www.lvroom.com

If you’re not the type of person who frequented the short programs at the Vancouver International Film Festival last year, you might have missed A.J. Bond’s fun sci-fi short Hirsute. But now you can watch it here… FOR FREE! Enjoy.

www.thesiblings.ca

I had a chance to sit down with writer/stars Jason Jones and Mike Beaver, as well director as Warren P Sonoda, to talk about the film, Christmas and Dave Foley’s ass.

What made you guys want to do a low budget Canadian comedy?
Mike: Yeah, we really wanted to do that.
Warren: It was a very conscious choice. We could have done a big budget American blockbuster, but we were like “No, no, no, we don’t need anything more than $50 and this case of Canadian.”

Would a big budget have helped?
Warren: You know what it was? It was just expediency. Jason and Mike wrote the script and they asked if I’d like to make it. I said, “I’d love to, but it’s a Christmas movie and we have to do it in the winter.”
Mike: It had snow but we wrote into your script that it didn’t have snow. Because, even in Canada, you don’t know if it’s gonna snow anymore.
Warren: More importantly, with everyone’s schedules, I only had them for two weeks. So the reason why we decided to do it this way is because we could. There was no other way.
Mike: We lucked out because of the crew, the actors, how everyone just nailed every single take… we didn’t take too long on each scene. It was a tight schedule and we just lucked out. The stars aligned and everyone stepped up.

Why did you guys decide to take the handheld verité approach?
Jason Jones: It’s just how we wrote it. We decided on the format before we decided on the story. We were watching Mike’s home videos…. sorry, Mike was forcing us to watch his home videos and we were like, “Wouldn’t it be great if we took the best moments of all these videos and made a movie of that.” That was kind of the first idea. We talked about our similar stories, our Christmas stories, our birthdays and whatnot and combining elements that way.
Mike: Funny enough, some of the scenes in the movie are still from that original video tape. It was little moments, the sisters and the kids, the way they’re moving around and talking and cooking. The side you knew was real was what we translated into the script.
Jason: The story was the archetype of both our families. Two parents who shouldn’t be together… don’t print that.

Whose family is the story closest to?
Mike: I’d say mine.
Jason: Character-wise, it’s closest to Mike because he has two brothers. I had a brother and a sister. The core story really had nothing to do with our families.
Mike: The story was manufactured. On a normal Christmas, every family has a separate team. I don’t think it varies too much from family to family.

Jason, did you learn anything about your wife Samantha Bee by playing her husband onscreen?
Jason: I learned that if we ever get 10% of that couple in us, it’s time to break up. No. The question that comes up the most is, “They say you write what you know. Is this what you know?” For some reason I always write these doughty put-upon wives for Sarah to play… and that’s cuz she is.

Are you comfortable in a lead role, cuz normally you’re a supporting guy.
Jason: I like supporting roles. I like the roles that you do and are cut out before you even shoot them. My specialty is getting cast and then getting on plane to go shoot it and then them saying when you get off the plane, “Oh, we cut your role.” Those are the roles you want. No, it’s great. No one’s giving me any parts in Hollywood. Write it for yourself and come up here and do it.
Warren: That’s where Mike and Jason really took the bull by the horns. They weren’t waiting around for someone to give them a movie to do. It was out of that necessity to be creative. I’m glad we were able to do Coopers’ Camera because these guys should be in more movies… way more movies and they will.
Jason: As long as we write them.

Let’s talk about Christmas. What was your happiest Christmas moment ever? Or unhappiest?
Warren: My brother stayed up all week for me making this model war set. I was like 10 years old. My family gave that to me along with a Super-8 camera. So we made little movies.
Mike: Mine are more the sour memories. One Christmas that I felt terrible at, we woke up in the morning and my parents got us a bunch of gifts. But the big present they got us, there was always the one big present, was a VCR. My dad was trying to explain to us what it was cuz we didn’t really know what it was. “It’s a VCR!” My brother lost it. He was like, “This is awful. This is the worst Christmas ever.” It brought a real sour onto the whole day. Then we started watching movies.
Warren: He bought you movies?
Mike: He rented them. Of course he didn’t buy us movies.
Warren: They were like $100.
Jason: “Ninety-nine dollars! What the fuck?”
Mike: But that was the worst Christmas because my brother complained and whined and it was awful.
Jason: My best Christmas ever? Any Christmas I wasn’t beaten. My Dad liked to make, well they were happy jokes in the end but they were cruel jokes in the middle. I wanted a drum set really badly. It was exactly like A Christmas Story. Final present behind the tree and it obviously wasn’t a drum set. He pulls it out and it was in a big box and I was like, “Oh maybe it is a drum set.” I started opening it and there was another box inside. And another box inside. And another box inside.
Mike: Oh, that gag.
Jason: I got to the final box and it was just a little drum. He was like, “Sorry, I couldn’t afford it this Christmas.” I was like “Oh great, thanks.” I was miserable. Then he was like, “Hey come with me, I need you to help me get something in the basement.”
Mike: Awww…
Jason: And the drum set was downstairs.
Mike: That’s a father who loves you. My favourite Christmas is the one where my mom cut me a cheque for $200. And that’s a true story.
Jason: “Get some clothes, they’re terrible.”

Dave Foley has a remarkable ass.
Warren: It was for real. It was all him.

Was he very open to the idea of exposing his ass on screen?
Warren: He had no idea he was going to do nudity. He offered it. Mike and Jason wrote it in as this sex-obsessed neighbour. Dave’s the one that said, “If he’s sex-obsessed then he should be having sex, with no clothes on.”

Would it be fair to say then that Dave Foley offers the ass?
Mike: Yeah, he offers the ass.
Jason: It was actually contractual that he has to perform pants-less. It’s a weird thing.

This conversation always happens when I’m talking with three dudes.
Jason: He had a VERY large cameo.
Mike: Let’s go take a shower guys!

Did you guys do all your own stunts?
Jason: Oh yeah, we did all our own stunts.

What’s the best way to take a convincing punch in the nuts?
Mike and Jason: Tuck!

Was it difficult for you guys to act drunk for most of the movie?
Warren: There’s a lot of drinking in this movie
Mike: We’ve done it a lot. It’s not the easiest thing to act convincingly so it’s still funny and still gonna generate laughs, but still subtle enough that you buy it. That line me and Jason are on is a tightrope.
Jason: It’s also weird in this movie because we start sober, accelerate to 100, hunch over a bit, crash, then get up again. It’s six days of drinking crammed into 16 hours.
Warren: Being exhausted for the entire shoot helped people get into the zone of being trashed.

Are you guys all whiskey men?
Warren and Jason: No.
Mike: I used to collect the labels off the necks of Jack Daniels bottles and keep them in my wallet as badges of honour. “Look how much whiskey I’ve drank!” Like in high school you wanna be cool. “I’m a boozer. I’m gonna follow in my dad’s footsteps. I’m so cool I drink JD straight.” I used to think I was Keith Richards in high school for a bit.
Jason: But not the rock part.

There’s a lot of crude humour but I was never grossed out.
Mike: You’re a sick man.

Well, to give you an example, I saw the new Kevin Smith movie and there’s a scene where Jason Mewes, rather graphically, gets his face crapped on. And that just disgusted me.
Jason: We try to capture the scatalogical or gross-out humour in an actual scene. It was literally like, “Hey, we’ve got this really dramatic scene, wouldn’t it be funny if it was on the toilet?” Or he just told his son he’s a hermaphrodite as we’re sitting in front of a pile of puke after he just tried to kill himself with Lysol. Then he tries to clean it up with the Lysol he tried to kill himself with.
Warren: After I read the hermaphrodite Lysol suicide scene, I said I have to make this movie. If I shoot any one scene, this is the scene I do.

What are some tips on giving a really good gift to somebody for Christmas?
Warren: Give something that you wanna get so if they don’t like it you can just take it back.
Jason: Truthfully, it’s listening to my wife and I never do it. They drop hints all year. You just gotta listen. But now I have an iPhone so I can write them down immediately. I never used to do that. Listen. They do drop hints all year long and you just gotta collect those and go with one you can afford.
Mike: I’ve stopped doing it.
Jason: It’s just cash or a cheque?
Mike: No, no, no. My wife and I will go, “Christmas is coming up, do we wanna give gifts? Well we had that big dinner out last week so how about that was Christmas?” I get that from my family. Christmas was fucking cancelled at Thanksgiving in 1995.
Jason: Christmas is cancelled.

I should state I haven’t seen or heard about the large majority of the estimated 4000 films playing at VIFF this year. So I’ll add to this post as I see good ones. I should also state that I’m very bad at making estimates too.

