Jay Baruchel talks about Goon

My interview with Jay Baruchel is part of this week's WE cover story.

 

COVER STORY: Canadian Film 2012 preview w/ Jay Baruchel

Posted By: Andrea Warner

Canada’s actors, writers and directors fare well enough in the court of public perception, but too often our films are dismissed as either too highbrow, too dull, too weird or, simply, too Canadian. What does that mean? Well, in 2012, it means a potential Academy Award winner (David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method), a Variety magazine “one to watch” screenwriter (actor/writer Jay Baruchel’s debut, Goon) and an indie darling on the festival circuit (Carl Bessai’s Sisters&Brothers). Get thee to a movie theatre!

JAY BARUCHEL
There is no man in Hollywood who is more proudly, staunchly, defiantly Canadian than Jay Baruchel. So what better subject matter for the young actor’s screenwriting debut than hockey? And better yet, a feminist hockey movie free of “alpha male douchebags.” Baruchel spoke with WE at the Whistler Film Festival in December about his dream project, Goon, which hits the big screen Feb. 24.

Full disclosure: I actually interviewed you for The Trotsky a while ago, and we talked about goat sacrifices in Victoria and how my dream is for you, Nicholas Cage and Crispin Glover to star in a movie together.
I told Cage that! Crispin was his best friend when they were teenagers.

I enjoyed the trailer for Goon, and I’m excited: you speak well, so I feel you probably write well, that the two correlate. Is this the first film you’ve written?
No, I’ve written a bunch, but it’s the first one that got made into something.

What was that process like for you?
It was combining all the fun I get out of writing, with all the fun I have as a hockey fan. It was trying to find what is most exciting and interesting to watch as a hockey fan and put those into a movie. And then just try to make myself laugh, and as much heart, for lack of a better term, into it. I had no interest in just making a movie about an alpha male, frat-boy douchebag.

Really, you don’t say?
(Laughs) I was convinced I could make a sports movie that was humble and honest and pure and not offensive. When I say offensive, I mean people will be offended by Goon, but not offensive — I wanted absolutely no mysogyny. I’m a momma’s boy who grew up with a little sister. I hate that shit. It’s embarrassing.

Who are some of the screenwriters you’re inspired by?
I don’t know how much I’d be able to pinpoint. Any movie I watch is indelibly marked in my head. Good ones and bad ones. Everything I like is in this movie. I tried to economize as much as I can. I tried to do that Clint [Eastwood] thing in Unforgiven or Gran Torino or Million Dollar Baby, incredibly simple stories that are incredibly involving as well. As I started writing, I won’t lie, there’s a fair bit of Gladiator or Braveheart in there too. Evan Goldberg and I had one or two phone conversations of about an hour a piece and mapped out, more or less, almost the entire movie. It came really easy to us. And I banged out my first draft in a month and a half, or two months. When Stauss got involved, he instituted this writer’s room type thing, where it would be just me and him and a few other people in a room and just — I hate using words like this — spitballing, talking shit and comin’ up with different ways, like “How does this work? Is this going to be funny enough?” All that stuff.

Being funny in your head and being funny on the page are two different things, and then to sustain going from the page to being said out loud ...
It’s a long, long, long process. I think people can say funny shit, but what’s also far funnier is a strange back and forth. Believe it or not, the script for Goon is incredibly dialogue-heavy. There are monologues, too, so I probably went a bit Mamet on that. (Laughs) But basically if I find it funny and one or two other people find it funny, it’s probably not too shitty.

Carl Bessai

My interview with Carl Bessai is part of this week's WE cover story.

Carl Bessai

COVER STORY: Canadian Film 2012 preview w/ Carl Bessai

Posted By: Andrea Warner

Canada’s actors, writers and directors fare well enough in the court of public perception, but too often our films are dismissed as either too highbrow, too dull, too weird or, simply, too Canadian. What does that mean? Well, in 2012, it means a potential Academy Award winner (David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method), a Variety magazine “one to watch” screenwriter (actor/writer Jay Baruchel’s debut, Goon) and an indie darling on the festival circuit (Carl Bessai’s Sisters&Brothers). Get thee to a movie theatre!

