private broadcast-ers–to allocate 5% of revenues as an expenditure requirement for the production of Programs of National Interest (PNI). PNI is a category that includes dramatic series, comedy series, award shows, theatrical features and long-form documenta-ries–more than a dozen categories and sub-categories overall. But this

With our own medium in flux, filmmakers can be forgiven for looking upon the up-

heavals facing magazines as an unsettling cautionary tale. Much has been made of

the challenges facing printed words and pictures. Yet as I consider all the tools that

help people everywhere to understand the Directors Guild of Canada’s membership

and what we do, Montage magazine and its online version strike me as among the

most supple and accessible.

Each issue evolves with the times, evolves with our members, evolves with the

hot topics of the day. Each issue is a fresh opportunity to innovate on content and

design. Each issue can be mailed anywhere, picked up any time, distributed to any office, any forum. More and more

issues can be consulted online. The accumulating web archive of Montage issues and accompanying video is a precious

record of our members’ achievements and values going back in time. And it can evolve forever.

This issue, the first since I was elected National President, builds on the editorial team’s work over many years.

We have added a French feature article to the mix and its English version will be available online at the DGC Montage

website. We continue to look for excellence wherever it thrives in Canada and around the world. We continue to make the

point that talent knows no limits—geographic, cultural or otherwise—and we aim to set a standard of inclusiveness, of

diversity, of quality for all who thumb these pages, literally or electronically. We continue to assert that film begins with

people and the Directors Guild of Canada exists to protect and promote these very people—our workplace rights, our

creative opportunities and our livelihoods.

Welcome to this generation of Montage. My thanks to our dedicated Editorial Board and to the team at the helm:

Editor Marc Glassman and Designer Alex Alter, ably supported by Communications Director Alejandra Sosa.

TIM SOUTHAMPRESIDENT, DIRECTORS GUILD OF CANADA

How Canada’s funding system can create a boom in

authored work. The DGC’s “asks”are in italics and offer

a cheap solution to an on-going problem

LISTENUP

TheSolution

1%


well-intended policy did not address all forms equally.

PNI is failing theatrical feature films and long-form documentaries be-cause broadcasters overwhelmingly prefer dramatic series. They more effectively aggregate audiences and build brand power during their broadcast run.

The state of the feature film within the broadcast television sector is dire. Despite TV being the preferred way in which Canadians watch movies, broadcasters have drastically reduced their support for Canadian film. In the English market alone, direct broadcaster support for feature film went from $16.3-million in 2003 to just $3.3-million in 2011. That’s a drop of 79%.

To help reverse this pattern, and ensure PNI resources are available to support the production and use of theatrical feature films and long-form documentaries, the CRTC should increase the PNI requirement for private broadcasters from 5% to 6% and dedicate that 1% increase to aug-ment existing broadcaster spending for theatrical feature films and long-form documentaries. This requirement would be cost-neutral as it would leave unchanged the general requirement on broad-casters to spend 30% of overall revenues on Canadian Production Expenditures (CPE).

The addition of the further 1% of broadcaster revenues to PNI would result in an estimated increase of $66-million per annum towards direct production expenditures for theatrical features and long-form documentaries. It would thus annu-ally leverage another $200-million towards production.

CBCOur public broadcaster also needs to up its game. As the CBC’s mission comes up for review in the wake of recent budget cuts, it’s time for our mandated national broadcaster to embrace, once again, its founding principles. Those fundamental ideas include: “be predominantly and distinctively Canadian…actively contribute to the flow and exchange of [national] cultural expression…contribute to shared national consciousness and identity.”

It’s time for the CBC to become the home of Canadian indigenous tele-vision production. The broadcaster must strengthen its commitment to long-form drama and documentary and become the natural place to showcase the best and the brightest of our feature-film writers and directors.

Providing audience accessCanadian taxpayers support the production of Canadian films through a number of refundable tax credits made available by federal and provincial levels of government, but they see very few of the films made by the Canadian industry. Theatres are dominated by U.S. tent-pole films that leave smaller Canadian films to fight for box-office scraps. As a result, Canadian features average around 3% of total box-office revenues in Canada each year.

The CRTC requires all pay-per-view and video-on-demand (VOD) services to license all new Canadian feature films that comply with relevant industry codes and are suit-able for each service. Pay-television services, meanwhile, are subject only to an “expectation” (rather than a condition of licence) that they “license all Canadian films that are appropriate for the service.” This is a far cry from the original CRTC requirements that pay-televi-sion services license every Canadian feature film that complied with the relevant industry code and schedule those films evenly throughout their programming day.

These provisions were well-inten-tioned on the part of the regulator

but they have failed to achieve their purpose. They leave it entirely up to broadcasters to decide which films are “suitable” or “appropriate.” Approximately 100 new Canadian films per year are made available for Canadian audiences. Only a small portion are ever seen. There are serious loopholes the broadcast-ers use to minimize their obligations and thus lose sight of the CRTC’s original aim: to make virtually all feature-film productions widely available to Canadians.

Overall there has been a striking decline in the airing of Canadian feature films on English-language television, which, according to one study, has dropped from 73% (of Canadian feature-length produc-tions) to 36% between 2004 and 2011. Financing dollars from Pay TV for English-language films have also dried up, with a staggering 98% decrease from $9.2-million to just over $300,000 over that same time frame. Licence fees for Canadian films, an important marker of use, have fallen by as much as 50% in a recent two-year period.

The CRTC should clarify its regulatory requirements relating to each of the licensed pay, pay-per-view and VOD services and their obligations with respect to Canadian feature films. This could be accomplished by amending the wording in each case to reduce or eliminate the discretion available to broadcasters that flows from the use of words like “suitable” and “appropriate.”

If they do, the financing of Cana-dian feature films and accessibility to a wider national audience would be greatly improved. Over-the-top servicesIn recent years Canadian broadcast-ers have had to compete with new over-the-top (OTT) services. The most prominent is Netflix, which now has well over three million Canadian subscribers and is operat-ing under a CRTC Digital Media Exemption Order.

The Commission has repeatedly indicated that the presence of OTT providers in Canada has not had a negative impact on the ability to achieve the policy objectives of the Broadcasting Act. However, it is without question that Netflix’s unique, unregulated environ-ment has enabled it to avoid the

sector-building requirements shared by other content-providers. As a result, OTT providers operate as free riders with regard to ensuring Canadian content and culture in the broadcasting sphere. Pay-per-view providers and VOD services that compete directly with unregulated OTT providers face a regulatory requirement to contribute 5% of their revenues to the production of Canadian dramatic content. The Broadcasting Act states, “Each element of the Canadian broadcasting system shall contribute in an appropriate manner to the creation and presenta-tion of Canadian program-ming.” It’s time OTT providers, such as Netflix and others, were making such a contribution.

A solutionTheatrical feature films and long-form documentaries are the cultural heart of our industry. To create more of these authored works we need to realign our collective imperative.

We should be able to achieve these objectives without any new sources of taxpayer funds, without any new public institutions and with no fresh grants or subsidies for an already robust and growing industry. Instead we can depend on the responsible management of existing arrangements and the application of clear policy to achieve already affirmed and established goals.

Taken together, these steps would mean more resources for produc-tion, more films and guaranteed access for audiences to the films Canadians author and create.

Brian Baker is the National Executive Director of the Directors Guild of Canada.

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

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GROWING INTO IT

In his youth my brother, Rory, was hyperactive and hyper-intelligent. He stripped our Apple II computer down to its chassis and left the hubcaps spinning on the living room carpet before puberty set in. Mom was unimpressed. Until he reassembled it with no ill effect whatsoever. I still have the letter he received from an explosives company. “Dear Roderick. Thank you for your enquiry. If you’d please provide your shipping address, we would be very happy to fill your order.” He was 12. While it’s true that he had, like many six-year-old boys, wanted to become a fireman, there was a moment in time when all that shifted. Perhaps he just realized that starting fires for a living would be way more fun than extinguishing them. One year, when my parents were in pro-duction, Rory stumbled upon John Thomas’s Special Effects shop in back of Panorama Studio in West Vancouver. I’m sure it wasn’t seven seconds before he knew this was his destiny. He spent the entire summer back there as John’s youngest apprentice ever.

Then there was me. I’d been an extra in every film my father had ever made yet, much to my parent’s surprise, I had no interest in the space in front of the camera. I wasn’t drawn to film’s technical jobs either. As I came of age to enter the workforce, I found myself pinned at a crossroads. I knew that film was my home. After all, if I didn’t work in film, what the hell would I have to contribute at the Sun-day dinner table? But where exactly did I belong?

Then one day there was a knock at our oversized front door that brought with it my answer. A personable young woman introduced herself to me and explained she was a location scout looking for a place to make a movie.

“You’re a what?” My ears perked up. She explained

her job of finding locations for films as I listened in rapt amazement.

“They pay you for that?” I asked skeptically and was assured that was the case.

How could I have missed this? Those people I live with are keeping things from me. I began asking questions rapid fire. When I revealed to her that my family were all in the industry, she must have thought I was being held cap-tive and had just broken free before opening the door to her. She grabbed some photos hastily and made good her escape lest I should trap her in a Vulcan mind meld.

My mind was blown. It had never occurred to me that there was a realm in film that would allow me to explore the whole world with the same lens through which I’d seen my childhood home. Despite my family business being make-believe, somehow I thought that being an adult would mean tempering or even abandoning my reverie. The notion of being paid to search for amazing places, to this day, almost 30 years later, still makes me think that I’m pulling off a truly awesome scam. My career has taken me to many amazing places and given me unique glimpses of the world that most people never have the pleasure of experiencing. I’ve walked on the roof of BC Place stadium, flown over huge portions of British Columbia and peered into the depths of buildings, boats and dams. Some would argue that the job of Location Manager is highly administra-tive these days and they aren’t wrong. But I consider filing the paperwork to be the price of admission and, as often as not, the show is seriously spectacular.

My parents sold the family home many years ago now, remarkably returning it to the Guichon family in the process.

Mom said that after Rory and I left they began to feel as if they should close off a wing or two. So they built themselves a float-home, carrying on with the river theme, and started a new chapter. I always love hav-ing the opportunity to drive out that way, especially with people who’ve never seen the property before. It’s still got the type of street appeal that realtors dream of, majestic in its stance, historical, somehow sagacious in its beauty.

My parents celebrated their 50th anniversary this past weekend. We hosted a small dinner in our backyard. Our place is nothing special, I admit. Just a suburban lot in another part of Delta, as it turns out. As our family reflected on all that 50 years of marriage can contain, I was struck by how truly unique and special a life I’ve led and how grateful I am to them for having commuted and paid for oil heat and kept horses and insisted steadfastly that 4260 River Road West was the only place to live. Because from where I’m sitting, they could not have been more spot on.

Kendrie Upton has been a Location Manager and DGC member in B.C. since 1986. She’s also taught in the field of locations throughout her career. Her father, Keith Cutler, is a past President of the DGC National as well as a Past Chair of the DGC B.C. District Council. He received the DGC Lifetime Service Award in 2004. He and his wife, Dixie, now live in Whiterock, B.C.

Photo Left: River Road West now. Kendrie Upton as a child. Author’s print of 4260 River Road West. All photos courtesy Kendrie Upton.

one side and grazing pastures, complete with fruit trees, to the other. The river, an ever-present theme, lent an undeni-able beauty blended with an industrial charm as the fishing community was literally at our doorstep. To a five-year-old with the freedom to wander at will, this property was its own universe. Hours were spent imagining my realm to be everything from an alien planet to an ancient ruin. Our shed made a formidable castle and the hen house doubled brilliantly as a drive-in with a pick-up win-dow. In his teens, my brother took a tiger torch to a massive blackberry thicket at the rear of the property and created a thorny labyrinth with rooms and passages. I shudder to think of my own child climbing the rooftops of that massive old house across which we scurried constantly.

My connection to this land-scape was unyielding. Each hiding place was a friend to me. I understood, from among my earliest memories, the value of place and the impor-tance of setting. The way in which environments shape us and our experience and the true value of home. No two days of my youth were any-thing alike and my creativity proved to be my most trusted companion. To this day I’m happiest in my head.

This pastoral upbringing didn’t betray my dark side. I’m a proverbial film brat. My father followed his short-lived career as a cowboy with a stretch in radio that led to his starting up a production company in Van-couver long before B.C. really knew what a production was.

While he was busy writing, producing and directing, my mother learned to edit and co-produced many of his early projects. Later she returned to school and joined a public relations firm. But her escape from film was brief and soon that familiar magnetic force drew her back into “the life,” this time as a publicist.

by KENDRIE UPTON

My childhood was extraordi-narily idyllic. My father spent part of his youth in B.C.’s Chilcotin as a ranch hand and my mother, like so many girls, dreamed of horses. When they had children, they made the choice to live outside the city in what is now the large sub-urb of Delta but at the time was a reasonably small town with a rich history of fishing and farming, in a two-acre homestead in Port Guichon that we called home. The 13-room rambling antebel-lum was situated across from the south arm of the Fraser. Its massive farm-style kitchen rarely saw a meal without guests, though many were unexpected.

This had been the homestead of the Guichon family before my parents were captured by its bucolic charm. Early on, they ran a boarding stable and horse folk provided an endless loop of entertainment and affordable, if not entirely appropriate, babysitting. On Sundays my father would line the fence posts with martinis and on Mondays my mother would wonder why it was so tough to make ends meet.

The house was framed by lawns and mighty hedges in front, a fenced backyard that, in later years, included a pool, a riding ring and horse barn to

SPIRIT OFPLACE


The new President of the DGC, Tim Southam, is a man of many qualities. He possesses a fierce intelligence and strong will, vital characteristics for a film and TV director. Leavening that rock-solid core are droll wit and sophis-tication—this is a man who appreciates dance and the-atre but is just as concerned with politics and business. Southam is a nerd when it comes to governmental policy issues as well as the right kind of equipment to use on a film shoot. He burns white hot when answering ques-tions about the state of Canada’s media industries and the tough road that creative people have to travel to get work done in this country. But he is just as passionate about Aboriginal people in Canada and how their rights have been betrayed. With Tim Southam, the roles of art and politics merge.

As a director, Southam has had a diverse career. Consider-ing his wide range of interests—the performing arts, Aboriginal rights, Canadian politics, an intense love of literature—that isn’t too surprising. The main thrust in his work has been a fascination with narrative. It’s storytelling that has been his keenest pursuit, whether in documen-taries, feature films or television episodes. His love and respect for all genres in media shine through his work, as does his unyielding professionalism.

Southam’s filmography has a variety of through-lines. His weather eye for the right detail marks his work with such dance and theatre artists as Veronica Tennant (Sa-tie and Suzanne), Jean-Pierre Perreault (Danser Perreault) and Brent Carver (Home Through the Night). Southam’s appreciation of literature informs such films as David Ad-ams Richards’ Bay of Love and Sorrows and Michel Marc Bouchard’s The Tale of Teeka. His love and anger about politics fuelled Trudeau 2 and One Dead Indian. Southam’s concern for the intricacies of narration and how to effec-tively tell a story are the challenges he faces every time he directs House and Bones, the hit American TV shows that have launched him in the U.S. —Marc GlassmanTIM SOUTHAM in conversation with…

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“The directors are like giddy kids on set. They get to do things they’ve never done before.”

