Denis Côté is the greatest contemporary hope for salvaging the independent spirit of the art film in Canada. Think that’s an exaggeration? Name me a Canuck filmmaker who has won as many awards (Les états nordiques, his debut, won the Goldern Leopard at Locarno and screened at TIFF in 2005; his 15 shorts (since 1997) have won countless awards; and Nos vies privées played Locarno and now TIFF again), or simply produced as many feature films with a particular cinematic point of view over the past three years. While most English Canadian hopes (Scott Smith, Keith Behrman, etc., etc.) often take more than 4-5 years between features, Côté is about to shoot Elle veut le chaos, his highest budget feature to date (“about a million”), and will have it finished for the festival circuit around this time next year (2008). By then his feature filmography will include Les états nordiques (2005), Nos vies privées (2007), and Elle veut le chaos (2008). When you also factor in his no-budget know-how, borne out of a necessity to combat national funders (and exhibitors) who turn their backs, his feats are even more impressive – LEN cost $60,000; NVP about $20,000. Indeed, to any filmmaker looking to make a splash with a debut film, Côté is an ideal art-over-commerce model to examine, thankfully (finally) providing results to start the process of dismissing the bloated melodramas of annual festival favourites Thom Fitzgerald and Carl Bessai, or the middle-of-the-road comedies that garner greater attention for their hokey titles (Phil The Alien, Young People Fucking) than for being a genuine attempt at serious cinema.
Yet over the course of Côté’s progress, not many critics in the English Canadian cinema scene have taken notice of this former critic’s refreshingly vital filmmaking spirit. Toronto’s NOW magazine, never a bastion for engaged cinematic discussion, panned Les états nordiques in its 2005 TIFF coverage with the most scathingly dismissive review I’d ever seen – until this year, and his new film. Writing under a heading cloaked in critical negativity and ignorance – “What You Should Miss” – not only did they dismiss Côté’s film again, they did it with ONE SENTENCE (the full review is no nicer), simultaneously panned Le cèdre penché, Rafaël Ouellet’s debut feature (Ouellet is Côté’s Director of Photography) and, at least online, made the name of the reviewers impossible to find. Not all Canadian critics have been as unnecessarily cruel to Côté, but not many have jumped on his bandwagon, either.
The value of a film like Nos vies privées, though, must stand outside of such context, on its own legs – and it does. A combination of unique character framing against the scenery, and a penchant for fascinating psychological confrontations make it a rapturous, active cinematic experience. Narratively, it’s the story of Milena (Anastassia Liutova), who has rented a house in the woods outside Sherbrooke to hang out with Philip (Penko Gospodinov), a Bulgarian lover she met online. He arrives at the outset of the film, they enjoy each other’s physical presence, and inevitably start to find faults in one another and their relationship. Soon events seemingly orchestrated by the environment around them impinge upon their love, sending their idyllic retreat into dark personal isolation and introspection. Ouellet’s photography consistently highlights the characters over the landscape; only a few gorgeous misty shots of a nearby pond provide a respite from their relationship’s mutual isolation. This point seems key to Côté’s approach to the film, as he recently denounced citizenship in cinema quebecois (proper), instead claiming membership in Truffaut’s Planet Cinema, a place of storytelling only beholden to the medium itself, not place of origin or descent. Côté’s desire to make a film about the condition of being human, as precocious as that may sound, is in actuality an ideal point for bodies like Telefilm to consider. Everyone loves, fucks, and worries the other doesn’t love them at some point, and this basic but universal condition turns out to be a key catalyst of Côté’s film – on the slow, foggy surface, at least, and before the psychology of the narrative kicks in.
No, NVP is not a perfect film: the rationale of the narrative starts to unravel with the intrusion of a strange man, Guillaume (Jean-Charles Fonti), and, despite its healthy open ending, it arguably wraps up too quickly. But, again, considering his budget and the alternatives, it’s a relative slice of heaven. Has Côté reached auteur status on the strength of two solid features? Clearly not in the mind of this country, and ultimately only time will tell. But for now he represents a beacon of light that places like Telefilm, TIFF, and other government-funded institutions with an extreme grip on the supposed tastes of a nation might turn to as a successful model of independent filmmaking. If so, perhaps they’ll start to demand new thoughts and visions from our cinema, not the tired old ‘box office’ cliché.
I asked Cote to put aside his plethora of projects (he begins shooting Elle veut le chaos right after TIFF) to answer a few questions about his filmmaking process, the Canadian critical and industrial climate, and why the woods outside Sherbrooke are not exactly what you might hope for – especially if you’re from Bulgaria.
