In some ways, it’s kind of amazing that Paranormal Activity creator Oren Peli even has time to conduct interviews. The creator of the microbudgeted phenomenon (the fourth instalment of which hits theatres later this year and he has remained extremely tight lipped about) has parlayed his success into becoming quite a sought after producer and writer that has no fewer than six projects on the table with him working in various capacities.

This weekend finds Peli moving away from the found footage concept that his biggest hit was based around (as well as the short lived ABC series The River) to produce and provide the screenplay for director Brad Parker’s debut film Chernobyl Diaries, a more documentary styled tale of several American friends and a pair of Aussies who get more than they bargained for when travelling to the ruins of Pripyat in the Ukraine on an “extreme tourism” excursion to the town abandoned in the 1980s by the meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant.

Peli sat down with Dork Shelf while in Toronto about balancing his work load, stepping out from behind the camera to produce, and why you should always make sure you have the rights to any and all potential artwork before you shoot a film.

How did the idea for setting a film at Chernobyl come about?

It happened rather accidentally. I was browsing the web one day and I came across these photo blogs of people who actually went on tours in Pripyat. I had known about the Chernobyl disaster, of course, but I didn’t know that there was this town next to it – which makes sense since this is where the workers for the plant lived – that was abandoned over night and it just became a ghost town. When something like that usually happens, for economical reasons people will normally stop to pick up their things first and then go, but here no one had a chance to pick up anything when they left. It was like everyone vanished. There was definitely this post-Apocalyptic feel to it. In addition, there’s such strange growth of vegetation there that it’s become one of the eeriest places on Earth. That was why I thought this would make such a great setting for a horror movie.

Did you ever get a chance to visit Pripyat or would you want to?

It’s funny because not only did I want to visit it, but we were actually thinking of shooting it there because it could make the production cheaper since we already had the locations there. (laughs) Why not? And the initial research that we had done told us that the levels of radiation there aren’t that bad, actually, and if you’re there long enough and for a certain period of time that you’re going to be okay. Unless, of course, you’re there for days and weeks at a time non-stop. There wasn’t going to be a problem. It’s a real thing that people go there on trips. You can go on YouTube and search for Pripyat.

But the only main reason we didn’t shoot there was because in 2011 and for most of the year the Ukrainian government stopped allowing people to go in because of construction on the reactor. We tried really hard to pull strings, but they just wouldn’t let us in, so we had to find a Plan B. HOWEVER, the one thing that we did find out while we were already shooting on set in Serbia was something really interesting from a nuclear researcher that said it was true that you could hold a Geiger counter in the air and it would show that the radiation in the air was negligible and safe, but if you were walking around and there just so happened to be a patch of dust on the ground that you kick up and one of those particles happens to still be radioactive, you’ll breathe it in and it gets lodged in your lungs and you could get really ill. That’s when it felt good that we skipped the whole idea of a trip. (laughs)

Where did you finally end up shooting to make it look like it could have been this ghost town?

We found this great location in Hungary that was once a military facility in the 70s around the same time that Pripyat was built that had been abandoned by the Soviets in the mid-80s around the same time that Pripyat was abandoned. It had very similar architecture and a very similar level of decay. It was already a great basis point.

But the best part of shooting there was that Brad Parker could look at every location and say that certain spots would work perfect for certain scenes and what spots we could make look right later in post by using visual effects. He could visualize everything perfectly so we could flow from one location to another without telling what scenes have visual effects and which ones are practical. It all looks very similar from Hungary to Serbia where we filmed. No one would suspect the hard work we went through because we wanted to make Pripyat the main character in the movie and we wanted to be as faithful as possible to recreating it as closely as we could.

On one of the walls of one of the buildings, there’s a really amazing mural of a scientist on the side of a building. Was that something that was there originally?

That’s actually a story that was really heartbreaking for us, and I think this is the first time I’m telling it. What we did was that we had our art designers paint this mural on the side of the building that had been there originally. It was really expensive and time consuming to restore, but we loved it and it ended up being in the background of most of the shots. Then, very, very late in the process when we had about a week to deliver the movie, someone said “Are you sure you have clearance for that particular image?” (laughs) And we we’re just, like, “Um… Yeah, we were told that it’s… um, fine.”

Then we actually did look into it and we realized that the artist is alive and someone didn’t double check everything and it was done by this German artist who’s now in his late 70s. We had to then hire an attorney in German to track him down through an art gallery and contact him and ask if we could use his image, and he said NO. We tried to see what we could pay him and he still said no, no, no. He didn’t want it to be used at all. So at the last minute, we had to commission an artist to draw a new image and use CGI to replace it in the background of every shot. So that was one of the biggest near heartattacks during the production because we didn’t think we would be able to release the movie. Luckily we had a fantastic visual effects company, so they did it so seamless that no one would ever expect it. What you saw that looks so good was actually drawn by a friend of Brad Parker in a little more than one day.

This is Brad Parker’s first film as a director coming from a visual effects background, but you still wrote the film. Did you feel it was important to have a different set of eyes with a different set of design skills to bring the film to life?

Well, for many years now Brad has been doing some of the most recognizable commercials that you’ve seen. They were already mini-movies, so we already knew that he was an expert at the top of his game, but it’s true that he’s a first time director. We had to make sure that we were comfortable with him.

My producer Brian Witten and I met with him many, many times, and we just loved him as a person and we thought there was a lot of confidence in his abilities. We just had to make sure that we were all on the same page when it comes to working with the actors more than the visuals because we wanted to do some things that were really unconventional. The fact that he hasn’t been spoiled by “traditional movies” makes him very open minded to the unique ways we wanted to shoot the movie. We found out that he was very much a visionary filmmaker with a strong visual sense, and when we told him the way we wanted to go about making the movie so that it doesn’t feel like a typical horror movie, he came to us with a lot of really great ideas of how to make that possible, so that gave us a lot of confidence in him from the beginning.

The style of the film is quite different structurally from the Paranormal Activity movies. Was it a bit of a leap to making something that has to be a lot more directed and narrative oriented?

It’s true because this one’s not found footage. The best way to describe it would be that it’s halfway between found footage and a traditional movie. There’s a much greater sense of narrative, but at the same time we allow the actors to improvise a lot of the dialogue and we employ a more stealthy style of shooting. Just about every minute of the movie is still handheld, but it’s done this time by professional cameramen. It’s still shaky, but we wanted you to feel like you were actually going on a journey with these people as opposed to just watching actors reading lines. It was important to keep the actions really visceral and real and authentic.

It’s also your first film where the camera doesn’t function as a character in the movie.

True, but it’s not that much of a leap, really. Early on in production we thought for a moment that it was going to be a found footage film, but after a while we realized that it was going to stop making sense if we did it that way. It wouldn’t work and we dropped it immediately and we said that there’s been a lot of movies that have done this kind of style that have worked really well, like if you look at some of the earlier Paul Greengrass films and movies like Traffic, Children of Men, The Wrestler… these films aren’t pretending they’re found footage movies, but there’s something about them that’s really different from traditional movies. They don’t feel very polished. They feel raw and gritty and dirty in a good way that makes them feel a lot more visceral. That was sort of our guideline for how we were going to approach making Chernobyl Diaries. It still makes you feel connected to the characters without having to go in the directions that I had in the past.

The film definitely has this almost documentary and even video game influence to it with this third person floating camera aesthetic, and you used to work in software and game design, so were you ever making these conscious decisions when you were setting up the film?

If I did, it wasn’t really consciously, and I would really give a lot of the credit there to Brad and our cinematographer Morton Soborg, who was also the full time camera operator. He just shot In a Better World, which won the Oscar for best foreign film, before he came to us, so he was amazing. The main thing for us was to make those movements feel very free and unorchestrated. We never wanted to make it look like we planned anything with actors going from Mark X to Mark Y. We wanted it to always be sort of random.

Sound design has always played a huge role in all your work from producing to directing with the sound often coming before the visual payoff.

I heard while I was making the first Paranormal Activity that sound was 70% of what you end up seeing., and I believe that a really collaborative use of sound can be way more effective than anything you see. So you have these moments where you don’t really see anything – it’s darkness – and you hear a noise far away. It’s not even that you really know what the noise is or that you think the noise is even something threatening. Just the fact that you hear something clattering nearby when there’s not supposed to be anyone else there can be really scary.

It’s a really tricky matter to deal with sound and we take it very seriously. Our sound mixer on set was someone who just won an Oscar for The Hurt Locker, and we had another amazing sound designer from ILM who did some great work. Then we had this CRAZY guy, his name was Diego Stocco who did our music, or score if you can even call it that. It’s not really even music in the traditional sense, but he has all of these broken instruments that he takes these violins and pianos and he just bashes them to try to create very weird and discomforting melodies instead of a soundtrack, because we never really wanted people think there was actually music there. We wanted them to think that it was all blending in from the environment and the atmosphere. It becomes a very, very delicate process, and sometimes it’s even accidental, but a huge part of these kinds of movies is making sure everything sounds right.

It seems like a harder concept for a writer to convey than it would be for a director.

There’s no real trick to it. To me, the essence of the movie was people who find themselves way over their heads and trapped in a town in a foreign country where no one’s going to help them and there’s no way of getting out and you can’t stay there for too long sue to the threat of radiation. These people kind of have to wait it out while there’s this whole other thing to worry about that you don’t know what it is or how to defend yourself against it. That was the main thing to convey in the script. From there, you kind of work yourself backwards to creating characters that feel real and we get to know and like them. Then you move forward to figure out how they are going to try and get out of there based on who they are as people. You just keep going after it time after time over a period of months until eventually something that looks like story emerges.

Are there any plans for a sequel or will this be a stand alone film?

You know, I never think beyond one movie at a time, and when I did the first Paranormal Activity I never could have dreamed there was going to be a second, third, or fourth one. So you never know. We should be so lucky that the film should be successful enough on its own, but at this point we’re not thinking at all beyond the first one.

You have quite a bit on your plate right now and you’re starting to become quite a sought after producer with your hands in a lot of things. Did you ever dream that you would get to this point and do you see yourself doing more writing and producing in the future rather than directing?

Like I said before, I never looked past the first Paranormal Activity. I was just hoping that it would get out there and do well. It performed beyond my wildest dreams and everything that’s happened beyond that is just bonus. To think that I could write and still be given the opportunities to make movies like this is awesome and I feel like the luckiest guy.

As far as the future, I really don’t know. I never really thought I would ever get to make something like Chernobyl Diaries, let alone write and produce it. Sometimes it might make more sense for me to direct a movie and other times I may just produce, but I’m just going to take it as it comes and goes.

So you’re not going to talk about what Paranormal Activity 4 is going to be about, are you?

(laughs) I’m really sorry, but I can’t help you. You’re just going to have to wait and see. (laughs)

Below you can read our interview with the trio and find out how Luke Skywalker got involved, how their music would be classified as X-Files, and what kind of hats they wear in this band and all their other bands.

Then go see them celebrate the release of Crayon Wars on June 1 at Sneaky Dee’s.

Dork Shelf: When and how did the band start, and how did you get to where you are now?

Wendy Leung: The long story is that this band is an evolution of my solo work. When i finished my last record I realized the music I was making wasn’t really in line with what I love to listen to. The musicians I was working with were also turning their focus onto other projects so it was a great opportunity to rethink and bring new collaborators on board. I wanted to create songs that focused on vocals and beats so I decided to experiment with drum machines on top of live drums. We were a 4-piece originally; half the songs on Crayon Wars were written with live drums, and the others were completed after our drummer left the band.

DS: Why did you change the name of the band?

WL: I think the music outgrew the name. I’ve always thought us as a band rather than “me with some musicians helping out.” We played as “Wendy Leung” for a couple of years but it was confusing to explain that the name referred to the entire band and not just me as a singer/songwriter. This record also sounds entirely different from my old stuff so it makes sense that it’s its own thing. We threw names back and forth for a long time before landing on one that stuck, which is why the change didn’t happen sooner. Crayon Wars is actually one that we came up with but it sounded more like an album title than a band name to me so we saved it. There are some others that also stuck but for completely the wrong reasons, so we figure one day we’ll make a line of “rejected band name” t-shirts to sell at our merch table…

DS: Can you explain the story behind Crayon Wars and the process of making it?

Owen Norquay: So there was this giant war between the reds and the blues and the leader of the red was named Luke Skywalker and he was a centipede. He fought with a hundred light sabers against his arch nemesis Baby Blue Bear and his tertiary nemesis Large Small Pox in order to save Crayon City. He was destroyed. By Little Sheep-Bird.

