Standing about 6'5" and sporting a shaggy mane of hair, Reg Harkema has all the towering presence of a grizzly bear on the offense. But there's no reason to fear the affable Toronto-via-Vancouver filmmaker, who's actually more like a teddy bear.

He's also on his way to becoming a heck of a director. In addition to his two features, A Girl is a Girl (1999) and Better Off In Bed (2004), Reg has cut some of the best Canadian films in the past decade – Child Star, Falling Angels, Last Night and Hard Core Logo to name just a few. But it's his own new film, Monkey Warfare, that's really going to make a name out of Reg Harkema.  

Monkey Warfare is a smart, focused picture that questions the urban, commercial society that most of us choose to live in. Reg tells the story through a pair of stoner, bike-riding ex-revolutionaries (played by Don McKellar and Tracy Wright) who live a mundane, hand-to-mouth existence in a downtown Toronto neighborhood. The couple's life becomes decidedly more interesting when their pot dealer is busted and they become entangled in an awkward love triangle with a new 'provider,' played by the talented Nadia Litz.

The film says as much about bike-riding and pot-buying etiquette as it does about globalization and radical politics. It succeeds because of that balance, and because Harkema keeps the tone light and amusing, never straying too far from the characters' developing relationships. He also spins a killer soundtrack that supports the film's political preaching while helping to establish the fun stoner aesthetic.

FilmCAN sat down with Reg in his front yard in Parkdale on a sunny Saturday afternoon, to chat about Monkey Warfare, the Toronto-Vancouver divide, and why September 11, 2001 was a bad day to pitch a film.  

filmCANSo where did you get the idea for the film about these former radicals?

Reg HarkemaI'd been working on a script with a friend of mine, an actress from A Girl is a Girl. We had this script about a female radical who gets involved with this dude and the two of them do all these actions together, then he gets run over by a Coca-Cola truck. Then she decides to suicide-bomb the Molson Indy. So, we got the fifth draft done and ready to pitch it and then... September 11, 2001, nine in the morning. It was our first meeting and people just jumped back from the script like it was a hot potato. The whole project kind of fell apart. Some time later I was cutting Child Star and was still a little post-9/11 politicized and interested in politics and so on and I saw a scene between Don (McKellar) and Tracy (Wright) and I thought there was definitely something beyond acting going on there.

filmCANWell they are...

Reg HarkemaYea, they're a couple, right. And I thought, why has no one ever made a movie with Don and Tracy? So I said, I better come up with a story. The Mother and the Whore (Jean Eustache, 1973) is my favorite movie of all time. It's a love triangle movie, so I thought what can I do to make a love triangle kind of thing - and suddenly all my research and interest in radical politics came back. I wedged the character from one story to this one and created the whole thing. [My girlfriend] Cyndi and I had also just moved to Parkdale and saw the garbage out on the streets, which is something you can't do in Vancouver. It's illegal to do that. So it was a whole new phenomenon for us. I thought, wow look at all this stuff all over the street. And thought, someone could survive on this - and people do. I used to watch them from my porch at my old place.

filmCANWhat kind of parallels are there between you fleeing Vancouver and coming to Toronto, and the characters of Dan and Linda?

Reg HarkemaWell, we kind of fled after Cyndi hit a guy with a Molotov cocktail, in the face. No, no - I had kind of hightailed it about three years ago to come to Toronto to finish off a cut of [Scott Smith's] Falling Angels. I had just been evicted from my place and was living with Cyndi in a cramped apartment off Commercial Drive that was full of mould and I just thought, I gotta change things up here. I'm sick of the rain. I had the opportunity to come to Toronto with Falling Angels, and I came. Cyndi came out a year later and actually drove a U-Haul across the country. When I started thinking about this project, it was just natural to adapt all those things we had been through. Tracy Wright commented on this when she was formulating her character, how she wanted to be sensitive to how personal she felt the story was to mine and Cyndi's relationship. And I was like, if you want to be sensitive to that, why don't you draw on your relationship with Don [laughs.] So I think she mixed it up.

filmCANNow that you've grown accustomed to Toronto, would you ever want to move back to Vancouver?