FILMCANLet's start with the end. Without spoiling the film, the things that happen to your two main characters in the final 10-15 minutes are very unsettling, and ultimately don't offer much hope – for reconciliation, moving forward, coming to terms with the present. Why make those types of choices for your characters and narrative?
DENIS CÔtÉI
agree that the film is constructed in two distinct parts
and most viewers will naturally choose their favorite one. The first
part is quite narrative[-driven] and I would say comfortable, borderline “cute”.
I think the actors are wonderful and it’s easy to connect with them.
But after the 40-minute [mark] in the writing, I personally
got to the point where I find it asphyxiating watching these
two happy birds getting into small (i.e. pointless) arguments, testing
each other’s
intimacies, intentions and all… I needed something else, more mysterious,
more cinematic, more troubling. Silence maybe.
So the second part, despite its hopelessness, is in my opinion
much more rewarding and challenging for a filmmaker. And I
hope for the viewer, even if I must admit the second part appeals more
to die-hard cinephiles or film critics.
Ending the story on such a sad note is also based
on a good percentage of these ‘online dating experiences’, especially the long-distance,
painful ones. Let’s face it, it never finishes well or even develops
in a satisfying way. I shouldn’t hide that I experienced the whole
thing myself. When a Russian girl tells you after two months of chatting
that you are the most important man in her life, there’s a problem… or
the blooming of a story in my head!
FILMCANThroughout the film the landscape was
often denied a point of view (from the characters). There are
many shots from behind their head, drifting left or right,
but never really revealing their encounter with an unusual
object, or giving us a sense of their feelings of their context within
the surroundings, perhaps other than of fear of the unknowable. In particular,
why are the woods around Sherbrooke such a negative experience for these
two lovers from Bulgaria?
DENIS CÔtÉIn
my first feature, Les états
nordiques, landscape was all over the place. Then I started watching
films and always being astonished at how many times filmmakers
use “landscape
shots”, a sky, a tree, a lake etc. just to create a link between
scenes. Maybe wrongfully, I thought it was all about insecurity.
I thought that too often, we try to transform landscape into a character.
Its beautiful when its well done – Bruno Dumont, Terrence Malick
or architecture in Antonioni’s work – but usually, I think
we collect or cowardly paste these shots in our editing just to feel comfortable;
we think the rhythm of our film is more appropriate, poetic
or whatever. So I thought, Nos
vies privées will be all about characters, their humanity,
their intimacy, their bodies, their personal confusion. And
somehow, NOT seeing the woods, NEVER seeing the skies, not
concentrating on objects is more mysterious. Maybe I’m wrong.
FILMCANIn La Presse you declared: "Quebec
cinema has a language. Cinema (of the) planet doesn't. Nos vies privées doesn't
wear a tag, doesn't have a cultural identity." Why is this important
to you, and how does it impact your approach to filmmaking
and storytelling?
DENIS CÔtÉFrançois
Truffaut used the term Planet Cinema to talk about films that don’t
wear a tag. When I make a film, I’m not selling you a cause, I’m
not selling you politics. I’m not making films to change the world
or to tell you not to shop at Wal-mart. So, pushing the envelope a little,
wanting to be different, pushes me to create “filmic objects” more
than conventional narrative films. It’s as simple as that I guess. Nos
vies privées is
about disconnection, intimacy and personal troubles. It’s universal.
I simply don’t feel very Quebecois when I make a film. I feel like
a human being, so political questions, cultural frontiers or
territorial barriers seem quite abstract to me at some point.
In what way is Tropical
Malady a Thai film? In what way is Claire Denis a typical French filmmaker?
They are from Planet Cinema and they don’t have a cultural, political
or moral agenda as far as I’m concerned.
FILMCANHow did you conceive of the film's primary story and style, and at what point did you turn to the Bulgarian actors?
DENIS CÔtÉLes états
nordiques won
a prize in Korea and I decided to use the money for a new project.
$5,000 was used for equipment. $5,000 was used for the actors’ trip
to Montreal and accommodations. None of my collaborators were paid
so they became natural co-producers. We shot the whole thing in 12
days with the Panasonic DVX100B and we added another $8,000 for postproduction.
Whole budget is about $20,000.
FILMCANHow did you cast the actors, and how
did the story develop in relation to casting, production and
editing?