Dean Marino: Oh wait, you mean the record?

WL: Crayon Wars (the album) is a collection of songs I wrote both before and after we formed this band. We began recording in Owen’s house with Cameron Harding engineering and finished at Dean’s (now closed) studio, Chemical Sound. Because we were so close to the project we wanted an outside ear for mixing so we reached out to a childhood friend of Owen’s in NYC, Evan Sutton, who specializes in electronic music and sound design. The entire process took about a year and a half; we took our time and put a lot of thought into every little detail along the way, so we’re extremely happy with how it turned out.

DS: How have you developed your sound? How would you classify it?

DM: I would classify it as top secret.

ON: It’s an X-File.

WL: [hums the X-Files theme song]… It’s funny, my songs have always been described as dark and melancholic but I think this is the lightest collection yet. At least the most danceable, anyway. We’re veering back towards the dark side from a sonic perspective though, so stay tuned for that in the next album.

DS: What’s it like being a musician in Toronto?

WL: It’s pretty awesome. There’s so much going on in this city that you could go out every night of the week for months and see a different local band each night. There’s also a great sense of community – bands are really supportive of each other, and sometimes you end up meeting people to start new things with. I think it’s common for musicians in the city to have more than one project on the go.

DS: What’s it like for all three of you being in multiple bands? How do you prioritize? How do each entity’s sounds influence this band?

WL: We get to wear different hats in each of the bands we’re in.

DM: I wear a fedora in my other band – and I shred.

ON: In this band I wear a toupé.

WL: My hat falls off in the other band because I dance so much. Wendy Versus is kind of my baby – I pour my heart and soul into it but I also spend a lot of time managing the logistics, paperwork, etc. I love playing in Papermaps because it’s pure fun, and because it’s such a different genre from what I’m used to it pushes my creative boundaries.

ON: My roles are different in each band – I’m the primary beat-maker in this one but I’m heavily influenced by working with my brother Chris, who writes the beats for Soi Disant.

DM: It’s nice to play different roles in the various projects I’m involved in. It keeps me “fit” musically. I really like playing in Wendy Versus because it allows me to focus on my guitar playing (rather than carrying the whole performance, like in Papermaps). Musically, it’s exciting because I get to explore more atmospheric textures than the more concrete stuff I do in other bands.

DS: Where do you like to play in Toronto?

WL: I think we can all agree that we feel at home at Rancho Relaxo, not because of the venue necessarily but because Two Way Monologues, which puts on most of their shows, has always been supportive of all of our respective musical projects over the years. After that I have to say I quite like The Cameron House. It’s a smaller space but it’s intimate and great for quieter acts.

DM: We’re lucky to live in a city with so many great venues! I think it really comes down to who’s there more than where we are at any given time.

ON: Any place with a stage and a mic!

DS: What other local acts do you like?

WL: Lovely Killbots, who we’re so happy to have playing our album release party! I also love Ketch Harbour Wolves, and Volcano Playground.

DM: Born Ruffians, The Elwins and lately I’ve been excited about a Guelph-based band called From East to Exit.

ON: Little Foot Long Foot, Meanwood, Rock Plaza Central, Orchards.

DS: What’s on your Dork Shelf (movies, books, music, games)?

WL: X-Files, Fringe, The O.C. DVD sets, the Infernal Affairs trilogy, most of Coupland’s fiction, and my Colecovision console with such excellent games as Frogger, Smurfs, and Q-Bert. In iTunes rotation is a lot of electro-pop but on my shelf are vinyl of The National, Florence + The Machine, Jay-Z.

DM: Blade Runner; it’s like a basic course in existentialism and film noir all at once. Also I’d like to own every Stanley Kubrick film. I’m addicted to buying books, including ones by Don DeLillo, Nicholson, Baker, Nick Hornby.

ON: Star Trek: all of the series and movies except Enterprise. I only read non-fiction books ’cause unlike Dean I LIKE FACTS…

DM: I also have a large collection of non-fiction! And I like Tame Impala.

ON: …and I’ve never owned a video game console. That being said I do relax with Tiger Woods Masters Golf on the Wii from time to time. I also never listen to music.

DS: What’s next for Wendy Versus?

WL: We’re releasing Crayon Wars (vinyl and digital) June 1, throwing a party in its honour at Sneaky Dee’s with Lovely Killbots, Mix Chopin, and Patrick Grant. After that we’ve got a NXNE showcase at The Cameron House on June 16, and then we’ll be gearing up for an August tour with Papermaps.

DS: What else should we know about Wendy Versus?

WL: We’re all left-handed, and I think all wear the same size pants.

ON: It’s weird playing in a band where I’m so much older than everybody else.

DM: Uh…yeah. And, we’re actually nice people so you should stop us on the street if you see us.

WL: It’s true!

ON: Free hugs!

Director David Weaver might one of this country’s most intriguing directors, but he’s not exactly a nice, quiet Canadian filmmaker. His darker sensibilities are best characterized by his second feature Siblings, a superbly sick 2004 comedy about a few children who kill their parents and try to form a new fractured family while covering up the crime. That sensibility was founded in his ensemble debut Century Hotel and continues into his latest feature The Samaritan.

The new film feels like a vintage neo-noir harking back to late 80s/early 90s crime movies and stars the one-and-only Samuel L. Jackson. He plays a veteran grifter who just got out of a hefty prison sentence with plans to play it straight. Of course, that sort of lifestyle isn’t easy to escape, and with Jackson’s late partner’s son (a delightfully deranged turn from Luke Kirby) currently in trouble with a local crimelord (played by Tom Wilkinson with uncharacteristic bloodlust) it’s only a matter of time before he slips back into the con world. But if you know anything about Sam Jackson, you can assume that none of the guilty parties will be let off easy.

With The Samaritan opening this Friday, we got a chance to chat with David Weaver about the inception/inspiration for his new film, the challenges of creating genre movies in Canada, and what it was like to work with the great Samuel L. Jackson. (Note: Weaver dropped one pretty hefty spoiler during the interview, but we’ve provided a warning if you desperately don’t want to know).

Dork Shelf: I thought The Samaritan had a nice, old fashioned feeling as a crime movie, almost  like a traditional noir or even a neo-noir like The Grifters. Could you talk a little bit about that influence?

David Weaver: Well, it’s interesting, I had a film prof say to me once that all directors are just remaking the movies that they loved when they were teenagers. (Laughs) Unfortunately that’s very true for me. I guess I haven’t grown at all. I’m still making the movies I would have made when I was 16 years old. I’ll leave you to decide whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

But for sure, those were movies that I saw when I was growing up and really loved. For me, the inspiration for making the movie was always early Neil Jordon movies like The Crying Game or Mona Lisa. The Usual Suspects is another one that fits into that genre. I just feel that those movies don’t seem to be made much anymore. There were a flurry of those made in the 90s and then they seemed to die down a bit. There aren’t many noirish movies made today, and the few that are made, from my perspective, are artificial. There isn’t much atmosphere to them and they aren’t character driven. Or they’re studio movies, like something Denzel Washington or Tony Scott would make together, that are kind of mechanistic. You know, every five minutes something explodes and it’s shot with 16 cameras and beautifully lit. They’re great in their own way, but they aren’t that kind of smaller-scale character driven neo-noir that I grew up loving. So, when you are fortunate enough to get to make films, you start to look around and think, “Why don’t we make movies like that anymore?” I thought that this film was unabashedly an attempt to revive that genre and I think that’s what appealed to people all the way down the line to make this movie.

DS: Was it difficult to get a movie within that genre and with such dark themes made in Canada?

DW: Oh yeah. Look, I went to film school in the States, but at the same time I grew up in Toronto and I live in Toronto. One of the things that I try to do as a filmmaker is put the Toronto that I know up on screen. I don’t think that’s in a lot of movies. When people think of Toronto in films they think of the Egoyan or Cronenberg Toronto which is very cold and lost. There’s nothing wrong with that. That’s a vision of Toronto, it’s just not the Toronto that I see.

DS: Yeah, or Toronto will stand in as New York or another city.

DW: Right, which is even worse. So a big part of it was to embrace the noir genre, but also to unabashedly try to make it work for the city that I love. You know, a great part of those movies is that when you see them, you feel Los Angeles in Chinatown or you feel New York in a Sidney Lumet movie or you feel London in the Neil Jordon movies. I don’t see why as a Canadian filmmaker we can’t do that. It seems to me that we have this great unexploited setting. So that was part of it. And then you know, it’s a difficult type of movie to get made. It’s a hard thing to make a movie that so unabashedly dark. You’ll have people come to you and say, “Could you somehow change the twist?” And what I tried to explain to people is that the kind of movie that we were talking about just a minute ago really committed to their characters and to the idea that tough things do happen in life. That’s the great thing about film noir is that going right back to the 30s, it looks into the darker corners of life. And that’s what I’m interested in as a filmmaker, those dark corners.

DS: It strikes me that writing a credible con job is very difficult. How did you approach doing constructing those sequences?

DW: I wrote the movie with Elan Mastai and I think one of the great things about writing the film was that he had a real appreciation for those movies as well, so you have the excitement of writing with someone who is totally on the same page. You get into this back-and-forth of trying to top each other with the con. You know, “What if this happens?” or “What if we throw in this twist?” I think that’s a part of the joy of writing this sort of movie. We drew on other con movies, but we never limited ourselves. A lot of what goes on including the notion of “The Samaritan” was just stuff that we invented. That’s part of the pleasure of it, getting to embrace the vernacular of those movies. Some of it like talking about “the grift” or that sort of thing comes out of other movies. But then you start to go with it and build on it. About half of it is stuff we found elsewhere and half of it is what we came up with on our own.

DS: I have to ask, how did you get Samuel L. Jackson and how was directing him? From what I understand, he’s very good at throwing around the word “motherfucker” and I’m sure it would be tough to be on the wrong side of that exchange.

DW: (Laughs) Well, when you know Sam, “motherfucker” kind of loses its sting after you’ve heard it a few times. You learn how many different ways it can be said. It’s not just used in anger. It could be, “Hey motherfucker, I loved your script,” which is quite pleasant. Anyways, the story is very banal unfortunately. I have a rep in LA who used to play golf with Sam. He never pitched him everything because he didn’t think it was appropriate. But he loved our script for The Samaritan and passed it along to Sam. It was a great moment because I found out on a Thursday and then on a Monday they wanted to buy it. They were nice enough to insist that I stayed attached, so I scraped together all of the air miles that I could and flew to LA. I made the incredible mistake of watching Pulp Fiction the night before (laughs), but I met Sam Jackson and he was a fascinating guy right from the beginning. He loved the material and he got what it was about.

One of the things that I think Sam saw in it was that there’s a sort of analogy in a way between what con artists do in terms of taking on a persona and what actors do. I think that was something that he was always very interested in. When his character commits to doing the con, he goes through an actor-like process to prepare for the role. I thought that was also what was amazing about Sam as a performer, in a way. He comes to the set in a very complete fashion. With a lot of actors, even Tom Wilkinson, they come and ask you, “How do you see this guy?” or “What should I wear?” There’s isn’t a lot of that with Sam. You write it, he takes it and creates the guy. You can modulate the performance, but that’s your relationship with him. So, it’s a little different than it is with a lot of actors. As a director, I think you come to appreciate that. There’s a certainty there that isn’t always the case in making a film. It can be intellectually and emotionally exhausting to make all of the decisions and it’s great to work with someone who has that level of self-assurance and doesn’t need any handholding.

[Now entering Spoilerish territory]

DS: When did you start working on The Samaritan? From what I understand, the screenplay has been around for a few years.

DW: Yeah, the idea came to me about five or six years ago or maybe even longer. I’ll leave it up to you about what to include about this in terms of avoiding spoilers, but the movie has been criticized because of the similarities to [REDACTED].

DS: That’s definitely something I had planned to bring up.

DW: Yeah, it’s a mixed thing. I have a lot of admiration for [REDACTED] and think it’s a great accomplishment. But at the same time, this idea actually preceded [REDACTED]. I actually hadn’t seen that movie when I started working on the script with Elan Mastai. Elan might have seen it. Inevitably, you face this question when you discover a similarity like that and wonder, “Should we drop this or go another way?” I didn’t want to because the idea that I had was to focus very closely on the consequences of this huge revelation. I always thought of The Crying Game.

