Whistler Film Festival Borsos Competition

Isabella Rossellini in Guy Maddin's Keyhole

Credit: Supplied

WE COVER STORY PT. 2: Borsos award shines spotlight on Canadian films

Posted By: Andrea Warner

Internationally, Canadian films and filmmakers are still struggling to get the recognition they deserve. But they’re the proud centrepiece of the Whistler Film Festival thanks to the esteemed Borsos Competition for Best Canadian Feature Film. But it’s not simply the $15,000 prize that has filmmakers clamoring for the honour; it’s living up to the legacy of the man behind the title, the late Phillip Borsos (The Grey Fox and Bethune: The Making of a Hero).

The Vancouver-based director/producer was just 41 years old when he succumbed to leukemia in 1995, devastating his family and community, and cutting short an award-winning career that had already altered the Canadian film scene. But as time passed, his widow, Beret Borsos, wasn’t sure how or if her husband’s legacy would be remembered. Until, that is, local filmmaker and Whistler Film Festival board member Carl Bessai came calling.

“They wanted to do something to honour Phillip and they thought that tying an award named for him to a festival that has a truly West Coast identity was a really good match,” Borsos recalls. “I’d been out of the whole film loop for a long time and sometimes I wasn’t sure if Phillip had just been forgotten, so it was tremendously moving for me to realize he wasn’t. And it also seemed to be something so lovely for my boys.”

The competition is open to up to eight feature films of new, narrative work by Canadian filmmakers, but prides itself on celebrating independent vision and diversity. Borsos says the focus aligns itself well with her late husband’s love for discovering and advising young talent — particularly now that their eldest son, Angus Borsos, is also a filmmaker and therefore a potential future Borsos Competition contender — provided he gets past the judges, of course, she laughs.

*****

This year’s competition boasts six features that will definitely redefine what it means to be an indie Canadian flick. WE has the scoop about what to expect from the 2011 contenders.

388 ARLETTA AVENUE
Starring Nick Stahl, Mia Kirshner
Directed by Randall Cole
A 1984-inspired thriller about a couple who doesn’t realized they’re being watched 24/7, shot entirely from the vantage point of surveillance and handheld cameras. Think the Blair Witch Project meets The Lives of Others, with a privileged Toronto twist and some very pretty actors.

CAFÉ DE FLORE
Starring Vanessa Paradis, Kevin Parent
Directed by Jean-Marc Vallée
A love story that weaves back and forth between a recently divorced DJ in present-day Montreal and the young mother of a disabled son in 1960s Paris. Atmospheric, tragic and French, it promises to be a heady, gorgeously filmed trip through the fantastical.

DOPPLEGANGER PAUL (Or A Film About How Much I Hate Myself)
Starring Tygh Runyan, Brad Dryborough, Ben Cotton
Directed by Dylan Akio Smith & Kris Elgstrand
A delightfully bizarre dark comedy wherein a man escapes a near-death experience and then meets his doppelgänger, which sets in motion an only-in-the-movies chain of events: a lost thumb, a stolen manuscript, riding a miniature train, morning talk show appearances and a road trip to Portland.

KEYHOLE
Starring Jason Patric, Isabella Rossellini
Directed by Guy Maddin
Moody, atmospheric, beautiful and disturbing — so, yep, a Guy Maddin film, but that’s where the similarities end. This is a 1930s gangster picture set in a haunted house, where it’s almost impossible to tell when waking life ends and the dream world begins.

MARILYN
Starring Allison Mack and Simone Bailly
Directed and written by Christopher Petry
Another atmospheric pic — this one shot in the gritty style of the 1970s — about a bank robber on the lam with a young runaway. But it’s the source material that fascinates: a story written by Patrick “Paddy” Mitchell of the Stopwatch Gang while he was in prison.

MONSIEUR LAZHAR
Starring Fellag, Marie-Ève Beauregard, Marie Charlebois, Evelyne de la Chenelière
Directed by Philippe Falardeau
This French-language flick about a 55-year-old Algerian immigrant dealing with personal tragedy and juggling his new job as a substitute teacher is already a winner: it was named the Best Canadian Feature Film at TIFF and is Canada’s official selection for the Academy Awards’ Best Foreign Language Film.

Whistler Film Fest runs Nov. 30-Dec. 4. Info: WhistlerFilmFestival.com.

Guy Maddin and Whistler Film Festival

Part 1 of my Q&A with Guy Maddin is in this week's WE, just in time for the Whistler Film Fest. Part 2 will be out when his new film Keyhole gets released.