Montage: Your directing career begins with Satie and Suzanne. Can you tell me about it?Tim: It was a virtually narrative-free one-hour exploration of what I thought was going on inside the head of the French composer Erik Satie at a very specific moment in his life. It was as non-narrative as a film is allowed to get, and yet the most exciting formal exercise of my life in that we set ourselves the challenge of making a film that was visually born entirely of special-effects techniques that were per-formed inside the camera the way they would have been in 1923. I love to return to this kind of abstract filmmaking, as I got to do over the years with films like Perreault Dancer and, just recently, with a tribute film I made for Brent Carver’s Governor General’s Performing Arts Award. The very next thing it occurred to me to do after Satie was to go to the folks making the mainstream Global television series Traders, and to suggest to them that I become one of their writers. My objective there was to learn to write conventional narrative scripts, and by a complete set of happy accidents I ended up doing just that.

Montage: Did your business background help you?Tim: It did. Prior to becoming a filmmaker, I had studied economics and spent several years selling advertising space to bankers. That gave me what I describe as a meta-knowledge of economics and banking, which I was then more than happy to sell by the pound to Traders, the plots of which were all about the stock markets and banking in the tail end of the exciting go-go years of the ‘80s and early ‘90s when bond traders ruled the world. The people who made Traders thought this would be useful. Then I was given the opportunity to write a treatment for an episode, and then to write the episode itself. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was being helped and mentored in this activity by two of the greatest television writers in modern history—Hart Hanson, who created Bones, and David Shore, who created House, both of whom are Canadian. They showed me how to write this script, and I did my best, and we were all nominated together for Geminis for our separate scripts but I knew very well where mine had come from. At the end of that season I went back to what I really wanted to do, which was to make films. I came away from Traders with at least a slightly better ability to make narrative films. Traders taught me to make linear storytelling my mission, so I then set out to do that on a variety of long-form projects.

Montage: You were able to bring those narrative skills to Drowning in Dreams, which is a documentary.Tim: Right. I got into a more narrative form of story-telling with Drowning in Dreams, which is set on the north shore of Lake Superior and which I feel draws on the abstract dance filmmaking and the more nar-rative drive of linear storytelling that I acquired from Traders. To my mind, it was a satisfying blend, and I feel it told the story of these very real people.

Montage: I’d like you to talk about that notion of abstraction. You have very interesting abstract notions in Satie and Suzanne. You’ve got that whole sense of what cinema history was and you also evoke Preston Sturges in Drowning in Dreams. This was not normal practice for a documentary filmmaker at the time.Tim: My overriding preoccupation in both Drowning in Dreams and Satie and Suzanne was to create a state of complete suspended consciousness. The idea

I had was to use a specific menu of techniques to do this. In Drowning in Dreams the idea was to meta-phorically throw this character into Lake Superior and as the character descends towards the object of his desire, which is a sunken shipwreck, everything that happens psychologically to him and the other five narrators of the film is revealed to us. It gets particu-larly loopy when our divers are caught by rapture of the deep—nitrogen narcosis. In Satie and Suzanne we found ourselves inverting sets and using all kinds of special art department and in-camera techniques to induce a suspended state—an absinthe-driven one in Satie and Suzanne.

Montage: On The Tale of Teeka you got to work with Michel Marc Bouchard, a brilliant playwright. Did that help in the education of Tim Southam as a writer and director?Tim: My mission to essentially stalk and harass writers began early. So it seemed perfectly normal for me to stalk David Shore and Hart Hanson when I was working on Traders and it was equally normal for me to stalk, harass and otherwise badger one of our great playwrights, Michel Marc Bouchard, into allowing me to film his screen adaptation of his play L’histoire de l’Oie. Making that film introduced to me the missing link, which was how to drive a story at a prosaic level with relentless suspense and an ability to engage audiences with characters, but also to have, at a subliminal level, the element of abstraction. What I found with the making of The Tale of Teeka was that I was on the front lines of art as manifesto—the very dangerous front lines of what art could do to provoke people. As soon as the film was ready for broadcast, the Catholic School Commission in Quebec put it on their famous Index, which is to say it was censored.

Montage: Let’s abandon your film chronology and leap ahead to One Dead Indian. The Tale of Teeka dealt with the consequences of child abuse when the issue was still steeped in controversy. You were in the forefront again with One Dead Indian. What brought you to the project?Tim: One Dead Indian was also an adaptation, this time a great script by Andrew Wreggitt and Hugh Graham from an excellent non-fiction book by Peter Edwards. In terms of the question of abuse, it felt a lot like The Tale of Teeka. We were talking about a community that had been absolutely misunderstood. Our objective as filmmakers was to provide the hu-manity of the events in as cogent a way as possible. We were making a film about Mike Harris’s Conserva-tive government, which was exceeding its brief and engaging in abuses of power the likes of which we had never seen in 20th-century Ontario and which whipped a peaceful protest into the shooting of Dudley George.

Marc Glassman, Montage’s editor, talked to Tim Southam at the DGC office in Toronto about a host of subjects ranging from Canadian film policy to his own filmography.

Montage: Tim, your education was somewhat dis-parate—liberal arts and then an economics degree—and you travelled quite a bit. What was the draw for you to go into film and television?Tim: I was really a person in search of a calling. I was absolutely steeped in media. I come from a family that was involved exclusively for 125 years in getting the news out. I happened to be very interested in what it means to reach out to fellow human beings through media, and of course what is it to build a business around that. That preoccupied everyone I heard around the dinner table, all through my life, so I’m a media brat.

Montage: I thought of you first off as a writer. Would that be true?Tim: I’m a writer of essays. What I learned subse-quently as a director was that I have the ability to interpret text into something else. It means working with this road map that we call a script and doing something aggressively creative, which is transform-ing the written word into sequences of film and sound. Coming at this profession from the position of a very active reader is what all of the members of the Directors Guild of Canada do: We receive a script and we turn it into film on all screens and all formats all over the world. I also pursued something I thought would be useful, which was economics. It allowed me to understand some of the other dimensions of what our Guild is about, which is the strict economics of bringing people to work on a film project.

Previous page: a young Tim Southam. Courtesy DGC.

Top: The Bay of Love and Sorrows (Tim Southam,

2002). Courtesy Yergeau Images. Bottom left: The

Tale of Teeka/L’histoire de l’Oie (Tim Southam, 1998).

Courtesy Tim Southam. Bottom right: One Dead

Indian (Tim Southam, 2006). Courtesy Mongrel

Media

“My mission to essentially stalk and harass writers began early.”—Tim Southam


book, the play and the novel. You have been able to adapt all of them to the dramatic media of television/film.Tim: Reading well, understanding something and then translating it to the screen is what I do. On the filmmaking side, I delight in chasing down writers who have said something I would like to say differently but respectfully on film, and on the TV side it’s the same—I look for writers who are doing something I feel is making me laugh, making me cry, making me think in a different way, and who have figured out how to do it in the medium of their choice. I try to get on board with them for as long as I can.

Montage: Tim, you’ve been working a lot in the States over the past few years on the hit shows Bones and House, and some upcoming fairly hot cable shows. What’s your work experience been like there, in terms of crews and the ability for you to perform as a director?Tim: For me it comes back to this agenda of stalking great writers and, with that, looking for a chance to work and learn with the greatest actors and crews. We all want to do our best, and a director really gets to do his or her best when script, cast and crew are at their best. Bones and House are state-of-the art productions set in these hybrid “dramedy” universes I adore, and they have budgets. You’d have to be crazy not to want to have those experiences and learn everything you can from them.

Montage: When did you join the DGC?Tim: I was forced—because you literally could not direct Canadian episodic television with an accredited producer without joining the Directors Guild of Can-ada. So I was in mid-shoot on my first show, which was Blue Murder, and found myself in the position, after 10 years of directing in a non-guild posture, of being forced to join the DGC and, having done so, then discovering that here was an organization that was going to give me healthcare, which was going to eventually offer me a pension if I worked enough, which was going to defend my rights on set when the going got tough, which was going to make sure the scheduling of these shows, the workplace safety aspects and my rights as a director were reasonably protected, even in an extremely high-pressure envi-ronment like episodic television, where hard decisions have to be made every day. There are baseline rules for how these decisions are made, which are entirely the product of negotiations between the unions and the engagers. I learned all of this and, most importantly, from my point of view, here was an organization that was doing an absolutely stellar job at convincing lawmakers in Ottawa that what we do has relevance, that we are culturally and economically so important that all governments needed to continue to take an interest in homegrown filmmaking in Canada, that we had a choice between being exclusively service-providers to powerful U.S. producers and working for those people or we could also grow film and TV here. We’re still in mid-flight on that project, and the Directors Guild is heavily engaged in making that case and also internally with our partners, looking for solutions to the question of how to do this better: How can we make these films better? How can we make these series better? What should we argue for? What should we get together and workshop? How can we bring much more diversity into the mix? How can we be really, truly competitive on the world stage and also speak clearly and well to our ever-evolving

Canadian population? All of this with only 12 million households hooked up to cable and budgets a third or less of the budgets that can be achieved in the larger U.S. market.

Montage: It’s interesting that, with the exception of House and Bones, which of course are American shows, albeit with Canadian writer/producers, we’ve been really talking about Canadian artists all along. It seems to be that there is something within you, which is a true belief in Canadian art and Canadian identity. Would that be correct?Tim: For the members of the Directors Guild of Canada, in some sense there is a slogan that we could all reach for: “Proud to tell our stories, great at telling yours.” Our members are world-class filmmakers who can either make something up and move it all the way through the process to screens around the world—that would be known as domestic production or homegrown production—or we can rent or sell our services to producers from other places and provide the very best filmmaking available to those people anywhere in the world. We are extremely strong art-ists and extremely strong craftspeople and we prac-tise those skills, in some sense, in an unpredictable way. We never know if we’re going to have a chance to suddenly become financed—and a new film or series may suddenly become the next great Canadian success—or we may find ourselves working for years on other people’s work. That duality, that dichotomy between working for someone else as a filmmaker or working on your own material, is well known to all our members. It’s all good art and we’re happy to be good at both. The fact that we are seen as such cutting-edge artists that we could work on the very best shows anywhere in the world is something our members are very proud of.

Montage: Before becoming the DGC president, you were head of the NDD, the National Directors Divi-sion, for a number of years. Can you talk about that and what that role was?Tim: The National Directors Division, in bringing directors together at the national organization, has been given the informal mandate to negotiate its own contract for directors nationally. It’s the only caucus currently that negotiates a national contract for a group of members, at least within the standard agreement, which is a big piece of the country. We’re hoping something similar will evolve for the entire membership and a more nationally coherent contract will emerge for all of our categories—all of this is, of course, at the behest of our district councils, which hold our negotiating rights. The other piece of the NDD’s function is the sophisticated, multi-pronged conversation we’ve introduced through workshops and screenings and Montage and the Awards around doing what we do better and better as the playing field keeps shifting massively beneath us. Filmmaker Rob King is the newly elected NDD Chair and I’m hugely optimistic about the course he’s charting.

Montage: We talked a lot about The Tale of Teeka, among others, including the fact that you shot in both French and English and you were raised in both languages.Tim: I see our efforts to become more effective in French as simply our obligation to be vigorously representative of French-speaking members in all categories, anywhere in the country.

The real dialogue was around how to do it properly in terms of representing the Stony Point and Kettle Point communities, and telling the story in a way that made sense to everyone involved. And the dialogue was not just with our actors but also with Dudley George’s family to make sure we were doing things in a way that was representative of the com-munity, because every community is different. I found that to be far from the abstract, dream-driven world of fantasy filmmaking I had been doing up until then. I was coming back to an absolutely crucial responsi-bility to be as socially truthful as possible and for me, One Dead Indian was an exercise in being as humanly truthful as possible.

Montage: Now to peel back, to give it a bit of chronology: We jumped over The Bay of Love and Sorrows and again, having worked with Michel Marc Bouchard, you got to work with one of the great novelists in Canada, David Adams Richards. Tell me about that experience.Tim: The attraction of The Bay of Love and Sorrows was that it articulated in a very original way the story of a mid-20th-century prototype that has always interested me, which is the Gucci socialist—the socialist-in-theory who has a personal backup plan, who has money. The story in The Bay of Love and Sorrows centres on wealthy Michael Skid, returning at the age of 18 or 19 to the small town he grew up in on the Miramichi River with big ideas about com-munal living, where everyone would pool their money and live together. All of the films I have done, apart from the performing-arts films, have to do with the land. The Bay of Love and Sorrows is set in the woods along the Miramichi River, a very wild and fascinating part of the world that David Adams Richard knows inti-mately, having grown up there. Montage: Can you talk about the process of adaptation? We’ve been talking about three different forms really—the non-fiction investigative journalistic

Top Top

Top to Bottom: Haven (Syfy Network).

Courtesy eOne Films. Satie and Suzanne

(Tim Southam, 1994). Courtesy Rhombus Media.

Perrault Dancer (Tim Southam, 2005).

Courtesy Tim Southam


“The directors are like giddy kids on set. They get to do things they’ve never done before.”

Montage: Over the period of the next three years, what would you like to see happen? Are there goals you can articulate?Tim: I’d like to see a new generation of repeat film-makers on the independent film side. I’d like to see a generation of empowered and enabled filmmakers feeling confident they will get a second and third and fourth film made, and there will be some name recognition attached to them as artists, in Canada and around the world. We don’t have that right now in English Canada and we have to. I would like to see the same thing for the cre-ative teams that are responsible, more as a collective, on the television and web side, because of the sheer scale of series producing; making anywhere between 13 and 24 episodes of any given title a year requires teamwork. I would like to see those teams properly empowered. I would like to see a filmmaker’s voice emerge more truly in Canadian television-making in the way that it has in the U.S. market and the Euro-pean market.

I would like to see the conditions of film workers currently working right on the edge of their ability to survive on a low hourly wage radically improved. I would like to see all of the guilds get better at understanding the very awkward nexus between commercial filmmaking and independent filmmaking. We have constant friction between a type of filmmak-ing that is inherently profitable, or at least functional commercially, and a kind of low-budget filmmaking that is done on a wing and a prayer and is costing the filmmakers their entire livelihoods and their homes and their cars. I’d like the Directors Guild of Canada to come up with a way, with producers, to properly articu-late an independent film contract that will get us further down the road in optimizing opportunities for independent filmmakers at a very low budget level. I think we can do a more supple job together. That can only help with the new kind of independent TV that’s going to come up—low-budget television that will be essentially like a low-budget film except it will be a serialized production for television or for the Internet. Similarly, we are already well on our way to articulat-ing a creative environment for the Internet. I’d like to make sure we understand who is playing in that field, what they are doing and what that business is like be-cause it’s evolving so quickly. I would like the industry to better acknowledge the intense diversity of Cana-dian society and reflect it in our hiring practices. And finally, I’d like the Directors Guild of Canada to con-tinue to be as nimble as it is in surfing the unbeliev-able level of change, which is in a way energizing and in other ways eroding our industry and our craft and our art form in this decade. I feel we’re already light on our feet—I’d like to stay that way, and the way we do it is by staying in touch with our members, staying in touch with our engagers, staying in touch with our government partners and articulating a vision for the future of Canadian production.