What I loved about that movie was that a lot of times in say an M Night Shyamalan movie, the big twist comes in the last few minutes. Those are great movies, don’t get me wrong, but I like films like The Crying Game or Psycho where the twist is added into the story and then you see all of the dominos fall afterwards. So, we made the choice to write the script and it made its way to Sam. He saw read it and felt the same way. So that’s why for me, it’s very different than [REDACTED]. It’s not really a revenge film. It’s more a consequence of a decision that he made 20-30 years earlier.

[Now leaving spoilerish territory, have a nice day.]

DS: Since you’ve done so much TV work, could you speak a little bit about the difference between directing TV versus features?

DW: It’s funny to me that people perceive that. I don’t feel that I’ve done a lot of TV in particular, but I do feel like I’ve gotten to do a lot of different things in TV that I never would have done if I hadn’t been asked. That’s probably the best way to put it. I think the big difference is that in television, you’re hired like a craftsman to do a job and you hope to satisfy the people who hired you. It’s like you’re building a table and you try to craft it and make it strong and suit the function required. On my feature films, I’m really not interested in anyone else’s opinion (Laughs). I mean, I listen to my collaborators, but the reason why I make films and why I spent 5 years working on The Samaritan is because ultimately I want to see the movie. In the end that’s the most important to me with my films. I want to make something that sings to me. I’d love it if someone else likes it and obviously it’s great if it makes money. But ultimately, I made movie for me and created something I wanted to see. Like we were talking earlier about those neo-noir movies that disappeared. Not even Neil Jordon is making Neil Jordon movies anymore, so if he’s not going to do it, I’ll do it for myself (Laughs). The biggest pleasure of a film for me is looking at it when it’s finished. If it doesn’t work for you, I’m very sorry, but that’s the attitude I had.

DS: Are you working on any new films now?

DW: I’m trying to make a movie called Moon Palace, which is entirely different. It’s based on the last short film I made that went to a lot of film festivals. It’s about a guy who wants to be a writer and answers a want ad for a Chinese restaurant. The owner has bugged all of the tables in the restaurant and wants someone to sit in the back and write personalized fortunes for everyone based on their conversations. Then a girl comes in and he falls in love with her, but can’t explain how he knows everything about her. It’s a little urban comedy based on simple ideas of fate and whether or not we can manufacture our fate. So, that’s what I’m hoping to do next.

Thunder Bay native Kevin Durand has made a name for himself as a new go-to source for delightfully evil characters in TV and film. Whether it his role as the mercenary Martin Keamy in Lost, the Paul Bettany-bashing angel in Legion, the neo-Nazi hit man in Smokin’ Aces, or the Southern-drawl spouting robot hater in Real Steel, Durand has proven himself to be an actor who delights in being bad.

This week he returns as a more lovable character in Edwin Boyd: Citizen Gangster, albeit one that’s still a bank robbing cop killer. Durand plays Lenny Jackson, one of the key members of the infamous Edwin Boyd gang that went on a string of bank robberies and prison escapes in Toronto from 1949-1952 and became a bit of a media sensation in the process. The feature debut from writer/director Nathan Morlando is a meticulously researched and ridiculously entertaining romp that is easily one finest Canadian films of the year. We got a chance to chat with Durand about the film, the unique challenges of portraying a real person, his favorite collaboration with Martin Lawrence, and the joys of playing a bastard.

Dork Shelf: How did you first hear about the project? From what I understand Nathan Morlando has been working on it for years.

Kevin Durand: I was sent a script and was completely blown away. I could see the 13-14 years that he put into it, because everything was so clear and the characters were so rich. I knew I needed to meet this guy. I met Nathan on Skype with his wife and producer Allison Black, who’s also amazing. I was really intrigued by the script and the story, but then when I met them, it was a no brainer. I just had feeling that he was going to knock it out of the park and he did.

DS: Had you heard anything about the Boyd Gang before getting the script?

KD: I didn’t know who they were, but as soon as I read the script I wanted to know more about them. Of course I started on Wikipedia (laughs) then I started searching through biographies and news articles. I read as much as I could about them, specifically trying to find out as much as I could about Lenny Jackson. When my Uncle Tom found out I was playing Lenny from The Boyd Gang, he lit up like a Christmas tree. He remembered hiding in his basement convinced that The Boyd Gang was going to break into his house, steal everything, and kill them. Their reputation was so elevated by the media. They weren’t out to kill anybody, but it was interesting to hear about that media blitz and the reaction it caused.

DS: Were you able to find much about Lenny because his life is not quite as well documented as Edwin Boyd?

KD: I found nuggets of information and I had to do a lot of dot-connecting. But Nathan met Lenny’s son and they had a good conversation. Luckily, I had that conversation to use as a resource. Also, the way Nathan and I worked together allowed me to bring humanity and a certain nobility to him, even though he acts in devious ways.

DS: Through that conversation with Lenny’s son or any of the hours on interviews that Nathan did with Edwin, did you hear any anecdotes or pieces of information that really stuck with you and informed the performance?

KD: To be honest, the best bits of information that I got were through the literature, really. I thought it was so fascinating that this guy served overseas for five years in the Second World War and even though he was on the front lines, he was never injured. Then he came home and everybody he grew up with had perished overseas and he was lost. So he started riding the rails like many young men of that era did and lost foot almost immediately. There were certain little nuggets like that. Like how Edwin Boyd talked about how even though Lenny only had one foot, he was the fastest runner he had ever seen. To me, that meant this guy was a fighter. He was the biggest guy in the cage and was going to do whatever it took to get that across. There was also this immense love between him and his wife. I read that eight years after he was executed, she drank herself to death. That’s pretty quick. I’ve got some drinkers in the family and eight years… wow. So it was just little things like that I put together. Enough to get a sense of who he was.

DS: Having worked with many established directors before, how did you find Nathan Morlando stacked up as a first-time filmmaker?

KD: He killed it. He killed it. Never raised his voice, knew exactly what he wanted, but at the same time had this confidence level that you rarely see in first time feature film directors. If you had ideas to bring to the table, he was always down for the greater good. A lot of the time that meant us sitting down and bouncing ideas off each other until we got where we wanted to go. It was a great collaboration and that’s a huge part of why the performances all through the movie are really good and fleshed out. Everyone got a chance to contribute and I think everyone did such a great job.

DS: I really enjoyed the relationships between you and the other members of the Boyd gang. Did you try to spend time together off set to build up those relationships at all?

KD: Oh completely. Scott and I…Lenny and Edwin weren’t best friends. There was this constant energy and friction between them over who was the leader of the gang. So we kind of had that a little bit in real life, fed into it, and it read on screen.  We also all lived on this one floor in Sault Ste. Marie, so it was almost like we were in the flophouse. We were constantly together. I actually trained Joseph Cross and Brendan Fletcher, so it was almost like we were in the army barracks together. We got really tight. We didn’t rob any banks, but we thought about it.

DS: How did you find coming back up north to shoot in Sault Ste. Marie?

KD: I’m from Thunder Bay, so I felt completely at home. I felt more at home there than I probably have on any other set because the people of the Soo remind me a lot of the people that I grew up with. Very loyal, generous, polite, kind and strong. I had no issue with the cold either. I love it. I kind of miss it.

DS: You’ve done quite a few villain roles—

KD: Oh yeah, I’ve done my fair share of those, especially in America.

DS: Do you have to find something in all of those characters to make them empathetic like you did with Lenny or do you like to revel in being bad for the sake of being bad?

KD: It’s in all of us, you know? If you’re driving to work in bad traffic, someone cuts you off and is completely disrespectful, that thing can rises inside all of us. But also, when I first really got interested in becoming an actor, I started out with King Lear and did I ever want to play Edmund. I would take his monologues and recite them on my own. I wasn’t even 100% sure if I wanted to be an actor, but I knew I wanted to play Edmund. I never had any interest in Romeo or Hamlet. I always wanted to play the bastard. I find that’s often what I gravitate towards now as well. You know, a great multi-dimensional bastard is always so much more fun than a hero. Especially when you’ve got to walk around and be a nice Canadian guy most of the day.

DS: As a character actor who has been in so many projects, do you find that people will sometimes recognize you, but not know what from and demand that you tell them?

KD: Constantly, constantly. It’s interesting. I actually really dig it because when I started out my big inspirations were guys like Gary Oldman and Tim Roth. These cats who would just disappear into these characters, and that’s what I want to do. So, when people are like, “What do I know from?” and I name a couple of things, I’ll normally hear back “There’s no way that was you.” To me, that’s such a great compliment. It makes me feel like I’m doing something right.

DS: Your next movie is Cosmopolis and I was wondering if you have any lasting impressions of working with David Cronenberg?

KD: He completely lived up to and exceeded my expectations. When I got the job I did a dance of joy because I’m such a massive fan and I started prepping three months before I shot. So when I got to set I could just sort of follow him and his calm, cool, collected, meticulous methods. Everyone on that set was so happy and calm and focused. It was a really great way to work. I hope I get to do it again. I haven’t seen the movie yet, but it’s very poetic and will be up for interpretation. It’s not a movie that follows the rigid North American film formulas, which was so exciting to me.

DS: Was there more fake blood on that set or Resident Evil: Retribution?

KD: Oh man, Resident Evil takes the cake for fake blood. My god! There’s a lot of fake blood, lots of bullets, lots of burning hot shell casings from automatic weapons flying at your face at all times (laughs). It was good fun. The zombie people will love it.

DS: Finally, the most important question. Which movie of your have you watched more often, Big Momma’s House 2 or Wild Hogs?

KD: Oh my god. I would have to say Wild Hogs. They’re both Martin Lawrence movies. Me and Marty…thanks for bringing that up (laughs). Actually Big Momma’s House 2 was my first American movie and got me my papers, so I’ll always have a special fondness for that fat suit.

When interviewing China Heavyweight director Yung Chang outside on a gorgeous spring day during the Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival, it was oddly appropriate and symbolically cheesy that we talked beneath a cherry blossom tree. It adds an odd air of comfort to the interview that I doubt I’ve ever had before while talking to someone.

The Canadian, multiple award winning Up the Yangtze filmmaker returned to China with a lot less difficulty this time around to document the building of the Chinese national boxing squad. After a decades long ban of the sport due to its perceived brutal nature, Chang followed master coach Qi Moxiang and a group of impoverished pugilist hopefuls from largely rural areas as they train and fight for their dreams.

In addition to our chance to talk with Chang about his first foray into making a movie about sports, you can also have a chance to talk to Chang and coach Moxiang as they will be attending almost the entire opening weekend of the film at the Varsity in Toronto, for the evening shows on Friday, May 11^th, all day on Saturday, May 12^th, and the matinees on Sunday, May 13^th.

Dork Shelf: Your last film really gives no indication that your next one would be a sports movie, what made you want to do this story?

Yung Chang: Well, it was always in the back of my mind that I wanted to make a martial arts film, and I also loved boxing movies. That was my upbringing. I watched lots of kung-fu movies growing up, and Shaw Brothers movies, and those kind of kung-fu soap operas and things like that. I loved that stuff, but they would always have kind of a minimal amount of action, and there would always be so much backstory and so much development of these themes of loyalty and respect, and all sorts of these very Confucian elements that at some point became embedded in the culture of the kung-fu film.

Similarly, boxing movies are the Western kung-fu epics. You can reflect and impose so much more within that genre. It’s fun to play with the tropes, and fun to turn them around a little bit. I felt that in this boxing movie that the notion of boxing being this totally Western, totally American, capitalist and violent sport – all reasons why it was banned in China – to take that and put that in the context of a Chinese story would be an interesting investigation into China and also hopefully it’s history.

DS: We’re you surprised that this sport despite being a martial art had been suppressed for so long?

YC: It’s interesting how the coaches are training the students by using traditional martial arts techniques. It’s this selective training mentality to train people to fight in a sport that’s very much about the individual. It’s at that point where it becomes interesting how boxing clashes with actual Chinese culture.

I was reminded of a movie made recently called Ip Man, and it all revolves around a character who’s the quintessential Chinese hero. He’s reserved, patient, contained, very calm, and then you have his enemy who’s this brash and crazed Western boxing guy, and that to me was just exemplary of how many Chinese view the sport of boxing.

It’s different in China Heavyweight because you have a character like Coach Qi who for me epitomizes the modern Chinese hero. He’s so similar to many coaches in so many gyms around the world who don’t want to be paid a dime, but do it for the passion because they believe in the dream and the value of teaching these skills and these virtues to their students. In contemporary China now, I think they’re faced with so many sort of moral confusions where people are driven by greed and corruption that Qi is almost one of the last heroes that’s somehow able to instil some sort of moral character to the younger generation. To me that’s what struck me.