Achilles and the Tortoise
Dir: Takashi Kitano
Country: Japan
A comedy about a young boy with dreams of becoming an artist that is directed by (and stars) Takaski ‘Beat’ Kitano. Come watch the master who made Zatoichi at work.
Sat Sept 27, 6:30PM at Granville 4
Tue Sept 30, 4:00PM at Granville 7
Mon Oct 6, 7:15PM at Granville 6

Filth and Wisdom
Dir: Madonna
Country: UK
What the hell? Madonna directs Eugene Hutz from Gogol Bordello. The VIFF guide proclaims that this film is proof that Madonna is a better director than Mike Leigh and Guy Ritchie.. As if! Still probably worth checking this one out.
Thu Oct 9, 9:00PM at Granville 4
Fri Oct 10, 11:30AM at Granville 3

God’s Puzzle
Dir: Takashi Miike
Country: Japan
A VIFF favourite returns. Takashi Miike has made a career out of cranking insane movies like Audition, Ichi the Killer, Gozu and Sukiyaki Western Django (out now) at an insane rate. This one is a sci fi and probably crazy as well. By the time you finished reading this, Miike just finished another movie.
Thu Sept 25, 10:00PM at Granville 7
Fri Sept 26, 2:30PM at Granville 3

Gomorrah
Dir: Matteo Garrone
Country: Italy
Italian Mob movie that really has people talking. Watch five storylines all weave together like a bowl of worms. You thought I was gonna say spaghetti, didn’t you? I would never do that. Based on a best selling novel that forced the author to go into hiding because of the secrets it revealed. What a wimp!
Tue Oct 7, 9:30PM at Granville 7
Wed Oct 8, 4:00PM at Granville 7

Hunger
Dir: Steve McQueen
Country: UK
Artstar Steve McQueen directs a movie about an IRA leader’s six week hunger strike. Depressssssing!
Mon Oct 6, 9:15PM at Granville 3
Tue Oct 7, 11:00AM at Granville 4

[Rec]
Dir: Jaume Balaguero, Paco Plaza
Country: Spain
Terrifying Spanish horror that has already been remade for North American audiences. This is widely regarded as one of the scariest movies to come out in the past few years. The remake is called Quarantine and comes out pretty soon. It stars the sister from Dexter and pretty much everyone I’ve talked to hates her. So maybe you should check this out instead. For the people who watch movies on their computers, I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t let you know a high quality DVD rip of this movie is pretty easy track down online.
Wed Oct 8, 9:45PM at Granville 7
Thu Oct 9, 4:00PM at Granville 7
Thu Oct 9, 9:30PM at Granville 2

Serbis
Dir: Brillante Mendoza
Country: Philippines/France
Arthouse Alert! Strangely similar to 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days. Set in a porn theatre in the Philippines, this one follows the lives of the family who run it and the male prostitutes who frequent the establishment. Oh, and about halfway in, a transsexual gives an onscreen blow job where you see everything.
Thu Oct 9, 9:00PM at Granville 4
Fri Oct 10, 11:30AM at Granville 3

Tokyo!
Dir: Michel Gondry, Leos Carax, Bong Joon-Ho
Country: France/South Korea
Three directors one movie. Two of these directors are brilliant. One I’ve never heard of. Can you guess which one? Hint: The Host and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind are two of my all time favourite movies. (Sorry, could only find the en francais version of the trailer)
Wed Oct 8, 2:00PM at Granville 4
Thu Oct 9, 7:00PM at Granville 7

Waltz With Bashir
Dir: Ari Folman
Country: Israel/Germany
The easy comparison here is Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, which we’ll gladly use as well. One of the buzz films at the Toronto International Film Festival and rightly so.
Sun Sept 28, 10:00AM at Granville 7
Thu Oct 2, 9:30PM at Granville 7
Sun Oct 5, 1:00PM at Granville 7

Guillermo Del Toro’s first cinematic offering since Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy 2: The Golden Army opens today. In this one, Hellboy battles a bunch of mythical creatures and saves the human race from decimation by a gigantic mechanical army made of gold.

It’s clear that the studio let del Toro go to town with this film. Pan’s Labyrinth had like four or five creatures. This one has hundreds and they’re all pretty much incredible. It’s impossible to get bored watching del Toro’s imagination run completely wild on the screen. This guy is on the verge of becoming the new Jim Henson.

When it’s time for the action though (this is summer after all) it’s pretty average. In fact, the person I went to the preview with literally fell asleep during the final fight scene. Not because it was incredibly boring though, he was just really sleepy. The film also jumps back and forth between Lord of the Rings style Fantasy and Men in Black style sci-fi too much. Take a wild guess which genre del Toro handles better (hint: he recently signed on to direct the Hobbit).

All in all, this movie, given the budget, is probably about as good as it could be. Hellboy 2 falls somewhere in between The Devil’s Backbone (incredible) and Blade 2 (forgettable). By that logic, this is a matinee-er. But an opening weekend matinee-er.

If you’re into Guilermo del Toro as much as I am you can read an interview I did with him before Pan’s Labyrinth won a bunch of oscars here.

Hellboy 2 Website

This just showed up in the inbox. Adbusting might not be en vogue anymore but Tibet certainly still is so check it out as it’s quite good. Here’s what Samantha Simmonds and Jessica Fraser, the duo responsible, have to say.

We are two Canadian filmmakers who had the privilege of witnessing the March uprising in Dharamsala, India (where the Dalai Lama and Tibetan government in exile reside). For three weeks we documented the courage and perseverance of the Tibetan people and have created a two-minute un-commercial to support their efforts.

Our hope is that in the final month leading up to the Olympics – and after – we will inspire citizens around the world to ask their governments to intervene on behalf of the Tibetan people. We encourage President Hu Jintao to meet with the Dalai Lama and establish Tibetan cultural and religious autonomy while keeping Tibet as a part of China.

If you feel inspired after watching it you can go to takeuptherace.com for more information.

Crispin Hellion Glover will be making a three night in-person appearance in Vancouver from July 18-20 to present his insane slideshow entitled “Crispin Hellion Glover’s Big Slide Show.” Following this, there will be a screening of his directorial debut, What is it?, which features Fairuza Balk as the voice of a snail.

Tickets for this massive event will be $20 (plus a $3 Cinematheque Membership if you don’t already have one. Cash only because it’s more difficult for the feds to track. Please refrain from knocking Mr. Glover on the head and asking “Anyone home McFLy?” He really hates that and might try to kick you in the head.

Pacific Cinematheque
Crispin Glover

Will Christian Bale be able to top Val Kilmer’s masterful performance in Batman and Robin? Could The Dark Knight possibly be better than Joel Schumacher’s Batman Forever? Was Heath Ledger’s drug overdose all just an elaborate viral marketing scheme? Find out the answers to these pressing questions on Thursday July 17 at midnight.

There’ll be Midnight Screenings of The Dark Knight on Thursday July 17th at the following Bridge and Tunnel Megoplexes

Colossus Langley Cinemas (IMAX Location) 20090 91A Avenue, Langley.

SilverCity Riverport Cinemas (IMAX Location)14211 Entertainment Way, Richmond.

SilverCity Coquitlam Cinemas 170 Schoolhouse Street, Coquitlam.

SilverCity Metropolis Cinemas 4700 Kingsway Ave, Burnaby.

SilverCity Victoria Cinemas 3130 Tillicum Road, Victoria.

Cineplex Odeon Strawberry Hill Cinemas 12161 72nd Avenue, Surrey.

And one at the only theater you really need to care about:

Scotiabank Theatre 900 Burrard Street, Vancouver.

Tickets are on sale Friday June 27, 2008 at 6 am from www.cineplex.com

Losing someone close to the holidays is always difficult. The same is true for the loss of my beloved websites. Oink was always so giving around this time of year. You could download as much as you wanted and it was no problem. Oink didn’t even want anything back. But the worst part about losing friends like these if you have to go back and start hanging with friends you ditched when you met you better and cooler friends. The first phone call is always awkward as you reach out to those old friends who are slow and unreliable. Those old friends like to pull stupid pranks too. Like just when you think you’re downloading a movie that hasn’t been released in theatres yet, it turns out this friend renamed the most depraved porn you can imagine Juno or I’m Not There.

I just want to have every album, movie and television program I can think of at a moment’s notice and I don’t want to pay anything. But lawyers keep shitting on my party and shutting down sites that help me achieve this dream. Though it may feel like they’re winning a few battles, the war is ultimately a futile one. Okay, they want to make money, fair enough. Rather than fighting the most powerful marketing tool ever invented they should get with start rolling with the punches and realize there are plenty of lucrative ways to make money outside of selling CDs and tickets to movies. It’s old school thinking and it’s going to be dead soon. Companies can either smarten up or risk perishing themselves. If that mostly unfounded proclamation doesn’t change anyone’s mind, could you just change your ways out of pity for me? I’m running out of friends fast and I’m starting to get lonely. My hard drive won’t fill itself.