COVER STORY: Guy Maddin invites us to peer through the ‘Keyhole’

Posted By: Andrea Warner

The USA has David Lynch, Spain has Pedro Almodovar and Canada has Guy Maddin. Arguably they are the modern makers of weird, disquieting beauty that’s rooted in a genuine desire to explore the bottomless depths and shallow pools of human experience. They make movies that mess with our sense of self. Maddin, particularly, is a master of this as reflected by his unsettling new film, Keyhole. It’s a tense, disturbing genre mashup of 1930s gangster and haunted house flicks, gorgeously shot in black and white. It’s also a contender in the prestigious Borsos Competition at the 11th annual Whistler Film Festival. (For more on the Borsos award, see next page.)

The words “perverse” and “strange” get thrown around a lot by writers when talking about your films. Do you take pleasure in having a certain shock value?
Nothing is shocking. And real life can be perverse and strange. I just don’t have it in me to produce naturalistically performed movies set in workaday worlds. I’m not Chekovian enough. And besides, my tastes run to folk tales – savage narratives that tell us in no uncertain terms fearsome things about ourselves, no matter how strange or perverse they might seem. Please regard the Brothers Grimm or Hans Christian Andersen. Perverse and strange geniuses and superb role models.

It seems like Canadian cinema has never been stronger, and yet it still suffers from a serious inferiority complex. What’s your take on its evolution?
Canadian cinema just needs a big breakout, a phenomenal film that blows away all our fears, and the world’s preconceptions of our timid ways all at once. It’ll come. You can’t make it happen, it’ll just happen if we keep trying.

What made you decide to ground Keyhole so specifically in a house?
I used to dream of lost loved ones, in delirious nightly dramas during which I worked through, or expressed, feelings that never quite untangled themselves while everyone was alive. Now I dream only of empty architecture. These dreams are more haunting to me than the old unfinished-business dreams involving the family ghosts. I decided I wanted to make a movie that was about a house, about the places in which we live and they feelings they can produce in us. It’s too glib to say I wanted to make a film starring a house, because more often than not I like to watch films with people in them – not always, but mostly. So I knew I wanted to stray from my recurrent dreams and actually populate the corridors of my night-architecture with characters. But I also knew I wanted to stay inside that house the whole film. It’s a good-looking home with lots of detail, lots of surprises, surely more than enough visual richness to support 90 minutes screen time without it wearying anyone’s eyes. After all, we spend infinite hours in our own homes, often loving the environs more and more with each passing day. I wanted viewers to feel comfy, at home, in that house by movie’s end. Who knows if I got it right.

What does it mean to you to have Keyhole be part of the Borsos competition?
I am honoured. Borsos was a great filmmaker. I met him a couple of times and was deeply impressed.

Why is it important to have competitions like this one that honour Canadian films?
The winning of prizes means little, or should mean little, to the filmmakers themselves, but prizes help mythologize and glamorize the craft, help elevate Canadian filmmaking into the competitive and glitzy delirium of showbiz and all its artificial glamour. The prizes help remind us to embrace the artificiality of filmmaking, make us complicit in its fakeness, make us want to participate in the dream on the screen more. Without such prizes we Canadians will watch our films with a grim literal-mindedness we’ve always deployed in shooting down our own work the instant it gets airborne.

What is Canada’s film reputation internationally? Are we held in high esteem?
I can’t tell. I think everyone just feels sorry for me when they say nice things to me, and way more often they say terrible things to me. And I’m too busy bad-mouthing my Canadian colleagues to judge fairly how they’re perceived internationally.

Twenty or 30 years ago, the idea seemed to be that if you wanted to make it as a filmmaker, you had to leave Canada. How much of that perception remains today?
I’ve never even left Winnipeg to make a movie, so you’re asking the wrong person. I even suspect you asked this just to rub that fact in. But I do know that a hometown person is never deemed a complete success until he or she leaves and achieves something significant away from home. That applies to every country, not just Canada. Probably the worst place to be born in is Hollywood itself. These are the kids that have the biggest discriminations to deal with.

Bruce Greenwood

My interview with actor Bruce Greenwood, who will be at the Whistler Film Festival. 

Bruce Greenwood may not be a household name, but regular moviegoers know his face well.

Credit: Supplied

It’s that actor you know you’ve seen before

Posted By: Andrea Warner

12/01/2010 12:00 AM

 

His name may not be familiar, but his face sure is. Over his 20-plus years in the movie business, Bruce Greenwood has evolved from a regular in Canadian filmmaker Atom Egoyan’s features to Hollywood go-to-guy when a commanding figure is needed. Be it presidential (Thirteen Days, National Treasure: Book of Secrets), corporate (Dinner for Schmucks), or captain (Star Trek), Greenwood has a knack for playing a man in control.