In many ways this film is about mentors and masters. We all have people like that, I think, who have marked us in our lives outside of our families and that was really influential when I was making this film. This coach was way more important than I originally thought he would be in the beginning.

DS: Was it interesting to see just how much a lot of these fighters training in China now are looking up to the greats of this Westernized sport without really having had a chance to see them in their prime?

YC: Exactly! It was shocking to me the identification they had with this culture. First, the material identification with things like Nike and Converse and Adidas across the board coming from very poor families with children who are wearing very fancy equipment or at the very least nice T-shirts and shoes. To me it was kind of odd, but then upon interpretation it seemed to represent this ideal and dream of success that was defined by materialism, but also glory and a certain individualism that they identified with in each of these boxers. These are athletes that beyond the merchandise are defined by their personalities, and by their brashness like the enemy in Ip Man.

You know, my co-editor on the film, Xi Feng, a Chinese editor, commented on how the younger generation today only sees a fast path to success, and while that’s quite universal, the stakes are a lot higher in China to some degree where with the backstory of these kids we get the sense that they don’t really want to be harvesting tobacco leaves, but that they might have this other path that this new generation of the Chinese middle class might reach by way of the long path.

DS: It’s also hard to develop that kind of brashness and bravado in a small town in a culture where such emotion has always been looked down upon, and that’s something that a boxer has to thrive on to succeed.

YC: It’s SO huge. In martial arts, you’re not even supposed to fight. It’s an art. Boxing is an art, as well, but it’s also based around personality and persona. That is VERY different than the Chinese mentality, and that’s where the metaphor gets a little more juicy. There’s something definitely to be looked at there in the film.

Joyce Carol Oates wrote a great book called On Boxing, and there’s this great passage about how the flair of the boxer and his mentality are the biggest part of the sport. Fighters don’t go into a bout thinking they’re going to lose, they have to think that they have to win and they’re the best in the world. They can’t know anything else, and they train that way, too. That’s how you build up the stamina needed to stand in a ring naked with an audience surrounding you and you become this almost mythical figure.

DS: It’s also funny in a way to see this country slowly embracing a sport that seems to be declining somewhat in popularity now thanks to the rise of MMA. Do you think that it’s because it’s something still seen as being somewhat exotic to these young fighters?

YC: I think there is a certain exotic element to it. It’s a tough sport to sell in China now, and it’s hard going for a lot of reasons. But here with boxing even with the rise of other fighting styles, there’s this certain element of mythmaking that you can’t have with a fight in an octagon or a cage. It’s so different the level of glory and the stage acting almost like this gladiatorial setting. It’s embedded in our brains as Western kids growing up and watching these movies. I think that still holds and there’s really nothing in comparison to that.

In China, it is this kind of clash of ideals that’s being explored across the board from the fights to the training process. In China you’re educated by rote, by memorization, and by following the rules, and in the West you’re told to be creative and thing outside the box and to be improvisational, and that’s something altogether new for these students of boxing. It’s almost hand in hand where boxing and education in China sort of fall, and they’re going to break at some point where people are going to realize that they don’t need to memorize all this shit and that they can be creative and think outside the box. That’s potentially where we’re going in China. That’s what the country is waiting for; people they can see as these kind of flamboyant characters. I think as China figures out where they fit into the world and as they feel more aggressive and more confident, you’ll start seeing this kind of boxing mentality coming out.

DS: Now on your last film set in China you had a hard time gaining access to what you needed. This time around when you were dealing directly with a national program was it easier or harder?

YC: I gotta tell you, we had a great time getting to know these guys, and it happened so quickly. It was in December of 2009 that we went on a research and fact finding trip and Han Yi, my Chinese producer because this is a co-production with a Chinese company – which immediately allowed us the kind of access that we needed to film without fear of being run out of the country like what happened with Yangtze – he and I walked around this small town accessible only by one really bumpy road. That place has got to be milked for more film shoots because it was just amazing. The food was awesome, the people were so supportive. And the coaches are such important people in that town, that once people got wind of what we were making a film about, the doors just started to open. There was some drinking required, though. (laughs) You know, the Chinese method is to have dinners and drink a lot of baijiu and then things are happy and you’re friends.

That helps, but to gain such intimacy with the subjects always takes time. That’s not immediate. You have to work with it and play with the ideas of having cameras around these people at all times who have never had that experience before in their lives. You actually have to film a lot of bad stuff that really isn’t useful, but it helps get them used to the idea of having a camera around at all times. The joy of this film was that it was so collaborative that if something was changing in someone’s life, they would let us know what was happening and we would be able to catch up with them and be there for that moment. We were lucky for those moments, and when shaping the story I tried to make it as iconic and almost fictional as possible to achieve the level of intimacy that you sometimes sit there and question.

For having been bred on kung-fu movies and boxing movies, but never really being cognizant of the actual sport that much, this was a great training ground for me as a filmmaker.. We didn’t want to get so many of the mundane details. I didn’t want to make (Frederick) Weisman’s Boxing Gym. I wanted to try to make something that was sort of a hybrid, but not in a fictional way, but to make one of those movies that I loved so much.

It comes as little surprise that the ever prolific independent filmmaker and actor Joe Swanberg is in the middle of trying to set up yet another film when I call him to talk about an upcoming trip to Toronto. After having a hand in crafting six films in 2011 alone and also appearing as an actor in all of them (and on top of appearances in friend and collaborator Adam Wingard’s You’re Next and the upcoming V/H/S, which he also directed a part of), it doesn’t seem out of character for the young artist to be constantly hustling his way through the DIY filmmaking community.

Often associated with the “mumblecore” style of filmmaking (mostly just out of proximity and participation within the same SXSW programming year that birthed the term), many of Swanberg’s films focus on the deeply intimate personal relationships between everyday people. Often sexually explicit and purposefully banal at times, his filmmaking style suggests someone who truly does just let the camera run until he believes thr truth is found; even when he often has to direct himself on screen.

Swanberg comes to Innis Town Hall in Toronto this Sunday, May 13^th,  for a screening of three of his 2011 releases and to conduct 15 minute Q&As following the first two screenings (Art History at 4pm, The Zone at 6pm) and for an extended lecture moderated by The Grid’s Jason Anderson following the third film (Silver Bullets at 8:00pm). Joe talked to Dork Shelf about being so prolific that you become exposed to the world, his collaborative style, and what led to his move towards self distribution.

Dork Shelf: One of the things that’s really admirable about what you’re doing is that you’re so prolific and turning out a lot of work, but something that I’ve noticed about the people that are the most prolific is that they often tend to be the most personal kinds of filmmakers. Is it hard to keep putting yourself out there like that?

Joe Swanberg: Especially with this trilogy that I’m showing in Toronto, I think it has gotten to the point where I do need to step back for a little bit. I tried to go really deep and the films have always been really personal, but these three in particular are really autobiographical in a lot of ways. I spent a lot of time really analysing myself, you know? (laughs) I’m kind of ready to just take a back seat for a while and just explore some different kinds of characters, and I imagine that it’s a cycle that I’ll keep going through because I have a desire to tell those personal stories and it’s something I think that’s important for artists to do. I always connect really well to other autobiographical work from other people, whether it’s music or books or movies. I’m driven to make that kind of work, but there’s definitely limits on how much I can tolerate.

DS: You once had a distribution agreement with IFC for some of your earlier work. Was the more deeply personal nature of your recent output something that led to your decision to self distribute?

JS: Yeah, definitely. I just felt like these films in particular needed a very personal approach to the distribution because of that very nature. I kind of toyed around with traditional distribution for a little bit, and I talked to IFC about these films. IFC wanted to put them out and in the end I just decided that I wasn’t sure. I didn’t have a real set idea of how I wanted them to screen, but I know I wanted a little more control over that. At least more control than it’s realistic for IFC to let me have, anyway.

It’s been great and I am really happy about that decision. I think it’s great that every time these films screen that I’m there in person to talk about them. The whole experience and it’s really cool. And the films – Silver Bullets and Art History, especially, because The Zone is really new – have been having a longer life span than my work usually gets to have, because the IFC model is a day and date model, where there’s a big push for them for about a three month period along with a festival premiere or something shortly after that. They tend to come and go – which isn’t a bad thing because they are seen by a lot of people – but they tend to go by within a really short window and a lot of people miss that opportunity. With Silver Bullets and Art History, which premiered in Berlin last year, it’s been really nice to let the word of mouth build and to take them around city by city in a slower fashion that’s allowed a lot of people to catch up with them in the meantime.

DS: And when the films are so closely linked to one another, it gives off the feeling more like an artist that’s touring with an album that they want to support.

JS: Totally. It feels really nice. A few other filmmakers have been doing this recently and I think it’s been really successful. Like Crispin Glover and the way that’s he’s been touring with his movies. He’s a lot more famous than I am and he makes a very particular kind of film, but I really admire the model and I think it’s really cool what he’s been doing. He and a few other people have really been inspiring me as far as making a live sort of event out of the film screenings, especially in a case like this where it makes sense with the films.

DS: Of these three films which all ostensibly have the same release date, Silver Bullets was the one that took the longest to make, correct.

JS: Yes, and by a LOT.

DS: Was the personal nature of that where you are kind of looking at the dark side of the acting profession something that you might have over thought and stressed out about more than the other two films?

JS: With Silver Bullets I think it was such a long process because I almost made three films over the course of that time. The original shoot and the kind of initial incarnation of Silver Bullets was mostly stuff that I shot with Jane Adams, Larry Fessenden, and Kate Sheil that was a film that was just about a photographer that was really, really different, and I almost shot a feature length’s worth of footage that were nearly finished films in and of themselves. Something didn’t quite feel right, though, and the second time that we got together to shoot was when we pushed more into the werewolf and genre direction, and at that point I was trying to marry the original footage with the new footage and every few months when I could save up enough money, I would get back together with the actors and keep shooting. The film really did take a full two years to find its shape.

I’m really excited and happy with the finished film because I don’t think it was something I could just dive into. It’s something that required a few missteps and false starts to really find itself.

DS: Something like The Zone has a much grittier and darker feel to it, and it utilizes different methods of cinematography to produce a desired effect. Given that your films have to preserve a sort of “on the spot” intimacy, how do you decide what method you are going to use to film when you don’t always know where the scene is headed?

JS: I try and go in without too many preconceived notions. I really want to be surprised by the filmmaking process and I want to know the space I’m working within and the actors and all of that stuff before I settle on something. I have ideas, but with The Zone I knew early on from the initial idea that I wanted to shoot half the film on an iPhone. Until we got there and started shooting, though, I didn’t know how practical it was going to be or how any of it would even be integrated. That’s all just a discovery process.

Art History, though, was a little bit different because that was one where I worked really heavily with Adam Wingard as my D.P., so he really had a lot to do with the work of that film. I think he’s a really brilliant cinematographer. I’ve done a couple of movies with him where he’s been my D.P. and he just looks at light and composition in a totally different way than I do, so it’s really exciting for me to collaborate with him. He’s constantly coming up with shots and ideas in the moment that I never would have thought of. It’s a nice mixture of his stuff and my stuff, and it’s interesting because the movies that he directs are so different from mine, but the way we work is really similar. It’s been an easy collaboration, but it’s easy to see how from the outside that people wouldn’t expect us to have much to do with each other.

Silver Bullets, which I shot myself, was really just a long, long period of trying out a lot of different things before I hit upon the look and the feel that I wanted to go for, but I knew what I really liked.

DS: The way that you make these movies in almost a documentarian’s style really requires a huge level of trust with the actors in your films because they have to go pretty deep to give these performances. How do you approach the actors prior to shooting and during the shoot to make them comfortable with the material?

JS: That’s something that I’ve had to figure out and try to get better at as I’ve made more films. I think early on I was really cavalier about my approach and I just sort of expected that we were all on the same page and that everyone was down to do whatever, but then the more films I’ve made the better I’ve gotten at talking to people before we shoot. I really understand and appreciate a lot more now the sacrifice and the work that my actors are willing to make and for them to trust me and go along with a process like this. Especially since I’ve now acted in other people’s films and I know what a vulnerable position you’re in as an actor and what kind of feedback you need from a director. It’s easy to get really self-conscious about a performance without it. I have a lot of long conversations with people I’ll be working with now just to make sure that everybody knows what they’re getting into and what the outcome might be before we even start rolling.