What do you think about Lester Bird, the prime minister of Antigua, who said, “As long as they’re not endangered, why not?”
Watson: Well he’s an idiot. [laughs] What isn’t endangered? We don’t know what the population level [of sharks] can drop to. But I do know one thing: Say I’m a captain on a ship, and I see all of my engineers popping rivets out of the hull and I say, ‘What are you doing?’ and they say, ‘We can get a dollar a piece when we get back to port for these,’ and I said, ‘Really? Oh, cut me in for that’—if I was irresponsible. But if I was responsible, I would get them out of there, because if they pull one rivet too many, then the whole thing collapses and the ship is gonna sink. We are on a spaceship, that’s what this planet is. And every species is a rivet in the hull of the biosphere. We’re going to pull one species too many, and it’s going to collapse. And there goes our life support system. Eighty per cent of all the oxygen we breathe comes from the oceans. We destroy the oceans, we die. It’s as simple as that.

Where have you seen a significant depletion in shark life?
Watson & Stewart: Everywhere.
Stewart: I grew up swimming with sharks in the Caribbean and if you go to the Caribbean now, there are only a couple of islands where you can see sharks.
Watson: The only other places you see them are in national parks like the Galapagos or Cocos [Islands]. But even there, they’re getting poached. So what happens is, having destroyed the fish in the other areas, they are now moving into national parks and attacking them there.

Do you think if you had waited until after April 30, 2002 when you guys went to Cocos, your relationship with Costa Rican officials would have changed what happened?
Watson: No, because when it happened we found this boat that was breaking Guatemalan law, so we contacted the Guatemalan government and asked them what we should do. They asked us to bring them in. So we were simply doing law enforcement. Of course what we didn’t anticipate was that the poachers controlled the courts in Puntarenas. So it really didn’t matter because the kind of pressure the Taiwanese put on Costa Rica is such that they would have kicked us out one way or the other. Anybody who’s been down there has had a hard time because the judges, the police, everybody are all in the back pocket of the ‘Shark Fin Mafia,’ as we call them.

So who polices you?
Watson: Who polices us? Nobody. We are the police. Most of the world’s surface is under a state of lawlessness and anarchy. And that is the world’s oceans. We have every law in the book that we need, but nobody voices them. We’ve taken it upon ourselves to enforce them, and we are allowed to do that. No government is doing that.

How far would you go to save these animals, considering Rob’s own fight to save his leg—do you have a threshold?
Stewart: The thing is, it’s so important, but one of the things I really try to say is it’s not really about sharks. It’s a bigger picture. [Sharkwater] is a movie that uses sharks as a metaphor for what we’re doing to the oceans. It’s about saving humanity, because we’re in a totally unsustainable relationship with the world. We spend so much time with the propagation of our own genes, but no thought about whether the future generations are going to have a planet to live on. And I think the planet is just waking up to it as well. It’s something worth dedicating your life to.

What does it feel like to be charged with attempted murder?
Watson: We didn’t actually attempt to murder anybody [laughs]. In the end the most powerful weapon we had was the camera, much more powerful than the rifle. So everything that we did was documented. It would have been very, very difficult for them to have won on charges of attempted murder. It was our cameras and our word against their word, and they’re a bunch of poachers. So I wasn’t too worried about that.

Would you guys ever go back, aside from Rob’s own attempt?
Stewart: I’ll go back to Cocos. The first couple times I go, I may go through Colombia.

You’re not afraid of the Taiwanese mob?
[Both pause]
Stewart: There are certain dangers in everything, I wouldn’t—
Watson: People say, ‘How could you protect a shark in the same way you would protect a whale?’ I find this very strange. A hundred million people have died in the 20th Century in wars over real estate and other people’s real estate, and now people are risking their lives over silly little oil wells for corporations. And somehow that’s considered okay. I think that to risk your life to protect an endangered species is a far more honourable thing to do than fight the world for oil, or real estate. And people do lose their lives fighting for wildlife and I think it’s courageous and they should be commended for that.

Who’s a typical poacher that you would encounter?
Stewart: It’s difficult to say who’s a typical poacher. It’s a whole system that you have to look at: There’s a puppeteer at the top, and there’s always somebody who’s playing the pawn below him. And like we said in the film, the fin is sold for 80 cents in South America, but by the time it gets to China, now it’s $300-400 a pound. So the middleman is making money and not the actual fisherman.

Some of the images in the film are pretty graphic. Why is there a stigma attached to people not minding that versus images of slaughterhouses and the attention they get?
Stewart: It’s a lot easier to anthromorphosize mammals than it is for sharks. They’re furry, cute and cuddly, whereas sharks come from the deep, dark unknown ocean. So one of the reasons we needed to make the movie was to move closer to sharks than we’ve ever been before. So close that they can actually see the reality and understand the shark as an incredibly magnificent, beautiful and important animal for the ocean. And that’s why in the movie, when you see sharks getting killed, you don’t see it until the very end.

What would you say is the biggest misconception about what you two do?
Watson: I’ll just be frank about it. I don’t care about what people’s conceptions are. Our clients aren’t people. Our clients are whales and sharks, sea turtles and birds. That’s who we represent. People can criticize us all they want, but we don’t hurt people, we’ve never injured anybody and we’ve never been convicted of a crime. So the criticism is totally irrelevant. People don’t want to see their luxuries interfered with.

In 2003 [Paul] wrote a response to Carl Pope and said, “We are in very deep shit.” How much further are we at this point?
Watson: It keeps getting piled higher and deeper [laughs]. It’s a problem. I just read in the paper today, that the world’s population will be 9.2 billion by 2050, and I think that’s a conservative estimate because it was 3 billion in 1950 and now it’s 6.5 or seven billion. I estimate it will be closer to 12 billion. There’s simply not enough resources on this planet to support those kinds of numbers. One thing we don’t realize is 50 per cent of the fish that comes out of the ocean isn’t eaten by us, it’s fed to cows and chickens, pigs and sheep. So we turned cows into the largest aquatic predator on the planet.

So is that the worst-case scenario?
Watson: I’m optimistic on that because I’m a firm believer in the natural laws of ecology. People can only get away with this for so long, and then all of a sudden, nature turns on you. And nature will turn on us, and the earth will survive. We know the Earth’s going to survive. It’s wiped out a lot of species, but evolution will carry things forward. The question is will we survive? And unless we learn to live through the course of those laws of nature, the answer is no. We will not survive and we will go extinct.

-Patricia Matos

That was the thing that got my attention first in the movie, I was like, ‘Wow, Lucky McKee is an extremely tall man.’
It’s hilarious, the size difference between me and Kristen Bell is just… You don’t really realize it until she’s in his apartment, and it’s like, whoa. Once you see that size difference and the doors close, it’s like, ‘Fuck.’

So Roman is something you wrote in college but it got put on hold and then you made May.
I wrote May in my junior year of college, and Roman just popped out at me in my senior year, and I was kind of intending for it to be something that I would make with my friends on black and white Hi8 as kind of a warm up movie to May. I just never got it together and ended up getting into some other things, and figured it’d be better to give that script to another director just to make the two films more distinct from each other. We tried it a couple different times with a couple different directors and actors, and it’s never worked. And Angela and I kinda clicked and said, ‘Wow, why don’t we just swap?’

Did you shoot this before or after The Woods?
We shot the parts with Kristen Bell, the opening, before I went to Montreal to shoot The Woods, and we shot the rest of the film about a year and a half later, after I was finished editing The Woods. It was kind of a goodbye movie to Los Angeles, and I got the hell out of there.

I’m gonna assume shooting digital with a small crew was a lot of fun and a lot less stressful than The Woods was.
Yeah, I needed it, you know? I needed to get my feet back on the ground, and my creativity got so beaten up working in the studio system and having every single little idea that you have challenged from 20 different angles for no apparent reason. And you just have to repeat yourself, which gets tiresome to work on the same 90 minutes for a year and a half is really hard on your brain and your heart, and stuff like that. And Roman was just the first… When we came back to shoot the brunt of the movie after the woods, it was just the first week or so of shooting, it was just me and Angela, and my buddy Kevin with a camera, in my apartment. It was just three of us. We shot all the stuff of Roman alone, it was just so intimate, you know?

Even though Kristen Bell is in Roman, there weren’t ever strong commercial ambitions for this film were there? Was anyone saying “Oh, we might have a Blair Witch or a Saw here.”
No. We did it for ourselves. Since it was such a small amount of people, and didn’t require a tremendous amount of money, it was just something we felt comfortable with taking a chance on. That’s why we shot the part with Kristen, the opening of the film, ‘cause there’s that kind of a time break in the story there and we said, ‘Let’s just shoot the first 20-25 minutes of the movie and see if it works.’ See if it’s dramatically effective. And it did, and we finally got it together.