Greenwood spoke with WE just one day after wrapping work on the Vancouver-shot mystery-drama Donovan’s Echo, in which he stars alongside Danny Glover. He’s resting up for his mini-residency at the Whistler Film Festival (to Dec. 5; WhistlerFilmFestival.com), where he’ll head the Borsos Jury (which awards the festival’s top prize for Canadian film), participate in a Q&A, and screen his new movie, Meek’s Cutoff.

I tallied up the roles in your recent films and you’re often cast as ‘The Man’ in one way or another. Do you think there’s something ultra-commanding about your presence? 

Greenwood: Umm. (Laughs) No, I’m just a schlub. Just a regular schlub... It’s funny — once you’ve done it a couple times and you get away with it, people tend to think that’s all you can do, and they want to know what they’re getting when they hire people. Now more than ever. It used to be you could just audition for something and they would be like, ‘Oh, yeah, he’s figured this part out. Let’s give it to him.’ But it’s not really like that anymore.

Do you get frustrated by the type-casting? 

No. It’s just, I mean, the opportunity is there to allow yourself to be typecast, and if you’re not working and you feel like working or you’re hungry to work, you just do it in spite of yourself. Quite often I resist the urge.

What made you want to accept the position as head of the Borsos Jury? 

[I] went to a couple of festivals this year, Venice and Toronto — as [a contestant], as it were — and I’ve never been on a jury before, so I’m looking forward to that whole process. I’m really looking forward to what the other jurors have to say, and I expect I’ll learn something. That, on top of being able to go back to Whistler and spend a few days there at the beginning of the season — what more do you need?

You’re also starring in a film, Meek’s Cutoff, that’s being shown at the festival. That’s particularly exciting for fans of filmmaker Kelly Reichardt (Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy). What made you sign on?


I thought the script was really interesting, and the chance to work with Michelle [Williams] was really appealing. I love the time period and the environment. And a couple of [Reichardt’s] other films I’d been quite affected by.

What was it like working with Michelle Williams? 

In this movie, she’s a very quiet actor; she does a lot with very little dialogue. She’s one of those people, you look at her face and you read on it a thousand things. She’s just got that ability to communicate without words. In a sense, it’s the definition of a film star.

You and Atom Egoyan, who will also be at the festival, have had a lengthy working relationship. 

Yep. We were both young once. (Laughs)

Do you have a favourite story about working with him? 

I remember when we were doing The Sweet Hereafter, at the time I had a front tooth I could remove, but he didn’t know that. We were messing around, doing screen tests with wardrobe and different amounts of whisker, because I’d come there with a lot of beard-age, so we chopped it off in bits and he’d go, ‘Yeah, maybe the sideburns smaller.’ We finally ended up keeping the big sweeper mustache, and I said, ‘Well, what if I take my tooth out? That might work.’ And he said, ‘What?!’ And I said, ‘I can take my front tooth out.’ So I popped out the little flipper I had, and he just goes, “Oh! Oh my God, oh!... Okay, yeah, let’s go for it!’ You could see him processing it and his initial horror, like, ‘Geez, are we gonna go that far? Okay, yeah.’ He’s just a really open guy, really fun to work with.

Atom Egoyan

My interview with Atom Egoyan is this week's cover story.

Director Atom Egoyan returns to the Whistler Film Festival for its 10th-anniversary edition.

Credit: supplied

Atom Egoyan — in praise of Whistler film fest

Posted By: Andrea Warner

11/24/2010 12:00 AM

 

Atom Egoyan, one of Canada’s most celebrated filmmakers, never went to film school. Instead, he went to film festivals. “I wouldn’t have had my career if I hadn’t gone to film festivals,” he says, on the phone from his adopted hometown of Toronto. “That’s where I met the people who became my crew eventually, and the actors I work with... The festivals were my film school.”

It’s evident from the B.C.-raised Egoyan’s lengthy history of award-winning films that the decision to eschew traditional education for on-the-job learning paid off handsomely. He garnered international acclaim with 1997’s Oscar-nominated The Sweet Hereafter, and has continued to craft intelligent, acclaimed art-house fare.

It’s Egoyan’s belief in the important role festivals play in fostering Canadian cinema that’s made him a prominent supporter of the Whistler Film Festival (WFF). Since its inception, he’s been a regular jury member and has used the fest to host advance screenings of new works, such as last year’s Chloe. Egoyan returns this year for WFF’s 10th-anniversary edition, facilitating a discussion with celebrated cult director — and Quentin Tarantino mentor — Monte Hellman, best known for early Jack Nicholson vehicles The Shooting and Ride in the Whirlwind, as well as the 1971 drag-race drama Two-Lane Blacktop, starring singer-songwriter James Taylor.

