Over his twenty-year career, Allan Moyle has remained an unsung hero of Canada’s filmmaking elite. It could be because of the director’s choice to reside in Venice, California – or simply because the bulk of his best films were made outside of Canada. Yet despite where he’s lived or worked over the years, Moyle is still proud of where he came from. In fact, when FilmCAN spoke to the colourful director recently, he couldn’t contain his excitement over making his latest film (Weirdsville) in Canada and his plans to make all his films here from now on.
Allan Moyle first jumped into our collective consciousness at the dawn of the ’90s as the writer/director of one of the biggest cult films of the home videotape age, Pump Up the Volume. The film made a star out of Christian Slater and launched the career of an unknown Samantha Mathis. Moreover, it established Moyle within the Hollywood studio system as a groundbreaking director that could speak to and relate to the young folks.
The natural follow-up to Pump Up the Volume came five years later, when Empire Records hit theatres – or rather, home video – in 1995. For whatever reason, the film failed miserably at attracting a theatrical audience, but thrived upon release on VHS and eventually, DVD. Just like Pump Up the Volume, Empire Records displayed a youthful exuberance in tackling themes of rebellion and alienation, while painting a glossy portrait of what it was like to be a teenager in America. The cult film also gave career turning point roles to Renée Zellweger, who next starred in Jerry Maguire, and Liv Tyler, whose follow-up films included Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty and the Tom Hanks-directed hit, That Thing You Do!
Four years later, Moyle returned home to Canada to direct arguably the best film of his career: the pitch-perfect, Maritime-bent gem, New Waterford Girl. The film was a revelation in Canadian cinema: a regional story with honest, down-to-earth characters, which could play as a comedy while still confronting real and relevant themes. Moyle brilliantly captured the isolation of small town life and stirred a magical performance out of yet another unknown, Liane Balaban – who, in her very first role, practically stole the film. Despite netting seven Genie nominations and several festival prizes, New Waterford Girl failed to find the large-scale audience it deserved.
In the years following New Waterford Girl, Moyle worked consistently within the Canadian and Hollywood film systems, but failed to churn out a hit that matched the success and made the connection of his earlier works. On one of those productions, 2000’s Jailbait, Moyle met rising Canadian producer Nicholas Tabarrok, who would pass along the script to one of the most rewarding projects of the director’s career. Fast-forward to 2007: Moyle is back with the comeback film Weirdsville – a dark and devilishly funny comedy about a pair of junkie crooks who can’t seem to catch a break to save their lives. Throw in a couple Satan worshipers, a band of vigilante little people and a pair of curling stone-wielding drug dealers and things get, well – considerably weirder. For Moyle, the film marks a bit of a departure – the protagonists are real extroverts and the comedy is seriously offbeat, yet somehow the director seems more at home than ever (and I don’t just mean Canada).
FilmCAN sat down with Allan Moyle to talk about Weirdsville, making films in Canada and life in the matrix (no, not that matrix). We also hooked up with Weirdsville producer Nicholas Tabarrok to find out how the film came together, how they selected the soundtrack and his next collaboration with Moyle. (See below)
FILMCANWeirdsville really seems like a film that was born out of its script. Is that how the film came together – with Nicholas (Tabarrok, producer) getting the script to you?
ALLAN MOYLENicholas sent me the script, I read it and I jumped at it, and only after I agreed to do it did I realize how hard it was going to be to get the tone right. Luckily Nicholas gave us enough time to play with the weirdness of the movie structurally.
FILMCANWhen you read the script, did it feel like an Allan Moyle film right away?
ALLAN MOYLEWell, it’s pro-drug and I am, you know, “Allan R. Drug” – but in complicated way. I’m still mad at Nancy Reagan for “Just Say No!” – it was just such a silly approach to a very important part of our culture.
FILMCANI found, as a Canadian, this film, like some of your earlier works, has a real overt sense of Canadianness…
ALLAN MOYLEI’m very proud of that. The Canadian in-joke – and watching the movie last night (at TIFF) with a Canadian audience for the first time, I was smiling to myself because there are a lot of little Canadian nuances. The bong with the Canadian flag…
FILMCANThe curling…
ALLAN MOYLE…Yeah, death by curling. That’s sweet! That was all in the script – I mean, we augmented it. We decided that it wasn’t going to be shot as a “you know” movie. And then of course, we couldn’t get any snow.
FILMCANWas this a challenging film to get made? I’m not entirely clear – was this a Canadian-American co-production?
ALLAN MOYLEEverything’s a co-production in that bits and pieces come from everywhere, but the number one supporter was, believe it or not, the Government of Canada – who took a huge mind-blowing risk by supporting this movie, because they could get in trouble. They could get in hot water, don’t you think?
FILMCANAhhh…
ALLAN MOYLETelefilm, supporting drugs?
FILMCANYeah, I hear what you’re saying that the film is pro-drug. But I think it is and it isn’t. The characters bumble their way through this misadventure, despite being really high, but there is a desire in both of them to try and better themselves…
ALLAN MOYLEAnd they do. Maybe they go from hard drugs to pot, which isn’t even a drug, right? Yeah, it’s anti-drugs in that they end up as entrepreneurs and businessmen.