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

in feature film and in television in Canada, particularly English Canada—a consensus emerges quite quickly that we may not have found a way yet, in our various production services, to identify and support the creative team in the way we see similar teams being supported elsewhere internationally. There is a chance that Cana-dian production is hampered by a tendency towards creation by committee, and a worthwhile experiment rests ahead of us where the creative team, however it is defined, is really given the opportunity to soar.

Montage: What would be your evolving agenda in terms of working with Telefilm, the CMF, the CMPA and all the other organizations to make sure these conditions actually happen, so that the creative teams can actually create authored work in film and televi-sion?Tim: It’s all part of asking what we can do together to really float Canadian television upwards and have it join the extraordinary surge of quality that is hap-pening worldwide. And what we can do to produce recognizable, branded and known cadres of repeat names in feature filmmaking, what we can do to get past that first feature on the English-language side. What can we learn from Quebec? Should we be talk-ing about greater commitment from our provinces to equity investment in feature film, in addition to the tax credit? Is there a way in which we can aggres-sively single out strong voices in feature film and give them another shot? We’re already doing a good job of understanding that the measure of a film’s success is not purely box office in a world that is increasingly watching films at home. What can we do to bring the entire system into the actual ebb and flow of creation in film in an increasingly platform-agnostic world? Under our constitution, the national organization is tasked with dealing with all issues of national or international import, as well as membership services and being the home of the director. Many of the questions I’ve raised around how to build a better mouse trap in television and film and on the web have to do with the director’s role in both. The Na-tional Directors Division already has a very full slate of initiatives designed to pull writers, producers, editors, composers, production designers and directors into environments where they can really work out the best ways and means. We know we’ve had an impact; we know certain shows’ creators and entrepreneur producers, by virtue of attending some of our events, have chosen to move to a new approach to making their shows.

Montage: Do you feel our broadcasters, producers and distributors are being entrepreneurial and innova-tive enough in terms of the product that has been produced for them?Tim: The fact that there are relatively few players in a highly managed environment, industrially in Canada, means the highly managed component of that envi-ronment requires scrutiny by non-industry players, by citizens and by unions. I dare say that, without unions in this country, the level of scrutiny that is necessary to the proper management of what is essentially a cartel-driven economy would fail. I feel it is almost a sacred obligation for guilds to understand the indus-tries they work in, to understand how quickly they evolve and change, to have the courage to scrutinize how these highly managed economies are being managed and to have the courage to challenge how they are being managed, all the time. I believe the Directors Guild of Canada has an obligation to be a scrutineer in this small economy.

Montage: As the president of the DGC, how do you see ways in which the conditions across the country can be made better across the board, and are there ways of sharing information or of doing something more collectively in terms of the financing of films?Tim: The Directors Guild of Canada is a very active cultural lobby for film. One of the sad ironies of where we are right now in film and TV in Canada is that, in some ways, things have never been bet-ter. Seemingly, in television, there has never been a better legislative framework for getting Canadian television shows onto the prime-time schedule on the networks. On the film side, Quebec in particular has produced a new generation of truly international stars. Beneath that success story, we also know there are some terrific challenges. On the feature film side, you can argue that, while the flame is burning bright in Quebec, it has probably never been dimmer in Eng-lish Canada in terms of the prospects for emerging filmmakers and the prospects particularly for repeat filmmakers who are contemplating their second film in Canada. It is a commonplace to say that much of the energy and vitality of independent feature film have shifted to the television universe and, along with it, many of the actors and writers and directors of this generation—particularly to cable and the Internet, where the opportunity for unique and audacious ex-pression is higher than it has ever been in television. Having said that, there are filmmaking centres around the world, including Quebec, which are showing there is still a great deal of potential vitality in feature film, so why is English Canada seemingly sitting out that opportunity?

Montage: As well, why is it that, with a few excep-tions, the equivalent of the HBO and Showtime kind of authored TV shows aren’t really happening here either?Tim: When we ask the question of all of our mem-bers—what they think would take us to the next level

Top, Left to Right: Heartland (CBC).

Courtesy eOne Films. Flashpoint (CTV).

Courtesy Bell Media. Bottom: Southam on the

set of Bones.©2014 Fox Broadcasting

Co. Cr: Jordin Althaus/FOX

“I would like the industry to better acknowledge the intense diversity of Canadian society.”—Tim Southam


LA COLLABORATION ENTRE LE RÉALISATEUR ET L’ASSISTANT-RÉALISATEUR

En avril dernier se tenait la table ronde des réalisateurs, organisée par la Guilde canadienne des réalisateurs — Québec. Quatre réalisateurs chevronnés y ont discuté du rôle de l’assistant-réalisateur et de sa collaboration avec le réalisateur. Avec générosité, ils ont livré leurs réflexions et leurs anecdotes inspirées de leurs années d’expérience cinématographique. Il nous fait plaisir de partager avec vous le fruit de ces discussions sur le rôle déterminant de l’assistant-réalisateur.


photo d’immense talent avec qui j’ai eu le plaisir de travailler. Je suis moi-même originaire de Gatin-eau, ainsi que notre collègue Anne Sirois*, qui est avec nous ce soir, dans la salle. Ensuite, nous nous entretiendrons avec Yves Simoneau, un citoyen du monde par sa personne et par son œuvre, dont il nous parlera. Yves, c’est vraiment le pionnier du « Je m’en vais » et qui est revenu. Finalement, nous discuterons de notre sujet avec monsieur Denys Ar-cand, dont nous connaissons tous l’œuvre. Il nous présentera également un clip tiré d’un de ses films. Philippe, avant de présenter l’extrait de ton film, aimerais-tu en parler un peu ?

PF : Mes assistants-réalisateurs ont été mes pro-fesseurs, mon apprentissage. J’ai commencé avec Éric Parenteau, qui est ici ce soir. Mon principal défi était d’avoir l’air de quelqu’un qui savait ce qu’il faisait, alors que je devais assimiler comment on fait un film. Les assistants-réalisateurs nous font super bien paraître quand la scène est un tant soit peu compli-quée et exige la participation d’un grand nombre de personnes. Quand tout fonctionne et que ce qu’on avait en tête est bien transmis à l’écran, c’est souvent l’assistant-réalisateur qu’il faut remercier. Aujourd’hui, je voulais montrer la scène d’ouverture de Monsieur Lazhar que j’ai décidé, à la dernière minute, de tourner en plan-séquence. C’est une scène où on devait révéler la présence d’une personne pendue dans une classe d’école. J’ai longtemps réfléchi avant de me décider à mon-trer cela. Puis, comment le présenter du point de vue des enfants ? C’est en visitant le lieu, en étant dans le corridor, en voyant la porte et la petite fenêtre de la porte que j’ai eu l’idée. Et là, forcé-ment, la première personne qui était concernée, c’est Carole (ndlr : Doucet), mon assistante. On s’est mis au travail en se demandant « Comment va-t-on faire cela avec les figurants ? ». C’est un plan-séquence qui devait s’étaler sur plus de deux minutes. La scène n’a rien d’hyper spectaculaire, mais elle allait fonctionner seulement si tous les cues tombaient à la bonne place, à la fois dans les silences et dans les gens qui se bousculent.

(EXTRAIT VIDÉO)

TS : Bravo. Je tiens à souligner que non seulement tu as agencé le lieu et la trame, mais aussi, tu as introduit les deux jeunes personnages principaux et tu leur as lancé le défi non seulement de faire des choses tout à fait anodines, comme fermer leurs casiers, mais aussi de réagir au phénomène de cette personne suicidée. Tu as couvert tellement de territoire. J’aimerais que tu nous expliques quels étaient tes objectifs et comment tu as dépouillé cela pour ensuite avoir tout ce qu’il te fallait.

PF : Pour moi, cet extrait tombait sous le sens pour parler de la relation assistant et réalisateur, parce que beaucoup d’idées viennent du repérage. Per-sonnellement, la réécriture que je préfère, c’est lorsque j’ai tous mes lieux en tête. À ce moment-là, je reprends le scénario. Il est possible dans un plan de présenter non seulement les personnages mais aussi les lieux. Lorsque les enfants arrivent dans un certain dés-ordre le matin, comme on le voit ici, il est possible de présenter cela. Il y a moyen aussi de dire que la mort s’est infiltrée dans l’école. Donc, en ayant une caméra là, vivante, dans un plan-séquence, j’avais

Présentateur :Bonsoir, et bienvenue à tous. Nous avons le plai-sir d’accueillir ce soir messieurs Denys Arcand, Philippe Falardeau, Yves Simoneau et Tim Southam (voir encadré). Ces quatre réalisateurs ont accepté d’échanger avec nous sur le rôle et le travail des assistants-réalisateurs. Si vous avez des questions ou des commentaires, n’hésitez pas à intervenir. C’est vraiment la bonne soirée pour le faire. Tim Southam sera notre animateur pour la soirée.

TS : Bonsoir, et merci d’être avec nous. Je m’appelle Tim Southam. Je suis ici parce que je suis très im-pliqué à la Guilde canadienne des réalisateurs. Je suis heureux d’être avec vous ce soir et d’avoir le privilège de m’entretenir avec trois très grands réalisateurs, dont les œuvres sont totalement im-briquées dans notre conscience culturelle. Vous les connaissez de nom : Philippe Falardeau, Yves Simo-neau et Denys Arcand. Nous nous entretiendrons avec eux de la relation réalisateur, ou metteur en scène, et premier assistant. Nous parlons toujours de l’œuvre de l’un ou de l’autre, tout en sachant pertinemment qu’il y a une équipe derrière. De fa-çon pratique, qu’est-ce que cela signifie ? Il est important que ces trois réalisateurs soient présents, parce qu’on retrouve une formidable cohérence, une formidable intégrité de ton et d’exécution dans leurs films. Comment s’y prend-on pour que dans certaines productions, les co-médiens, les figurants ou les membres de l’équipe derrière la caméra, toutes ces personnes arrivent au bon moment, à l’étape voulue, en sachant ex-actement où elles sont et ce qu’elles doivent faire? Je crois que cela découle en grande partie du tal-ent de ces trois messieurs, mais également de la façon dont ils constituent leur équipe. Et ce soir, c’est de cet aspect dont nous nous entretiendrons. Comment s’y prennent-ils pour pallier les accidents inévitables d’un tournage ? Ceux qu’on connaît tous, puisque nous sommes tous assujettis aux mêmes réalités d’horaires, de budgets ou de catas-trophes climatiques. Voilà ce que nous discuterons avec eux, après avoir regardé leurs clips. Je vous présenterai d’abord Philippe Falardeau qui est originaire de Hull, une région riche en talents. Philippe a un frère, Martin, un directeur

On arrive sur le lieu de tournage et les assistants qui avaient démissionné, les deuxièmes, troisièmes, étaient là, je les reconnais. Je demande à Tamás s’il les connaît. « Bien oui, je les connais. » Alors, « Il faut que tu leur demandes de revenir. C’est une question de fierté nationale. Vous êtes en train de donner une très mauvaise image du pays, alors il faut vraiment que ça marche lundi matin. » Il est allé les voir, les a convaincus de venir l’aider et, le lundi matin, on s’est tous retrouvés là à re-garder les bateaux. « Envoie 20 figurants, envoie 50 figurants, envoie 100 figurants, envoie les chariots. » C’était absolument sécuritaire. Il y avait environ une demi-douzaine de Zodiacs pour récu-pérer les personnes qui allaient tomber, parce qu’il y en avait qui devaient tomber. Et celui qui était un jeune assistant-réalisateur pratiquement inconnu est devenu du jour au lendemain l’assistant-réalisa-teur le plus connu de Hongrie. Parce que la journée s’est super bien passée.

TS : Sur Bury My Heart, je pense que j’ai repéré cinq assistants-réalisateurs.

YS : Quand il y en a plusieurs, on ne peut pas avoir cette loyauté qui est tellement importante entre les deux, le réalisateur et l’assistant-réalisateur. On se fie un peu à l’impression, puis à l’expérience, au curriculum vitae et aux recommandations. Il y a trois grandes sphères : la relation personnelle, la chimie qu’on a avec la personne; la partie prépara-tion, parce que ce film, c’est vraiment une opéra-tion militaire; et la partie exécution. On ne peut mesurer l’équilibre entre ces trois sphères. Il y a un coup de chance là-dedans. Pour être un bon assistant-réalisateur, il faut beaucoup de psycholo-gie, beaucoup de générosité aussi, énormément de générosité. Puis, il faut savoir rire.

TS : Regardons ton clip.

(EXTRAIT VIDÉO)

YS : Ce qui est extraordinaire, c’est que cela s’est super bien passé. C’est une des journées où on a perdu le moins de temps. Tout s’est bien réglé, il n’y a pas eu d’accident, sauf à un moment, en répétition. Quand on a terminé la journée, on avait traversé tous ensemble une bataille et cela a soudé l’équipe d’une façon extraordinaire. C’était le début du tournage en Hongrie, on avait six se-maines à faire.

la possibilité d’installer tout cela en même temps. Après, c’est un peu la magie qui opère, et je pense que les assistants aiment quand on leur dit: « O.K., il va y avoir de la figuration, il va y avoir beaucoup de cues. » On a tourné dix-huit prises pendant un avant-midi, ce qui permettait de tra-vailler les cues dans les premières prises. Comme on tourne en numérique et surtout, avec des en-fants, c’est important pour moi de pouvoir tourner beaucoup. Donc, on a pu placer les cues un peu au fur et à mesure. Dans ce cas-ci, je n’ai pas voulu faire trop de mises en place pour ne pas brûler mes comédiens, mais finalement, c’est la dix-huitième prise qui était la meilleure. Sachant que le son serait refait, je pouvais parler à voix haute. Ce que je trouve bien, c’est qu’entre le moment où je sens que le cue doit venir, que je donne le cue et que la personne à l’autre bout du corridor le reçoit, il y a toujours un délai. Les assis-tants ont un flair pour ces choses-là et ils s’ajustent rapidement. J’aime ce travail à la chaîne. C’est encore plus fascinant quand la scène doit être tournée sous plusieurs angles différents et qu’on la reprend rapidement. Les assistants savent exacte-ment où tous les figurants sont rendus à ce mo-ment précis. C’est un art de la valse, du ballet, de la chorégraphie qui est vraiment plaisant. Je retrouve dans tout cela l’essence de la relation entre un as-sistant et le réalisateur, du repérage jusqu’à la prise finale. Ceci illustre vraiment un cas où l’assistant et ses tentacules ont le don d’ubiquité : j’avais des cues dans l’escalier, j’avais des cues pour deux comédiens et pour le groupe, j’avais des cues de l’autre côté à deux reprises. C’est bien si on a le temps. Sinon, cela devient stressant. Je savais qu’il n’y a pas d’événement, qu’il ne se passe rien dans le film Monsieur Lazhar. C’est un gars qui va en classe tous les jours avec les enfants. Ce qui se passe, c’est une tension lat-ente. Et cette tension, elle naît là, dans ce plan. Si ce plan est raté, je n’ai pas de film. Je n’ai pas de film parce que le fait de découvrir le cadavre par le regard de deux enfants, on sait qu’à un moment donné, ça va ressortir, puis ça va exploser. Alors, si cela n’est pas réussi, le film aura de la difficulté à s’en remettre.