Reg HarkemaNo. I'm set up here. Of course I'd love to live in Amsterdam. But I like the people here. For the first time in my life I feel a sense of connection to a film community that reminds of the connection that those French new wave filmmakers had.

filmCANI gotta ask, what is it that the actors smoke in the film?... because it sure looks a hell of a lot like...

Reg HarkemaThey are smoking something called 'honey blend' that my designer found and supplied. Except he got some of the honey blend mixed up one day with actual stuff and that wasn't too cool and he had to go to one of the actors and apologize.

filmCANWhat was your process like when you actually sat down to write this script? Are you thinking about shots [when you write]?

Reg HarkemaYea, I'm thinking entirely in terms of my edit, which is the problem with my scripts. Which is why Telefilm turned down production on this film - because it's a very script-centric system. They all buy into a very Syd Field, Robert McKee idea of what a film script should read or look like. I mean, we're not making novels here. The movie is like 78 minutes, its 70 if you don't include the credits and the Molotov cocktail scene. The script is 86 minutes. I'm building in like, 20 percent of the movie just to experiment and figure out what I'm going to keep. We shot a whole expository sequence for Nadia's character, Susan, where her dad was an oil executive. There's actually a shot where she refers to her dad and you see him next to a gas pump. But because people didn't realize it was a gas pump, we dropped that whole thing - though it did help them understand their characters. But it reads very expository, and in a script it seems like blah-blah-blah. You tailor these scripts in a certain way so they read. Every director says, oh I'll change it back the way I want before I shoot, but they never do. There's no time. So you get stuck with that script that's built for making a novel, not a film. Whereas my scripts are designed to make films.

Catch Monkey Warfare at TIFF 2006 -
Sunday, September 10, 6:00 PM @ VARSITY
Tuesday, September 12, 2:00 PM @ PARAMOUNT

You can learn a lot about Peter Mettler from his patio furniture. The table that graces the Canadian filmmaker's third-floor deck is an ancient scarred metal number, chipped and rusted and seriously weather worn. But where some might see decay, Mettler sees beauty. Instead of painting over the marks, he's preserved them, gilding them with metallic paint and sealing the surface in a coat of protective lacquer to create a striking, earthy abstract of organic textures and autumnal tones. There's something mysterious, psychedelic, maybe even transcendental in the table, in the fusion of coincidence and craft that went into creating its pocked fractal finish.

It's the same approach Mettler uses in his films, eight of which are screening at TIFF as part of this year's Canadian Retrospective programme. Since he emerged on the Toronto scene in the 1980s, Mettler has consistently pursued those moments of cinematic alchemy where the act of recording an image turns into poetry, even prayer. His early work as a cinematographer for the likes of Atom Egoyan and Patricia Rozema laid the groundwork for his style, but it wasn't until 1994's Picture of Light, a bold fusion of documentary and philosophizing that uses the majestic Aurora Borealis as its focus, that Mettler's vision was fully realized on screen. That was followed by 2002's landmark Gambling, Gods and LSD, a hallucinatory exploration of travel, ecstasy and mysticism eventually cut down from a 55 hour assembly of footage shot at various locations across the globe.

This year, Mettler returns to TIFF with two new projects: Jennifer Baichwal's doc, Manufactured Landscapes, on which he acted as DOP; and his own live happening, Elsewhere, billed as "an evening of improvised audio visual adventure," and featuring the director mixing visuals in real time to music provided by artists such as Murcof, Martin Schitz and the Evergreen Gamelan Club Ensemble. FilmCAN sat down with Mettler at his telltale table to talk about technology, mystery and what it's like to have a retrospective devoted to you midway through your career.

filmCANYou started your career in the dark days before the Internet, worked through its development, and now produce projects within an environment where it's ubiquitous. How has that - and the rise of digital technology - affected your process?

