Canadian Film Makers

Canadian filmmakers make their name with low-budget, inventive films


By Eric Volmers, Calgary Herald September 25, 2010 8:50 AM
In the early 1980s, maverick filmmakers Bruce McDonald and Atom Egoyan entered into Canadian cinema mythology by stealing attention from the Toronto International Film Festival with an impromptu screening of their student films on Bloor Street.

The directors, who would go on to become two of this country's most recognizable filmmakers, decided to present their student films in a burst of guerrilla marketing just as the festival was in full swing. It worked. Festival officials, believe it or not, were charmed. The stunt even made its way into the festival's official history this year. More importantly, the two young directors made their mark at a time when even veteran Canadian filmmakers had a tough time getting noticed for their work.
"We set up a projector on Bloor Street in downtown Toronto," says McDonald. "We had a screen and plugged into some local stores with a long extension cord and we showed our movies. That was our way of being a part of the festival. We were on the news. We got more press doing that than if we had our 12-minute student film in the film festival."
A few years later, McDonald's first feature film, 1989's Roadkill, picked up the festival's $25,000 Best Canadian Feature award, and Egoyan, of course, went on to make such influential homegrown classics as The Sweet Hereafter and Exotica.
The story reinforces McDonald and Egoyan's reputation as scrappy, against-the-grain filmmakers and points to the long-held view that Canadian directors need to think outside the box when it comes to gaining traction in a country notorious for ignoring its own filmmakers. Given the difficulty of getting films greenlit in this country, this year's Calgary International Film Festival has an unusually high number of entries from Canada's thin ranks of visionary filmmakers -- directors who have generally made their name not as guns-for-hire but with a body of low-budget, wildly inventive and often personal independent films.

McDonald has two offerings -- the musical dramedy Trigger and the documentary Music from the Big House -- at this year's festival, one of an incredible five movies he has either completed or has in various stages of post-production this year. Renowned indie Quebecois filmmaker Denis Cote's newest, Curling, will also be featured, as will wunderkind Xavier Dolan's sophomore feature Heartbeats, a followup to the 22-year-old actor-director's internationally acclaimed indie film I Killed My Mother. Cult director George Mihalka -- perhaps best known for his quasi-classic low-budget 1981 slasher flick My Bloody Valentine -- is back with the against-type dramedy Faith, Fraud and Minimum Wage. Calgarian Michael Dowse will present Fubar II, the well-received sequel to his pocket change-budgeted 2001 cult mockumentary about gormless headbangers in Alberta. (Fellow Calgarian Gary Burns, another director with a distinct style, was scheduled to screen his newest The Future is Now! at the festival but it was not completed in time.)

While artistic instincts are obviously key to the esthetic of these filmmakers' early works, necessity also played a role. Given the sparse funding available for films, Canadian auteurs are often forced to develop their chops in the darkness of relative obscurity, usually for small audiences.

"In the early days, I never imagined I could get hired to direct anything," says McDonald. "We always made films with our friends and created the project from scratch in a way. I was so used to doing that. Our first instinct has always been to call ourselves filmmakers, in the sense that we nurture the project. Whether we write it ourselves, or our gang writes it, we grow the project from its infancy to completion. There really wasn't much of an industry when we started, so we never really entertained the idea of 'Hey, let's go get a job.' Our jobs were like driving cabs."

English-Canadian filmmakers, in particular, can be given a certain carte blanche early on simply because so few people are watching and so little money is involved, says George Melnyk, associate professor of film at the University of Calgary.

"Maverick directors like Mc-Donald and others are the very heart of Canadian cinema because they show us our unconventional side," says Melnyk, who edited the book The Young, the Restless and the Dead: Interviews with Canadian Filmmakers. "Since only one per cent of English-Canadian film theatre audiences attend Canadian film screenings, our directors have the freedom to express themselves because so few Canadians are watching their work. That is a shame commercially, but a triumph artistically."

Dowse was among those identified as upcoming Canadian directors in Melnyk's book, part of a new wave of filmmakers who have been able to make their mark with early low-budget films that didn't owe anything to the current cinematic trends.

When asked, both Dowse and McDonald are vague about what stylistic or thematic threads link their work. McDonald's best-loved films -- Hard Core Logo, Roadkill, Highway 61-- are rock 'n' roll road movies. Similarly, Trigger is about a reunited female rock duo. Music from the Big House is a non-fiction account of Toronto singer Rita Chiarelli's musical visit to the notorious Angola prison in Louisiana.

Dowse's most personal films -- which include Fubar, its sequel, It's All Gone Pete Tong and the TV series The Foundation -- are all comedies that are partly defined by improvised dialogue and the director's reliance on a regular stable of performers (Paul Spence, Dave Lawrence, Mike Wilmot, S.C. Lim).

But both directors have dabbled in higher-budget projects, with mixed results. McDonald's 2001 thriller Picture Claire, starring Mickey Rourke, Gina Gershon and Juliette Lewis, cost $10 million and never found a distributor. He has been fairly open about how it nearly derailed his career.

Dowse's Hollywood experience was more positive, he says. Kids in America -- starring That 70's Show actor Topher Grace, who also co-produced-- sat on the shelf for a few years but is now scheduled for a theatrical release in March. It was a good learning experience, Dowse says, but admits the process of creating a Hollywood film is very different than how he has worked in the past.

"It definitely feels less personal," says Dowse. "You've got 12 cooks in the kitchen. So you don't have your hands on the steering wheel as much as you may like. It's different in that way. But it's still as funny as my other films and has the same heart to it. But when it's a bigger budget, there's more at stake and more people breathing down your neck."

Dowse is currently set to start shooting Goon in Winnipeg, a hockey comedy starring Jay Baruchel, Seann William Scott and an as-yet unnamed "major American star." Evan Goldberg, who wrote the American hits Superbad and Pineapple Express, penned the screenplay.

Dowse agrees that English-Canadian filmmakers who work with small budgets are awarded a certain freedom, but says having a continued career in the business means you have to take advantage of that freedom to get to the next level. "It gives you a little more licence," Dowse says. "But it's the same with any film. If you make a bad film, it's hard making the second one after that. You're only as good as your last film. That's the silver lining: the audience is relatively small. But I would much rather have an audience and more pressure to work under."

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