For more information about Joe and his films, please visit his website.

If writing on the internet can be seen as a bit of a bloodsport in this day of comment sections, message boards, and RSS feeds, making a film that’s essentially about the birth of the internet and the rise of the cyber activist could be even thornier territory. First time feature director Brian Knappenberger takes a look at internet history and culture in We Are Legion: The Rise of the Hacktivists, and as one should with such a topic, the director seems to let minor criticisms and petty comments simply slide as he creates a timeline through which the audience can trace the route of the information superhighway in a single 90 minute burst.

Focusing more specifically on the rise of Anonymous, the famed, anomalous and shapeless “police of the internet,” Knappenberger makes the case for the internet being both a useful tool for social and political change and the other side of the coin where people just do things for the “lulz.” Of course, no one film could ever bring together a complete history of the internet and its role in activism from Anon’s tussle with the Church of Scientology to Twitter’s role in the Egyptian quagmire, but Knappenberger approaches the material from a purely factual manner from many of the people on the frontlines of internet activism.

Knappenberger talked to Dork Shelf briefly and almost in passing just before the premiere of his film at the Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival about the difficulties one faces when trying to take an objective look at something as anomalous as the internet.

Dork Shelf: How daunting does it seem at first when throwing yourself into this wide open, yet oddly hermitic world of the internet? Because you aren’t only making a film about online activism, but also about the history of the net.

Brian Knappenberger: (laughs) “Don’t worry, the internet’s here.” Or like the classic meme “Oh fuck, the internet’s here.” You know, I’ve been fascinated by the internet and internet culture for a while now. I’m an independent documentary filmmaker and journalist, and I did a lot of tech stories before this, and I was really fascinated specifically with Anonymous before we started making the film. The first time I had ever heard of them was the origin of that particular meme and when they attacked the Church of Scientology. I think it’s something to really look back on and find out exactly what it was that happened there. That was something that was really innovative in that it was one of the first times that any group on the internet was ever able to actually mobilize human beings to stand up for something they didn’t think was right and to do it all over the world. I think all internet activism after that point really started to follow that model.

DS: Well, there’s that and in the film you also show how something as simple as Twitter can be used as an object for change.

BK: Absolutely!

DS: But at the same time when you go to look back at the beginnings of this cultural shift, you start to go down this sort of rabbit hole that can point you in different directions. We’re you ever surprised at how far reaching the historical context for the film was despite taking place mostly over a couple of decades?

BK: Yeah. I didn’t know how far down that hole I was going to go, Yes, it’s really amazing because everything gets out into the open so quickly that it builds exponentially. You can look at any of the Anonymous Twitter accounts for evidence of that and just how quickly that message can be brought out now. And watching the evolution of memes and protests, you can really see that. Take, for instance, the SOPA blackout. A certain chapter of Anonymous was beating the drum on that for a really long time, including even Google and all of their lobbyists in Washington even jumped on that bandwagon. Anonymous was relentless in pushing this, and suddenly it kind of got roped into the mainstream.

Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t see how that message really gets out there by any means other than that and through something like Anonymous. Then it broadens out to other tech people and it becomes inevitable, but it’s an unbelievable prescedent.

DS: Were you surprised that you were able to get a lot of these previously anonymous activists to come forward and talk to you for the film? I mean, many of these people aren’t hard to find if you know them in real life, but it’s another issue entirely to go on camera and on the record to talk about it.

BK: I don’t know. For us it was interesting, because on the one hand, it’s actually not that hard to be in contact with members of Anonymous because you can very easily and freely engage in online chats and absorb the dialogue and participate, and sometimes you have to dodge some bullets, but it’s almost always a passionate discussion. But there is a kind of level – particularly with people who have a huge respect for their own anonymity – there is a level where you have to gain their trust to go on camera and describe some things that are sometimes illegal. We’re careful not to be cavalier about that.

DS: It’s part of what makes the internet sometimes a scary place for everyone because even those who are proud of their activism might still fear reprisal or that big brother will somehow find a way to them.

BK: That’s exactly right. We’re living in this post-9/11, post-Patriot Act culture with increasing surveillance moving into our lives. Anonymous just sort of serves as that axis that such protesting can revolve around.

DS: Were you ever personally afraid as a filmmaker as to how the internet would react to your film?

BK: Sort of, but I think that kind of criticism is fine. If you look at the comment section in our trailer – which has almost 500,000 hits in a short amount of time, which is huge for a documentary – there are people who think that the idea of using Anonymous as a force for good is ridiculous, and we do touch on that a lot in the film. “We are not good. We are not trying to do something worthwhile. You guys are idiots.” And I mean, the name of my film has the word “Hacktivist” in the title, and for some people that’s just a patently wrong or ridiculous idea.

Once one of the best professional skateboarders in the world, Stacy Peralta hasn’t moved far from the scene that has made him a prominent name, but he certainly has evolved into the rare breed of former athlete and businessman who can be also considered an artist. After having directed some of the pioneering and much passed around Bones Brigade VHS tapes in the 1980s, Peralta turned his eye to the world of documentary filmmaking with his much beloved and deeply personal Dogtown and Z-Boys (which he also fictionalized with his screenplay to director Catherine Hardwicke’s actorly remake Lords of Dogtown). He followed that with the surfing film Riding Giants, and an out of character and underrated look at the LA chapters of the Crips and the Bloods in 2008’s Made in America.

Now after previously having written off making a film about skateboarding and his past, Peralta returns to the world of ollies and grinds to tell the oral history of the crew of clean-cut, young skaters that made his Powell-Peralta brand of boards some of the most sought after in the industry. Bones Brigade: An Autobiography chronicles the formation of a masterful squad of champions like the moody and shy, yet brilliant Rodney Mullen, the youthful prodigy of Steve Caballero, and the estimable Tony Hawk. The film follows the crew’s formation, the backlash, the deeply personal turmoil in the minds of the skaters, and finally to the dissolution of Stacey’s partnership with co-founder George Powell in the early 1990s.

In an appropriately old school looking classroom on the U of T campus, Peralta sits alone taking interviews for his double duties as a producer and director at this year’s Hot Docs International Documentary Film Festival. Not only is he in town to promote a labour of love nearly a decade in the making, but also to talk about his role as a producer on director Parris Patton’s No Room for Rockstars, which takes a look behind the scenes of the Vans Warped Tour.

Dork Shelf sat down to talk about both movies with Mr. Peralta and looked at why he needed coaxing to come back to skateboarding films, the similarities between touring rockers and skaters, and why his darkest hours as a filmmaker were spent working on television.

Dork Shelf: Now was Bones Brigade something of a passion project for you? I know the original idea for it had been kicking around for about a decade.

Stacy Peralta: The guys actually asked me to make it around 2003, 2004 and I didn’t feel comfortable making it back then. I didn’t want to be a director AND a character in a film again. I did that in Dogtown and I thought to do it again was too risky. So I declined the guys’ invitation to do it, but they kept at me over the years, and finally a year and a half ago and they said “We are now older than you and Tony Alva were when you made Dogtown. We really have to make this film now. We’re going to be 50 years old now.” And that’s ultimately what really got me. I said I would do it now because the timing felt right. I just said “Damn the torpedoes and let’s do it.”

DS: Do you think some of that was also because you had to go through Dogtown twice now, seeing that you also scripted the fictionalized version of it?

SP: Well, I didn’t want to do anything more in the skateboarding world, really, because how am I going to make it look different than Dogtown? There was all that worry, but the primary thing, but really it was mostly the idea of the dual role of director and character. That bothered me the most.

DS: I can see that, but I also don’t mean this as disrespect in any way, but calling this film an autobiography feels like a misnomer in a way. It’s really more of an oral history.

SP: I really only put that on there because my wife knew how concerned I was about this, and she said that if I put An Autobiography under the title that it alerts people that might have an issue with it right off the start.

DS: And as the guy who started the crew at the heart of the film, the buck pretty much starts and stops with you, anyway.

SP: Right, but this way I can also tell people that if they aren’t fine with that to exit the theatre right now. (laughs) They can’t fault me for it. I’m just a little sensitive about things like that. That’s all.

DS: When the guys were trying to setup this story, did you know if there was any push back from within the group to NOT tell certain elements of the story, because Tony and Rodney in particular have to relive some really hard memories?

SP: Rodney was VERY nervous because he told me that if he was going to do this, he was going to really unload and open himself up. But he also said he was afraid to do it, so it took time for me to build that trust up again to tell him that I would protect him and that everything would be okay, and if he looks at the film and there’s something too personal in there, we will deal with it. He had that option. So just for him to know that really helped to pave the way. And after every moment I spent with him and every interview I did with him, we would spend time decompressing the situation before we would part, It was very, very helpful to him.

Before the first screening I prepared him for it and I told him that this was going to break his circuits. He wasn’t going to be able to interpret this based on one screening. It was going to take time and he had to be prepared. He came to the first screening very nervous, but he had some very close friends with him to see their reactions to let him know it was okay.

DS: And his story is something that’s pretty universally relatable, which is being young and awkward and having to decide if you want to turn the one thing you are good at into a lifelong career. There’s a lot of mixed feelings there that can stay with you that can stick with you your entire life.

SP: Oh yeah. Totally. In his case, he’s revealing a very intense relationship with his father that certainly shaped him, but also cost him a tremendous amount of emotional grief. And he was very straight with us about it and what he had to deal with in terms of his father not understanding skateboarding and not liking skateboarding and not approving of it, and I know that was so difficult for Rodney to deal with that head on. But it’s such a huge part of who he is and he knew that he had to discuss it.

DS: Were you ever concerned about reliving how divisive the role of the actual Bones Brigade was within the skateboarding community at the time, and how some saw them as being “above it all” with their clean cut, mostly clean living images? Were you afraid of reopening some of those old wounds with some of the people you interviewed?

SP: No. I wanted to open that up and I wanted to go directly to that and let them vent and voice their feelings about how straight the team was. I thought there would be great humour in that and that it would be interesting and unusual to finally see a group or a sports team that didn’t end up in rehab. (laughs) They we’re straight. That’s the way they were, and we didn’t sidestep it. I even make fun of myself in a couple of places because of how much I promoted safety in the 70s. We all take a shot at ourselves. I mean, we all rip apart that movie that we did, Animal Chin.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s something that I learned myself as a filmmaker, too. We never took those shots at ourselves in Dogtown. I wish we would have because I think it would have made for a more interesting film. But I’m a better filmmaker now, and I realized going into this that these people are some of the best in their field, but we’ve got to find some weak areas where we can point and poke fun at ourselves.

DS: Which is something you almost have to do for balance when talking about people like Tony Hawk who comes across almost like this mythical figure nowadays.

SP: But you also see where this guy comes from, and through those points you see how exactly it was that he got there.

DS: And that’s something that the movie makes very clear, which is the amount of work that went into their craft.

SP: That’s exactly one of the things that these guys wanted to get across. They wanted to deconstruct the myths that sort of surrounded all of them for their careers, and let people know that this was always their goal and they wanted to become good skateboarders, but it was never something that was handed to them. They really had to put in their time and pain. All of them.

DS: Are you surprised now by how culturally relevant the style of filmmaking you helped pioneer with your skate films has become with it showing up constantly on MTV and youth oriented programming? Did you ever think while making something like Animal Chin that you admit was somewhat embarrassing now that it would almost become somewhat of a norm?

SP: Never. Never ever ever ever crossed my mind. (laughs) I never thought that those videos would have a lifespan even two years after their shelf life. Never.

DS: It’s also kind of lead to this culture where kids who fancy themselves as up and coming skateboarders have become really image conscious about who they are and how they come across on camera because they’re afraid of how it could affect their potential sponsorship deals. Do you have any real feelings about that?

SP: I mean, it’s kind of always been a big deal because it’s a potential door opener for some of these kids, and a lot of them know this, especially when a camera is around. If they’re lucky enough to have a career in skateboarding they can get paid for it and travel around the world, and they can get to do what they love doing on someone else’s dime, if you will. That’s a huge deal.

DS: And in many cases these kids would never get the chance to have any of these opportunities.

SP: Exactly, but here’s the deal. Just doing it for the rewards, there’s really nothing to be gained from that. But if they’re doing it because they love doing it, that’s the real test. That’s something that Lance (Mountain) said, is that this could be something that’s really going to help the kids out there because they’re getting involved in skateboarding for sometimes the wrong reasons. He said he hopes that it opens them up to see the other side to it.