CARL BESSAI
At the start of our conversation, Vancouver-based filmmaker Carl Bessai laughingly concedes he’s never done karaoke. He just can’t put himself out there like that. And yet he’s easily one of the country’s most prolific, excitingly experimental filmmakers, cranking out one-to-two movies a year over the last decade. He alternates scripted efforts with largely improvisational films, like his newest feature, Sisters&Brothers, which wraps up his FamilyX trilogy and will hit screens this spring. Bessai, who operates almost giddily without any kind of safety net while filming, and who has swept big names like Glee’s Cory Monteith and 90210’s Dustin Milligan into starring roles in Sisters&Brothers, can’t concieve of singing “Sweet Caroline” at closing time. Luckily, he has no such inhibitions when it comes to taking risks as an indie filmmaker. Bessai spoke with WE over the phone from his office about quantity over quality, improv and Sisters&Brothers’ leading men.

QUANTITY OVER QUALITY
“My hero is [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder, the now-dead German director. He died when he was 47, or it might have been younger, but he made 47 movies. (Laughs) Some years he made three or four films. He was just insane. And not all the films are that good, but I really marveled at the incredible volume and and the way he made films with a company of actors that he really trusted. There was a lot of collaboration and a lot of craziness that went down in their personal lives, but it was really amazing to see the creative output...

“I love the craft of those crazy, imperfect films. You see something like the new Sherlock Holmes movies: they’re beautifully made and they’re stylish, but they lack a kind of truth and beauty, a substance. The thing that I always feel like from a directing point of view is, I guess, my truth, about the truth that I experience with people. Like, in Sisters&Brothers, we really tried to stick to narratives that were related to experiences we’ve had or people we know or things that are close to home. It sounds so heady, it doesn’t sound funny at all, but that’s where the beauty is. You take something that isn’t necessarily all that funny, but you juxtapose these dramatic narratives with these bites of humour, and there’s something so great about that. I really feel like that’s what Sisters&Brothers was.”

THE FRAMEWORK OF IMPROV
“I have to build a framework for a script or it’s impossible to do. The trick is getting everyone together to jam so you can build the outline properly. The only thing we’re really doing here is skipping the writing of dialogue. You do a lot of work-shopping and discussing with the actors so everyone has a really strong idea of how they relate to each other. People have to be able to bring a certain amount of experience to the table. If you look at the story between Cory Monteith and Dustin Milligan, who star as a movie star and his brother, a former actor who wants to start a charity, there’s a ton of the actual actors’ lives in the story. They are relying on shorthand to build their brotherly narrative.

“They were two young men, once upon a time, who lived in Vancouver together. They decided to go to Hollywood. In real life! And Dustin got a job on 90210 and started to take off, and Cory was struggling. And then of course, Cory got onto Glee and Dustin left 90210 and things shifted and their relationship changed. What does fame do to your relationship? And they weren’t brothers, but they had a brotherly relationship, so there was a certain amount of chaos they experienced in real life. I love when you can tap into that stuff, because when they’re on the spot, they know what to say.”

GLEE POWER
“Before I had cast these roles, I knew it was going to be two brothers, one of whom was famous and one who wasn’t, and the rivalry that comes out of that. I come from a family of brothers, and I have a brother who’s really the guy I’m closest to in the world, but he’s an architect. We get together two, three times a year and for a while I was thinking, you know, I should just come in and read my resume, and you should read yours, and once we get that out of the way, we can get on with just kind of getting along. (Laughs) But there’s always this sense that we have to have this pissing contest of who’s doing what before we can relax. I always thought it was a little bit more him than me, I never felt the need to whatever, but it was funny. Like, God, how old are we now? We used to run track together, so we’d always race against each other, and sometimes he’d win and sometimes I’d win and we’d train together and had this crazy rivalry.