DENIS CÔtÉEditing was funny because of course I don’t understand Bulgarian. But the script, unlike all the improvisation in Les états nordiques, was all written to the last detail. Some translators helped us and everything was completed quite naturally. I learned that creating a film is not only about dialogue and language… Nobuhiro Suwa did the same with Un couple parfait. He doesn’t understand a word of French and… you probably see the result!
FILMCANWhat kind of working relationship do you have with Rafaël Ouellet, your director of photography on the film, and also the director of Le cèdre penché, which you produced?
DENIS CÔtÉRafaël
is a true artist, much more open-minded than me. He loves pop culture,
he’s an A1 technical whiz;
I need him. Maybe he needs me for some other stuff like my
one-man-indie-distribution-machine attitude or skills or whatever.
Actually we made a deal to each shoot our own film during Summer 2006.
He made Le
cèdre penché for
less than $10,000. We do guerilla projects, with the qualities
and weaknesses it implies. We think fast, work fast, shoot fast. Maybe
too fast sometimes.
FILMCANWhere has the film screened so far, where
will it be screening soon, and what has the reaction been?
DENIS CÔtÉIt
was launched at Rendez-vous du Cinéma
québécois [Quebec City, February 2007]. Then it was in Competition
in Locarno (always an amazing experience, with great crowds).
After TIFF, next stops are Reykjavik, Ghent, Paris, Germany, Argentina
and more to come I guess. I got rejected by a lot of Canadian festivals
but the European reaction is stronger. How I should interpret that, I don’t
know.
FILMCAN Do your films screen theatrically in Quebec outside of festivals?
DENIS CÔtÉWe should find a way, yes. Some two-week runs in a nice Montreal arthouse – place is expected soon. Les états nordiques was quite successful; people want to see this new effort, I guess.
FILMCANNotably as a former critic used to engaging readers with opinions on a film or filmmaker, how do you respond to the negative, ambiguous criticism your films receive in places like NOW magazine, or the lack of attention from mainstream Canadian media outlets? Does the response from international media and critics differ, and is that where you take some inspiration?
DENIS CÔtÉI
start production of a new film in three weeks on a $1 million budget
plan. I never had this kind of money for a project. After two features
made without any help, I feel that Sodec and Telefilm wanted to give
me total liberty for something. It’s called Elle
veut le chaos (natural translation would be She Wants Chaos).
It’s a black and white tragic/comic melodrama/western about a sad
girl surrounded by five angry men in an isolated place. Should
be ready around April ’08. Great team, great cast.
FILMCAN A lot of talented Canadian directors
are unable to make feature films more often than every four or five years.
Three parts: A) How do you manage to make films so fast, B) how do you
feel about making films so quickly, and C) what keeps driving you to make
a feature every year?
DENIS CÔtÉThat question is haunting me: why so fast? Maybe it has to do with the fact that I can’t do anything else, I feel empty and useless very fast; I had health problems lately so crazy ideas get into your head. I will slow down, I’m sure. But I’m already starting to work on distributing a new short film, so…
I first encountered Martin Gero at a comedy club in Toronto, where he was a regular, often inspired performer at the Catch 23 improv show. It was outside that same club that Gero and writing partner Aaron Abrams would come up with the seed for their first feature film project, Young People Fucking.
Homegrown big screen comedy is hard to sell to Canadians, so it’s all the more noteworthy that YPF managed to score the opening slot for this year’s Canada First! Programme at TIFF. Taking time out from his role as a writer and producer of the popular sci-fi series, Stargate: Atlantis, Gero spoke me with me about comedy, the benefits of television experience, the Canadian film question and, of course, young people fucking.
FILMCANSo how was this idea conceived?
MARTIN GEROAaron Abrams and I were just talking outside Catch 23 one night and telling stories about the sex that we’d had as single guys, and I was like, it’s crazy that this is all crazy, hilarious stuff that happens to everyone I know, and no one’s making a movie about it.
FILMCANSo, this idea has been a long time in the making, then?
MARTIN GEROAaron and I became friends because Aaron had one of those cards that lets you see movies for free. I was a freelance writer, so I had a ton of free time, and also had a penchant for seeing three or four movies a day, so we would just go to movies and talk about movies. Aaron had written a bunch of plays around town that were kind of unproduceable, because they were like 110-scene plays – they were basically movie scripts, but he didn’t want to write a movie script because he didn’t know how to get a movie made, basically. When I got my job on Stargate, I was kind of desperate to find something to write in that first year that wasn’t Stargate. We both really love romantic comedies, but for us, romantic comedies have been kind of sanitized. They usually end at that first kiss – whereas for us, the really interesting part begins after that first kiss.