DS: Now from pioneering this type of filmmaking, you got called in to do some work on Hollywood during the Bones Brigade time to work on movies like Police Academy 4 and Gleaming the Cube. What was it like making the transition from that sort of DIY ethic and was that sort of the seed that led to you eventually parting ways with the crew and with George Powell?

SP: It was unusual because everything was legal. I wasn’t used to that. I was used to climbing fences and always looking over my back. When I was working in Hollywood, not only was everything legal, but you had police blocking off streets for you to do whatever you wanted. That was kind of fascinating. It gave me a chance to work with better equipment, for sure, and I also had a team of people helping me to do something. It was a different way of doing things. It was way more collaborative with producers and whatnot. It gave me a taste of what filmmaking was and that it was something I could potentially do in my life.

It let me know that I could leave and go somewhere else, ultimately. I knew that I didn’t have to stop what I wanted to do. The fact that I knew that George and I were having problems and that I was eventually going to leave some day meant that I at least knew that I had a potentially other career somewhere else.

It wasn’t until a few years later after I had been working in television that I decided that I wanted to start making documentary films. I started off on features doing second unit stuff, and then I got a chance to go to television to work on a variety of things from comedy to documentary to various MTV jobs. It was this mythic thing, but I hated television. It was the worst thing I had ever done in my life. It was the first time I ever felt like I was going to a job.

It’s the job where they tell you up front that they’re hiring you because they like what you do and they want you to break the box open, and then the second you do, they say “NO NO NO! STOP! We can’t do that!” I found that a creative straightjacket and I couldn’t wait to get out. Thank God I was saved by documentary filmmaking.

I really enjoy that because I read a lot. I read primarily non-fiction, and I just find that when I make films now I get to learn about subjects that I don’t know about or that I want to know more about them. Either that, or it’s a subject that I know a lot about and I just want to connect the dots of a given time period. I really, really enjoy seeing that come together. That’s fun as a filmmaker to me.

DS: I’m going to switch gears a little bit and talk a bit about No Room for Rockstars for a bit since elements of the two films and the idea of an extremely rugged work ethic definitely seem to go hand in hand even though you’re the producer on this one and not the director. Now I know you had done some work with Vans in the past, but how did you come to work on this one?

SP: They originally came to me and wanted me to direct the film, and I really didn’t have any interest in doing it as a director, but I did want to stay on as a producer. So, Agi Orsi, who also produced Dogtown and Riding Giants, also helped produce this, and we had worked with (director) Parris (Patton) before as an editor and we thought he would have the best take on this and the right tone, so we hired him to do it. That was it.

The idea was that they had made a lot of films about the Warped Tour over the years, but they had never made one that was personal. They weren’t good films. They were just montages. Every seven minutes these films would repeat themselves and just end up being the same thing over and over and over again. So we thought that if we do this, we have to follow several bands over the course of this entire tour, and hopefully the bands and the personalities would be different and get a sense of what this is really like.

But the other thing it was going to require was a director who was always on set all the time. Parris actually followed twelve bands and shot over 300 hours of footage, and we only ended up with about four of them because the others just didn’t pan out or the band members weren’t that interesting.

The thing I like so much about the movie and how it came out, is that it’s kind of like a great primer on what it takes to be in a young band today and to emerge. I mean, twenty years ago to get a hit song you had to play it on the radio and – BOOM – instant access. It’s not like that anymore. These kids don’t get played on the radio or MTV, so the only way they can get to their fans is to get on a tour like this where it’s a crazy carnival.

DS: And that’s something that tends to get lost in this kind of storytelling and reality culture where we tend to overly mythologize and skew what it takes to be a success.

SP: Totally, but you look at someone in this movie like Mike Posner who doesn’t let any stone go unturned, or you look at (Never Shout Never lead singer) Chris Drew who says that he loves what he does, but that he doesn’t want this where he says that he loves Warner Bros, but he hates being affiliated with them. It’s two sides of the same thing, and then you have someone like the guys in Suicide Silence who say that if they aren’t on the road for 300 days a year that they can’t pay their bills or support their family. Then you have the guys sleeping in the backs of their vans just trying to get on the other side. It covers things from all these different angles.

DS: Now it was a bit after your time, but skating used to be a huge part of the Warped Tour scene. Did you ever get a chance to witness that and do you think the tour might have gotten a bit more commercialized without it?

SP: I didn’t know it at that time. My assumption, and this might not be correct, is that they just pulled skating because it wasn’t generating enough interest. I would imagine, though, with the saturation of just how much skateboarding there is on television and in videos is that it wasn’t special enough anymore to bring it along because kids could see it anywhere. That’s my assumption. I in no way know if that’s true or not.

DS: In a way, like a lot of the musical styles on Warped Tour now like emo and pop-punk, it seems like something that just becomes oversaturated until the bottom drops out of it.

SP: Well, with Warped Tour, it was always started as a punk tour, but now it’s all over the place. You’ve got these guys like Mike Posner and Chris Drew in there who never would have been there in the beginning. So it’s evolved into something that was a little different from it’s original mandate, and with that change I think that skateboarding just kind of got thrown out because it was just so tied to punk rock music.

DS: Which is why it goes pretty nicely that you’re here promoting both this and Bones Brigade because both are designed to show that you have to put in that hard work to succeed.

SP: All the time. You see these guys getting up insanely early and pushing their gear around and setting up their tents and all this crap all over the place and they are not just mentally involved, but physically invested in their own success. It’s not an easy situation. I know what it’s like to go from hotel to hotel and place to place and podunk town to podunk town. And we were building a sport in the 1980s that didn’t exist. It only existed in the vacuum that we created, wondering if it was ever going to become of everything. And at the beginning of the 1990s, it did kind of drop off like that.

DS: Did you guys start to see the writing on the wall at that point or was it sudden for you.

SP: We saw it, but then we realized that the sport – much like with music – doesn’t die. It just cycles up and down, but every time it does cycle down, it cycles down lower than it did before. We finally realized that it was par for the course. It was good for a ten year run.

DS: Which is strange to think about when you talk about a sport, most of which rarely fluctuate in popularity.

SP: Yeah, but it burns very hot when it’s popular, and those who love it stay with it, and those who don’t shed it off, then it starts to cycle back up again and a whole bunch of fresh new kids come into it, and when they come in to it, they always bring something new to it.

DS: Now that you’ve finally made another skateboarding film when you previously said you weren’t going to, would you be willing to tell another one?

SP: I think there’s a whole bunch of stories, and a whole bunch of events, and a whole bunch of personalities and pieces of time where things happened. I was asked this same question after I did Dogtown and I would say that I can’t imagine myself doing another one, and here I am having just finished another one. I can’t imagine it now, but there’s a fantastic collection of people where any one of them could make a great story.

In the role of serious ass kicking taskmaster Agent Maria Hill, the actress best known for her comedic work on the hit television show How I Met Your Mother, is one of the people charged with the unenviable task of reigning in the egos and talents of some of the comic world’s greatest superheroes, including Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), a not-hulking-out Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), and Captain America (Chris Evans). In addition, she also has to butt heads with her boss – played by the recently crowned highest grossing box office draw of all time – and the rest of a wary American government.

The actress sat down with Dork Shelf during a promotional stop in Toronto to talk about breaking away from her more comedic day job to fire off some guns, and how the set of The Avengers really did have a team like vibe thanks in part to some great actors and a great director.

Dork Shelf: What’s it like joining up with a cast this huge and being one of the new additions to a team that has never officially been together but has always been around?

Cobie Smulders: It was extremely intimidating. Like you said, it’s about getting this team together. So to come in and be intimidated and also be one of the most commanding presences in the film was… challenging. But I just tried to not fall about in front of Robert Downey Jr. and Samuel L. Jackson and Scarlet and Chris and Chris and Mark.

DS: Because you have to boss them around…

CS: Yeah, I have to boss them around, and Maria doesn’t really agree with what’s going on, so she’s kind of the naysayer in the group. But you know, Joss Whedon made me feel so comfortable. Just the fact that Joss chose me was comforting. Do you know what I mean? He’s a man who knows what he’s doing. He’s a fanboy and I don’t think he would have chosen me to play Maria Hill if he didn’t believe in himself. So I took a lot of solace in that.

DS: Was there any actor who you were really worried about having to boss around on screen?

CS: Robert Downey Jr. I had one line with him and I just thought that I don’t know how I’m going to say it, but I’m just going to try and move my mouth, breath out at the same time, and hopefully form a sentence.

First of all, he’s the nicest man, but I’ve watched him throughout his career even going back to the 80s. Less Than Zero was one of my favorites. And also, I felt that coming into this Avengers world, he’s already done two Iron Man films and is one of the major reasons why were doing The Avengers. So it was sort of a Godfather thing and then he was also extremely handsome and charismatic. So it was a deadly combination. I felt very intimidated around him, but there was nothing to be afraid of.

A lot of times we get questions like, “Who has the biggest ego?” or “Who freaked out on set the most?” I understand why we’re asked those questions, but really everyone came together on this movie and really stepped up. Again, I think that all came back to Joss Whedon who wrote a script that was this good and gave everyone of the characters moments where they felt like their characters were served and they were served as actors. So there was no, “why did he get to do this?” Everyone had their scenes and were happy with what they did. I don’t know how he did it, but he did it.

Smulders with co-star Mark Ruffalo at the Toronto premiere of The Avengers

DS: Do you have any idea of where your character will go in subsequent films? Because without giving anything away, it seems like you’re being set up to replace a specific character.

CS: I know what you’re saying, but I don’t think I will replace anyone. It’s hard because if you look back at the comic series you see so many stories. Maria takes off from S.H.I.E.L.D. at one point, she goes off with Tony Stark as a spy in another one, she’s a life model decoy, she’s a Skrull. There are a lot of different ways to go. I don’t know. I know that they thought this was going to be successful. I don’t know if they realized how successful. And that makes it hard because this movie is such a good one that it’s going to be tough to follow. I know that they are doing another Iron Man then they are doing another Thor and another Captain America. If S.H.I.E.L.D. has a presence in any of those movies, I’d love to be a part of it.

But beyond that, I don’t know. I really honestly don’t know much. I didn’t even read the script when I got this part. I got it as soon as I signed the contract. They were like, “and here’s your part. This is who you are and what you’re doing in this film.”

DS: Did they give you much backstory in terms of the character and who she was in the comic books?

CS: No, not at all. I was abandoned. (laughs) It’s funny we were doing press in London and I was paired up with Clarke Gregg [Agent Phil Coulson] and he was like, “Oh yeah, I called up (producer) Jeremy Latcham and he sent over this massive book on my character and the history of the Marvel Universe.” I was like, “Um…where’s my book?” I was literally scouring the internet and contacting comic book venders to see if they had any of the series with Maria Hill involved. So, I really just did all of the research myself.

And then I did a lot of the training myself. I had a day in Albuquerque with the stunt coordinator, but the day after I got the part I hit the gym, hired a personal trainer, and started boxing. He had trained S.W.A.T. teams and helped me familiarize myself with weapons and how to load them and how to shoot them and how to roll and all these things so that I could do as much as possible myself. They were very helpful on set, but they had much bigger fish to fry than me on this film.

DS: You worked very closely with Samuel L. Jackson. What was that experience like because he’s a bit of a persona?

CS: I thought he was going to be very closed off and non-conversational and just kind of come in and do his thing. But he was so nice. The thing about him is that he’s been in every film ever made. He’s something like the highest grossing actor of all time. When I think of Sam I think of Pulp Fiction, but he’s done so much more.

I remember there was one day when we were on the helicarrier set messing around. We were standing in front of this huge window – and I should mention the helicarrier was a giant set the size of a sound stage. You could enter from one of three stairways and once you were in it, you were suddenly in the middle of this huge set with hundreds of extras and at times, you didn’t even notice where the camera was. So, we were on the front standing by the window joking about what would happen when we fell off and he was like, “You know, I could bring out my lightsaber.” And I was like, “Ok Sam, that’s a weird non sequitur.” And then I was like, “Oh no, wait. You’re a fucking Jedi. Shit!” I didn’t even think of that because I only ever saw the first prequel, so I’d forgotten he was a Jedi. Then I had to step back and admire his career. It’s just astounding.

DS: In terms of your career, is this the start of a shift into action films?