Peter MettlerWell when I was starting out - when non-linear technology started becoming something we could truly access - I was really excited about it because a lot of my thinking is associative, and non-linearity immediately meant 'OK, a lot of people are going to think this way.' Which means that the work I'm interested in will speak to them more, and there will also be technology there that will allow me to function in that way. For example, I don't think GGL would have come out that way if it was still analogue, Steenbeck. Part of the way it was constructed had something to do with what the technology allowed us to do.

At the same time, I find that the more computers give, the more they take at the same time. It's amazing how often I feel I'm just bogged down in technology, not doing anything except organizing the technology so that it will one day do what I want. And just when it does that, it's good for a year or two, and everything changes again and you have to build something up again.

Right now I'm working with Greg Hermanovic (Michael Snow's Corpus Collossum), who's a software designer (Houdinni), and he's really interested in image mixing too. I guess I'm kind of a beta tester or guinea pig, suggesting ways that I like to work that he can incorporate into building something fantastic, hopefully.

filmCANImprovisation seems to be a recurring theme of much of your work. What sparked this desire for the spontaneous?

Peter MettlerIf you start to look at the trail of work I've been doing, a lot of it involves improvisation, and my background early - in my teens - was playing the piano, learning music, and I think that led me to making films. Filmmaking took some of the emotions that are created when you're working on an instrument and made them more tangible from a filmmaking, visual perspective. And it became clear that's what I wanted to do. But I always carried with me this desire to do it improvisationally, not to create a blueprint and simply execute it like a regular feature film, but to have a set of themes and ideas, and then to go out in the world - or in a dramatic, scripted situation - to try and react to the elements that are there, that are a part of that piece of work. So if you look at the string of films, that developed in different ways: Eastern Avenue was more extreme, a sort of notebook; sometimes it was more dramatic, like Top of His Head or Tectonic Plates; and I think my favourite hybrid form was GGL. And at the end of GGL, without thinking of it too consciously, it was then, "Well, what now?" And then in Switzerland, someone offered me the opportunity to do whatever I wanted for their national exhibition, and I figured I had all this extra material from GGL, which is the bigger part of GGL, and I tried to figure out a way I could perform it somehow. I didn't know anything about image mixing or video at that point, and had a month to figure something out. I did this show with Fred Frith, and it was so exciting and invigorating that since then I've been developing different ways of doing this - building libraries of visuals, performing with lots of different musicians, working in dance culture situations. The great thing is you're basically creating a film on the spot.

filmCANIs it strange to do work that you have no record of when you're finished?

Peter MettlerIt's a funny back and forth, because when you finish a film, especially these kind of films, you ask "Why is it finished today?" Because actually it's a fluid set of associations that can always shift, and would shift and grow if you kept shooting and editing more - essentially there's no definitive version. On the other hand, it's transient, only of that moment or evening, and the kinds of things that happen are things that would never happen if you tried to make them happen. It's improv, and sometimes all this magic comes out. I do record it quite often, and maybe that's another step - to go into that material and pull things out that could be short films or alternative constructions of that.

filmCANWhat's one of the first things you'll do to brainstorm a visual treatment of your own project or someone else's, as director of photography?

Peter MettlerI think it's parallel lines - I'll see things or situations that are just so riveting as an image, and this could be something I see or imagine, and it seems like an anchor point. Then I start to think about why this image is so evocative, and then start writing in a free associative style, out of which come more ideas, some of which become structural or storylines, and some of those which relate to that first image.

Another way is to think in terms of an idea or theme, like 'the illusion of safety,' which is very much an idea, but it can become a filter. So when I'm exploring an environment, say in Las Vegas on GGL, I see things that start to explore that concept; there's all these different elements that will fit into that category. Slowly you have a body of images and sounds and text that you collect in relation to this filter, and then you figure out how to edit that together.

filmCANHow do you approach the types of films you make from an audience perspective?