Let’s talk about Angela Bettis. I guess the obvious questions would be: Why the role reversal between you two?
It just made sense. And we’ve been through similar territory with May, and become great friends, and just always wanted to work with each other. It made sense. Where she lacked experience in directing, I could help and show her the ropes a little bit, and with acting, vice versa for me. She really held my hand. It just made sense. We already had that working relationship. We just flipped sides of the camera.

The other reversal for this film is how Roman’s kind of ascending from madness, and May was descending into madness.
They’re kind of a photo negatives of each other. Roman starts off pretty consumed by his own brain and just living inside his head too much, and Eva brings this experience of killing this girl that brings him out of his shell. May just kind of sinks into her own brain and goes all anarchy.

You’re a great onscreen kisser. In May you make out with a girl on an elevator and in this one kiss Veronica Mars. You have wonderful technique.
McKee: [laughs] You love that I write these glorious parts for myself. I gotta get action somehow, man. [laughs]

You seem like a real nice, humble and talented guy. So where are all the depressed, rejected misfits in your movies coming from?
From me. Hard times, you know? Mentally and socially, everybody goes through the kind of stuff. I kind of just realized over the years that no matter what, you’re gonna end up with just yourself at a lot of points in your life. And thinking too much about things you can’t control, just kind of dramatizing that kind of stuff as it hits me. But that stuff just comes from what I see and feel.

I have this idea in my head that after May, you must have had all these Emily the Strange girls lining up to date you. Is that true?
No, not really.

Really? I’d think they would keep banging your door down.
I’ve met a lot of girls that really identify with May, but a lot of them would be too shy to be that forward. But you do meet a lot of people that seem to really identify with that girl, and that speaks to Angela’s power.

What’s a date with Lucky McKee like?
Kind of old school. I open doors for girls, and light their cigarettes. I just think women need to be treated like ladies…

…and then back to your place to watch a Dario Argento film?
[laughs] Nothing too twisted. I live in the sticks in Oklahoma now, so it’s usually just like shooting off firecrackers. Or getting into a bottle of bourbon and stumbling around in the woods at night.

Are your movies chick flicks?
I don’t know, I never really thought about it that way. They’re flicks with chicks, I don’t know if they’re necessarily chick flicks. A lot of guys really seem to identify with May, too. Just as many guys come up to me as girls when we go to conventions, or festivals, or something like that.

A recurring theme in your movies is people dying to make a work of art. Do people need to die to create something beautiful?
No, not necessarily. It’s something I was fascinated with at the time I was writing those stories, with the idea that there was so much negativity around death, but the few deaths that I’ve had to deal with in my life so far have completely changed me as a person, in good ways and in other ways. The biggest thing in any of our lives is the impact of death, especially if it’s somebody that you love. It stays with you forever, and there’s beautiful things about it.

Does it bother you that you haven’t made anything that’s garnered the kind of attention that May received?
I don’t know, I mean we’re putting the fourth DVD on the shelf [with Roman]. I’m pretty proud of that. We need to set Roman next to May on the shelf. All we’re trying to do is get ourselves to a place naturally and creatively where we can tell stories that cut deep, and one out of every half dozen, or one out of every ten…Maybe May will be the movie that people remember the most, which is fine. That happens to a lot of directors. It’s not going to stop me from making movies, it’s not something I really think about. I just think about what I want to do next, what I want to get out of my system.

What have you got lined up next?
Just various things, man. I’m working on my website, which is going to have a lot of really, really interesting content on it. It’ll kind of be an online art gallery, and I’ll kind of be a filter for that stuff. Angela and I are going to make another movie together here in the springtime. I’m going to make our first Oklahoma movie so that should be interesting. We’re going to act with each other on that one.

Your first film. All Cheerleaders Die, is that ever gonna be available?
All Cheerleaders Die, my buddy Chris Sivertson and I are going to put that out next year on our own, or maybe license it to a distribution company or something. As soon as he’s done with his Lindsay Lohan movie. that he’s making right now, we’re going to come out here and jump into that, ‘cause we’ll have a couple of DVDs on the shelves by the end of the year. We’ve been holding off on All Cheerleaders Die because a lot of people are saying, ‘We want this because it’s the first Lucky McKee movie’ and that’s just not the case. Chris and I co-wrote and made that film together, it’s a 50/50 collaboration all the way down the line. We wanted him to get a couple films out there so he establishes his name and his style, and we’ll put the film out. But the thing has been aging like wine, it’s hilarious. A zombie movie with football players and cheerleaders.

Cheerleaders who must die?
All cheerleaders must die.

“I really wanted to show how everybody is connected in this horrible event that starts the film. In a sense we’re all connected into this whole society and you can’t really get away from it,” says Weber. “And honestly, we’re not all that much different. Even when someone’s trying to make a good choice, sometimes wanting to make the good choice doesn’t work. Even though Stephen is very successful, he just makes a whole series of bad choices. Is he any better than Nadia? I don’t think so. We’re all in the same boat. I just didn’t want to pass judgment. That was really important in the writing of it. I just wanted to make sure that I didn’t make anybody look worse than anybody else.”

Weber, a film editor by trade, is no stranger to gritty low-budget Vancouver cinema. He cut all the films of maverick Bruce Sweeney, with whom he attended the UBC film school. Weber, a resident of Mount Pleasant, is also no stranger to the goings on in his film. “I first thought of the idea as I was renovating my house. I’d step outside and see really stoned prostitutes staggering down the alley. I went, ‘Oh, where did we move to?’”

In the film, Doug’s house is actually Weber’s house. But the similarities between Doug’s character and himself don’t stop there as Weber also participated in community patrols similar to the ones depicted in the film. Essentially, these patrols are citizens walking around their neighbourhood, approaching undesirables and telling them to go somewhere else. Weber concedes that community patrols are problematic, but adds, “What can you do? So you have a bunch of people with small children who are concerned and go ‘Look, can you go somewhere where nobody cares. We care, so we’re going to stop you from working.’ Unfortunately, that’s what the powers in the city tell you to do.”

When asked if the horrible scenario is likely or just preying on middle-class paranoia, he points out that incidents like this have been known to happen. When asked if he’s worried about it happening to a loved one he responds, “We don’t have a kid, we have a cat. My Wife has mentioned that. ‘Oh, what if the cat gets pricked by a needle?’ I don’t know if HIV or HEP C crosses over to cats. I doubt it.”
With all the drugs, prostitution and property crime going down in an alley that probably looks like yours, it’s no surprise the film is hitting pretty close to home for many who’ve seen it. “At the Vancouver Film Festival we had a fantastic response. At least a dozen people came up to me after each show and told me it was important. They live in the area and appreciated someone going out and tackling these social concerns, although it really isn’t that much of a social movie.

I’m just trying to make something that’s entertaining and somewhat sellable.” He also goes on to add that while the movie may be a Vancouver story, people in other cities have had no problems identifying with the film, “There’s a Mount Pleasant in every major urban centre. I think there’s a real common ground here with this film and we knew that going into it.”
Mount Pleasant website

Reg Harkema has basically edited every good Canadian movie ever made. Now he’s written and directed a good Canadian movie of his own. Monkey Warfare is tight, funny and low-budget story about a pinko couple (Don McKellar and Tracy Wright) who fled Vancouver after a Molotov cocktail incident went wrong. Now in Toronto, the couple live in a constant marijuana induced paranoid haze that they’re gonna get busted. They survive by selling shit they find in the trash and online and don’t own phones. When their dealer gets busted, an impressionable young girl with perky breasts and BC bud (Nadia Litz) comes to the rescue and Mckellar’s penis twitches for the first time in years. Shit goes haywire when Mckellar steals Litz a bike and she starts her own gang of militant bicyclists who like to torch SUVs.

Rather than be intelligent and do some research about his good little movie, I did none and cracked stupid jokes over the phone to him for 25 minutes. To Reg’s credit, he laughed at these stupid jokes and didn’t hang up even though he probably should have. Once again, this goes to show that the coolest people in the film industry are the seemingly invisible nerds who edit the films.

I understand you collect records and are into French New Wave films? I also understand you have a girlfriend. That’s a bit of a contradiction don’t you think?
[Laughs] My girlfriend collects records.

So you’re not making the girlfriend part up then?
No, No. She hasn’t quite grabbed onto the French New Wave part. On one of the first dates we went on to see if we were gonna be able to handle each other, I made her go see my favourite movie,The Mother and the Whore, by Jean Eustache, which is about three hours of French intellectuals sitting around in cafes. She slept for about half an hour in the middle…

Were you trying to sabotage this?
No, No, No. I saw her favourite movie, Shakes the Clown and I dug it.