FILMCANBack to getting the film made – was this a difficult one because of the content?
ALLAN MOYLEThe people that saw the script knew immediately they had to make it somehow or other. So that’s the biggest door that you have to go through – “we will make this movie.” The decision and the commitment. Typically with me, and I think with any art, the commitment and the joy is opening the doorway and then the money flows to that energy by hook or by crook. We weren’t wringing our hands and we got some support right away. I mean, you need to cast a movie and actors – good actors, expensive actors – responded to the parts, so then we weren’t in that horrible position of making offers to actors with money we don’t have. The actors that we like, actor-actors, not movie stars – you know, neither Scott (Speedman), Taryn (Manning) or Wes (Bentley) work for money. They work for the opportunity to express themselves in an interesting way and the script did that for us, the story.
FILMCANFor someone who’s made films in both the Hollywood and Canadian system, how do you compare the two experiences?
ALLAN MOYLEMuch easier, much more fun, much more human, much more deep experience here. Everything’s better here. I mean, pick a category I’ll discuss it with you. Nobody makes movies in Los Angeles anymore anyway, at least not independent movies, its too expensive. Every time I come here to do a movie or to go to the festival or to visit friends, I trip out on how beautiful Canada is and I beg my wife, who’s sitting right over there, to move back to Canada. She’s Japanese, she likes the weather there [in California]. [To his wife, Chiyoko] Am I lying? There’s just something extremely human about it here. You walk along the street; everyone’s read a book in the last month. Everyone’s smoked a joint in their life. Everyone has this sly dissidence towards the insanity of the Bush administration…
FILMCANSo it all comes down to weather?
ALLAN MOYLENo, no, it all comes down to weather for my wife. But if she had to make movies, she’d have learned what I learned. Young Canadians go to New York or London or Los Angeles to see what its like. To see if they can figure out how it works. You know, it’s a new matrix, its fun to walk into it and try it – and we have friends there, many of whom are Canadians and guess who flocks together, to discuss endlessly, who we are? But you know, I make a movie here every year, that’s about nine months, so where would you say I live [to Chiyoko?] – “in your own world Allan!” Haha. Between Mars and Canada.
FILMCANIt struck me that in 1999, when you came back to Canada and made New Waterford Girl, it was the first Canadian film you’d made in a long time…
ALLAN MOYLEThat was a hard movie to get made…
FILMCANWhy was New Waterford Girl a difficult film to get made?
ALLAN MOYLEWe had to shoot on location, in the wind and rain, in kind of an extreme location, with not enough days and not enough money to do anything right. It was kind of a big stress just to get it done. In another movie I shot here, which will go unmentioned, which was so laughably difficult – we went from a shooting schedule of 25 days to 17 days because of some money problems – my wife talked me into doing the movie anyway, even though I was ready to quit. She said, “Why don’t you just do the best you can. Do the best you can and have fun and support everybody and get paid and let the movie be what it will be”. So I elected to do the movie, but for me, with a completely new approach which was, it’s not going to be perfect, its not even going to be good, its going to be whatever it’s going to be and I’m going to have fun everyday, and obviously just do the best I can. I learned this on the movie Say Nothing, a product movie – and then I brought that lesson to the making of Weirdsville – and I didn’t know that key thing when I was making New Waterford Girl.
FILMCANDo you feel like Weirdsville fits in well in your oeuvre?
ALLAN MOYLEYeah, it’s the most free and it’s the most fun. I've decided now it’s the most fun. And I’ve decided now to have fun, officially! I, Allan Moyle, declare that I will never do another movie that isn’t fun and uplifting with something deep and political and gleefully strange about it. Our next movie – catch the title, Nerds Vs. Vampires – is a comedy set at a comic book convention with lady vampires, hot lady vampires who can only feed on the blood of virgin males. Hence, they go to a comic book convention because there’s a high density of virgin males…
FILMCANGreat concept…
ALLAN MOYLEIt’s a phenomenal concept! It’s written by a very, very smart guy, Lee Hoverd. It’s clever. It’s like Weirdsville. Imagine Weirdsville set in a comic book convention – think of the fun we’re going to have.
FILMCANAre you shooting that soon?
ALLAN MOYLEYeah, we don’t have a cast yet, but the script is ready and the ideas are ready. And again, that film will get made, even if we have to shoot it in a hotel with a cell phone.
FILMCANAnd is it going to be a Canadian film?
ALLAN MOYLEDeeply Canadian! The writer Lee Hoverd is Canadian, Nicholas (Tabarrok) is Canadian, and I’m Canadian. It takes place in a hotel ballroom. I mean, we could shoot it in Romania, but why, we’ve got the hotel rooms here. I just smile thinking about how much fun we’re going to have.
FILMCANThere’s one thing in particular I wanted to talk to you about. It’s present in all of your films, this rock n’ roll sensibility. Dating back to Pump Up the Volume…
ALLAN MOYLEDating back to me seeing Performance (Donald Cammell/Nicolas Roeg, 1970) when I was your age. That was a Jack Nitzsche score with all songs, do you remember?