TS : Comment les consignes ou les demandes se diffusent-elles dans l’équipe durant la période de préparation ? Bien sûr, tu pars de tes chefs d’équipe. Mais, avec trente-cinq comédiens en tout temps, comment Carole et son équipe étaient-elles impliquées dans le déroulement pour que tout soit en place et compris tous les jours ?

PF : Je dirais que cela repose beaucoup sur l’assistant. J’ai travaillé avec seulement quatre as-sistants différents dans ma vie. Certains sont très impliqués au niveau du contenu, d’autres vont se soucier davantage de me donner tout l’espace mental nécessaire pour que je puisse me concen-trer à la création plutôt qu’à la logistique. Ce qui était génial, c’est que les enfants aiment Carole et qu’elle aime les enfants, ce qui était essentiel dans son rôle d’assistante. Chaque fois que j’ai fait un film avec des enfants, c’était une condition sine qua non que les enfants soient en confiance avec l’assistant-réalisateur. Carole sentait si les enfants avaient besoin d’une pause et m’en informait. Les enfants ne sont pas des professionnels, alors quand on travaille avec eux, il faut leur laisser cette bulle. J’avais besoin

qu’elle soit en mesure de discipliner le plateau, surtout dans les scènes émotives. Un des aspects critiques du rôle de l’assistant-réalisateur, c’est d’aller vers les gens. Pouvoir tenir ce rôle de pol-icier avec doigté, c’est formidable, un peu comme un professeur d’école qui doit garder le contrôle de sa classe. J’essaie de laisser l’assistant intervenir de cette façon le plus souvent possible, parce que si je dois faire un ou deux speechs dans le film, il faut qu’ils aient du poids. Si par contre j’interviens trop souvent, la portée ne sera pas la même. Voilà pourquoi il est important que l’assistant-réalisateur soit directement relié à tout cela.

TS : Merci, Philippe. Maintenant, nous allons passer au clip d’Yves Simoneau, tiré de la minisérie Napoléon.

YS : Cet extrait, c’est une scène montée dans laquelle il y a beaucoup de plans. C’est une scène avec un moment d’action dangereux, alors que l’armée doit traverser le Danube, une rivière assez menaçante, sur un pont flottant fait de bateaux par l’armée napoléonienne. Tout cela est basé sur des faits historiques. Il y avait donc en partant un es-pace restreint devant accueillir des centaines de fig-urants avec des animaux qui traversaient. L’armée ennemie lance un bateau enflammé pour frapper ce pont, qui va exploser. Il y aura des gens précipi-tés dans l’eau, des animaux qui brûlent, etc. Donc, c’est la scène à faire et on doit la tourner le lundi. Nous faisons le repérage le samedi. Toute l’équipe est présente et la grande question est «Est-ce que ça va tenir ? ». Le directeur artistique avait déjà bâti un pont dans le film et des tonnes de dynamite avaient été nécessaires pour le faire sauter, tellement il était solide. Donc, j’avais pleine-ment confiance en lui. L’assistant-réalisateur qui était là, c’était un Hongrois qui avait eu trois mois de préparation. Il était d’une précision un peu exa-gérée, mais je trouvais qu’il prenait cela au sérieux. Quand il voit le pont flottant, il s’exclame : « On va tous mourir ! » Il se dit qu’il y aura des centaines de figurants là-dessus. Puis il ajoute : « Je veux un Zodiac par figurant, au cas où ils tombent à l’eau. » Parce que si tu tombes à l’eau dans le Danube, tu ne peux pas t’arrêter, tu décolles et tu meurs. J’ai demandé : « Bien, y a-t-il 500 Zodiacs en Hongrie ? » Il répond : « Je ne pense pas. » Pendant tout ce temps, je croyais qu’il plaisantait. Il me lance alors, à la fin de la conversation, « I don’t like you. I’m quit ». Il est parti et a amené toute son équipe avec lui. C’est le samedi soir, on doit tourner le lundi matin. Le lendemain est jour de congé. Il fallait donc décider si on allait annuler une journée de tournage aussi importante. On devait faire cette séquence-là en une journée. Le bateau était là, tout était là, tout était planifié. Il faut remplacer le gars, sinon qu’est-ce qu’on fait ? Tu peux ap-peler n’importe où dans le monde un samedi soir, personne n’est disponible. On était assis le diman-che matin et le réalisateur de la deuxième équipe, Mario Luraschi, dit : « Mon jeune assistant est pas pire, il s’appelle Tamás. » J’ai fait venir Tamás. C’est un jeune assistant-réalisateur. Il a environ 26 ans. Celui qui vient de démissionner, c’est le plus grand, le plus fameux assistant-réalisateur de Hongrie. Je demande à ce jeune : « Est-ce que tu serais prêt à prendre la relève pour nous aider ? » Il a toute cette pression sur lui, et il répond « Est-ce que je peux voir le lieu de tournage ? »

J’AIME CE TRAVAIL À LA CHAÎNE. C’EST ENCORE PLUS FASCINANT QUAND LA SCÈNE DOIT ÊTRE TOURNÉE SOUS PLUSIEURS ANGLES DIFFÉRENT, ET QU’ON LA REPREND RAPIDEMENT. LES ASSISTANTS SAVENT EXACTEMENT OÙ TOUS LES FIGURANTS SON RENDU À CE MO-MENT PRÉCIS. C’EST UN ART DE LA VAISE, DU BALLET, DE LA CHORÉO-GRAPHIE QUI EST VRAIMET PLAISANT. —PIERRE FALARDEAU

Previous page, Left to Right: Tim Southam,

Phillippe Falardeau, Yves Simoneau,

Denys Arcand.

This page: Left Tim Southam.

Right: Yves Simoneau

Encadré :Quelques œuvres des réalisateurs invités

Denys ArcandLe déclin de l’empire américain (1986)Jésus de Montréal (1989)Léolo (1992)Les invasions barbares (2003)L’âge des ténèbres (2007)Le règne de la beauté (2014)

Philippe FalardeauLa moitié gauche du frigo (2000)Congorama (2006)Monsieur Lazhar (2011)

Yves SimoneauLes fous de Bassan (1987)Dans le ventre du dragon (1989)Free Money (1998)Nuremberg (2000)Napoléon (2002)Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (2007)Assassin’s Creed: Lineage (2009)L’appât (2010)

Tim SouthamPrésident, Directors Guild of CanadaDrowning in Dreams (1997)The Bay of Love and Sorrows (2002)One Dead Indian (2006)


TS : Parle-moi un peu de la structure de la prépara-tion pour un tournage de cette envergure.

YS : C’était une mécanique militaire. D’ailleurs, on avait notre conseiller, le commandant Raguet, un spécialiste des guerres napoléoniennes. Il a fait venir toute l’équipe d’assistants-réalisateurs, di-recteurs artistiques, costumes, accessoires. Il leur a donné un système de couleurs et de chiffres, parce que les gens ne parlaient pas la même langue. Ceux qui avaient un carton bleu et un chiffre 4 al-laient à l’endroit indiqué par un carton bleu et un chiffre 4. C’était très simple et tous ont immédiate-ment compris le système. Grâce à la méthode du commandant Raguet, je faisais tous les jours, tous les plans avec tout le monde, puis je libérais 300 Russes, 300 Autrichiens. Cela nous a aussi permis d’ajouter la séquence au Maroc, qu’on avait prévu couper parce que trop chère. C’est purement et simplement parce que la production était d’une très grande efficacité, grâce à une communication parfaite.

TS : Merci, Yves.Monsieur Arcand, Denys, aimerais-tu nous guider dans la séquence d’ouverture des Invasions Bar-bares ? On revient presque dans le huis clos. C’est une scène d’introduction d’un film où l’hostie est apparemment le seul médicament dans cet hôpital. Aimerais-tu voir la séquence avant ?

DA : Oui, j’aimerais cela parce que je l’ai oubliée un peu.

(EXTRAIT VIDÉO)

DA : D’abord, je suis moins bon que Philippe Falardeau, parce qu’il y a une coupe. J’espère que vous l’avez remarquée. L’hostie nous permet de couper.

TS : Je me disais que c’est parce que tu te servirais à nouveau de ce corridor. DA : Non, pas du tout, ce n’est pas le même. En fait, le secret, c’est qu’on a eu la chance d’avoir pour nous un hôpital vide. C’est mon assistant, Jacques Benoît, qui a tout fait le reste. Paix à ton âme, Wilbrod. Moi, je n’ai rien fait. Je ne suis pas vraiment bon pour cela parce que je regarde tou-jours les acteurs principaux. Donc, je me fie en-tièrement à mes assistants ou à mon assistante pour savoir s’il y a eu des figurants, s’ils étaient bien, s’ils étaient à la bonne place.

INTERVENTION D’ANNE SIROIS :Le souvenir que j’ai de travailler avec toi, De-nys, c’est que tu ne te souviens pas de toute l’information que tu donnes. Dans le film qu’on a fait, tu as donné à chacun beaucoup d’information. Les petits détails, oui, on les a ajoutés nous-mêmes, mais c’est toi qui a nous a informés de ce que tu voulais. Quand je vois cette scène, je peux com-prendre que Wilbrod a fait énormément de travail et que les décors ont apporté beaucoup à la scène. Mais c’est toi qui as dirigé dans cette direction. Je crois que tu t’enlèves beaucoup de crédit. Je suis garante de cela.

DA : Bien, merci beaucoup. Oui, c’est possible, ef-fectivement.

TS : Il y a aussi une question qu’on n’a pas vrai-ment abordée. On change souvent d’assistants-réalisateurs dans le métier...

DA : Je ne change pas beaucoup. Très peu. En fait, je travaillerais encore avec Wilbrod s’il n’était pas mort. C’est très particulier. Parce que je tourne très peu, une fois tous les cinq ou six ans, je me sens un peu comme un imposteur si je me compare à eux. Alors, mon premier critère pour choisir un as-sistant, comme pour les comédiens, c’est de savoir si j’ai envie d’aller manger avec cette personne. Il m’arrive de prendre des comédiens un peu moins bons, mais que j’aime, parce qu’on sera bien en-semble. J’ai envie de travailler de cette façon. Donc, la personnalité du premier assistant, c’est fondamental. Je veux que ce soit le fun. C’est mon premier critère. Ce sera une aventure agréable parce que la vie est très courte. La seule autre fois où j’ai changé d’assistant, c’est quand j’ai fait mes deux films en anglais, une série pour la CBC qui s’appelait Empire. Mon as-sistante, qui était de Radio-Canada, ne parlait pas anglais. Alors les acteurs anglophones devenaient paranoïaques parce que nous, on se parlait en français vite, très vite, et qu’ils ne comprenaient pas. Donc, lorsque je tournais en anglais, je pre-nais un assistant-réalisateur et un directeur photo anglophones pour être certain de parler anglais sur le plateau. C’était là une raison de changer d’assistant; autrement, j’ai tendance à garder le même monde.

PF : Moi, j’avais une conception un peu romantique de ce qu’était un assistant avant de commencer le travail, il y a 15 ans. Peut-être une conception européenne, où l’assistant fait partie du processus créatif bien en amont, alors qu’on n’est encore que deux autour d’une table à regarder une ébauche de scénario, à aller s’inspirer des lieux. C’est vraiment un travail bicéphale. Ma relation avec l’assistant commence en pré-préproduction, et elle commence avec l’horaire. La première réunion, c’est en fait le premier horaire établi à partir d’un scénario qui n’est souvent pas fini. Mais si je veux une deuxième tête avec moi pour m’aider tant sur la structure et la logistique que sur le contenu, c’est un autre métier. Quoiqu’il en soit, cela ne fait pas partie de cette culture nord-américaine du travail de l’assistant et pourtant, je pense qu’il y a des as-sistants qui seraient assez ouverts à cela. Personnellement, je ne sais pas encore com-ment font les assistants pour démêler un horaire. Mais il est vrai qu’il y a différentes dimensions au travail de l’assistant, parce qu’entre établir un ho-

raire et avoir le doigté pour gérer un plateau, il y a deux mondes. Fusionner les deux, ce n’est pas évident. J’aime travailler avec Éric Parenteau, parce qu’il arrive qu’en repérage, je repère un lieu, puis je cherche Éric, et Éric est sur une colline. J’arrive et je regarde ce que lui vient de voir. Et oui, Éric a compris le contenu du scénario. Je me souviens que le film C’est pas moi, je le jure ! se termine avec le personnage qui, juste avant d’essayer de se suicider avec une balle de bowling, parle à la caméra. Au début du film, après sa tentative de pendaison, il y a une scène d’un souper avec la famille; ça va mal, personne ne se parle, on entend les cuillères qui frappent très fort le fond des bols. Je devais avoir une voix hors champ du petit garçon pour démarrer le film et Éric m’a dit : « Puisque tu finis avec le garçon qui s’adresse directement à la caméra, pourquoi ne commencerais-tu pas le film de la même façon ? Puis au souper, au lieu d’avoir la voix hors champ, l’enfant parlerait à la caméra pendant que les au-tres mangent. » Je trouvais que cela bouclait très bien cette idée de narration. C’était une idée d’Éric qui, au moment où on tournait la scène, est venu me voir et a dit : « Essaie-le, ça ne coûte rien ». Cette relation-là, c’est ce que je cherche. DA : Un des plus beaux moments que j’ai vécus avec un assistant-réalisateur, c’est avec David Webb, un super assistant qui reste maintenant à Hollywood. Je devais tourner une scène à Times Square, un samedi soir. Je vais faire le repérage le vendredi, la veille. Il y a 100 000 personnes et c’est une petite scène, mais quand même, c’est 100 000 personnes. Puis, il faut la tourner dans la rue, en fait juste sur le petit triangle qu’il y a au milieu de Times Square. Et là, je me dis : « Je n’y arriverai jamais, je suis incapable de faire cela. » Alors le sa-medi après-midi, je suis totalement démonté et je suis couché, tremblant, dans mon lit. David Webb frappe à la porte pour m’apporter quelque chose. Ma blonde, qui est productrice, est là et lui dit : « Va lui parler, parce que ça ne va vraiment pas du tout, il ne s’en sortira pas. » David entre dans la chambre et vient s’asseoir à côté de moi, comme auprès d’un grand malade : « Qu’est-ce qu’il y a ? » Je lui réponds : « Qu’est-ce que je fais ici ? Pourquoi j’ai écrit cela ? Je n’y arriverai jamais, c’est Times Square. » Alors il m’a regardé, puis il m’a dit: « Est-ce que tu sais les plans que tu vas faire ? » J’ai répondu : « Oui, les plans, je les sais par cœur ! » Il dit : « De quoi tu t’occupes ? Nous, on ne sait pas les plans, mais tout le reste, on le sait. On sait comment éclairer, on sait comment gérer la foule, on peut tout faire cela sans que tu t’en occupes. Si tu sais les plans, viens nous voir à 19 h ce soir, dis-les nous dans l’ordre, tu vas voir, cela va se passer tout seul. » C’était éblouissant. Je me suis toujours souvenu de cela. C’était un grand moment pour moi et c’était vrai. Autrement dit, il me disait de cesser de me préoccuper.