“So, I walked in the door with that structural idea. I’d worked with Dustin Milligan on Repeaters, my previous film, and loved working with him. He’s such a great actor and I hadn’t realized how funny he was and how good on his feet he was. I thought he’d be good in this improvising world, so I reached out to him, thinking that he would be a good movie star brother, but he was the one who said, ‘You know, this little outline is interesting. It’s exactly what my relationship with Cory is like. Do you mind if I call him?’ I’m like, ‘Do I mind if you’d call the star of Glee and ask him to come and do our no-money movie? I really mind!’” (Laughs)

TRUST EXERCISES
“The actors have to trust that I’ll put together a narrative that works. And the actors love working like that... but they have to feel safe to be in a place where they can fuck up. When you’re Cory Monteith and pretty famous, you don’t want to be exposed fucking up. There’s a lot of trust there and we can take the bones or the raw materials and put together this film, that at the end has the ability to be well received. It takes a certain amount of faith and luck and all that other stuff to come together. But it’s an exciting way to work. It really puts you on the line.”

David Cronenberg

My interview with David Cronenberg is part of this week's WE cover story

COVER STORY: Canadian Film 2012 preview w/ David Cronenberg

Posted By: Andrea Warner

Canada’s actors, writers and directors fare well enough in the court of public perception, but too often our films are dismissed as either too highbrow, too dull, too weird or, simply, too Canadian. What does that mean? Well, in 2012, it means a potential Academy Award winner (David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method), a Variety magazine “one to watch” screenwriter (actor/writer Jay Baruchel’s debut, Goon) and an indie darling on the festival circuit (Carl Bessai’s Sisters&Brothers). Get thee to a movie theatre!

DAVID CRONENBERG
Filmmaker David Cronenberg has built an art-house reputation for being the thinking man’s perverse subversive. His weirdest, kinkiest or most disturbingly vicious movies — The Fly, Crash, A History of Violence — have, at their core, an almost obsessive interest in exploring human psychology. Cronenberg admits that his lifelong fascination with the subject isn’t so much about understanding ‘why?’, but in asking ‘why not?’ Much the way the founders of psychoanalysis, doctors Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, do in Cronenberg’s new film, A Dangerous Method, which opens this Friday, Jan.13.

“Someone pointed out to me — I had actually forgotten — that my very first film was a seven-minute short called Transfer, which was about a patient and a psychiatrist, and that was before I made any other fiction films!” Cronenberg laughs, over the phone from his homebase of Toronto. “It’s a very fascinating, strange relationship, which we sort of now take for granted and have absorbed into being a kind of standard human interaction.”

But of course, that wasn’t always the case. Set at the turn of the last century, A Dangerous Method, based on Christopher Hampton’s play, The Talking Cure  (itself based on John Kerr’s non-fiction book, A Most Dangerous Method: the story of Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein) focuses on the push-pull between Freud (Viggo Mortensen) and Jung (Michael Fassbender), both respected doctors attempting to cultivate dramatic breakthroughs via talk therapy. Their relationship devolves from that of a father/son, mentor/mentee to bitterly disappointed former friends. The catalyst of their dissolution is Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), Jung’s patient with whom he embarks on an sado-masochistic affair, and who eventually becomes Freud’s patient, protegee and one of the first female psychoanalysts.

“This is at the moment of the invention of psychoanalysis that we’re seeing in the movie,” Cronenberg says. “The boundaries were not at all well established. You can even make a case for Otto Gross [Jung’s colleague] saying, ‘Well, why should we assume having sex with our patients is a bad thing? Maybe it’s a good thing. Maybe under the terms of psychoanalysis, maybe it can work under certain circumstances.’ The ethical boundaries and therapeutic boundaries were not at all established, it was all up for grabs and was all being invented at the time.”

Jung’s patient-turned-lover, Spielrein, could be considered one of the guinea pigs of the ethics of psychoanalysis. Fittingly, it’s her story — and the critical response to Knightley’s portrayal — that proves most compelling after the credits roll.