So let me ask you, what is Monkey Warfare?
I took it from Abbie Hoffman’s book, Steal this Book. He had a little section in there called Monkey Warfare which is all about low intensity methods of monkey wrenching the system. Rather than being a bomb maker and going underground, he said you can actually do these little things if you like, instead.

Is that one of the things you’re trying to say with the film? Grass roots action seemed to be portrayed as hopeless and taking to the streets and smashing heads doesn’t work either.
One of the fun things about calling it Monkey Warfare is it’s less a title and more what the movie is actually doing. We’re not a big Hollywood film by any means. Just as radical political activists aren’t firmly ensconced in the seats of power in electoral politics. Hopefully my little can stub the big toe of the Hollywood giant the way radical activists keep pouring salt in the wounds of the mainstream political powers.

Your film is populated with young ignorant idealists and old experienced pessimists. What category do you fall into?
I like to see myself as an old ignorant pessimist. [laughs]

Are we all just a bunch of apathetic pussies? Do we need to go out and start burning cars?
Well, you know if someone was inspired to start burning cars from my movie I think it’d be great. Just make sure you don’t let any of those gas fumes escape and get all over yourself and light yourself on fire.

Well maybe you could tell me how to make a Molotov cocktail right now. Because I understand the Molotov cocktail safety instructor scene is cut out of the theatrical version.
If you go to our MySpace page you can actually see the scene that was cut out. The rationale is that yeah, we’re actually showing how to make a Molotov cocktail. The whole of point of that is we’re trying to show how to do it safely. But because, according to the lawyer, we’re showing a criminal act… Never mind that there’s 20 dozen ways that show how to kill someone in the latest Bond movie. Once again, it’s the powerful coming down on the weak.

So how do you make a Molotov cocktail?
I don’t really know. It’s outlined in Hoffman’s book. We just used his instructions as kind of a jumping off point for an improvised performance by my man Flick Harrison who stars in that Molotov cocktail safety scene. I’ve actually had different older film critics point out to me that we’re missing some of the details. Apparently you’re supposed to take some styrofoam and soak it in the bottle.

I got in trouble in high school for telling a younger kid that you can make LSD with lemon juice, Raid bug spray and paper. His mom was really pissed. So you gotta be careful.
The sequence is actually done in French. It was done for comedic value but lawyers have no sense of humour.

Your movie’s shot in Toronto but you’re a Vancouver guy. Why’d you go and do a thing like that?
Well I live in Toronto. I’ve been there for 3.5 years. I’m a Vancouver guy in the sense that I was born and raised and grew up here. But only recently moved. The East Van cultural milieu permeates the entire core of my being. I obviously bring that as an influence to my film. I think of it as more of an East Van film than a Toronto film. The characters—even though they’re being played by a Toronto archetype like Don McKellar—are proto-typical East Van people who fled to Toronto.

Do you think living in Toronto is punishment for the characters?
[Laughs] Well, I’m not into self-abuse. Nerve: Well how I saw it was this: You had this couple and they got kicked out of the Garden of Eden, Vancouver, and are being punished by being forced to live in Toronto. Reg Harkema: You know, in this post-modernist age, everyone’s interpretation is valid. I’m very fluid in what I’m trying to say in that I’m never trying to say anything. I present situations and let people figure it out for themselves. If you read it that way, your particular reality is that Vancouver is a Garden of Eden….

Well it’s not necessarily a Garden of Eden. It’s just by comparison because Toronto is so shitty.
You know, I’m East Vancouver represent and all that but I’m not sure I would entirely agree. It’s not fucking raining like this in Toronto. Nerve: What kind of bike do you ride? Reg Harkema: I ride a, I think it’s called a Fiji or a Fuji. It’s a thin Italian street racing bike. I got it off a dope dealer, this guy Rod in the movie. He sold it to me. Because I’m 6’6” and he thought I was the only one who could fit it. I rode it like every day of the year in Toronto. It was fine until I had an encounter with some guys who, in a fit of road rage, wrenched the back of my wheel and it got bent… with the money I make from this movie of the week I’m currently working on, I might bite the bullet and buy a new one.

Well, you could steal one?
No, I’m not into that.

You’ve never stolen a bike?
Naw, I’m into liberating bikes. That’s the thing. When you ride the same route in Toronto you notice people abandon their bikes. They’re locked up and it’s got beer bottles on it and it’s just sitting there for three weeks. At that point you’re just like, “fuck it, let’s take this goddamn thing.” I’ve done that few times.

Okay, well do you know who stole my bike? Because I’m kind of pissed off about that.
Well did you leave it in a place for a long time?

No, not really. It was blue and I really miss it. Is there more bicycle theft in Toronto than here?
I read in the newspaper in Toronto that there’s been a recent rash in bicycle theft. But I think that sort of petty crime is probably more prominent in Vancouver because of the downtown eastside and the heroin.

Will there be a big spike in bike theft after this movie comes out?
Bike liberation! There’s nothing worse than seeing a cool bike that someone has abandoned and are just letting it rust away. People have this internalized bullshit morality that if they take that bike they’re stealing. No, that’s saving.

Are you one of those militant bicycle guys?
No not really. With the film coming out in festivals, I’m starting to be in contact with people who are involved with Critical Mass. It’s a whole world of people I’ve never met or dealt with. Oh man, these people live the life. I’m a fucking poseur compared to these people.

What do you think about Critical Mass? I want them to fuck off already. The politics behind it seem so flawed. Cars burn more gas when they’re idling.
Well, I actually rode in my first Critical Mass a couple months ago… From what you’re saying, from a political standpoint, there might be something to that. But for the experience of actually riding in it, man that was awesome. It felt like I was in the Hell’s Angels or something. My dad watches it and he gets so hopping mad about it. People holding up traffic on Friday when everyone is trying to get home. On the other hand, to ride through traffic on a Friday afternoon in Toronto is taking your life into your own hands. Maybe slowing traffic down on a Friday afternoon is a good thing.

Have you received any threats?
There were a handful of threats made to me—a few of them were death threats to me and I think Karen, the festival director [at the Toronto International Film Festival] got one too. But again, that initial knee jerk reaction came at a time when people didn’t know anything about the film other than it portrayed the assassination of George Bush. People imagined it would be this liberal fantasy, some sort of wet dream.

“Liberal porn” is the term I’ve seen used.
Right, that it was this sort of bloodletting where people would be dancing up and down the aisles in great delight at seeing President Bush being shot. Anyone who goes to the cinema with the sole expectation of having this great cathartic moment in seeing President Bush being shot will be disappointed. It’s not what you think. You have to judge the film for yourself.

One person in particular who blasted you was Hillary Clinton. She said you’re despicable and you make her sick. She could be the future leader of the free world. That’s pretty heavy.
Well I think it’s terrifying. How can she say a film she has not seen is despicable? That doesn’t bode very well. On that basis, she could invade a country without looking at the intelligence dossier. It’s not very reassuring.

What has the right’s reaction been?
t’s difficult to say… In America, I don’t think I have a lot of fans on the Rush Limbaugh show. There are plenty of people who were very quick to condemn the film. Of course, there are some people for whom just the idea is too much. But I think they are the minority. I think most people will want to have a look beyond the controversy and have a look at what this film really is. The film, I hope, poses some serious questions on how the war on terror has been prosecuted in the last five years. It poses some really serious questions about the polarizing effect of the invasion of Iraq. These are all things we need to be thinking about and we have good reason to be alarmed by some of things that have happened.

Do you enjoy the stir you’ve created?
I enjoy the fact that people are talking about the film. This was not the purpose of making a film about the assassination of Bush as a starting point. It was not about taking the assassination as a form of entertainment. The intention of the film, I hope, is to pose some serious questions about the climate of fear we live in. There’s the political, social and counter-cultural consequences of this fear we all live in. 9/11 obviously changed the world in so many ways. It has meant that there is a component of fear in the way so many things are handled that just wasn’t there before 9/11. I do think that these are extraordinary times that we live in and I think they’re noteworthy. I guess, for America, there has never been a time like it. In Europe in the late 60s and early 70s, terrorism was very much on everyone’s agenda. Whether it was Northern Ireland or Algerian terrorism in France. For America, this is a unique time.

So in 2007 the war in Iraq is still going on and there’s still an ongoing nuclear threat from North Korea. I guess these problems aren’t getting solved any time soon?
I think you’re right. It’s pretty hard to imagine Iraq turning into a garden of Eden in the next year. If only. One of the problems with making a film that is set in the near future is you’re offering hostages to fortune in the sense that world events could take a completely different turn to the one you’re anticipating. One of things that was reassuring was on the day the film first came out in the UK North Korea announced it had successfully completed its first nuclear test. There was President Bush making very similar statements to the ones he makes in the film which is, of course, a speech from 2003. So we’re getting some things right.