YS : Un autre truc qui est drôle et qui correspond un peu à ces deux faits, c’est lorsque tu t’entends bien avec ton assistant, qu’il vient s’asseoir à côté de toi et te dit : « J’ai lu le scénario, as-tu vraiment besoin de cette scène-là ? » Je le regarde : « C’est vrai, tu as raison... parce que non, ça ne rentrait pas dans la journée. »

TS : D’ailleurs, il faudra un jour qu’on change le nom « assistant-réalisateur » pour un terme qui

décrit vraiment les deux fonctions de gestionnaire et de co-metteur en scène. Bien sûr, nous savons très rapidement, la deuxième ou troisième journée, quand un premier assistant nous a vraiment sauvé la peau, ou quand il veille sur nous, quand on con-state qu’on a assez de temps pour faire une scène importante et que cette scène est bien placée dans l’horaire. Même si cela nous échappe, quelqu’un de très expérimenté placera cette scène-là. Elle doit être là dans la journée, dans la semaine et dans la vie des comédiens qu’il connaît peut-être mieux que nous, sauf en séries.

YS : Aux États-Unis, c’est un métier dangereux par-ce que si cela commence à traîner, le premier qui part, c’est l’assistant. On remarque aussi que peu d’assistants-réalisateurs y deviennent réalisateurs. La plupart deviennent directeurs de production, ou producteurs.

DA : En France non plus. Il semble que ce n’est pas le bon chemin pour devenir réalisateur.

INTERVENTION D’ANNE SIROIS :Voici mon point de vue sur cette question. On est toujours pris un peu entre l’arbre et l’écorce. On reçoit les vœux d’un réalisateur, on voit ce qu’il voit, on voit aussi les moyens que la production nous donne. Je ne peux m’imaginer réaliser. J’ai tellement l’habitude de tenter de tout ramener pour que ce soit faisable et réel que je serais in-capable de lâcher la bride et figurer comment ré-aliser le mieux possible. La seule chose à laquelle je penserais, c’est comment le faire réalistement. Je ne crois pas que c’est cela, un bon réalisateur.

TS : Cela rejoint également la question de la sé-curité sur le plateau. C’est un sujet très important actuellement parce qu’on a eu de gros problèmes. Bien sûr, il y a une responsabilité légale, mais il faut qu’une personne puisse dire non. Elle doit avoir le pouvoir et être mandatée correctement par la production pour être en mesure de dire non à des idées du réalisateur qui en demande le plus pos-sible, tout en sachant qu’il pourra essuyer un refus.

DA : C’est fort possible aussi que cela demande un talent différent. Il y a très longtemps, j’ai eu un assistant absolument génial. Il s’appelle Jacques Méthé. Il est devenu un directeur au Cirque du So-leil, parce qu’il est génial pour organiser des trucs invraisemblables. Lui, c’est ce qui l’excite.

TS : L’assistant avec qui je travaille actuellement a été cinq fois gagnant sur Jeopardy. C’est la per-sonne la plus intelligente sur le plateau. Je dis cela sans condescendance, parce qu’on sait que le ciné-ma est un lieu de gestion autant que d’invention. Ces deux aspects doivent coexister et j’estime que le point d’intersection, c’est le premier assistant. Ce qui, à mon avis, démontre la pauvreté du terme « premier assistant ».

Merci beaucoup, messieurs.

*Anne Sirois, première assistante à la réalisation sur Le règne de la beauté de Denys Arcand. Pré-sidente du Conseil du Québec de la Guilde cana-dienne des réalisateurs.

An English version is available on the DGC/Mon-tage website.

ALORS, MON PREMIER CRITÈRE POUR CHOISIR UN ASSISTANT, COMME

POUR LES COMÉDIENS, C’EST DE SAVOIR SI J’AI ENVIE D’ALLER

MANGER AVEC CETTE PERSONNE.... DONC, LA PERSONNALITÉ DU

PREMIER ASSISTANT, C’EST FONDA-MENTAL. JE VEUX QUE CE SOIT LE

FUN. C’EST MON PREMIER CRITÈRE. CE SERA UNE AVENTURE AGRÉABLE,

PARCE QUE LA VIE EST TRÈS COURTE. —DENYS ARCAND

This page, Right: Denys Arcand.Left: Phillippe Falardeau.

Opposite page: crowd shots; all

directors except third from the Top,which does not include Arcand.

All photos courtesy Jean Demers


by ADAM NAYMAN

When Canadian author Lawrence Hill’s historical novel The Book of Negroes was released in 2007, it had the

kind of integrated critical and commercial success that most writers can only dream of having. It was a national

best-seller, shortlisted for the Giller Prize and won the prestigious Commonwealth Writer’ Prize, an honour previ-

ously accorded to the likes of Rohinton Mistry, J.M. Coetzee and Mordecai Richler. The praise from all corners was

overwhelming, but at least one potential reader wasn’t convinced.

“I just didn’t want to read it,” recalls DGC member Clement Virgo. “The title was very strange to me; I couldn’t

imagine what a ‘book of Negroes’ was. I wondered what the story could possibly be. I had an aversion to the title.

I’d pick the book up while I was in stores and then put it back down. And then I was at This Ain’t the Rosedale

Library, a bookstore in Toronto’s Kensington Market, which is where I live. Molly Johnson, a local jazz singer, was

there and she forced me. She took my wallet and forced me to buy the book right there. And even then, I left it

on my coffee table. I didn’t want to read it. And then I did.”

CLEMENT VIRGO’S

THE BOOK OF NEGROES

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At this point, it’s probably safe to say that Virgo has read The Book of Negroes as closely as anybody except its author. Working with help and input from Hill, the 48-year-old filmmaker has prepared a six-hour mini-series adaptation of The Book of Negroes, slated for broadcast in early 2015 on the CBC. (It will air in the United States on BET.) “I spent almost two years trying to make it into a feature film,” says Virgo, who agreed to an interview with Montage this summer while deep in the editing process at Technicolor in Toronto’s East End. “I couldn’t finance a film version. The budget would have been too high for the movie I was seeing in my head. There’s a renaissance in television right now, so it felt natural to approach the CBC. It sup-ported us and suggested a miniseries and we agreed.” The director is right to cite the recent artistic renais-sance of television productions, from True Detective to Masters of Sex to Orphan Black. Virgo has worked on several key television series–including, most impres-sively, The Wire (he directed two episodes in 2002). Based on the limited amount of footage that was made available at press time, The Book of Negroes joins the ranks of small-screen presentations directed with a cinematic eye. The footage from Episode 1, which describes the abduction of 11-year-old Aminata from her home in West Africa by white slavers in the middle of the 18th century, has a combination of epic physical scale (the miniseries was shot partially on loca-tion in South Africa) and intimate, detailed character work. The visual language is eloquent and concise. It’s also patient in a way that most feature films literally can’t afford to be. The old saying that “time is money” is never truer than when on a film set. “When you’re making [a feature] it can’t be much more than two and a half hours,” says Virgo, “unless you’re making Transformers. In television, you can open up the story and give yourself the time to tell it right.” That same sense of patience informed the entire production. The Book of Negroes came together slowly and deliberately over a period of several years. “Because it’s such a big project, we had to look at it as a co-production,” says Virgo. “I wanted to shoot in Africa, and one of the only countries that could support what we wanted to do there was South Af-rica. Our partner there was Out of Africa Productions. The producer, Lance Samuels, did Bang Bang Club [a

drama about war photographers] a few years ago. We wanted a company that could sell it internationally, so EOne came on board. We wanted exposure in the United States and showed it to BET and it was a match for them. And since the story is set partially in Nova Scotia, we ended up working with the Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation as well.” The international flavour of the film’s financing mir-rors the contents of its story, which takes place on three continents. After being plucked from Mali and taken across the ocean in a slave ship—a genuinely nightmarish passage that at times feels like the liter-ary equivalent to one of Hieronymous Bosch’s hellish canvases—Aminata works on an indigo plantation in South Carolina and in a well-to-do household in New York before resettling in Nova Scotia during the Ameri-can Revolutionary War. Recruited by the British aboli-tionist movement, she accompanies a group back to Africa to begin a “free” community and then attempts to return to her ancestral home nearly seven decades after being forcibly removed in the first place. The story is told entirely in Aminata’s voice, which evolves from wavering naiveté to the rich, assured tones of someone who’s seen it all. It’s one of the rich ironies of Hill’s narrative that the little girl who wanted to be-come a storyteller is obliged to do just that at the end of her ordeal. Aminata’s stated fondness for the work of Jonathan Swift tips us off to her creator’s overarch-ing literary strategy, which is to use a subjective point of view to tell a more panoramic story. Like Amanata’s beloved Gulliver’s Travels, itself the tale of a weary and worldly traveller, The Book of Negroes is picaresque, except instead of disguising sociology as a fairy tale, it renders history in a style that’s as fantastic, grotesque and disturbing as a work of science fiction. It’s the utterly visceral aspect of Hill’s writing that Virgo says sets it apart from other books on the subject of slavery, but it’s also what gave him pause while he was working on his adaptation. “I wasn’t interested in making a horror show,” he says flatly. “To me, it was always about the emotion. I didn’t want to focus on blood and gore and violence. That’s not as interesting as the interior journey of the main character. I wanted us to be there with her, going through it as a very subjective experience. It wasn’t about presenting hor-ror but about developing some kind of an emotional investment.” While Virgo hasn’t seen Quentin Taran-tino’s Django Unchained (2012), he says he’s leery of any film that attempts to exploit such a scenario for shock value. These sentiments are echoed by Hill, who knew his work would be altered somewhat in the transition from page to screen. “It’s a hard-edged story, but we didn’t want to assault the viewer,” explains the author over the phone from Saskatchewan. “This was the first time I’ve been involved in a television production, and I was very much a neophyte in that area. I was learning on the fly. One of the things I found was that a little bit of violence and horror goes a long way on the screen. You can’t throw things at a viewer like you can at the reader of a book.” At the same time, Hill says he didn’t want a “sugar-coated” treatment of what is inherently “hard-edged” material. One of the reasons he agreed to let Virgo do the adaptation after the director contacted him was because of the confrontational aspect of his previous movies. “I’d already seen Rude but I had him send me Lie With Me and Poor Boy’s Game, and I watched them with interest. In Lie With Me, I saw a lot of cour-age. It was provocative. It wasn’t timid. I knew from it that he couldn’t back away from a strong story and he wasn’t afraid of any subject matter. And in Poor Boy’s

Photos courtesy Joe Alblas


Photos courtesy Joe Alblas

tagonist and her experiences define the narrative, but there’s also a wide array of secondary characters who figure into her story. With this in mind, Virgo’s series is very much an ensemble production, with key roles for a pair of African-American Oscar winners—Louis Gossett Jr. and Cuba Gooding Jr.—as well as a Ca-nadian star in Republic of Doyle’s Allan Hawco, who plays the extremely difficult role of Solomon Lindo, a Jewish-American slave owner whose compassion for Aminata very nearly obscures his complicity in a system he outwardly rails against. (Greg Bryk and Jane Alex-ander also star.) But of course the most important cast-ing decision was Aminata, who has been called one of the greatest heroines in Canadian fiction, a steadfast yet hardly stolid survivor whose humanity and humour waver but never fail over the course of her ordeal. “The challenge is that the character ages from eight to 80 during the story,” says Virgo. “So I actually used Steven Spielberg as a model. In The Color Purple, you have two actresses playing Celie Johnson: there’s a child actress and then Whoopi Goldberg takes her the rest of the way. I wanted to do the same thing.” In Epi-sode 1, Aminata is played by Shai Pierre Dixon; from there, she’s embodied by Aunjaune Ellis, a veteran performer who has appeared in many major American films and television series from Ray to True Blood but has never had a star showcase quite like this one.

“I looked at a lot of women,” says Virgo. “I needed someone who had youthful energy but who could also play older. And it had to be somebody who you could watch for six hours and who I could spend six months with. We looked in England, Canada and the United States. We looked at a lot of stars, too. Aunjaune came through, and I’m very excited to see how audi-ences are going to respond to her.” Given its source material’s popularity and pedigree, The Book of Negroes is likely to attract a wide audi-ence when it airs on CBC and BET, and at a time when television is frequently written about more passion-ately and enthusiastically than even art-house cinema, it will surely receive critical attention as well. The pos-sibility of a Canadian crossover hit is always exciting, and yet Virgo has no illusions about the potential pit-falls of putting so many resources into the adaptation of a story whose affirmative aspects are couched in a clear-eyed and rightly horrified perspective. “There are people who are going to have the same aversion to the series that I had to the book, just based on the title,” he says. “It’s something that you think about: Do I want to read a book about slavery? Or: Do I want to watch a story about slavery for six hours? Do I want to watch a movie about the Holocaust or about the Rwandan genocide? As a filmmaker, I’m try-ing to figure out how to best represent a collective humanity—to get people to recognize those feelings and those emotions.” It’s a considerable risk, but if it pays off, The Book of Negroes will have a special place in the pantheon of Canadian television productions–possibly right alongside Hill’s remarkable book in the contemporary popular canon.

Adam Nayman teaches film at the U of T and Ryerson universities. His first book, It Doesn’t Suck: Showgirls, is out now from ECW Press.