The film opens with a lengthy sequence in which a hysterical Spielrein is forcibly institutionalized. It’s an overwhelmingly physical performance. Knightley’s jaw is practically dislocated by fierce facial tics, her body contorted as she convulses. Contrary to the advertising campaign’s depiction, Knightley’s Speilrien isn’t just a mentally ill seductress; she’s a woman stifled by expectation, attempting to grapple with the intense shame of repressed sexuality. Or, as it was once known, hysteria.

“Women were worshipped as goddesses, in the Victorian style, and put on a pedestal, but that’s not really a great place for a human being to be,” Cronenberg says. “You were worshipped, but you weren’t supposed to have a sex life. You weren’t supposed to have an intellect. Sabina was speaking these unspeakable things, saying things that no one has ever asked her to articulate before, this is the talking cure after all. A young woman, coming from a wealthy family, of a certain class, saying she’s sexually aroused by her father beating her to the point that she masturbates. She could not let these things out of her mouth, but she desperately wants to. That’s where the facial deformity comes from, that she’s trying to speak, but she wants to deform the words, or pull them back into her throat, literally.”

But rather than applaud the young actress, critics have been largely derisive, calling her performance over-the-top and clumsy. One can’t help but wonder: if it had been Daniel Day Lewis giving that performance, wouldn’t there be Oscar talk already?

“I completely agree with you,” Cronenberg says. “All of that talk is just loony. Keira could have dialed it up or down anyway I asked her to, but we both decided we needed to show accurately — because the movie is very accurate, actually, on every level. We had to show what hysteria was. What did they expect? Sabina’s particular version of hysteria was well-documented by Jung himself. There were 50 pages of it, with Jung’s handwriting in the margins, talking about how her face was ravaged by tics and distortions and contortions and deformities and stuff. It’s all very accurate. She couldn’t just sit there and be mildly neurotic, because that’s not what hysteria was. She was completely dysfunctional when they brought her there. That’s why her parents were willing to institutionalize her, so it has to be shown. It was completely accurate.”

Andrew Bird Fever Year

My VIFF cover story for WE features an interview with Xan Aranda, director of Andrew Bird: Fever Year.

Despite years of friendship, it took filmmaker Xan Aranda plenty of coaxing to go behind the scenes with reclusive musician Andrew Bird.

Credit: Supplied

‘Fever Year’ marks directorial debut, Bird in hand

Posted By: Andrea Warner

Welcome to the biggest week of Xan Aranda’s life. Her directorial debut Andrew Bird: Fever Year, a concert documentary about the reclusive indie-rock violin virtuoso, makes its international premiere at the Vancouver International Film Festival on Oct. 8. That’s just five days after it makes its world premiere at the New York Film Festival. Excuse her if she’s freaking out just a little bit.

“The first festival to take it was Vancouver,” Aranda says, over the phone from her home base in Chicago, where Bird also resides. “Before [VIFF] and the New York Film Festival came along, I was just wigging out, thinking we would work so hard on this film that we like, but that people would be like, ‘Oh man, another music doc.’ I really hoped to make something that would pull outside of that.”

It does.

Fans of Bird know little about the man himself, other than what they glimpse through his carefully constructed, lush folk-rock songs. Since 2003, he’s released four solo albums and several live records, amassing a devoted cult following that grew in legion as chamber pop and his practice of violin looping caught on with the more mainstream indie rock crowd. His live shows reveal a genius-like approach to detail, both sonically and visually. But Bird’s not an accessible, knowable musician like his peer Owen Pallett (formerly Final Fantasy). Interviews are rare (he declined to participate in this story) and he’s not big on social media. His identity as an artist is carefully controlled. On the surface, it’s not a lot to work with when crafting a documentary.

But Aranda isn’t just any filmmaker. She’s been a friend of Bird’s for almost a decade, working with him on a variety of short film and music video projects over the years. When he came to her for a consultation about filming his final two concerts of 2009, Aranda saw the potential for something more.