At any point while you were making this movie did you have any ethical dilemmas?
I think the way the assassination was portrayed… it was very important to get that right. It was very important that it was incontrovertibly Bush who was shot. But at the same time, it was very important that it didn’t feel like we were dwelling on the assassination. Of course, you have to think about the ethics of a) portraying the assassination itself and b) putting President Bush’s face on another actor. So yeah, an awful lot of thought went into pretty much every element. One of the things, from an ethical point of view, that I think makes the film very easy to defend is, although it’s fiction, pretty much every twist and turn in the narrative is inspired by true story… it’s a patchwork of little anecdotes from the war on terror.

The eulogy that Dick Cheney delivers for Bush in the film was actually footage of Cheney delivering a eulogy at Reagan’s funeral. Is that in poor taste? Like there’s the ethics behind the premise and then there’s also the ethics in how you pull that off.
First of all, were President Bush to be assassinated, God forbid, the state funeral that’s described in the film is absolutely in character for the event that would take place. I think it’s appropriate. The remarks that Dick Cheney made at Ronald Reagan’s funeral are absolutely the kind of things Dick Cheney would say were the president to be assassinated; they are also things which he has separately said about President Bush anyways. That he’s a strong man of moral character, that he’s come along at a time when America most needed him, that he’s a simple man who trusts in God’s purposes. He’s said that word for word anyways. I think it’s entirely in character and I think it’s appropriate. I also think it was done sensitively.

So Bush is a public figure and that’s what makes this movie fair comment?
Yeah.

Well what about his friends and family? Is it fair to them?
Well it’s obviously going to be a sensitive subject for the Bush family. I appreciate that. I again, would not want to cause any offence or distress for the Bush family with this film. But he’s a public figure and the film is not a personal attack on him. I think it’s justified.

Do you think that because Bush being assassinated is easily imaginable is the reason why this movie has gotten under people’s skin so much? Say 9/11 never happened, Iraq never happened, Bush has a 60 percent approval rating and you make this movie. It probably wouldn’t be as offensive.
I personally do not think that it’s likely that there would be an attempt on President Bush’s life. I would think the Secret Service would concur in saying that it’s extremely unlikely that anyone would be successful in such an attempt. Were the President to have a 60 percent approval rating and were to have been no 9/11… actually not even that. Were the administration’s responses not to have invaded Iraq or try to connect 9/11 to Iraq, I wouldn’t have made this film and President Bush’s approval rating wouldn’t be where it is.

You seem like a pretty mild-mannered guy who isn’t all “Rah Rah Rah, I hate America and George Bush so …”
On the contrary

So you do hate America and George Bush?
No, no, no. I love America. I’m pretty passionate about America. There’s been a suggestion that it’s anti-American and unpatriotic to make this film. Obviously, patriotism doesn’t really apply because I’m not an American citizen. But I mean, the defining characteristic of America is that it is a democracy. Isn’t one of the most important facets of a democracy is that you should be able to criticize your elected leaders?

Well if it’s not America bashing, what is your intent behind the film?
I’ve been really alarmed by the way in which the war on terror has been prosecuted. The attempt to link 9/11 with Saddam Hussein and to use that as the initial pretext for the invasion of Iraq followed by the notion that Saddam Hussein was somehow posing a direct threat to America; those falsehoods have caused an extraordinary amount of pain and grief and loss of life. This provides an oblique take on that. Those are really serious issues. One of the extraordinary things is, even after that suggestion had been out there in the public arena, President Bush was re-elected in 2004.

Another term I’ve seen thrown around to describe this film Euro-arrogance. So you’re from the UK, is it your place to make this film? And is that another reason why people are angry about this film?
I think it probably is. First of all, the film is in no way didactic. It’s not preaching, I hope. It’s not some sort of rant. President Bush and Tony Blair are very keen to take every opportunity to remind us that we’re in this war on terror together. So, although 9/11 was an attack on American soil and the architects of the war on terror were very much American, the consequences of that have been absolutely global. There are British troops in the Middle East and there are Canadian troops in Afghanistan. The war on terror genuinely affects us all. So I think it’s entirely legitimate for me as a Brit to make this film as it would be a Canadian or an American. The practical reality is, when you look at the reaction the film in the news it makes it very clear that from a corporate political view, it’d be impossible for an American company to make this film. I’m sure there are plenty of American filmmakers who might have thought about making this film, but I don’t think they’d have had the opportunity to make it in America.

So I have a few quotes I dug up and I want you to comment on them. First one, “If this movie ever shows in the USA, only LIBERALS will attend. They’ll CHEER and give a STANDING OVATION when Bush gets whacked. Bank on it. It’ll have Chomsky-a-likes Pee-Wee Hermaning in theaters across the land.”
First of all, I would say that critics who have seen the film say they find the assassination very moving. Actually, one of the things that surprised people is the degree at which George Bush is presented as a human being who’s doing a difficult job. Anyone who is going into the movie expecting to cheer at that moment has a shot coming. The assassination is portrayed as a horrific event with dire consequences.

“This guy committed a felony with this video.”
Well, that’s absolutely not the case. The film does not incite anyone to commit this act and I haven’t broken any laws.

“I’d probably want to beat the crap out of the filmmaker for the insult, shut his free speech pie hole.”
Yeah, there’s been quite a bit of that. Rush Limbaugh, actually; no I take that back, somebody said that I was a sick limey faggot for making this film. I have no idea how making a film about the assassination of President Bush is a comment on your own sexuality.

“Ronald Reagan, shot at in 1981 in a homage to Jodie Foster’s performance in the movie Taxi Driver. John Hinckley tried to kill our President. Proof that movies can influence violence.
It is proof that movies can influence violence. The person who wrote that should be directing their ire at The Sentinel, which opened with the footage of the Reagan assassination attempt. There are countless films out there right now that do far more to glamourize violence. The assassination is portrayed as a horrific event with terrible, terrible consequences. I genuinely believe that no one could see this film and be inspired to kill the president.

Finally, has the attention that this film has brought you allowed you to sleep with anyone famous yet?
No, absolutely not. Sorry. I regret to inform you that it hasn’t.

So I guess Hillary Clinton won’t be calling you any time soon?
I’m sure we’ll have a hot date soon.

If Entourage has you hunting for someone to befriend before their career in the film industry takes off, you should consider cozying up to Jamie Travis. After the 27 year old UBC film grad got people talking about him in 2005 with his short Patterns, Travis didn’t rest on his modest laurels. Rather, he made three more shorts, Patterns 2, Patterns 3 and The Saddest Boy in the World. All three screened in the Toronto and Vancouver film festivals this fall, setting what he calls an “unofficial record” for most shorts made by one person to do the Canadian festival circuit.

Prepare to be impressed if the idea of a Canadian short conjures up images of a punk kid messing around with mom’s handicam on the weekend. Despite working with a small crew on the Patterns Trilogy—which is about the mysterious and bizarre relationship between two neighbours—it doesn’t look like your typical bedroom production. The Saddest Boy in the World—which is about a nine year old who plans to hang himself at his birthday party—is equally impressive, and was made with a crew of over 60 people.

His shorts combine the macabre subject matter and delivery of David Lynch and Todd Solondz with the art direction of Wes Anderson. The end result is something that seems wholly original and much more than pastiche.But despite the obvious Wes Anderson comparisons one can make, Travis claims he isn’t a fan, though he acknowledges the similarities. “What I really responded to when I saw The Royal Tennenbaums was that I felt a kinship with Anderson because I like to think I have that same attention to detail. That’s what I’m interested in. I like movie’s that are shot wide and the audience is active and eyes are roving from left to right and having to pick up details in the foreground and the background. Don’t let the audience be too passive.”

Passivity isn’t really an option when watching his films as the mise en scene is handled with the meticulousness of a serial killer and immediately draws you in. “Art direction is my big thing, “ says Travis. “People would tell you I’mvery controlling in terms of the art department. That’s the thing that comes across most strongly in my films. I don’t micromanage lighting and I don’t even micromanage performance. Working with actors is certainly not my greatest strength and I sort of just let them be.” But, of course, acting and narrative aren’t really the point with Travis’ films.

His obsession with the visual experience is the reason why you won’t be able to find his stuff on YouTube, even though it would certainly garner him a larger audience than screening his work in festivals. “I’ve always been opposed to putting my films in their entirety on the internet. There’s a certain prestige to playing at a festival and having a glitzy premier. For me, one of the most important things about making films is watching them with an audience. As soon as you put them online, you’re not watching them with an audience…It’s hard when you put so much work and money and energy into a project and then it’s [on a tiny computer] screen. I want it big. I want sound all around.”