According to Egoyan, who calls Hellman “a hero of any independent filmmaker,” it’s these kinds of events, where emerging filmmakers can learn from pillars of the community, that make WFF uniquely positioned to pick up where the Toronto International Film Festival — which began as a scrappy upstart but is now a key part of the Hollywood mainstream’s social calendar — left off. “These [emerging Canadian] filmmakers get lost in the bigger events, where it’s about a certain type of glamour,” he says. “I’ve seen it happen over and over again in Toronto and the other big festivals: The young filmmakers get really excited to be invited, and then it’s not what they expected; they kind of feel lost once they’re there.

“There was a time when Toronto really served emerging filmmakers, but that was before Toronto became what it is now. Whistler has the opportunity to really brand itself where emerging filmmakers working in new technologies will have attention, will really feel they’re the focus.”

Egoyan has witnessed firsthand how TIFF has changed over the years, and his hope is that WFF stays true to its focus. “[WFF]’s been able to do an extraordinary job of keeping a specific identity, and my hope is that it doesn’t become a victim of its own success,” he says. “It’s kind of crazy now in Toronto. Because of the accumulation of press and attention here, it’s being used by the industry for junkets for films that aren’t even in the festival. It’s so absurd. There’s a whole buzz around films that haven’t even been invited into the [festival] that are just being screened at the same time!”

But TIFF has played a significant role in what Egoyan calls an “incredible revolutionary shift” in attitudes toward Canadian cinema over the last 15 years. With TIFF now taken over by bigger-budget fare, WFF is stepping up, but Egoyan knows there are still plenty of challenges facing Canadian films.

“There are a number of filmmakers who have established there is a Canadian identity, and when you look at our best films as a group, we’re as good as the output of any country, really,” he says. “If you make a list of the most important and most lauded Canadian films, it’s a pretty impressive list. And these are films that have been made under very difficult circumstances. We’re neighbours with the most aggressive film industry in the world, so for us to hold our own — and I think we have — I find it really astonishing.

“We have a great industry... but we will always have the problem of being able to create as much of a marketing presence for our domestic product as the American product that’s also being shown in our theatres. It’s something we’ll always have to contend with, and it’s a fight that becomes harder as traditional audiences have changed.”

Hopefully, this is what festivals like WFF will continue to do: help filmmakers find audiences. And if the past does in fact repeat itself, festivals will also help build beneficial relationships between emerging artists and influential people already established in the industry — the way Egoyan did over two decades ago. In 1987, filmmaker Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire won the top prize at the Montreal Festival for New Cinema. Wenders promptly insisted the cash be given to Egoyan instead, which allowed the budding filmmaker to create his second feature, Family Viewing.

“It changed my life,” Egoyan says, laughing like he still can’t believe it. “He was my mentor, and certainly kind of a hero. That’s the classic festival dream-come-true experience.”

The 2010 Whistler Film Festival runs Dec. 1-5. Visit WhistlerFilmFestival.com for more details and a complete schedule, and see next week’s WE for more coverage.

Ivan Reitman interview

I got the opportunity to speak with director and producer Ivan Reitman last week. I watched Ghostbusters when I was little, I totally never ever thought I'd one day get to talk to the man responsible! I geeked out on this one. I couldn't help it.

The interview is part of the coverage for the Whistler Film Festival, which I'll be covering live next weekend for WestEnder.com

Ivan Reitman on the set of Twins (1988) with Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Credit: supplied

Top of his game

Posted By: Andrea Warner

11/26/2009 12:00 AM

Ivan Reitman, the famed 64-year-old director and producer, often falls into the category of “Really? He’s Canadian?” Hollywood is, of course, chock-full of high-profile northerners often mistaken for American by virtue of the magnitude of their fame, including Jim Carrey, Mike Myers, and Saturday Night Live creator and film producer Lorne Michaels.

But few have been as successful or as influential as the Toronto-raised Reitman, who, over four decades, has directed and produced box-office-smash comedies including Meatballs, Ghostbusters, and, more recently, I Love You, Man. Reitman is being honoured for his cinematic achievements on Friday, December 4, at the Whistler Film Festival — a tribute that comes at the cusp of what seems to be a Reitman revival, what with him having produced two films this year (Atom Egoyan’s Chloe, and son Jason’s Up in the Air), and the recent news that he’s set to produce and direct Ghostbusters III in 2010.