Game, I saw something unusual: a depiction of the Black community in Nova Scotia.” The connection between Virgo’s acclaimed 2007 boxing melodrama and The Book of Negroes is en-tirely coincidental, but both Hill and Virgo see the Ca-nadian location as crucial to the meaning of the work. “The story of Africans in Canada hasn’t attracted a lot of popular attention in Canada,” says Hill, who did extensive research with primary historical materials before beginning the book. “There have been Black people in Nova Scotia for nearly 400 years, and the migration there created boomtowns and radical nov-elty in their demographics.” Virgo, who was born in Jamaica and says his family originally came across the Atlantic Ocean during the middle passage generations ago, adds that for many people, both then and now, Nova Scotia has functioned as a sort of threshold to life in Canada. “You have to go through there to get to the rest of the country,” he says. The Book of Negroes is Virgo’s first attempt at a pe-riod piece after a series of very contemporary dramas, and he says he was humbled by the burden of repre-senting history. “We think we know everything about slavery,” he says. “I thought I did, anyway. I know a lot of cursory things about Africa and the middle passage but the detail in Lawrence’s book is so impressive that it made me realize how little I actually did know. And so I really wanted to get all of those details into the series. The sense of smell. The sense of history.” The director knows the inescapable pop-culture reference points for his series are going to be Roots and 12 Years a Slave, but his true storytelling model was actually a film about a very different time and place: Roman Polanski’s 2002 Oscar-winner The Pia-nist, about the fall of Warsaw during World War II. “If one can have a favourite Holocaust movie, that would be it for me,” he says. “I love it because it’s so subjec-tive. You’re with this one guy the entire time. You’re stuck in the apartment with him. You feel like you’re surviving right alongside him, amidst all this chaos and madness.” The Pianist is of course famous for earning Adrien Brody an Academy Award for his tour-de-force per-formance in the title role. Polanski’s film is basically a one-man show, whereas The Book of Negroes’ dra-maturgy is more complex. Aminata is the clear pro-

“As a filmmaker, I’m trying to figure out how to best repre-

sent a collective humanity.”—Clement Virgo


by CARLE STEELThe morning of his unfortunate transformation into a werewolf, WolfCop’s protagonist Lou Garou stumbles out of bed, still drunk from the night be-fore. A little hair of the dog and he’s off to work at Woodhaven’s police department. There he deals with the usual small-town problems: robberies, a biker gang, local politics, a goodie-two-shoes cop as partner. The town of Woodhaven is bleak, its rhythms enlivened only by politics, the annual Drink & Shoot festival, and a few pentagrams here and there. WolfCop is meant to be a party movie but in some ways, the film and its production are an in-advertent Heritage Moment. There is no mistaking Woodhaven for Moose Jaw, the city that is closest to Regina’s soundstage and was just far enough away to get an extra bump in the rate of the Sas-katchewan Film Employment Tax Credit (SFETC). The locations are gritty, urban and have a pecu-liar iciness that is the backdrop to many projects in the last 10 years, among them Surveillance, Just Friends and Dolan’s Cadillac. The tax credit program, similar to those in ju-risdictions all over North America and the world, was cut suddenly by the Saskatchewan Party in its spring budget of 2012. It was a move that ef-fectively destroyed the film industry overnight. The loss of this support precipitated an exodus of film industry crew and production companies already beleaguered by the world economic downturn of a few years earlier and weakened by the demise two years before of the province’s broadcaster, SCN, which was killed almost as suddenly by the same government. The fallout was nuclear. The government’s move was perceived by many as a political attack on the sector, which is assumed to be urban, left-leaning and not typically part of the Saskatchewan Party’s voter base. (Many believe the cut was revenge for the portrayal of former Conservative premier James Gardiner in the Minds Eye biopic Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story.) Whatever the reason behind the decision, the cut was massively unpopular in the province, resonating with almost every demographic, whether local businesses, ser-

vice-providers directly involved with film and televi-sion or regular citizens who were fans of shows like Corner Gas and Little Mosque on the Prairie. Months later, after a complicated round of con-sultations with what remained of Saskatchewan’s film industry, the government announced Creative Saskatchewan, an annual $5-million investment fund that would support all of the creative indus-tries through grants. By then, though, the industry was not viable for people like WolfCop creator and DGC member Lowell Dean. Without mainstays like SCN, Minds Eye and Partners In Motion as local catalysts, Dean found himself out of work and considering his op-tions. A graduate of the University of Regina’s film program 10 years earlier, Dean had long ago over-come his initial reticence to staying in Regina. “Like many film school grads, I thought, ‘Where do I go, how do I get out of here?’ But it grew on me, and then I got a decent amount of work,” he says. “My dream is that Regina could be like an Austin, Texas for film: a cool, hip, indie place where you could still have a strong enough film community to sustain a crew base.” The cut to the tax credit ended any thoughts he had about staying in the province. “It’s hard not to be bitter,” says Dean. “I was aggressive in my support of any movement that would get us [the film community] anywhere but after a while, I felt I wasn’t making a difference. I want to have a career. I don’t want to be a martyr.” As a last act before he left the province, Dean decided to make a film. “My plan was to make this movie with all my friends and then go look for a real job, probably in Toronto or wherever I could get work.” The film was both a last hurrah and a love letter to Saskatchewan. Dean got together with his friends and made a trailer, hoping to attract an investor or some Tele-film micro-budget money. “We kind of had a hell-or-high-water attitude towards making the movie,” says Dean. “In hindsight we didn’t have a hell of a lot of a plan. I was frustrated and a lot of my col-leagues were frustrated. We just wanted to make a movie. I joke that the entire film industry volun-teered for the trailer.” Then along came Cinecoup, the West Coast film accelerator that offered up to $1-million in produc-tion funding to make the film, plus a guaranteed theatrical release in Cineplex theatres nationwide. Part talent hunt, part old-fashioned Hollywood film studio, the Cinecoup model challenges participants at a 90-day marketing and social-media boot camp, with the winner selected at the Banff World Media Festival. The result is a project with a ready-made audience before it’s even shot. WolfCop captured that audience. “We wouldn’t have chosen WolfCop if we didn’t think it was awe-some,” says J. Joly, head of Cinecoup. “WolfCop’s team got a green light for a number of reasons: they worked really hard, they had a strong origi-nal idea and a real persistence of vision. They knew what they were doing and what their fans wanted. At every level this project had serious legs.” That WolfCop came from a province that had de-stroyed its own film industry was both an irony and a challenge. “We felt it would hurt the project not to film in Saskatchewan, so we did everything we could to make that happen.” It took three months to negotiate a deal with the provincial government. After failing to get grand-fathered in on the tax-credit program, Cinecoup received a $250,000 grant from Creative Saskatch-

CREATIVE SASKATCHEWAN: HOW MUCH IS GOING ON IN A PROVINCE WITHOUT

A TAX CREDIT ?


ewan. Between the grant, private funding, federal tax credits, sponsorships and an Indiegogo cam-paign for promotional merchandise, they pulled it off. On the heels of WolfCop came another big Sas-katchewan project, the Corner Gas movie. With a budget of $8.5-million, that film was a better test of the province’s new granting system, which has a threshold for its production grants of $250,000 but can be doubled to $500,000 through an order in council. Even at the maximum amount, the pro-gram does not offer sufficient backing to bring in a production of that size. The government pulled another $1.5-million out of its tourism budget. The rest of the budget was filled out by Ontario and federal tax credits, Tele-film money and a Kickstarter campaign. Do the success of WolfCop and the resurrection of Corner Gas herald the beginning of the end of Saskatchewan’s film industry woes? It depends on who you ask. Regina Leader-Post columnist Murray Mandryk became a surprise hero in the film community with his continuing coverage of the saga of government support of film over the years. “They must have thought, ‘Whatever, we’ll offend a few artsy fartsy types and that won’t offend our voting base,’” he says about the government’s actions. “If they were really serious about whatever problem they had with it, it could have been fine-tuned.” The more flak they caught from the industry and the media, the more they dug in their heels. “Up until the threat of Corner Gas being shot in Manitoba. That became a huge problem politically.” And out came the tourism money, which to Mandryk is a terrible fit. “Yeah, the movie will show some pretty Saskatchewan sunsets, but so what? The theme song of Corner Gas is ‘Not a Lot Going On.’ I don’t think anyone wants that as their tourism slogan.” Saskatchewan film and culture veteran Valerie Creighton takes a longer view. She is currently head of the Canadian Media Fund and sits on the board of Creative Saskatchewan. As the former di-rector of SaskFilm during the heyday of the indus-try, she oversaw the birth of both the tax credit and the building of Regina’s soundstage. Creighton says any film industry functions on a delicate alignment of vision and philosophy that meets the needs of the industry and the imperative of the government. Ideally, it finds a public that recognizes its value. “It’s a fragile thing. Without that alignment it’s much harder. You’re fighting lo-cal barriers and miscommunication, or sometime values aren’t shared across those factors. It doesn’t mean it can’t happen. It just means it’s a lot tough-er.” She is open-minded about innovations funding such as Cinecoup. “We have a system that’s de-signed by gatekeepers. Cinecoup is a model that is designed by the end user. To me that’s an in-teresting approach,” she says. “Here you have a ground-breaking model landing in a province that was just breaking down an old model. That’s Sas-katchewan.” As for Creative Saskatchewan, it may not be perfect, but it’s a start. Ironically, it’s a government body that is offering grants, something the tax-credit system did not do. She points to Alberta as an example of a province that threw their program out and left it with nothing for several years. “Ev-erybody was gone in a heartbeat, similar to Sas-

katchewan. Now a lot of those people have come back and new players have emerged. Some stayed and started to rebuild the industry. Now they’re having a renaissance—there’s a multi-million-dollar build in Calgary for a new facility,” she says. For its part, Creative Saskatchewan says it’s working with the industry as best as it can on a daily basis. Creative Saskatchewan head J.P. Ellson says that 80 percent of the projects funded histori-cally by the film employment tax credit received less than $250,000 and that 60 percent received less than $60,000. “Once we have the opportu-nity to go through some budgetary examples with them, they see that in many cases the model we’re using is actually better for them.” Whether the industry will survive long enough for an Alberta-style recovery is another question. It seems unlikely the new system will create an indus-try that can bring in talent like Terry Gilliam, John N. Smith and Charlize Theron, all of whom worked on films in Saskatchewan’s recent past. Since WolfCop and Corner Gas, two small fea-tures—The Sabbatical and Basic Human Needs—have been shot in Regina. Other than Saskatch-ewan Arts Board funding for The Sabbatical, both projects were financed by what is becoming a depressingly familiar mix of crowd-funding, volun-teer and non-union labour, and in the case of Basic Human Needs, an Indiecan competition. In both cases, the budgets were alarmingly low, far below normal rates for a film or TV shoot. The pressure that puts on directors and film crews isn’t likely to be a sustainable economic model. From the set of Basic Human Needs, camera op-erator Layton Burton describes a bleak landscape where there is no crew, no work and no foresee-able future. “For professional filmmakers, it’s dire straits,” he says. “We’re told to forget the past and move on. Where there’s no industry, we can’t move on. Without the tax credit it’s impossible to attract bigger-budget film and television series to rebuild the industry. It’s a catch-22.” From the sidelines, the Saskatchewan film in-dustry diaspora doesn’t see an easy way back, even if they wanted one. For director Rob King, the 18-month lag in between the tax credit and Creative Saskatchewan meant that talented people quit the industry or left the province. “All those years and dollars invested in training went off to other provinces,” says King. “The drain of talent and the loss of skilled labour have to be rebuilt. That will take years”—years of spooked outside partners who have more consistency in programs in other jurisdictions. Expat editor Daryl Davis agrees. “If there’s a les-son in any of this,” he says, “it’s to not take any funding system for granted, wherever you are in this country. Keep actively engaging public officials in the value of your process. Don’t rest on your laurels.” In the meantime, as far as big productions that might sustain the industry, as the song goes, there’s not a lot going on. Dean is working on the script for WolfCop II, another love letter to a beleaguered province. Whether it is received or not will depend on if there is anyone left to pick up the mail.

Carle Steel is a writer, journalist and cultural worker based between Regina and Toronto. She is a regular contributor to Regina’s alternative bi-weekly Prairie Dog Magazine and writes for other visual arts and cultural publications.

WolfCop (Lowell Dean,2014). Left, centre: courtesy Adrian Dean.

Right, bottom: courtesy Rory Geddes. Remaining photos courtesy Shawn Fulton

Left, Top to Bottom: Corner Gas (CTV). Courtesy Bell Media. Hungry Hills (Rob W. King). Courtesy Rob King

Right, Top to Bottom: Corner Gas (CTV). Courtesy Bell Media. Hungry Hills (Rob W. King). Courtesy Rob King


GO GREENEby ANN ELLE

On a warm summer evening, Vancouver-based producer and DGC member Justis Greene and I ar-rive at one of the night locations for The Returned. The show has taken over a block and half of resi-dential North Vancouver, transforming the area into a Halloween night with ghoulish and clever decorations scattering across lawns and lurking out of windows. One house teems with crew, the murder scene. As we walk towards the action, Greene quietly ticks off the set’s costlier features lined along the road: the crane for a single above-ground shot, $12,000; three helium-filled lighting balloons, $7,000 each; snow, $20,000. I note it’s appropriate that the moon is nearly full for to-night’s scene. “Yeah, I ordered that last night,” Greene quips. Three years before Greene signed on to produce The Returned, he had been working on the Dis-ney film Tomorrowland, starring George Clooney, when he received a call from NBCUniversal Tele-vision. The network asked if he would stop what he was doing and take on a new television series called Bates Motel. It’s unusual for a producer to leave a potential blockbuster to toil in the trenches of television, but this new project intrigued him. The creators, Carlton Cuse (Lost) and Kerry Ehrin (Friday Night Lights), are notorious for making great television, and set to star was Oscar nominee Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air). Greene flew to L.A. to meet with Ehrin and Cuse. The chemistry was immediate and Greene took the job. The new gig required a major adjustment. For the past decade, he’d been on a feature-film roll, producing Tron, starring Jeff Bridges, Time Trav-eler’s Wife, with co-producer Dede Gardner (presi-dent of Brad Pitt’s production company Plan B En-tertainment), Snakes on a Plane, starring Samuel L. Jackson, and David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, among others. Compared to film, “tele-vision is phenomenally hectic,” says Greene. “You Ph

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ects over the past 25 years. In fact, much of the crew has followed him from project to project for at least a couple of decades. Greene cultivates this loyalty by fostering a work environment that’s based on trust and collaboration. “He’s done so many jobs in the industry,” Meehan says, “so he has an appreciation for what everyone does. Because of this, he attracts great people and everyone wants to work with him.” Both Cuse and Meehan note he never lets himself get upset about problems that are beyond his or his crew’s control. “He leads with quiet strength,” Cuse says. But he’s also “extremely funny,” adds Meehan. “Not a day goes by when we don’t all have a good laugh even when the show is difficult.” During the course of our conversation, the many intricacies of his job continue to unfold. It’s know-ing the world’s handful of top aerial cinematogra-phers so he gets the expensive shots he needs the first time around, as was the case for the previous day, spent in a helicopter; it’s a familiarity with ev-ery piece of equipment involved in making a film so when a director requests the use of a $12,000 crane he knows that the same shot can be made without such a toy. Greene “sort of fell into” the business, but from the first time he walked onto a film set, he’s worked with the best. In the late 1960s, both Mike Nichols’ Carnal Knowledge and Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller filmed in the Vancouver area. Crews were in such short supply that Greene and all of his roommates landed jobs building sets on the films. At the time, he was a still photog-rapher interested in fashion. On both sets, the people from William F. White noticed his affinity for cameras and lights and asked him to run the first branch of the Toronto-based company with the promise of training on every piece of equip-ment. Once the shop was up and running, he left it in capable hands and got back to crew work. In 1983, director Fred Shepisi’s Iceman was about to start shooting in northern B.C. and needed a production manager. With no PM experience but first-hand knowledge of the B.C.’s great white north, Greene was hired. Producer Norman Jewi-son spotted a talent and used Greene on his next film, Agnes of God. Greene’s first job as a producer soon followed for Glitter Dome, an early HBO made-for-television film. Since then, he’s rolled from one project to an-other, including multiple Disney films. Much of the work took him around the world so he was rarely home. In order to spend time in Vancouver with his wife and four daughters (the youngest now 25), he took on local television series and pilots like Neon Rider and Outer Limits. Early in his career, Greene also founded the Brit-ish Columbia Film Commission, drumming up a tremendous amount of film business. In 1978, the year he started the organization, the province’s an-nual film revenue was roughly $5.5-million. When he left, three years—and many L.A. traffic jams—later, revenue surpassed $105-million. With the team he put in place, the industry hasn’t looked back. Greene’s behind-the-scenes commitment also saw him serve lengthy stints on both national and provincial Directors Guild of Canada boards. Interviewed for the DGC’s 50th anniversary archi-val project, Greene recalled of his early days: “We weren’t an industry. We weren’t anybody, we were just a bunch of goofs. Then all of a sudden people started taking us seriously because the government