So while audiences may be enjoying his work, they aren’t very big audiences. There’s barely any money to be made and not a whole lot of acclaim to be garnered from making a really good short. Traditionally, they’re used as a vehicle into advertising or feature filmmaking. Travis plans to do both in the future but believes there’s more to it than that. “Short films are also an art form. In every aspect of my life, I’m not capable of simply using something as a stepping stone. I need to throw myself into everything. So yes, they are building blocks to commercials and features but at the same time they’re totally an art form of their own, “ explains Travis. “I like that you can make tight little stories and you have an automatic constraint. So far in my career, I haven’t felt equipped to work without constraints. For me, length is a very useful constraint. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around writing a feature for these past few years and a lot of these shorts I’ve made this year are responses to struggling with writing my feature. Now that I‘ve made five legitimate shorts I’m finally capable—emotionally and psychologically—of writing a feature.” If Travis can pull off a 90 minute feature that keeps your attention like his 15 minutes shorts do, then surely he’ll have his own stable of agents, managers and leeches all hugging it out behind the scenes. We’re hoping to be a part of it. That’s why we’re being so nice.

The Patterns Trilogy Website

You have to go back pretty far to find a decent Canadian horror movie that anyone has heard of. The last one that’s worthy of mention is 2000’s Ginger Snaps; which, at best can only be described as ‘watchable’. To find a really good Canadian horror film you have to go back 20 years to The Fly, and technically it isn’t considered Canadian even though it was directed by David Cronenberg and shot in Toronto. Well a funny thing happened at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) this year; there were a lot of good horror movies there. One of the more interesting shows was a double-bill with the 15 minute short—The Eyes of Edward James and the feature—End of the Line. More shocking than the content of the films was that they’re both really good and made by Canadians.

Rodrigo Gudiño can probably lay claim to knowing more about horror films than anyone else in Canada. In 1997, he founded a 20 page black and white zine called Rue Morgue in Toronto. Since then it’s grown to be one of the preeminent horror publications in the world. Now 37, he’s making his first foray into filmmaking with The Eyes of Edward James, a psychological thriller mindfuck. This short employs a clever first-person perspective similar to a game of Doom. The Eyes of Edward James follows a psychiatrist forcing his patient to relive the murder of his wife through hypnotherapy.

“I always wanted to get into film, even from the very very beginning. I wrote a bunch of scripts for short films because I wanted to get a feeling for being behind the camera and what it takes to put a film together. But I couldn’t choose,” Gudiño says prior to his film screening at TIFF. The decision for him was made a little easier when, “one day, my co-producer Marco Pecota was like ‘why don’t you just shoot this one because it’ll be very economical and we can shoot it in two days.’ It turned out it was the one I liked the least. But I thought if I’m gonna fuck it up, I might as well fuck up the one I like the least. That’s sort of how it came about. The Eyes of Edward James is not indicative of the direction I want to go, it really is my crash course in filmmaking and I learned a lot from it.” Don’t let his descriptions of “economical” mislead you. The Eyes of Edward James isn’t some ‘let’s play with mom’s video camera’ production. It’s an impressive looking short that had a crew of 18 people and cost $10,000 to make.

The critic in Gudiño happily admits “[I’ve] said very harsh things about very many movies and I stand behind everything I said.” But a ‘put up or shut up’ mentality wasn’t a motivating factor to make the switch from a culture critic to culture producer. “It was more out of love and to explore horror in a more creative way. In a magazine, even though there’s creativity involved, it only goes so far. Rue Morgue is more like my horror university. So I wanted to contribute something.”

With 13 years of film writing under his belt at Rue Morgue and other publications, I asked Gudiño if having spent so much time in “horror university” helped or hindered his directorial debut. “Ultimately it helped me. I think other people could be hindered by it. If you know too much you fall into this idea that everything’s been done before. In actuality, that’s not the case if you develop a very strong vision. When you look at other people’s movies, they’re teaching you how they do things. The horror genre is very very derivative. There’s a lot of copying happening. It has always had that traditionally and historically. So to do something a little bit different doesn’t take a huge amount of effort. [The Eyes of Edward James] is a conventional horror film but I tried to put in a unique perspective and fuck with it a little.”

The other film on the double bill, End of the Line, is the fourth feature directed by Montrealer Maurice Devereaux. I can’t tell you how old he is or how much his film cost to make because he won’t tell me—answering the one might fuck up his dating prospects and answering the other might fuck up a distribution deal. What I can tell you is this: out of all the horror movies at the TIFF, Devereaux’s End of the Line had more people jumping out of their seats in terror than any other. Set largely in an isolated subway station, this bloody survival horror is kick-started when members of a religious cult get simultaneous pager messages telling them it’s the apocalypse. Naturally, this is their cue to start murdering everyone in sight with the daggers they have neatly concealed in their crosses.

To generate a little hype for his film, Devereaux had people dress up as religious zealots and walk down the streets of Toronto handing out pamphlets for the film. “My God they scare the shit out of me. As a filmmaker, if something scares me I think it might scare others. These people scare me. Anyone who, for whatever reason, is brainwashed into thinking that ‘oh you do this and you’ll be rewarded in other lives’ is not really holding onto anything tangible. So, for me, they’re all loose cannons. That makes them very very scary for me.” I took that as a cue to quietly slip the pamphlet of ‘literature’ I brought for him to read back into my pocket.

The film’s inclusion in the festival saw Devereaux waltz along the red carpet into the gala party in the shadow of a legitimate actor, Samuel L. Jackson. So how did a film like this make it past the screening board to get in? “I just sent it in. I filled out the applications and sent it off,” replies Devereaux. “Everyone said I was crazy. My other films have premiered at the Fantasia Film Festival and they wanted this film as well. But also, they were saying ‘you should try for Toronto.’ So it was a roll of the dice and it paid off because I got it—which is unheard of. Not only are there few Canadian horror films but there are few horror films period that get into Toronto. So it’s a big big honour.”

Both of these filmmakers agreed that there are lots of Canadians out there making horror films but there isn’t much of a Canadian horror scene per se. The problem, according to Gudiño is, “there’s no real system in place to get those films out how they need to get out. Films can’t just be good. They need to be worked properly to find audiences. The [people running the] Canadian system are very backwards and old school. They’re trying to make statements about what makes a Canadian film. That’s really not anything anybody should be doing. As far as I’m concerned, if a Canadian wants to make a film about car crashes or zombies, it’s a Canadian film because it came out of their head. You can’t really regulate content. That’s what’s happening now and it’s really unfortunate.” While Devereaux had this to add, “It’s difficult to make films anywhere. In Canada, the government finances Canadian and French Canadian films. If you don’t get that government financing then, of course, it’s more difficult. They’re not too keen on horror because it’s a government institution so it doesn’t look good. That just makes it a bit tougher.”

While horror films have been enjoying an economic revival in recent years, the genre, as a whole, still gets less respect than a western musical starring Rodney Dangerfield. The Eyes of Edward James and End of the Line aren’t exactly definitive Canadian horror films, but they’re a lurch in the right direction and definitely worth checking out. And with big time film festivals like TIFF throwing their support behind homegrown horror, it’s surely a sign of more gruesome things to come.

Despite this increased collective knowledge, anyone who throws paint on your clothes also spends time every morning deciding what they’re going to wear. We all have an image of ourselves that we want to project. Some want to look like a model. Some want to simply blend in. Some want to look like they don’t give a fuck what they look like. Ironically, the latter probably takes the most time out of the three to pull off. It’s inescapable unless you want to be like Albert Einstein and wear the same thing everyday.

But Einstein too cared about fashion. He said, “If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture, let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies… It would be a sad situation if the wrapper were better than the meat wrapped inside it.” You should listen to this guy because he came up with the theory that made all three of the Back to the Future movies possible. If you were to ask Einstein about this statement today he would say nothing because he’s dead. But if he were alive, Einstein would agree that meat and wrapper should go hand in hand, one complimenting the other. (Statements always sound more credible when you include an “Einstein would agree.”) So by all means fix up and look sharp, but clothes shouldn’t make the man. Rather, they should enhance him. Enhance him till he is a remorseless and unstoppable party killing machine. Take the peacock. Did you know that,despite their beautiful plumage, the peacock has a naturally horrible disposition and is the loneliest creature in the entire animal kingdom? It isn’t, but think how blown away you’d be right now if it were.

Was it because you wanted to sell one of your books to someone who didn’t know who you were?
No no no. I stayed hidden the whole time. I tried to be invisible. What surprised me was on Sundays we would sell three or four copies of What to Name the Baby and three to four copies of How to Get the Baby to Sleep. Like in any bookstore there’s always a pile of the current hardcover fiction and I don’t think I ever sold one copy of those. Yet you look at the bestseller list and this doesn’t seem to click with my experience from working in a bookstore. I can’t figure out why How to Get the Baby to Sleep isn’t like Pink Floyd’s Darkside of the Moon, the longest number one book in history.