CS: I was always open to action films. You get to do incredible things. Not only physically, it’s just a whole other medium of working. I was excited to go in a different direction from How I Met Your Mother. It’s funny because whenever we get a hiatus from the show there’s this rush from everyone to get out there and challenge ourselves with new things. Not that How I Met Your Mother isn’t challenging, and I’m so lucky because other shows would be so much more monotonous and I get to do amazing things that are fun and interesting. But I just wanted to play a different character, so when this came around I was just like, “This is the best possible thing that I could get!” So it was just cool to run around and shake off the sitcom and get really grounded into something. I really liked the severity of Maria Hill’s character.

DS: The Avengers is a surprisingly funny movie and even though you have a comedy background, you essentially play the straight role. Were you ever tempted to push things a little farther into the comedy?

CS: No I actually didn’t want to have any zippy one-liners or anything. I was really happy just giving out protocol and doing shoulder rolls and shooting people. Because like I said, it was such a cool change for me. There was a giant scene that got cut out that used to bookend the movie with Maria being interrogated about what happened. It was emotional and I couldn’t help, but really exaggerate the emotions with Joss and be like, (hysterically, like Ron Burgundy in a phone booth) “Oh god! There were all these guys coming and nothing that we could do about it!” The idea of starting this huge fucking movie freaking out like that just made me laugh. So I would be joking around about things like that off camera, but on camera I was very serious and very happy about that.

When thinking of movies from Norway, generally the first thing that comes to mind is some sort of brooding drama about blank faced emotionless characters lamenting their lot in life. The country isn’t exactly known for darkly comic and harshly violent thrillers with more twists than a Bulk Barn barrel of licorice, but director Morten Tyldum can be thanked for changing that perception. His latest feature Headhunters took a ludicrously successful Scandinavian novel from Jo Nesbø and turned it into a film that wouldn’t feel out of place in the Coen Brothers catalogue.

The film stars Aksel Hennie as Roger Brown, a high profile headhunter by day and art thief/forger by night who likes to pillage his wealthy clients’ collections to support his lavish lifestyle. Of course, that can’t last forever. One ill-conceived theft from a dangerous client forces Roger into a deadly game of cat and mouse packed with plenty of violence and one unfortunate hideout in the unsanitary depths of an outhouse. I’m being vague because you should know as little as possible before entering the theatre. This is a film that thrives on surprise, constantly shifting tones and genres at will.

Headhunters opens in Canada this week after moneybags success in Europe and with an American remake already on the way. We got a chance to chat with filmmaker Morten Tyldum about the motivations and influences behind his breakout hit as well as the challenges of designing proper big screen excrement.

Dork Shelf: What drew you to this material? Did you discover the book first or were you sent the script?

Morten Tyldum: I read the book and was immediately fascinated by the character of Roger Brown. I thought he is such an intense character and I really loved his journey. I think there’s a little bit of Roger Brown in all of us. The insecure arrogant character who has surrounded himself in this armour. He’s sort of made himself into another person. He lives such a fascinating life and right away I thought there was a good movie in there. So I called the publisher asking for the rights and a production company had already picked it up. So I made a call and said, “I just read the book. I know you’re developing it. It’s a fantastic story, I’d love to make a movie out of it and you’d be really stupid if you don’t let me direct it.” We had a meeting in Stockholm, I told them my vision of the movie, they agreed with it, and we went from there.

DS: Did you approach Headhunters any differently than your previous films since it was your first adaptation?

MT: Well, my second movie Fallen Angels was kind of an adaptation, but so loosely that it was more “inspired by” than anything else. I read that script before the book and didn’t think much about the book once we got started. With this, it was a very interesting process. I sat down with Jo Nesbø [the author of the original novel] beforehand and said, “Thank you for allowing me to make a movie out of this great book, but the movie has to be mine. I have to take this story and retell it my way.” He said, “of course.” That’s what he wanted and he was so cool about it. That’s what you have to do. You have to put the book away. You should respect the spirit and the tone of the book and then retell the story in a way that would be the best fit for a movie. If you just go chapter-by-chapter and try to recreate it exactly, I think the movie suffers. It’s a different medium and has to be approached in a different way.

DS: Was it difficult to get a fairly ambitious thriller/action movie off the ground in Norway?

MT: Well, it was a fairly tight budget. The book is so popular in Norway that we probably could have gotten an even bigger budget, but I thought we could make it for what we had. It wasn’t a huge budget, but not a tiny one either. It was about $5.2 million, which isn’t bad. But the problem was that in Norway, we don’t actually have any stuntmen. I had to get all the actors to do the action themselves. So there were lots of challenges there. Also, we were shooting in October and November, which is freezing cold and Aksel Hennie would be covered in shit and blood wading through a river naked. We had to deal with those kinds of things, so there were a lot of physical challenges. But in a way, I think that creativity thrives on restrictions. It forces you to think creatively. We couldn’t do huge stunts or explosions or slo-mo stuff. We couldn’t be a slick Hollywood film and had to shoot it another way. I decided that I wanted things to be very real and gritty and at the same time, I wanted to use dark humor. I wanted people to say, “oh that’s horrible” but not be able to stop laughing.

DS: I really enjoyed the darkly comic tone, was that from the book or something you brought to it?

MT: There’s a bit of that in the book, but more in the movie. The book is slightly more distant in a way and is more about the milieu. The humor is there, but I twisted it a little bit more. For example, I insisted that the dog was white and got speared on the front of the tractor. Jo was like, “what?!” I wanted to have one shot in the movie that had never been done in the history of filmmaking and that’s the one. A guy escaping on a tractor covered in human shit with a dead white dog on the front. That is a unique shot.

DS: Was it difficult to find a balance between all of the genre elements and competing tones in the film?

MT: Very much. That was the hardest thing. We made a conscious choice that we wanted this to be a very severe movie. Roger changes so much and not just physically. He’s constantly changing outfits. First his suit is ruined so he’s wet, then he puts on another uniform, then he’s covered in shit, then he has the car crash and is covered in blood, then he has to shave off his hair. He goes through so many transformations that we decided we wanted the movie to be the same way. Wherever Roger is, that’s where the movie is. So in the beginning he’s in control, or at least thinks he is, so we shot the opening like Ocean’s Eleven. Everything is very slick and elegant. Then he starts losing control and the Coen Brothers come in. Then there’s the car crash and it’s shot completely handheld and in and out of focus. So the style of the movie changes and becomes more absurd and comedic as the things spiral out of control. I always felt that the mood and the genre should change with him to keep viewers off balance. That was a big challenge and I was really worried about pulling it off. I wondered if it would be completely confusing and I had a lot of people telling me it had to be more consistent. But I decided that I had to try it and I’m really happy that I did because that seems to be what people are responding to.

DS: Since you’ve worked with Aksel Hennie before, did your have him in mind for the lead role of Roger from the beginning?

MT: In the first meeting I had about the movie, I said that I wanted Aksel to play the lead. He was the only one I could see doing the part. To me, it’s a really tough part on a few levels and I didn’t think anyone else could do it. Aksel can be really strong and really vulnerable at the same time. Also, he’s playing an asshole and I needed someone in the role who could help me make the audience like this guy. Aksel can be a charming asshole. He’s a phenomenal actor and also very physical. He was the one falling off the tractor and driving all the cars. There were no stunt men. It was always him. He even shaved off his own hair and a lot of the blood in that scene is his own because he cut himself so badly while doing it with a dry razor. He’s the kind of actor who goes all that way and that’s what I wanted and needed.

DS: I heard that there are already plans for an American remake? Will you be involved in any way?

MT: No. Summit Entertainment is doing it. They have the rights and they are a great production company, so it will be very interesting to see what they come up with. I’ve been in meetings with them. They’ve had me read the script, but I don’t think a director should make the same movie twice. So I hope they find a filmmaker who reads the book and is inspired in the same way that I was inspired. That’s my hope. That they come up with something new and different even though they are adapting the same book. If Summit comes up with a script that has a completely different angle, then I might be interested, but I’m not going to remake my own movie. I already made it.

DS: How did you shoot the outhouse scene and what was that day like on the set?

MT: [Laughs] You have no idea how many different opinions people have about how shit should look. There was nothing that we discussed more. “No, it should be lighter, it should be darker, it should be thicker.” Ugh, we had so many discussions about that. Then once we finally found the look, we shot the scene very casually. Aksel went under for like a minute or two breathing for a toilet paper role. His whole body was submerged in this special tank and he just did it like, “yeah whatever.” We were so worried about it and then he jumped in, did it in an hour and we moved on like it was a normal scene. After all that discussion and concern, it was a bit anticlimactic.

DS: You’re currently working on a science fiction movie in America, what can we expect from that?

MT: Yes, it’s called What Happened To Monday? and we’re actually casting that right now. It’s based in a future where overpopulation is a major problem. Siblings aren’t allowed and are actually killed. So, the story is about seven identical brothers who share a life. They are named after the days of the week and take turns living the same life. Then the Monday brother suddenly disappears and they have to find out what happened to him without being caught. Eventually they find out that they are being hunted and it turns into a pretty intense sci-fi thriller. I’m really psyched about it.

Although he’s probably best known for his roles in intricate character based ensemble pieces like Margaret, Zodiac, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Avengers marks a different kind of ensemble cast for actor Mark Ruffalo. Stepping into the role of Bruce Banner (once held by Eric Bana and Edward Norton across two moderately canonical films since the start of the cinematic superhero boom), Ruffalo dives headlong into blockbuster filmmaking for what will probably turn out to be the highest grossing film of his already esteemed career.

Joining the famed, illustrious dream team of superheroes from the Marvel Comics universe, Ruffalo plays the heart and soul behind the dangerous and volatile Incredible Hulk alongside Iron Man Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), the demigod Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Captain America Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), and the agents of the secret government organization S.H.I.E.L.D. (Samuel L. Jackson, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner) as they band together to fight Thor’s fallen brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) who seeks to use the power of an energy source known as the Tesseract to unleash a cosmic army bent on destroying the human race.

It might seem like a stretch for the classically trained actor, part-time screenwriter and director, and one fraught with sometimes impossible to please fanboy backlash, but Ruffalo approaches The Avengers with the same desire for variety in his work that’s driven his career up to this point. In a demeanor befitting of the role he plays in the film, he bounds into the room like a force of nature and talks proudly in the most animated of fashions about his first big foray into comic book action cinema.

Dork Shelf got a chance to sit down with Mark Ruffalo this afternoon to talk about working with fanboy icon Joss Whedon, his adventures in motion capture, and his feelings about film criticism.

Dork Shelf: You’ve done a lot of ensemble films in your time, and this is a bigger sort of ensemble film…

Mark Ruffalo: The ULTIMATE ensemble film

DS: Does the dynamic change when you are working on something with this big of a budget and with this much franchise potential riding on it?

MR: I think it depends on your director, really, and Joss is really a small movie director. With him it’s all about character, and writing. It’s having everything sort of add up and not making too big of leaps from here to there. It’s all very well realized, and because of that it’s like a little indie movie, but with a lot bigger craft service and huge special effects. (laughs) But the stuff that he’s working with, all the dramatic stuff, it’s really easy. It’s all really relatable and very human, oddly enough. He really does humanize the characters. And he’s an actor’s director. You know, people wouldn’t necessarily think that about him, but I’ve worked with a lot of actor’s directors and he rates tops with me, as far as that goes.

What I loved about working with him was how much he had to say about Banner, and how he really understood his back story and some really cool places to go dramatically with him.

DS: The film is already getting great reviews across the board…

MR: Yeah, it’s crazy.

DS: I wondered how important that is to you having coming from a sometimes smaller background in film…

MR: Some of which haven’t been well reviewed.

DS: Now you are making a movie on this scale, how important is that to you?

MR: You know, for a long time that sort of thing was more important to me, but that was just heartbreaking, and it almost helped me lose sight of why I love doing this. A few years ago, I kind of promised myself that for me the experience of making the movie was what I was going to be how I judged the final product. I have so little control over the final product, but that being said, when someone read Peter Travers’ review of this movie to me out loud, I was just, like, “Okay. That’s dope.” (laughs) That feels nice, you know. I tell you, it makes doing this process a hell of a lot easier to be doing press for a movie where you come into a room where everyone likes it instead of trying to convince them for 20 minutes to like a movie that they hate, and sometimes you just can’t do it no matter how hard you try. You just can’t sell it. So it’s the icing on the cake when you have a good experience, but I’ve long forgotten hanging too much importance on it.

DS: You’re now playing the third Hulk in the Marvel franchise. What did you do to sort of differentiate your take on Hulk and Banner from the other films?