Peter MettlerI definitely make films to show people, I don't make them for myself; of course it's a combination of the two. If I did make them for myself only, they would be quite different, and I don't even know if I would do them. The point is to create an experience for the audience that will lead them into a certain path of thinking or experience. So even though I make films that are challenging, I don't think I make films that are deliberately obscure, they're just challenging.

filmCANRumours circulate that the original cut of Gambling, Gods, and LSD was a whopping 55 hours. What's the deal?

Peter MettlerGGL was built around themes, not specific subjects, so I kept finding things that would fold into this network of ideas, and I was surprised it was that long. That was an assembly stage, not a cut, but it works as a cut because nothing was repeated; it was all different subjects and material, and it's a thing that shows you the whole journey or picture. And in the film most people's on camera participation is ten minutes, and in the raw material it was a couple of hours; so that alone gives it a much bigger breadth of ideas and characters.

Every time you make a film you have to work in a set of parameters, and unfortunately a lot of them have to do with how much money there is, who's putting up the money, and what the frame is they want in order to give you that money. One of the big ones is time - a feature length film; and another is the language or form you use. So GGL was focused to be a long theatrical film from the start, and 3 hours is about as far as you can push it. I think the 55 hour cut is a true reflection of what happened there, but to condense it and make it happen more rhythmically and interestingly, 8-10 hours would work quite interestingly.

filmCANHow does it feel to receive the retrospective treatment from TIFF?

Peter MettlerWhen the Toronto International Film Festival decided to give a retrospective of my work I found it very encouraging, because it means there's actually serious interest in what these types of films are trying to do. And not just my films, but films by other filmmakers with a similar style who are always struggling to make films like this because they simply don't fit the straight model of distribution. It's important that institutions like TIFF encourage this - because they can demonstrate there's an audience that wants to be provoked or entertained in that way.

filmCANWhat's the most important effort needed in making a film that both challenges and reaches an audience?

Peter MettlerI think you can always see it in a film where you have that connection - something meaningful, individualistic and specific. And when it's not there it tends to have this hollow form full of repetitions of clichés that you've seen before, whether it's gestures, narrative, or how the camera works. And you can picture those shoots, where everyone is concerned with "OK, you do this now and this has to come in under this money." Which is fantastic, but everyone is wrapped up in the whole co-ordination of what they're doing, and somebody has forgotten to pay attention to what the film is about. Often the films are made as institutions that just function for their own sake of function. Then other films are really made about trying to connect to a zone, an essence, an idea, a situation; and how do you make that connection? I think that's the biggest challenge of making meaningful work.

More on Peter Mettler's audio/visual evening Elsewhere on September 15 at the Berkeley Church at: http://petermettler.com/elsewhere/

Steve Gravetock is the Associate Director of Canadian Programming and Special Projects at the Toronto International Film Festival, which makes him just about the most qualified person there is to run through this year's Canadian programme. FilmCAN sat down with Gravestock to get a sense of how the programme comes together, what's in it, and what's on the minds of Canadian filmmakers in 2006.

filmCAN When you begin putting the programme together, do you go in with a predetermined theme or specific approach to use as a guideline?

Steve Gravestock No. It's dictated by what's there. I mean, things come up, but ultimately what determines we're going to show a film or not show a film is the quality of the individual film. We like to be representative, we like to have things from all over the country, but it doesn't determine what we show. If one region has   particularly good year and another region doesn't, then we go with what we think is the best. It's film by film.

filmCAN Do you have to be more careful about including films from Quebec?

Steve Gravestock It's different. Quebec is a separate market because of the language. There's always a few films that have been commercially released in Quebec. But we're finding that's less and less of the case. It's less frequent. Almost everything we got from Quebec this year, with the exception of A Sunday in Kigali, is new. They may have played one festival before us, in Europe, but most of them I think are world premieres. Catherine Martin's two films ( Dans les villes and L'esprit des lieux ) are world premieres, and Cheech is a world premiere. Sur la trace d'Igor Rizzi I think is a North American premiere. [ It was scheduled to play Venice on September 4 - ed. ] End of the Line, which is in English though the director's Quebecois, that's a world premiere.

filmCAN How does the 2006 programme differ from last year's?