“There’s no point in doing a concert capture,” she says. “That’s only for the fans and they’ll watch it once and put it on the shelf. I really wanted to make a film that — I don’t know if I captured his essence, but gives you a chance to be with him. He’s a very private person and I don’t think that this film really tells you who he is, but you do get the chance to be with him and that was a goal. I very much wanted this to be story with music and music with story and for you to kinda not realize when one is happening and then the other, just the next thing you know 80 minutes went by... I know he’d talked to a lot more directors who were more experienced and famous than I am, and ultimately he said he wasn’t comfortable with that.”

Admittedly, as Aranda discovered, Bird wasn’t always comfortable with her approach either. He proved reticent throughout about the documentary aspect to Fever Year, but Aranda kept pushing.

“It took a lot of coaxing,” she laughs. “Andrew would be very happy to only have the on-stage be what he shares... It was very collaborative, but lots of reluctance. We tried one direction for a while, but ultimately we both watched it and were like, ‘This is so stilted!’ I’m 100-per-cent a fan of verite. I told him I wanted to shoot more with him. I’d call him and be like, ‘Hey, what are you doing today?’ And he’d say, ‘Oh, I’m recording.’ We’d say we want to come with you and he’d be like, ‘Okay, you can come by between two and three.’ And I’d be like, ‘Well, when are you getting there?’ And he’d say, ‘Nine.’ And I’d be like, ‘Ok, I’m going to meet you at your house.’ That was hard for him. He’s so focused. He doesn’t want his recording messed up, either... My first and foremost concern was that it honor his pace as a human. Imagine an MTV version of Fever Year. Andrew is really deliberate, he’s really thoughtful, he’s very careful in everything he does. It wasn’t hard to just look at who he is and honour that; and, it’s the style of film I wanted to make, so it wasn’t a stretch for me either.”
Fever Year takes its name from the unidentified illness that daunted Bird throughout his tour in 2009. In the film he estimates he had a fever of about 103 degrees at least 150 days out of the year. He also ends up on crutches at one point. Aranda immediately says “No,” when asked if she was worried about her subject and friend, then laughs.

“It sounds really callous, but I wasn’t worried about him, because I knew it was cresting soon, I knew what his schedule was,” she explains. “I always describe him as a frog in hot water. When you tour, you just take it moment-by-moment. It’s not until later you realize, holy shit, I just had a fever for 150 days. He was alarmed and towards the end of the year he saw some doctors, but there’s so much frenzy involved, you don’t even realize. But he does say in the film that he’s only not had a fever for three or four shows, and I like that he’s laughing when he tells you that. I wasn’t worried. He’s fundamentally very strong. But, I know what it’s like even in my own work — it really does take one to know one.”
For both the filmmaker and her subject, Fever Year is the culmination of over a decade of hard work, seizing every opportunity with dogged determination.

“I know what it’s like — and this does bring me both pause and calm — to be at a heyday that’s a result of 10 years of really hard work, and knowing that you have to respond regardless of what your physical resources are,” Aranda says. “And there’s a tragedy to it. Because if you didn’t take a bite out of every pie, you would be okay, but it’s everything you’ve worked for. I’ve been a producer for 10 years. I’ve worked my fucking ass off,” she laughs. “I was busy when Fever Year came around. I was tired and broke. It wasn’t the best idea for me, but I had to do it and I’ve never been sorry.”

Andrew Bird: Fever Year screens at VIFF Oct. 8, 10, 14. Tickets and showtimes: VIFF.org.

Kim Cattrall

My interview with Kim Cattrall makes up part of our summer movies package in this week's WEVancouver.

Dustin Milligan and Kim Cattrall.

SUMMER MOVIES: Kim Cattrall hits the motherload

Posted By: Andrea Warner

If you’re best known for your work as oft-naked glamarama Samantha Jones on Sex and the City, gaining 20 pounds to star as a washed-up porn star is enough to garner headlines and media attention. But Kim Cattrall’s reasons for signing on as the titular star in writer/director Keith Beardon’s debut feature, Meet Monica Velour, run more than skin-deep: she wanted to show the broken reality of the woman starring in 18-year-old Tobe’s fantasy, right down to the ways she debases herself in order to get custody of her young daughter. The award-winning actress/author spoke with WE over the phone about intimidating her teen co-star, Dustin Milligan, feminism and Juno as right-wing propaganda.