have to step up your game.” Instead of shooting two pages a day, the crew shoots quadruple that—seven to eight pages. “Your decisions have to be so much quicker,” he says. But Greene found Bates Motel’s dense sched-ule “refreshing.” It helped that the show, a Twin Peaks-inspired prequel to Hitchcock’s film Psycho, now going into its third season, had broken ratings records for scripted content on A&E and earned an Emmy nod, along with People’s Choice nomina-tions for both its leads. So early this spring, when Cuse asked him if he would double the load and take on his new show, with Cuse’s showrunner Raelle Tucker (True Blood), Greene didn’t deliber-ate long. The Returned, a remake of the French hit series that tells the story of residents of a small town who grapple with the mysterious return of their dead loved ones, had Entertainment Weekly enthusing, “It has the potential to be one of the most compelling drama series on cable, thanks to the phenomenal scripts written by Carlton Cuse.”Greene couldn’t refuse. And for his part, Cuse says one of the key factors in his own decision to do the new show was the Vancouver producer’s involve-ment. “It gave me total comfort that the quality of the show would be at the highest level.” I meet Greene in his office at Vancouver Film Studios, where the elaborate interior sets for Bates Motel and The Returned are located. His crew—roughly 230 people, including shooting and office staff—was on track to complete A&E’s order of 10 episodes of The Returned by early fall. Tonight, the North Vancouver team is simultaneously filming episodes three and four while others are busy at headquarters, preparing episodes five and six. Still more staff are prepping Bates Motel, which would begin filming in eight weeks, the shooting of its first two episodes overlapping with the final two episodes of The Returned. Greene, a trim, stylish man with a languid style, exudes a calm certitude. As Cuse says, “I have yet to come up against a problem that Justis doesn’t have a plan for solving.” Greene will tell you that he comes from a crew background, so he has a deep familiarity with many of the technical aspects on set. It’s his greatest asset, he feels, in running a smooth operation. He’s also quick to credit his crew—“the best in the business”—and especially his long-time co-producing partner Heather Mee-han, with whom he has worked on some 35 proj-

wanted to support this industry. It went from, ‘Let’s not bother with them’ attitude to ‘This could be a significant thing.’” Greene considers himself fortunate to have never been without work, and for some time now, he’s had the privilege of choosing his projects. “I make choices based on who’s doing the show, rather than what it is,” Greene says. “If you’re go-ing to spend 16 hours a day, five days a week on a job, it’s really nice to be surrounded by people who you like and trust. It makes it a lot more fun.” One career highlight among many was produc-ing A History of Violence for David Cronenberg, someone for whom he “would drop everything to work on one of his films; he’s such a special guy.” Greene and his crew won the 2006 DGC Team Award for the film, which earned two Academy Award nominations. For his part, Cronenberg, in a thoughtfully worded e-mail, says he appreciated Greene’s “intelligence, acute sensitivity to human realities, non-vindictive toughness when necessary, and vast knowledge of the business.” Plus, added the director, he’s “a lot of fun to work with.” Greene had risen at 4:45 a.m., as he does every work day. He’s in the office by 7:30 a.m. in order to supervise daily tasks even when shooting takes place at night—and let’s face it, a neo-zombies se-ries and a Psycho spinoff are not seeing a lot of sunshine. Indefatigable, Greene’s in good spirits that evening at meal break when he sits down with his longtime AD, Pete Whyte, and Meehan. It’s Friday, and the list of questions raised about Monday’s shoot is handled quickly. As the producer is about to depart, talk turns to weekend plans. A fan of local art, Greene recommends a visual arts festival. He’s also, incidentally, a motorcycle enthusiast and has owned some 30 different rides throughout his life, the latest a scooter. Before we leave, Greene wants to show me the hair and makeup trailer. One of his closest friends, key hair stylist Donna Bis, works here. She met Greene on the Iceman set and remembers the first moment she laid eyes on the crew’s production manager. “He was body-painting extras,” she tells me. “In those days, everybody did everything.” But Greene’s friendship with the effervescent Bis isn’t exactly what draws him to the blush- and pigment-laden bunker at the start of every day. “If you want to know how your cast is doing that day,” he says as we drive back to the city around midnight, “you talk to hair and makeup. They say things there they wouldn’t otherwise repeat.” He gets a heads up on what’s troubling them and the next thing you know, the problem’s gone. “Been doing it my whole life.”

Ann Elle is a Vancouver-based freelance writer.

Top Left: The Time Traveler’s Wife

(Robert Schwentke, 2009) .Courtesy Alliance Films

Bottom Left: Bates Motel (A&E).

Courtesy Joseph Lederer

Top Right: The Outer Limits.

Courtesy DGC Bottom Right:

The Outer Limits .Courtesy Doug Curran


by SUZAN AYSCOUGH

We’ve all heard the horrific and hopeful story of Mala-la, a young Afghan woman who dared challenge local customs and stand up for individual women’s rights. Now we can also hear the story of Tracey, a young Mo-hawk filmmaker who dared challenge local customs and stand up for individual women’s rights in Canada. You may not know DGC member Tracey Deer’s story because no one gets shot, except with a cam-era, in controversial documentaries such as Mohawk Girls (2005) and Club Native (2008), which take direct aim at a Canadian measurement system called “blood quantum.” It’s a system that determines one’s Native status—or not—based on the percentage of one’s In-dian blood. “This system was imposed on us by the Canadian government through the Indian Act to erase us from existence,” Deer told Montage over the phone from an editing room where she’s overseeing work on her first dramatic TV series (13 x 30 minutes), also named Mohawk Girls, a romantic comedy that premiers on APTN on November 25 at 9 p.m. “Having been forced to live under this system for over 100 years, the concept of measuring our ‘purity’ and therefore our ‘worth’ has been entrenched in many of my own people,” Deer continued. “I see it as brainwashing. We’ve been ‘trained’ to qualify, discrim-inate and exclude each other based on blood purity as the defining characteristic of what makes us who we are. It has led to a very negative attitude towards mixed marriages and mixed parentage. “I grew up knowing I was 89.62 percent Mohawk,” Deer says. “There are some people with 100 percent—they think they’re superior. When I was young, I felt ‘less than’…. I felt pissed. I was mad that my great-great-grandmother fell for a French guy (I think). I felt hatred for someone who ultimately gave me life. I hat-ed my own lineage. I always felt gross about the whole system. What about who I am? I’m a percentage? A statistic?” Deer wrangled silently with such identity demons as a young girl but ultimately decided to speak out when she concluded, despite her fears, “We can’t sacrifice our lives for the collective.” “Courageous” is the word chosen to describe Deer by Alanis Obamsawin, the award-winning Abenaki filmmaker who was busy putting the finishing touches on her own Trick or Treaty for a timely premiere during TIFF 2014 when she was reached at her office at the

National Film Board of Canada in Montreal. Obamsawin had nothing but praise for Deer’s vi-sion: “She was courageous, especially with Mohawk Girls, talking about blood quantum and tackling this very controversial thing about the status of Indians and measuring the blood of their own women. You could be excluded from your own community. How do you think a woman survives that? It’s very difficult.” “Being half black is worse than being half white,” Deer said on the same topic. She pointed to a real-life case affecting a good friend, a story that inspired some of the action in the upcoming Mohawk Girls, season one. Yet the bold filmmaker who today is creating, di-recting and producing Mohawk Girls, the TV series, has come a very long way from the fearful young woman who made Mohawk Girls, the feature-doc. “It was terrifying because I wanted to tell the ugly truth, and how were my people going to feel if the truth was ugly?” Deer asked rhetorically. “Our inter-action with Canada has been marred by many aw-ful things. I think the attitude is ‘Don’t give Canada any more ammunition against us.’ And with Mohawk Girls, I was afraid I was doing just that. “But they didn’t get mad. All that fear was for nothing, but it was part of my process. I’m not afraid any more. That process was me finding my feet. I feel proud of what I’m doing and I believe in it. I hope I’m making a positive contribution.” The series Mohawk Girls is being billed as a roman-tic comedy by executive producer Catherine Bain-bridge (Rezolution Pictures), who says it’s like “Sex and the City, Mohawk style.” How did it become a romantic comedy? “These stories come from Tracey’s life and very existence and she’s been so generous in telling them. They’re told with sensitivity and humour and fun and love,” says Bainbridge, who believes the series will reach its target demographic of girls and young women. Deer also hopes Mohawk Girls the series will touch young Aboriginal women and bridge the gap with the rest of Canada. “With all my films, and the show itself, I like to put the mirror up to my own people,” she said. “We need to be looking at ourselves because things need to change for the better. Sticking our heads in the sand and playing the blame game, with the victim mentality—we’re not going to build something posi-tive from that. I hope my work generates conversa-tions. And if anyone gets mad at the honesty, that’s because it’s the reality we’re living in. Let’s look at the reality and change that. “The other prong is a goal to build bridges with Canadians,” she continued. “What Canadians are exposed to with regards to my people is very nega-tive and superficial. News doesn’t dig into the context of the situation so I hope Mohawk Girls provides that context. It deals with universal themes everyone can relate to: love and sex and searching for identity.” So where did Tracey Deer, now 36 years old, find all this courage? Deer says it came during the summer of 1990 when she was just 12 years old. The Oka Crisis, as it was dubbed, went on from early July until late September and became international news when the Mohawks of Kahnawake (Tracey’s community) created a blockade on the Mercier Bridge to Montreal in soli-darity with the Mohawk community of Kanesatake, after the town of Oka refused to cancel plans to dig up the latter’s ancestral burial ground to clear the way for another nine holes of golf (on an existing nine-hole course) and other developments. “The Mohawks of Kanesatake stood up and we backed them,” Deer says of the summer she grew up. “The Oka Crisis was running the gauntlet to adult-

TRACEYI AM


hood. The Crisis marked the end of childhood for me. Before that, life was just a ball of fun. I have a huge family. They’re all within a couple of blocks from where I lived on ‘Sesame Street’ [a nickname]. We have a park right on our street. We lived right on the water. We played in the woods, made campfires and roasted marshmallows. It was tons of fun. I wasn’t very aware of the rest of the world or how different we were. “At first it was just an awesome adventure,” says Deer of the first two months of the Crisis. “This alter-nate cool universe. Go and get your daily rations and you didn’t know what you were going to get—it was fun. Until the rumour came that the army was going to invade and all women and children should leave the reserve.” The fun was over. Deer became very angry at how she and her people were treated. Eventually she “was able to harness that anger” and develop an attitude of “I’ll show you!” but that took time. “The world wanted me to disappear or be invis-ible,” she says. “They expected failure from me. I said, ‘You know what? I’m going to prove you wrong.’ In the documentary Mohawk Girls, I think I said, ‘I can take on the world.’” Deer’s new attitude was fuelled by another life-altering event: “After the Oka Crisis we got our first video store on the reserve,” she explains. Seeing films like Medicine Man in which a scientist played by Sean Connery finds a cure for cancer was “quite empower-ing to a kid,” she says. “I began wondering, ‘How do I become this?’ I’ve always been very goal-oriented. And at the end of one movie, I finally thought, ‘I’ll get to be a part of that if I just make movies.’ It was so clear in that moment: ‘This is what I’m supposed to do.’ And I told my Mom and Dad and they said, ‘That’s great, sweetie.’” Deer became focused on getting her hands on the one camera the video store rented that “weighed 25 pounds” and she saved her allowance for two to three months to rent it for one weekend. “All my early films were horror movies,” she says. “Nobody stopped me from having their children running around with knives and killing each other. At 12 or 13 years old, my first movie was Halloween at Tota’s which means Hallow-een at Grandmother’s. Looking back, clearly I was in a dark place.” Also not long afterwards, Deer started going to a private girls’ school “on the island,” which is what Mohawks call Montreal. She then went to Dartmouth College in New Hampshire on a full scholarship and took film studies modified with photography. She did a four-month internship at Global News, which gave her some news chops. She did a 10-day intensive Na-tional Screen Institute (NSI) storytellers’ workshop and was “an observer” on the series Moose TV, under the wing of director Tim Southam. Southam, who also directed the powerful indict-ment of the Ipperwash crisis, One Dead Indian (2005), praises Deer for two reasons: “She’s fighting for the in-dividual’s identity and rights and she also took the time to really develop as a skilled drama director.” In the NSI workshop, he adds, “She was fearless and at the ab-solute forefront. Now she’s applying advanced chops to something that really matters to her.” Southam also said she has the skill of a “mainstream director,” so it is her choice to create “niche programming.” Through all of this education, Deer began a practice that she still has today of having two homes and two perspectives. “I have a home in Montreal and I still have a home on the Reserve,” she said. Deer says all of her life experiences, her early hor-ror movies and her education led her to work on her

“first real movie,” One More River with Neil Diamond (Reel Injuns) when she was 23. She had been planning to move to New York City when fate hooked her up with producer Bainbridge. They talked for a few hours and she “hired me on the spot” to work as Diamond’s production assistant, a position she parlayed into a co-director credit. “I went back to the producers and said, ‘I’m doing way more up there than being an assistant.’ I figured I’d go for director and negotiate my way down. After I presented my case, they said, ‘You are co-director.’ I was in a daze. I was so excited.” That’s why today, Deer tells younger filmmakers, “Don’t wait for lighting to strike you. You need to open the doors yourselves.” With One More River un-der her belt, Deer said Bainbridge made an offer over dinner: “If you have any of your own ideas to pitch, I’d be happy to hear them.’ So right there at dinner, I said, ‘Growing up, I felt invisible and voiceless. Telling the story of young people and who they are in Kahn-awake is what I want to do.’” Bainbridge loved it and so did the NFB and APTN, and Mohawk Girls the doc was made.

It’s also worth noting that Rez Pictures’ producer Christina Fon said Deer is very passionate about her work and topics but she is equally savvy about bud-gets. “Tracey is one of the rare artists that has two sides to her,” Fon said. “First she has a vision, but sec-ondly, she is also sensitive to producers. She’s not at all hands-on financing but she really cares about being on time and on budget.” Initially that combo made it easier to get another picture happening. Up next was another gruelling doc about blood quantum called Club Native, after which Deer said she was “emotionally exhausted” and couldn’t imagine taking on another documentary right away, nor take on the “responsibility that goes with filming people’s real lives.” She took a long rest before she went back to Rezo-lution Pictures to pitch a fiction version of Mohawk Girls, which led to a pilot of the same name four years ago. “But one of the four leads declined the show, so we reshot the pilot with the rest of the series,” said Deer. “We rewrote and reshot the half-hour pilot that kicks off the new season.” The new season of Mohawk Girls, which kicks off on APTN in the fall, has an accompanying website, MOHAWKGIRLS.COM. Check it out to see webisodes, photo galleries, an interactive quiz and more.

Suzan Ayscough is a freelance journalist and president of her own media company, @OnCamera3000. She is also Director, Communications for the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television and co-founder of Play-back’s Canadian Film & Television Hall of Fame.