Steve Gravestock This year we saw a lot of truly independent work. There's a lot of people taking chances with narrative, and there was a substantial amount of almost artist-run stuff. But then you say that, you know, and it's actually across the board. A lot of films had fairly large budgets, a lot of films didn't.

filmCAN What about themes that are emerging now that you've got all the films to consider?

Steve GravestockI actually didn't even start thinking about themes until last week [this invu was conducted on July 24 - ed.], and there's stuff that pops up in weird ways, in films you wouldn't necessarily expect. There's a lot of concern about the environment, not necessarily in a "green" kind of way, but just sort of how we're responding to it, how we're restructuring it. Obviously that's in there with Jennifer Baichwal's film, Manufactured Landscapes - (the subject, photographer Edward Burtynski) deals with industrial waste. Most of the film is set in China, but there's some really creepy stuff in Sri Lanka, too, where these 17-year-old boys are jumping into vats of toxic goo to take apart big tankers.

The theme is obviously there in Gary Burns' film (Radiant City), too. He offers a more systemic sort of analysis: how the suburbs work, and what an artificial construct that is and where that came from. The film follows a family that lives in the suburbs, and then it gives you a historical analysis of how the suburbs developed, a number of urban planner types. It's a documentary, but it definitely plays with the form. Gary Burns and Jim Brown did it, it's a co-direction.

In Martin's film, L'esprit des lieux, which is a documentary that sort of traces the steps of this photographer who went to these rural regions in Quebec and documented declining rural life like 30 years ago. She found most of the people who were in the photographs at the time. The place is in an even worse state, but it's also nature sort of starting to take over the communities again, and has an obvious connection to the Quebecois mythology, the link with the land thing. In a weird way, Dans la ville, Martin's feature, is very connected to L'esprit des lieux, because it's about alienation in a city. You recognize Montreal in it, but spiritually you don't recognize it at all, 'cause it's a very harsh critique of how alienated people are even in Montreal, which is one of the least alienating cities I can think of. But it works. In some ways it could be any city. People aren't connected the same way they used to be.

It's there in Everything's Gone Green as well. Not so much specifically abusing the environment, but you know, get rich quick schemers. Or Monkey Warfare, Reg Harkema's film. Tracey Wright and Don McKellar play these bohemians who live by rummaging through yard sales and finding rare items that they can sell on eBay. At the dump they're scrounging off of there's development going on. So it's not as a major theme, but clearly a concern.

The other major corollary is a basic sense that systems have failed us. Certainly - well, I'm an old leftie, so I think of capitalism. But it's clearly there in Martin's films, definitely there in Allan King's movie (EMPZ 4 Life), I suppose it's weirdly there in Guy Maddin's film (Brand Upon The Brain). There's a more intense anger and angst about it than we normally see. You know, the history of Canadian cinema is flush with marginalized characters, but they're (now) both more and less socially rooted. It's not like Goin' Down The Road, where it's regional thing. This is more sort of anomie, it's both more abstract and has distinct causes. Something like Sleeping Dogs, Terry Odette's movie, is also... Terry's a huge fan of Kiarostami, and this is a very Kiarostami-like picture: neorealist rambling, you never know where anybody's actually going to go, you try to piece the plot together afterwards - you know, how did they get from there to here - and it's never quite clear, so it sort of grows organically. But it's very much about characters you just wouldn't really give a crap about or that you'd try to avoid generally. There's an anger that this guy's sort of been left out. A lot of it's coming from him, but the film does what really good works of art do, which is make you sympathetic to a character you'd just avoid most of the time.

filmCAN I'm surprised you haven't mentioned Fido yet. A zombie comedy doesn't seem like the natural choice to open the Canada First! programme.