Monica seemed like total character immersion.
It was. It was a complete immersion for me. That was the only way I could do it. I couldn’t do it, take it off, and go home. I was Monica. I just saw a take that we did behind the scenes, I saw it on the DVD, I’m interviewed as Kim between takes, but it’s not me. It’s Monica. To get out of it — it was just easier to stay right where she was. It felt like in a lot of the scenes that Dusty and I were just playing jazz. It felt effortless, free and surprising... he’ll follow you anywhere, he’s that kind of actor. He’s really open. He just turned 18 when we did it and he’s still fresh. Keith asked me not to be very nice to him so he could remain slightly nervous and hesitant in my presence. We were nervous that he wouldn’t be able to act it, you know, ‘cause that’s a lot to ask. So I withdrew a lot which made him a little edgy, exactly what Tobe needed to be.

So you wanted to keep him slightly intimidated by you the whole time?
On his toes! Because Monica’s like that, you just never know when she’s going to strike. One minute she’s banging on his door, next minute she’s fixin’ him a drink, then she’s crying in his lap, I mean this woman is all over the place. She’s in real, desperate measures. And you just sort of — she’s not predictable and that’s what makes her exciting to play... Within the first 10 minutes of their meeting, she rolls him! Keith said, ‘Is she really going to take it?’ And I said, ‘Yeah. He won’t know, he’s drunk. She needs the money. She. Needs. The. Money.’ She has to pay the lawyer to get the kid to go to Oregon. That was really, in my mind, what allowed us to go to all those other levels. I don’t think there’s a human being alive, who’s sane, that doesn’t understand a mother fighting for her child.

That really hooks into the character’s motivations of her and her child surviving.
When [her ex-husband] says, ‘You’re not going to see her until she’s 21,’ that was an improvised line, and I gotta say, my stomach just sunk. Can you imagine not being able to see your child?... And, when Tobe turns up with the daughter, you just want to scream, like ‘No!’ It’s the worst nightmare, because she’s caught. This kid, who’s her john, is kidnapping her child? To be able to do that scene, with the stakes that high with what [Beardon] wrote, to say, ‘Look at me. This is reality. Not your fucking fantasy of what a woman is. This is what a woman is.’ And, she’s that woman, whether she’s a PR executive on Madison Avenue, or in a trailer park in Indiana. There is that — that misogyny really — going on. Whether you’re Sarah Palin or Hilary Clinton, women are being victimized, just because they’re women. And a lot of women just let it happen. I don’t want to be that kind of woman.

Why are people so uncomfortable with women’s sexuality?
‘Cause it’s powerful! So powerful! It’s boundless. Maybe it’s just as simple as we can have more than one orgasm, I don’t know. (Laughs) Maybe for men that’s pretty daunting. They need us, and we have the power, but we don’t take the power. Nature has separated us simply in the form, and this is, well, it’s sperm! We’re all fighting for the best sperm... They’re already terrified and we’re fighting amongst ourselves, so what does that lead to? Loss of power, marginalization. Look, I work within it, I’m not just complaining about it, saying ‘Poor me, I’m a feminist, blah blah blah.’ I try and do something about it, and sometimes it’s just about educating young women about some things, and they may not like me for it, but it’s the way it is. Taking roles like this are exciting to me, because it’s talking about it in a very real way. It’s not demonstrating. It’s saying, ‘Look, this is what it is. What do you think?’ ... In some ways, I’ve waited my whole life to do a speech like that. The fact that a man wrote it, I think it’s fantastic. And then you look at like, oh God, what was that film, about the girl who keeps the baby? Ellen is in it.

Juno.
Juno, thank you. What does that say about women? She goes to an abortion clinic and I mean, is this a right wing piece of propaganda, that you go to an abortion clinic and they treat you like shit? I mean, c’mon! Really! I’m not saying that doesn’t happen, but why’d it have to happen like that? It kind of left a bad taste in my mouth.