MR: Well, the only advantage that I had, really, was that the technology brought us to a place where the actor could actually play The Hulk. The other actors didn’t get to play The Hulk. We all got to play, Banner, though. We all worked really hard to make The Hulk feel real and make him seem like an actual human being getting pissed off. He’s tender, he’s funny. We worked really hard to make him human, and that’s ILM as much as it is me, or anything else, and Joss Whedon of course.

Joss and I talked a lot about that and I signed on before there was even a script, but we talked about what we both wanted to see. Whedon was incredibly sensitive to the fact that me and Cobie (Smulders) are really the only new additions that he brings to this game. So, he’s, like, “Buddy, I really want you to score. You’re the only thing I’m really adding to the mix here.” But we definitely saw this as a continuation of the past movies, and I loved those movies and I loved those actors. I thought they were great Banners.

This is just an older version of him, a more mature version. He’s been on the run longer. He’s gotten to a place where he’s ready to deal with this and face it, and he has an almost ironic sense of humour about the situation he finds himself in. All of those things we’re just a continuation of where we last saw him, and the idea that maybe I could control this thing. Maybe I finally have some sense of control over it. But, you know, we were really going back to Bixby’s Hulk with Banner who really had this kind of world weary charm about him where he was trying to live his life even though he’s on the run. We really wanted to engage in that life and that’s what we were always going for.

DS: Throughout the film we actually get to see a lot of Bruce, which is nice. Did you have any favourite scenes with the other cast?

MR: My favourite scenes were generally the ones where I get to talk to people. (laughs) Or, you know, get to do some acting in them. It was just thrilling to see all those people assembled together. But for me that introductory scene with Bruce is so cool. It’s such a cool bridge from the past to here. And I really loved the scenes with Robert Downey Jr. As far as acting, those are exciting and fun and you never know what you’re going to get from him. Their relationship is really a cool one.

But then, you know, the stuff with The Hulk is just dope. Getting to do all that stuff. I have a little rubber version of people that I get to fling back and forth. But the one improvised moment that I had was my first day on set in my Chinese Checkerboard, man cancelling leotard, and it’s when I grab Downey while he’s falling and I have to throw him off. So we’re shooting and I’m just standing over his body and I just get up and I just ROARED, Which wasn’t scripted, (laughs) and Downey just opens his eyes and was like, “Really?” That was my first day on set and my sphincter muscle just clamped up. Yeah, that was pretty much it. (laughs)

DS: How did you find working in all those motion capture suits as The Hulk. Is that footage that you hope never gets out?

MR: My closest moment of turning into The Hulk in the whole movie was when they were rolling B-Camera on me and I was in that thing, and I was hot and sweaty and totally embarrassed and all the places that you want to look big look small and all of the places you want to look small look big, and I was just, like, “TURN THAT FUCKING THING OFF!” (laughs) “I’m sorry… I’m sorry. I don’t want to be rude. I don’t usually get angry, but there IS something called MOVIE MAGIC that HAS to be MAINTAINED HERE! Let’s keep the mystery alive!” (pauses, drolly) So yeah, it’s not my favourite thing.

DS: This is your first real foray not just into comic book films, but also to big scale action. Did you develop any sort of a taste for that kind of film or is it something you would prefer only coming back to every once in a while?

MR: Honestly, I don’t have a plan. The big misconception about actors is that we actually get to choose the things we do. It was fun and I really liked this, and I just got done doing a movie with Louis Leterrier – who did the last Hulk movie – which had a lot of action in it, which was a lot of fun for me. I’m getting to the place in life where I’m almost too old for it, but I still have a lot of fun doing it. I don’t know, it’s just kind of about going along with the program a little bit, and if something interests me and I decide to go there I do. I don’t really know why something interests me sometimes in the moment it does, but that’s been the deciding factor in what I do.

DS: And when you sign up for one of these movies, don’t you have to sign up for about six movies?

MR: Yeah, and they WANTED nine!

DS: Really? Was there any trepidation about that?

MR: Yeah, but once I sat down and I did the math, I knew that they had another Thor, then another Captain America, and another Iron Man, and they’ll probably do another Avengers at some point. It takes two years to make a movie and I signed on for six. It will probably take three years for each one that I’m in. (pauses) Are they really going to want a 70-year old Hulk? (laughs) So they’ll probably get three out of me before they get tired of me. I’m down with that ride. That can be fun.

DS: If you had to trade places with any other character or actor in the movie to play a different hero, who would it be?

MR: Um… Black Widow. (laughs) Can I be a woman? Seriously, everything that Scarlett (Johansson) did, all the physical stuff and all the hand to hand combat. That was just awesome. I would have loved to do that. Other that that? Loki, because really, that’s just SUCH a great fucking character.

It’s hard being the son or daughter of any notable figure when you try and focus on following in the footsteps of a famous parent. The expectations start to become unreasonable and hard to deal with. On the other hand, sometimes it’s hard to be the offspring of a larger than life figure because they’re never around to be that much of a parent. Filmmaker Corey Lee falls into the latter category as evidenced in his film Legend of a Warrior (premiering Monday evening at Hot Docs), where he attempts to connect with the side of his father he never knew.

Corey’s father is legendary martial arts master and trainer Frank Lee, a man who Black Belt Magazine once bestowed the title of “the father of kickboxing in North America.” A master in White Crane Kung-Fu and a student of various styles of hand to hand combat from wrestling to boxing to Muay Thai, Frank’s services have been in demand since the 1960s, training countless Hong Kong action stars through the years and even several current MMA fighters and champions. Even at his advanced age, Frank still travels as much as he did when Corey was younger, operating predominantly out of his Edmonton, Alberta based gym.

In an effort to make peace with his own feelings of distance and to give his own son some insight into who his grandfather is, Corey took up his camera and began travelling and training with his father to spend more time with him than they had previously spent together in nearly 20 years.

Dork Shelf sat down with Corey and Frank while in Toronto to promote the film in advance of its world premiere to talk about the filming process, physical training, and how their relationship has strengthened today.

Dork Shelf: Making the decision to make a movie about your relationship to your father is a really personal one that probably didn’t happen overnight. How long did you think about this idea before you actually got around to making the film?

Corey Lee: I think not unlike a lot of artists my own issues and relationship with my dad – actually, both of my parents – was something I had in some small way approached in my other films, but probably not as successful for me.

The real trigger for me was when I got married and my wife and I decided to have a family. I have two boys now that are five and three. When my first son was born, I really wanted to re-examine the relationship I had with my dad, and I think that was the real catalyst to say that I should approach this in a way that this is really honest and not dramatic. I’m not writing characters that are based on my father. I’m dealing with him myself, and previously all my experiences had been in dramatic filmmaking. What’s more challenging than trying to take on something that you’ve never done before in more ways that one? That’s where it kind of came together, and it’s been kind of a long road from there to here.

DS: Now when Corey showed up at your gym did you know he was going to make the film or was it a surprise when he showed up?

Frank Lee: He had mentioned it quite a while before that. Finally in about 2007 or 2008 when I had four fighters there involved with MMA, he thought it would be a good idea to come up with a camera and film that and follow me into the fight and stop it there. I said “Sure, if we have time, that’s fine with me.” That’s how it really started.

CL: That was the initial proposal that I was creating to pitch the film to the National Film Board. Those two and a half days that I hung out with you and just followed you with a camera and a lav mic was probably the longest time we had spent together in 20 some years.

FL: Since he moved to Calgary for school, it was the most time we had spent together.

DS: I guess it’s nice when you go to pitch an idea like this to have a hook to it when it’s just a simple story like this.

CL: Well, I know a film about a kid making a film about a parent isn’t that original, but my dad’s history and legacy in the martial arts kind of made it a no brainer. And I have so many memories of that gym, and not just the one that he has now and he’s had for 30 years, but all of these other gyms and all the other characters that have flowed through my life and his life and all these things that I connected to was in my veins even though I’m not really a fighter.

DS: Was it always your intention to come back and start training with your father again as a means of bonding?

CL: I didn’t know of another way. You know, martial arts is about movement. It didn’t make much sense to me to try and get to know this master who just happens to be my father by sitting in coffee shops or just walking down memory lane. To get to know him, I think I needed to be that vehicle for the audience. I’m that car that the audience is getting in and driving. I’m filtering his world through my eyes.

The toughest part was having to let go of the past. All that water that was under the bridge between me and him and my relationship with my mother and my sister. It had to be fresh. It was going to be this 40-something guy and his dad at the gym with him training me. It was really simple I think to let that just work and not let that be corrupted.

DS: And what were your thoughts when Corey said he was coming to train with you again? Did you think he was taking on too much by trying to train and make the film at the same time?

FL: I never really gave it a thought because I really don’t know that much about being a filmmaker. I told him that if he had an idea and he wanted to make it, he could do whatever he wanted. I mean, I’m a very busy man, but I always told him it was never a problem for me. I gave him 100% support and he started.

CL: It probably helped that I was a better filmmaker than I was at kung-fu.

FL: That’s not true. You were a very good performer. You were very good at performance.

You see, there are three levels to martial arts. The first level is where you focus on health, which is what the martial arts was mostly all about. Then there’s the second level where you go out and do performance. That’s like Jet Li, Jackie Chan. Those guys are performers. That third level, which is very hard, is the fighter. Not just anyone can do that. It takes a special person and that heart of a warrior, that heart that I have, that can go out there and get hit every time. It’s very, very hard to do. That’s why there are so few greats. Look at Muhammad Ali in boxing. He’s the best boxer of all time, but they have that rule where they can’t hit below the belt. In martial arts, it would be a fair fight, but he still had that warrior instinct where if it was straight boxing match, it would be no contest who would win.

DS: Do you ever wonder or think about the film bringing new interest into your gym and your teachings?

FL: Sort of, but not really, because my name is already established. I hate to say that, but my name is really famous all over North America, especially in my town. I’ve been teaching every year since 1966 in about half of the world, year round, doing the fighting and performance or seminars all throughout my younger days. So when I see a film and it’s about me, I know it’s not about Michael Jackson. I’m getting old now. I can’t perform like the old days. I know my son was the expert on that. I never thought the film would make me any more famous because I had already done some work with Sammo Hung and those guys. That’s why he got into this story. He wanted to find out the real me, and there was some things he didn’t know, so we started travelling together. He made my life story and when I saw the story and I saw myself in a natural life, I was really touched. I didn’t expect that.

CL: Well, what he said to me was something to the effect that it was more than a documentary. It was a movie with a lot of heart. That made me feel proud of what we accomplished. But then again, that film wouldn’t have been what it is if you hadn’t approached it honestly. Your level of comfort and your ability to be yourself in front of the camera and our relationship was crucial.

DS: And I can imagine that it would be easy for you to sort of open up since you have already had that sort of public life already.

FL: Yeah. That’s why I was so touched when I saw the film. In 1976 or 78 the National Film Board made a half hour documentary about me teaching martial arts that represents Chinese culture in the Museum of Man.

CL: And those snippets that you see are from that.

FL: And back then the White Crane style looked different. You know how the kung fu was with those ancient animal styles? It was beautiful, but you wanted to use it to defend and it could be deadly.

DS: Were you at all surprised when you were putting this together that you found you knew more about your father than you originally suspected or remembered? Do you think that there was just the great deal of distance that was causing a sense of distortion?

CL: I think that’s fair to say. It’s so funny because it’s not about a grudge or anything. We just settles into this cycle of “You should call me / No, you should call me.”  I don’t think either of us would necessarily admit to that, but we both get so caught up in our own lives. I was talking to my kids and I wanted them to know about him. I know he’s in amazing health, but I blink and ten years go by. I want to know who this man is and I want to bridge that gap that exists. Not just for me, but for my kids. And yeah, I do think I remembered a lot that I didn’t before, but there was definitely some stuff that I didn’t get out of him before, and the biggest was that he never wanted me to follow in his footsteps, which I’m sure he said before when I was a kid, but also that he was already seeing me as an adult. I just placed myself as a boy in his world. I think that was the biggest thing.

DS: Do you ever think that you could get caught up in your work the same way your father did or is that something you’re more cognizant of now?

CL: I would like to think that. (laughs) I would like to believe that I am, but I think some days you’re more present and some days you aren’t. Even with my father because we finished this film right before we had to submit to the festival, so my commitment to training with him hasn’t fallen off, but it’s definitely slid off. I certainly want to make more time to make more trips out there whether it’s by myself or with my family to hang out with him.