“I met with the writers just yesterday morning for breakfast,” Reitman says, over the phone from his L.A.-based office, about the long-rumoured Ghostbusters sequel. “I was giving them notes on some of the pages, and we’re going to try to get a good draft done by the beginning of next year. And once we have that... we’ll be assembling the original cast and the new cast, and [we’ll] make the movie.”

For Reitman, who, according to IMDB.com, currently has at least six movies in development, directing means returning to the lessons he’s learned since the 1973 horror-comedy Cannibal Girls, and his attempt to turn two years of hard work drafting the script for Animal House, the seminal 1978 frat-house comedy starring John Belushi, into his first major motion picture. That directing job ended up going to John Landis instead. “Having made only one $12,000 independent horror-comedy before, Universal was not ready to let me direct, and that was a heartbreaker,” Reitman recalls. “I realized I need to get back and sort of direct another small film and rebuild my career.”

Reitman assumed directorial duties for the comedy classic Meatballs in 1979, the first in a string of hits that included Stripes and Ghostbusters, which were also starring vehicles for Bill Murray, whom Reitman refers to as “genius.”

“I learn something [throughout all my films], but I think the great thing about Meatballs is that I had the opportunity to work with Bill Murray, who’s such a talented writer as well as performer,” Reitman says. “Some of his ideas were so good, I had to be very nimble on my feet. Instead of getting my back up and getting into a fight about just doing what I thought was important, I learned to work faster and make use of good ideas that came to me from others as part of the filming process, and learned to be fast enough to accommodate and still make the kind of schedule we were under. And mostly learning about funny, because funny is really hard. Everyone says so, and it actually really is.”

Figuring out what’s funny has motivated much of Reitman’s career. He’s modest when he talks about his accomplishments, but admits that he was pretty certain he’d tapped into something special when he screened Ghostbusters for the first time, just three weeks after wrapping the production, sans special effects. “It was kind of a gutsy thing to do,” Reitman says, laughing. “I got up in front of the audience and said, ‘Look, some of this isn’t even going to make sense because people are going to open up a refrigerator and there’s going to be a sign that says, ‘SCENE MISSING.’ But it was pretty much as good as any of the screenings we had [after the effects were completed], because I think people get into the story and get into the character, and the comedy interplay between them. It was effective; you get hooked in even if you don’t know all the pieces in between them, and it gave me great confidence.”

Reitman parlayed that confidence into a lengthy career of hits as a producer (Old School; I Love You, Man; Hotel for Dogs), plus some notable misses (he hasn’t directed a hit since 1993’s Dave). He’s responsible for making Arnold Schwarzenegger funny on purpose (Twins, Kindergarten Cop) and he bought the Trailer Park Boys to the big screen.

Reitman’s greatest accomplishment, though, might be his son, Jason, a celebrated writer and director who’s three for three in the filmmaking department, having directed Juno, Thank You for Smoking, and the much-buzzed-about George Clooney feature, Up in the Air, of which the elder Reitman is a producer. “It’s as big a thrill I’ve ever received in the movie business, the success that Jason’s having,” Reitman says, audibly beaming as he talks about his son’s triumphs.

“He’d clearly been paying attention way more than I ever knew,” Reitman continues, laughing again. “In fact, he went to great pains to pretend he was going to do otherwise; he enrolled in pre-med his first year in university, but clearly he wasn’t happy doing that.

“One of the best things I did was tell him a story about my own father: I’d come to my father and said I wanted to open a submarine shop, because they seemed to be doing well in other cities, and there were none in Toronto. Wouldn’t it be a great thing to do? And he said, ‘You know, I’m sure if you wanted to open a sandwich shop, you’d do a very good job, but I don’t think there’s enough magic in it for you.’ And it sort of freed me from that concern about earning money no matter what. And what I told Jason was, ‘You’d be a very good doctor, if that’s what you wanna do, but my concern is there’s not enough magic there for you.’ And he left pre-med, literally within two weeks of that conversation, applied to [the University of Southern California] to the English department, and started working on his first short, which then went on to win about 70 awards all over the world. He was good right from the beginning.”

He’s given the world plenty already, and now Ivan Reitman can be thanked for one of the best new filmmakers of the decade: all worthy reasons to raise a glass in Reitman’s honour, even if he hadn’t brought a little bit of Canada with him to La-La Land.

The Whistler Film Festival’s Tribute to Ivan Reitman takes place Friday, Dec. 4 at the Whistler Conference Centre, 7:30 pm. Tickets $50 from WhistlerFilmFestival.com.