Steve Gravestock It's a lot more serious than you think. You can take it as a very light satire, but again, it's about that false suburban ideal. The town (the main characters) live in is this sort of quasi-50s, place that only ever existed on TV. But it's also about how the zombies are all enslaved, they're domestic help. And you can clearly read a lot of different levels into that, especially with all this immigration debate, the Lou Dobbs issues... there's a lot of smart genre work going on in Canada right now, and it's getting better and more interesting. End of the Line 's another great example of that. It's a bit more of a straight-up genre piece, whereas Fido 's more of a hybrid. Cheech is kind of a hybrid, too. The director, Patrice Sauvé, is one of the big TV directors in Quebec. He did two of the biggest series of the last seven or eight years, La vie la vie and Grande Ourse . The film is quite amazing for a first feature. It's beautifully stylized, with sort of gangster picture feel, but they're the kind of hoods who are worried about their psychological state, and whether they're happy enough...

filmCAN Sort of like the The Sopranos ?

Steve GravestockA little, but it has that sort of colour scheme that Un zoo la nuit had , those rich reds and cool blues. It's about competing call-girl rings, and there's a scene where somebody describes the spiffy call-girl spot, and basically breaks into a quasi-commercial - it just comes out of nowhere. There's a musical number in the middle of the film, too, which is just bizarre.

Igor Rizzi 's like that, too. There's a weird, sly sense of humour that's driving the film. It's about a former professional soccer player who ends up living in Quebec, and he's lost all his money, and he kind of just wanders around Montreal with a soccer ball, quite aimlessly, supporting his lifestyle by committing petty crimes. Mercy 's the same way - it's kind of like Wings of Desire in Tehran, with really kind of odd, humourous bits that pop up out of nowhere. It's about an angel who's been sent to grant people's wishes, but he either can't grant them the kind of wishes they're asking for, or can't get people to give him a wish. Half of it's shot on surveillance-like cameras. It's pretty inventive.

filmCAN That's an interesting question: how much does innovation catch your eye? Are you more likely to pay closer attention to a film that's doing something new?

Steve GravestockWe've shown a lot of edgy stuff, but we also show stuff that's relatively straightforward. Again, it's case by case. But you want to see something that's new. The whole thing about being a programmer is finding new stuff, new voices. That's easily the most exciting thing. So it's not a defining thing, but you like to see it, and usually, it's reflective of what's going on.

Canadians aren't really as aware as they should be of the great stuff we do. And it's fairly large budget stuff to really small, more innovative, artist-driven stuff. It's painful. You get a ridiculous question like, 'Well, there's no Egoyan or Cronenberg or Arcand film, so it's a slow year, right?' No, it's not a slow year! It's like the thing Jonathan Rosenbaum always goes on about: any country outside of the U.S. is automatically consigned to having one, maybe two major filmmakers. Which is total bullshit. [Rosenbaum] froths at the mouth about it most of the time, and he should, because it's crap. It'd be like saying it was a slow year in the U.S. because there wasn't a Tarantino or Scorsese film. It's a slow year in Iran because Abbas Kiarostami and Samira Makhmalbaf didn't have films.

filmCAN I wonder, would people in Iran say that? Whereas people here, I think, do think it's a slow year when there's no Cronenberg, Egoyan and so on.

Steve Gravestock We've got, you know, Guy Maddin, Gary Burns. These are really significant filmmakers. They haven't played certain festivals, but... Now, thankfully, people include Deepa [Mehta] on that list of major filmmakers. I think, before Water, she would've been a rather significant oversight. But you know, things go in production cycles, and filmmakers have their own pace of working.

filmCAN Cool. I wonder, on a more general level, how you got interested in Canadian film?

Steve Gravestock It was in a Grade 11 class. They showed us two films: Goin' Down The Road and Midnight Cowboy, because allegedly they're supposed to be somewhat similar setups. I was somewhat shocked to find out Goin' Down The Road was a better movie. Besides, it's important to know where you're coming from.