FILMCANYour background includes a lot of improv. How much of the film was improvised, if any?
MARTIN GEROVery little of it. I do come from an improv background, but I really think improv is killing movies a lot, especially comedy, because it tends to become a laugh competition. We don’t really have any gags in our movie – all of the humour comes out of the situation. Aaron and I spent close to two and a half years getting the script to work. We both are big fans of runners in scripts and there’s deliberate patterns and equality between the characters. The shit thing is, not everyone’s great at improv, and these [scenes] are all two-handers. So if you get one person that’s awesome at improv, then it kind of cuts the legs out of that other performer who’s awesome at script stuff. As a director, though, I really like to do a lot of takes, and inevitably, what you do is you go, well, we’ve done this seven or eight times already, so let’s do a loose one – you don’t have to use the exact words, [as long as] the basic beats are still there. So that was a way to kind of improvise while maintaining the structure of the scene.
FILMCANWas it tough to sell a comedy? Lots of Canadian movies that get attention and press are still pretty dour. This one seems blatant about its status as a comedy.
MARTIN GEROWhen we had the first reading about two or three years ago, my agent at the time turned to me and said, “Great, you’ve just written your best script ever, and it’s never going to get made. It’s way too sexually explicit, and it’s a comedy, and if you want to make it in Canada we’re maybe screwed here.” [But] we had the luxury of having time to develop the script on our own without having to rely on other people’s money. We really got the film to the point where it was in very good shape. I think comedies are tough to get off the ground because, even movies that are going to be funny movies don’t necessarily read funny. So Aaron and I went to great pains to make the screenplay a funny read. The scene description was more like a novel than dry scene description. I guess it’s a technique that worked for us, because, to be honest, it just never came up. My experience as a director and how explicit the film was were bigger drawbacks.
FILMCANYour experience on Stargate is pretty extensive. How did you use that to say, this is what I’m going to do with the film?
MARTIN GEROBeing a writer-producer on Stargate… the directors are phenomenally involved, but the producers do have a fair amount of control, and more so than in the film world, we have final cut. So it was an easy sell once I could get in the room with people. It’s almost like there’s a vocabulary, a basic understanding of the realities of production I think they’re afraid novice directors will not have. The second I showed them that I understood how to plan a day, and simple things about how the logistics of production go (it was fine).
You know, I’m so thankful that I did three years of Stargate before this, because I was in that environment. That was more film school and short films than I could ever do. Also, it helped that the script is very specific in how it should be executed. It doesn’t leave a lot to the imagination except for maybe, like, colour palette. We did a lot of the directing in the script.
FILMCANSo you more or less already answered this question, but I suppose working on Stargate allowed you an amount of financial freedom that most filmmakers don’t have.
MARTIN GEROWell, it’s a weird double-edged sword, because it allowed us the financial freedom to do this film for zero, or very close to zero. But, you know, it’s my job, and I felt like I was super busy before I added a film on top of it. I really cannot say enough about the contributions Aaron made. It’s weird – when you’re making the movie it’s like, Aaron and I, Aaron and I, Aaron, and I. With the way the films are sold and the way people are used to dealing with films, it’s like all of a sudden Martin Gero’s Young People Fucking, and it’s not something I’m comfortable with. This film was a real partnership between Aaron and I.
FILMCANNow that you’ve entered the world of Canadian film, as opposed to just Canadian media, have you experienced the typical kind of paranoia or neurosis about, are people going to see the movie, how many people, why won’t people just go see a Hollywood film instead? Is that palpable to you yet?
MARTIN GEROWe’re not even near release, so right now it’s getting the industry excited about it and the press excited about it. I’ll be honest with you – I think I’m in the minority, here, but I think Canadian film actually has a better chance of getting seen than American independent film in Canada. I think that theatres, for the most part, go out of their way to try to showcase Canadian film. The real problem is that either A) films are marketed incorrectly, or B) aren’t good. The other thing is, Canadians are not famous for making feel-good movies. And the scenario for great word of mouth is when people have a lot of fun at a movie. People rarely go to the office the next morning and say, “Oh man, I had my heart torn out by this movie last night, you gotta go see it!” Buzz for a comedy versus a drama is a lot easier. When we finished our first cut, our sentiment was, man, I have no idea how good a movie we just made, but we made a movie that is definitely not bad. If people see it, I think we’ll find an audience for it.