Left, Top to Bottom: Mohawk Girls (Tracey Deer, 2014). Courtesy (in order) Eric Myre, Philippe Bosse, Eric Myre, Eric Myre

Centre, Top to Bottom:Mohawk Girls. Courtesy Eric Myre, Philippe Bosse, Philippe Bosse. Tracey Deer with first AD Erik Ajduk. Courtesy Eric Myre

Right, Top to Bottom: All photos courtesy Georges Khayat

The world wanted me to disappear or be invisible. They expected failure from me. I said, ‘You know what? I’m going to prove you wrong.’ – Tracey Deer


by JASON ANDERSON

While the vagaries of weather are the bane of nearly every shoot that dares to brave the outdoors, there may be even greater surprises in store when you’re on an island in the North Atlantic. Stefan Scaini learned this lesson many times over during the days and nights he’s dedicated to Republic of Doyle, the CBC’s light-hearted mystery drama about a son-and-father detec-tive team that handles the trickiest cases St. John’s has ever seen. In fact, the DGC member faced an especial-ly daunting clash with the elements while directing an episode in the show’s second season in August 2010. “We were shooting on a rooftop in downtown St. John’s,” says Scaini during a break from his work on Republic of Doyle’s sixth and final season. “We could see the Narrows and Signal Hill. Don McKellar was our guest star and we were hanging him in a harness over the side of this 10-storey building. Then the fog socked in and we couldn’t see 10 feet ahead of us.” Since it was the only day the crew could have the location, Scaini was at a loss over what to do next—besides, of course, express his sympathies to the dan-gling McKellar. But as the director recalls, “Suddenly this wind came along and blew the fog away in less than five minutes. The sun came out and it’s like the angels were singing. I just looked out and said, ‘See, this is why we’re here—even God loves St. John’s be-cause he wants to make sure we get it on camera!’” Of course, the Almighty doesn’t deserve all of the credit for making Newfoundland look so good. Since Republic of Doyle debuted four years ago, when it earned the CBC’s highest-ever ratings for a new dra-matic series and continued to be a strong performer despite time-slot shuffles, its cast and crew have worked hard to convey the region’s many charms and idiosyncrasies to audiences in the rest of Canada and the over 90 other countries where it’s seen. Nor have viewers been the only ones to be en-ticed by this grand seduction, what with all the main-land talent that has been lured east to work with star Allan Hawco and his fellow Newfoundlanders on Republic of Doyle’s team. A multiple DGC Award

nominee and winner of ensemble awards for Heart-land, Degrassi: The Next Generation and Spirit Bear: The Simon Jackson Story, Scaini is one of many DGC members with CFA status (that’s Come-From-Away in the local vernacular) who’ve grown attached to the re-gion. Scaini helmed 17 of the 67 episodes in the series’ first five seasons and he handles four of the final 10. He keenly remembers the beginning of his tenure late in season one. “It was my first time in Newfoundland,” says the Toronto-based director. “I’d worked up in the Mari-times quite a bit but not here. I’ve found the personali-ties right across the province are just so wonderful and embracing. There’s such a joy and passion for life here and we’ve tried so hard to get all that into the show.” A guest director in season five who previously earned DGC Award nominations for his short film Lenny and 2005 feature Pure, Jim Donovan was just as struck by his first impressions. “I hadn’t been to New-foundland before so it blew my mind,” he says in an interview from Montreal, where he’s working on Le Clan, a new TV drama for Radio-Canada. “I thought, ‘Ah, well, all those touristy pictures, you can make any province look interesting.’ But I really had no clue how beautiful it was.” He was similarly impressed by the production’s welcoming atmosphere, which is fostered in no small part by the social opportunities that the crew extends to visitors. First on the agenda is the weekly wrap-party gathering at the Duke of Duckworth, a St. John’s institution known colloquially as the Duke (it’s also a regular haunt for Hawco’s screen alter ego, Jake Doyle). “You’re not cool if you don’t show up,” says Donovan. “It’s almost mandatory.” Paul Fox, another guest director in season five, calls it “one of those jobs that everyone always wants to do because of the experience of going out there.” As Fox says from an editing suite where he’s working on Schitt’s Creek for CBC, “It’s great to be on shows where you can get a different perspective on the place than you would as a tourist because you can meet people who live and work there.” All three directors praise St. John’s for what Scaini calls the city’s “embarrassment of riches” when it comes to shooting locations and sheer beauty. “It’s so rich and so colourful and photogenic,” says Scaini. “You could be downtown with all the saltbox houses in their jelly-bean colours—that’s spectacular. Then you travel 10 minutes to the west and be at these dra-matic cliffs overlooking the ocean and see lighthouses and whales. This past summer we’ve had these mas-sive icebergs floating past. On the other side of it all, if we need something that feels a little darker and more urban, it’s not hard to find that, too. St. John’s is unbe-lieveable for its wide range of looks and styles.” At the same time, presenting St. John’s in all its grit and glory has never been the endeavour’s sole ob-jective. Hawco makes that point during a rare pause from his own duties on the show, which the National Theatre School grad co-created with Perry Chafe and Malcolm MacRury and for which he served as show-runner for the first four seasons. “I have a difficult time with shows that make the place the plot, so to speak,” says Hawco. “To feel like the setting is so important takes me out of a show because it makes me question whether or not I care about that place. What’s most important in any drama is you care about the people you’re watching every week. In some ways we tried to incorporate the place as a character so that it wasn’t just ‘about’ the place.” Fox admits that’s not always so easy for outsid-ers to do, given the scenery. “Everything looks so

As Republic of Doyle enters its final season on CBC, Allan Hawco and four DGC members from the mainland reflect on the lively dynamic between the proud New-foundlanders at the show’s core and the Come-From-Aways who’ve contributed to its success

ROLLINGON THEROCKS

Previous page: the cast of Republic of Doyle in

Newfoundland. Courtesy eOne films.

All photos of Newfoundland courtesy Kendrie Upton


Toronto or Vancouver is another challenge for guest directors, as Fox admits. Yet he doesn’t believe that his experience at Republic of Doyle was marred by any wariness toward the CFAs. Says Fox, “That’s less to do with where you’re from and more to do with, ‘Is this guy gonna cause trouble or is he gonna be one of us?’ Any time you show up as the outsider, there’s that ini-tial wait-and-see attitude.” In Donovan’s words, keeping Hawco “on his toes” was another big part of the gig. “The guy’s ev-erywhere,” he says. “But he’s sharp, man—he knows everything he wants from that show and he’s at the centre of it. The trick is going, ‘What can I do for him? And how can I get him to step up or try something dif-ferent?’ I didn’t really know Allan so it was an exercise in getting to know him and figuring out how I could stimulate his creativity.” Inevitably, a CFA’s chances for a satisfying stint on Republic of Doyle have a great deal to do with the rapport he or she can strike up with the show’s driving force. Christie can recall how the extent of her com-mitment stayed up in the air until she met Hawco. “The producers kept telling me, ‘We don’t know until you’ve worked with Allan.’ There was all this pressure because he didn’t get along with everybody. I found him a lovely guy to work with and have a great rela-tionship with him but apparently some people don’t.” Christie found it especially difficult to have her first spell in the editing room with Hawco on the same day that the team found out about the Rotundo’s passing. “There couldn’t have been a weirder start to all of it,” she says. “As it turned out, it was fine and they liked what I had done. Allan said, ‘She doesn’t always make the choices I would make but I like the choices she does make!’” Having devoted so much energy to the show, Hawco clearly appreciates the opportunities to lighten the load. As he continues work on season six, he’s been getting better at savouring the moments at hand rather than “losing my mind because I have a draft to finish, pages I have to get out for tomorrow and a cut that needs to be done.” With the end in sight, he and the team are looking forward to other projects in Newfoundland, perhaps something closer to the “much edgier” in-carnation of Republic of Doyle that Hawco initially conceived. He also expresses the pleasure he felt at being “just an actor on set” for Clement Virgo on the CBC mini-series The Book of Negroes, slated to air this winter. But first and foremost in his mind is his desire to do right by Republic of Doyle’s most dedicated view-ers. “I’ve been doing this for a long time,” says Haw-co, “and like all of us, you can tire yourself out and feel like there’s not necessarily a lot of people who pay attention. So when you have a circumstance where there’s a massive following and a huge audience base, you don’t want to leave them in the lurch. They’re genuinely devoted to the work you’re doing so you do feel an obligation. “Of course, you’ve got to make the work you’ve got to make. You can’t try to please everybody or you’d go crazy. But you want to be able to at least follow through with what you’re doing, which is why we’re so lucky to have the chance to end it.”

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

began treatment for cancer. (Sadly, he died that Au-gust.) Determined to learn the nuances of language and behaviour that gave Republic of Doyle its particu-lar flavour, she immersed himself in the series and the city as fully as she could. “The city is really small,” she says, “so I would just walk around downtown all the time. I’d go to galleries and bookstores and see things. Then I would ask people questions—endless ques-tions!” Thanks to that process and reading local histories like Paul O’Neill’s The Oldest City, the show’s references to St. John’s hangouts like Moo Moo’s ice cream shop gradually became less cryptic. She also developed an ear for the cadences, even if certain phrases could still throw her for a loop. Her favourite comes from Krys-tin Pellerin’s character, Leslie, when Jake tells her he’ll drive her car home and she replies, “Yes, by nose you will.” “There’s no real kind of translation for it,” says Christie. “I remember asking Allan and he said some-thing and I was like, ‘But you’re not describing it—I still don’t get it!’ As editors, we’re doing the first pass on performance and it’s meticulous work so you sort of have to understand which was the right one and which wasn’t. I mostly got it right. Occasionally Allan would correct it and say, ‘Oh no, it’s that one.’ Then I’d listen to both again and think, ‘What was the differ-ence?!’ Then I just got better at listening.” Scaini says he experienced much the same kind of learning curve, adding that he and the crew have got-ten many laughs out of the Whaddaya App, a Newfie translator that’s a staple of iPhones and Android de-vices on the set. The degree of conviviality and commitment among the largely local crew has continued to be a major draw for him over his five summers on Republic of Doyle. “They’re all so passionate about this show, about what the stories are telling,” he says. What’s more, that passion is shared by the community at large. Says Scaini, “I’ll walk into a local corner store here and if I happen to be wearing my Republic of Doyle hat, people just go on about how they love the show. Someone will say, ‘Oh, my brother-in-law was an extra—do you know him? His name is Jimmy.’ That kind of thing goes on all across the province–they have such pride for this and show such support.” “Everybody in St. John’s watches the show,” says Paul Fox. “If I’m here in Toronto and somebody asks me what I’m working on, people may or may not know it. But there, everybody knows it and knows it in detail. They know the relationships between the char-acters and what’s happening to whom. You’re in this town of Doyle fans.” It’s not always a love-in, mind you. CFAs have sometimes struggled to find their place inside the well-oiled machine that Hawco and his team have created. “We’ve worked with a lot of talented people,” says Hawco. “And this may sound generic but some people work out and some people don’t. Some people get that it’s not just about their vision, about what they want to shoot and the pictures or performances they want. “A big part of directing an ongoing television se-ries is getting your days, not going into overtime and still managing to capture what’s integral to the story and what are the most beautiful or most inspirational shots you need to tell it. But you’ve got do it on time and on budget.” Jim Donovan notes that the six-day shoot was es-pecially hard. “That speed is tough and you really do feel the compression,” he says. Showing up to lead a tight-knit crew that is not full of the familiar faces of

fabulous,” he says. “All the little wooden houses, the ocean and all these other things are so exotic to us as outsiders. But [the Doyle team] does divest you very quickly of that inclination to treat St. John’s as this bright, shiny object you want to show off. They don’t want it to become a pictorial. So what you do is what you do on any show, which is really plunge into the work and try to ignore the landscape in order to focus on the nuts and bolts of the characters and the stories.”

As Republic of Doyle comes to the end of a successful run, it’s easy to forget the gamble it once represented. After all, a young and largely unproven actor, writer and producer who was determined to develop a show-case both for his home province and himself was the spearhead of the project. In the process, Republic of Doyle not only helped establish a new infrastructure for Newfoundland’s film and TV industry, it proved the CBC’s drive for regional productions need not always result in folksy hokum. For all the impact the show has had on St. John’s, Hawco stresses it was never meant to be a “closed club” that benefited only the locals. “We’re striving to make the best work possible,” he says, “so you’ve got to surround yourself with the best people you can, whether they’re from here or somewhere else. We just didn’t have a big stable of experienced directing talent at our disposal in the beginning so we had to bring in people from away.” Another key talent among the CFAs at Republic of Doyle has been editor Caroline Christie. Having ed-ited 30 episodes during her three years with the show, she jokes that she came to know all the routes and runs for planes between St. John’s and her home in Toronto. Christie arrived in the summer of 2011 as a hastily arranged fill-in for editor Nick Rotundo as he


Peter Harcourt 1931-2014by TOM McSORLEY

“We are beginning to recognize that there is, in fact, a Canadian cinema that is inferior to nothing.” —Peter HarcourtIntroduction, Film Canadiana 1975-76, Canadian Film Institute, Ottawa 1976

The italics are his. The emphasis, as in emphatic, is pure Peter Harcourt, the phrase “beginning to recog-nize,” full of confidence yet somehow tentative, utterly Canadian. This sentence captures the essence of Harcourt’s critical ethos and his legacy. On July 3, Canada lost one of its greatest intellects and Canadian cinema lost a passionate, articulate, inspirational champion. Harcourt was a gifted, perceptive commenta-tor on Canadian cinema and Canadian culture. Throughout his career as an educator, critic, author and programmer, he dedicated his searching mind to illuminate post-war Canadian cinema. Like many university graduates of his generation, Harcourt went to England to further his studies. While at the British Film Institute, he had a revelation about his faraway, colonial country through the ground-breaking documentaries being made at the National Film Board. His 1964 Sight and Sound article, “The Innocent Eye,” represents not only his insightful appreciation of the films of Tom Daly’s Unit B but also, in a quietly radical sense, Harcourt’s decolonization. Canada was speaking for itself in these films, and he heard it. Returning in 1967 to teach, he began uncovering for us what he famously termed our “invisible cinema.” He would continue to speak with conviction about Canada’s diverse, eccentric and accomplished film practices. He took that imperfect risk: taking Canadian films and, yes, Canada seriously. “Inferior to nothing”: strong words, but necessary to spark post-colonial fires of thought across our emerging nation. Peter Harcourt was incendiary and he was luminous. He was my portal to the world of cinema, inter-national and Canadian, as I was lucky enough to take Introduction to Film Studies with him at Carleton University. It was electrifying. Here was a teacher who clearly had a calling—one that did not ask you to follow but rather to join, to add your voice. To my astonishment, he wanted to know what I had to say. Since Peter’s passing, I recall Carlos Fuentes’ memory of his awestruck encounter with Thomas Mann; that experience gave Fuentes the confidence “…to approach the fire of literature and ask it for a few sparks.” That is what Peter Harcourt did for me. Thank you, Peter, for building a fire, for inviting me to stand in its warming light and for encouraging me to add my own modest fuel to keep it alive.

Tom McSorley is Executive Director of the Canadian Film Institute. He is an Adjunct Research Professor in Film Studies at Carleton University, where he teaches Canadian cinema in the same classroom where he took that course from Peter Harcourt.

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