I also heard that you collect used needles from the downtown eastside.
That was for a specific project. Part of the project was looking for DNA from the early 21st century, like ‘found DNA.’ Part of it was we went to a school and collected gum from underneath desks. The thinking was we wanted to encase the stuff in amber so that in the future they could go into the gum and extract dental DNA…

Like Jurassic Park?
Yeah, like Jurassic 2005. So we went on a needle drag. The criteria was that it had to be publicly accessible DNA. On the Internet I ordered a neodymium boron super magnet. It’s maybe about the size of a domino. Imagine a domino surrounded by a huge halo of bubble wrap in a box that’s like 18×18x18. That’s so it doesn’t de-magnetize any of the equipment at Fed Ex. Magnets are measured by how many pounds they can hold. This one was a 320-pound magnet that you could hold up two people with one tiny little magnet. So, we took a broom pole and taped it with packing tape on the end. Then we went down to the alleys. We parked the car on Cordova near Oppenheimer Park, we put on gloves and dressed very scientifically and brought buckets and everything. There were surprisingly few needles there. I used to live at the corner of Powell and Columbia for a few years and I just know that there are gazillions of these things. There was all sorts of cans of Boost or Ensure or meal replacement type things. It’s really weird poetry. Junkies are the last people in our culture who still write on paper. They just crank it out and it’s everywhere. So we saved a lot of that. We began to notice that every time you’d smell piss you’d also find needles. Because the exact amount of privacy it takes to take a leak it takes to shoot up. The further we got away from the car, the more needles we’d find until about three blocks away we came back to the snowdrifts of needles that I remember from living down there. Then it was just like an embarrassment of riches. I filled up a bucket and then we got back to the car and realize we parked in front of the needle exchange, which is why there were no needles there. So what we also figured out is if you’re a junkie and you’re two blocks away from a needle exchange you’re all ‘Yeah I’ll go get a new needle’ but if it’s three or four block way it’s like ‘Naw.’ So for them work mathematically you have to have one every four blocks or else I don’t think you’ll fix the problem. That’s why I like doing art projects, because you find out all this accidental shit along the way that you never would have learned otherwise.

Well, I have a gift for you. [This is where I presented him with the used needle]
Oh that’s so thoughtful. Where did you find it?

In the lane on Powell and Carrall next to the East Indian restaurant underneath a dumpster.
Oh that place is a goldmine. I remember that alley… I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.

At this point we discussed fun things like what junkies write on scraps of paper, font serifs and why people love Helvetica and hate Arial for about seven minutes. It was fascinating, but only if you’re a nerd.

But should we talk about the movie?
Yeah, they’ll get pissed off if we don’t. If they come in here and we’re talking about Helvetica…

So from the books of yours that I’ve read and talking to my friends I’ve always gathered that you’re a private man.
Not really. I’m not even sure anymore. Maybe I am I just think I’m not. I don’t know. My policy has always been there are people in my life who have asked me not to talk about them. And there are some people who don’t mind. My parents don’t mind so that’s why they’re in the movie. Whereas you don’t see my little brother. So what’s your question?

Well why did you want to do this?
Because when you’re reading a book it’s supposed to be a quiet conversation, the author’s voice whispering over you shoulder. But with this movie you’re there and you’re in front of the camera. They had to talk me into it. I don’t like getting photographed. I love great pictures of me, who doesn’t? Great pictures of yourself, rather, whoever you are. The actual process of having that lens, it just really fucks me up. I really don’t like it. It’s been 15 years now and I’m never going to like it.

Maybe that’s why I say I think you’re private because I don’t see that many pictures of you floating around.
I love to have great pictures of me floating around but it means having the brown-black thing in your face and it just really fucks me up. And also, digital cameras at book signings… and afterwards people take your picture. Digital cameras, those flashes on those fuckers are just brutal.

And there you are with red eyes all over the Internet the next day.
You get three in a row and you get a headache and can’t see properly. Now, I have to say no because frankly I don’t want the headache and I want to be able to see for the rest of the night. That can come across as being sort of… you know. It’s a strange thing. For me to be in the documentary like that, it was really hard for me. I did it cuz I trusted Rob and Robin. When you’re doing anything creative especially with film and theatre you have to trust them completely or not at all. You can’t trust them 62 percent.

Did you enjoy the collaborative process? Because you think of books as just one guy.
Film is small “c” corporate or communal. So many people are involved. With books I can do exactly what I want to do, exactly the way I want to do it and I have veto power. It’s great. I didn’t have that in this project. I could just say whatever I had to say. Also, Rob Cohen [the film’s producer] he’s a dialectician so he coached me. The way we’re talking right now, this is the way I really talk. Of course, I talk completely different in the documentary. Rob, painfully, line by line made me get it right. So, that I don’t like, and I hope that’s not disrespectful.

That’s what I like about your writing. It seems very unscripted… if that makes sense. But this movie is scripted.
It was scripted. I think the funniest parts of the movie are the parts where I’m just yakking. But it’s not that kind of documentary, so c’est la vie.

How did you like adapting your work?
Oh, I didn’t adapt it. I just showed up and read my lines. They did all the work. I just showed up and was probably a pain in the butt to deal with. I don’t like cameras and that brings out all my weird phobias. Freaky shit. They did all the work. Everything. It was all them and I get credit for it. It’s like, “Sick, sorry Robin.”

You seem to enjoy collecting tacky touristy cultural artifacts.
No, not really tacky. They’re things that you never quite realize that unify, but they actually do. I just saw the poster today for the first time with the stubby on the loonie. That’s fantastic.

Do you think it’s safe to call you an intellectual?
No, cuz I never got a degree. Only a diploma. I have a diploma in sculpture. It’s like having a diploma in finger painting.

Well, you’ve written more books than I’ve read since I finished school four years ago so I’m going to call you an intellectual.
Okay.

Do you think being a patriotic intellectual is a contradiction? Because you think of being patriotic and you associate it with jingoism, which is lowbrow.
There’s a long form answer to that which is in the 60s when Canada broke away from its British colonial roots, there was this ten-year period that was financed with heaps of money. I say this is the movie, if it says Canada, here’s a million bucks. Then the money ran out in the 80s. For two no one explored what happened in the 20 years after the money ran out. In that 20 years you had a lot of strange and unexpected things, like the stubby bottle, Kraft products, and bad game shows. Who wants to be a jingoist? Not me. It was nice for me to identify myself with these things but also to develop something that unifies. How old are you?

Twenty-six.
You might be too young. But we were really hard on ourselves. We could only ever define ourselves as being non-U.S. Now, you don’t even hear that anymore. We define ourselves in terms of who we are and what we do and what we think and feel and what we’ve done. That is just a galactic shift that I don’t think anyone, especially in the late 80s or early 90s, would ever have imagined happening. I was raised in the late 70s to believe that by 2006, we’d be a state. I was also raised to believe that by 2006 there would be no birds left on the earth and that the oceans would all be tar. That never happened either. It sounds like so dumb and self-reflective, but the thing with the future is it always surprises you.

Why aren’t there more Douglas Coupland movies?
There is one, Everything’s Gone Green, which is at Cannes.

Are you going to Cannes?
I’m not going to go. I don’t like going to continental Europe. I’m working on two projects, but books are what I do.

Was it difficult combining concert movie with autobiography?
It was a bit of a challenge in the beginning, but once Leonard and I had done the interviews I really let his conversation direct the movie. Obviously there are songs that are more known than others and performances that were great. I couldn’t include all of them as there were 34 songs in the concert. That was hard and that was the big challenge.

You shot the interviews with Leonard Cohen by yourself?
Yes, and that was at his house with my own camera. I took a friend with me but it was just me and Leonard. It was so Leonard and I could just relax and it wasn’t with a crew so it wasn’t like a formal interview at all. It was more like a conversation

Was this something he immediately jumped at or did it take a lot of convincing?
Leonard doesn’t really jump on anything. It came out of the blue. I wanted to meet him and let him find out about who I was first, which he did. He had seen my Willy Nelson film also and I showed him some of the performance that I had shot in Sydney already. It was just an organic evolvement of how that worked. We just got to know each other first and then I slowly started to bring my camera over.

What’s it like sitting down and chatting with this man?
Every time you speak to Leonard you walk away somewhat changed. He’s an extraordinary, unique human being. So it’s fantastic. The thing with these interviews is I didn’t want to do an in-depth [biopic]. I didn’t want to make that sort of film. I really just sort of wanted to capture the essence of who he was as a person. There’s so much more to him than I could even put in a film but you just get an essence of who he is. He’s this very very complex, vast and talented individual. And a great writer too. One of the great scribes of our times.

What does he think of the film?
He really likes it. He’s very happy. It’s hard for him because he’s got a lot of people bowing at his feet and I think he’s a very humble person. He’s a bit overwhelmed by that. He’s very happy for me and he thinks I did a beautiful job… which is the best compliment I can get.