FILMCANNo I haven’t seen it…
ALLAN MOYLE You haven’t seen that movie? That movie changed my life. Go see it. Yeah, recording with songs is so much more fun. I do that, its nothing new. It’s a signature of mine…
FILMCANYes it is…
ALLAN MOYLE I’m not the only person who does it. But what’s unique in Weirdsville is we did it with such a low budget, because there’s so much talent around. Theoretically, you have a song purchase budget – a quarter of a million minimum, because you want to buy 10 songs at $25,000 each. But then Nicholas my producer says we need that money for something else. He says, is it okay if we spend some of your beloved music budget on Wes Bentley and I said yeah! If we can get Wes Bentley, cool and we’ll deal with the music later. So we ended up having to use all unknown bands and that was so much fun. We actually have the wank of having a good soundtrack and uplifting all these bands. So why not do this on purpose next time? Especially if you have great music people like John Rowley (music supervisor) and the editor Michael Doherty and even Nicholas the producer. You wouldn’t think a producer would be bringing songs, but he’s got hundreds of songs in his machine. He lies at home on his bearskin run with a cigar – I’m just imagining it – listening to songs. He brought more songs to the party than I did.
FILMCANIs there one film in your career that stands out, that you’re most proud of?
ALLAN MOYLEWow… you know, I’ve never been asked that. I wrote Pump Up the Volume, so I have a soft spot for that. And it happened at a certain stage in my career, before I’d been beaten up that much. It was a time of no impossibilities for me and I had a good time making that movie. And then I got deeper into the studio system and had a really checkered time. So I would say I was joyful making Pump Up the Volume and now I’m joyful again, thirty years later, but this time I think I know how it works. So I’m grateful and, what was that phrase, “it’s never too late to have a happy life”? “Its never too late to grow up?” “Its never too late…” It’s this great comical phrase, I’ll think of it…
But you know, my wife’s Buddhist. I now believe there’s no such thing as time. There’s no such thing as even this body and your body. It’s all this vast movie that we’re in. It’s multi-dimensional and the fact that we’re making movies within that matrix is even more crazy. I can’t control it, I’m just going to live it and hopefully make more movies like this (Weirdsville) for an audience.
FILMCANDo you believe that someone’s controlling this matrix that we’re in?
ALLAN MOYLEOouuu, wow. I now believe that whatever’s controlling this matrix is a benign force. I used to think you had to struggle to turn on the tap from a source of goodness and you had to make deals, like through religions and things like that. I’m now passed all that. I now think that you can choose for the matrix to be a benign force and low and behold, it smiles on you and then everything you do is easy. The universe is doing all the heavy lifting. So the older I get the less hard I work – on anything. In fact, I tell people, please do not work on that, please do not work, please do not worry, stay joyful and the solutions are going to flow to us.
FILMCANI believe that…
ALLAN MOYLEYou believe it, but try telling that to technicians on a movie when the cranes are falling.
FilmCAN hooked up with Weirdsville producer Nicholas Tabarrok to find out how the film came together, how they selected the soundtrack and what his next collaboration with Moyle will look like.
FILMCANTell us a little bit about how this film came to fruition…
NICHOLAS TABARROKIt’s so strange how one day it can be beloved and the next day it can be… no one wants to touch it. I think I optioned the script in 2001-2002 and there was this initial burst of interest and we got some development money and then we just hit a brick wall. I just couldn’t seem to get any traction on it and no one seemed to be going for it. So I kind of shelved it and I made [The Life and Hard Times of] Guy Terrifico (Michael Mabbott, 2005) and I made The Limb Salesman (Anais Granofsky, 2004) and I made another film in the meantime and then it picked up again a year-and-a-half later. By then, regimes had changed, there were different people at different companies and it caught fire again. It was the very end of 2004 when this film really got started and then it just went boom-boom-boom-boom-boom – and everything just fell into place. But right ’til the very end, we had a disagreement with our US distributor and we lost some financing and I had to scramble very hard and very fast to replace it. It’s always very difficult to make a movie, no exception.
FILMCANI understand you’ve made films both in the Canadian system and the American system – how would you compare working in those two different spheres?
NICHOLAS TABARROKIts funny, to me it’s not really that different. I think what’s different is the independent system and the studio system. When you’re getting financed entirely from one source and the studio owns the picture – I’ve never been in that situation – I think you’re almost an employee. Both times where I’ve worked with US financing and Canadian financing, it’s always sort of been independent, its always drawn from different sources, its always cobbling together four or five pieces of money, adding it together and making the film that way. So really, the geography of it isn’t that different. Its very similar, same struggles, same obstacles and challenges. I think the difference really isn’t so much the nationalistic one, than it is the difference between indie filmmaking and studio filmmaking. I haven’t had the chance to do the latter, but I’d like to have a shot at it.
FILMCANWeirdsville has a really great and relatively high profile cast, especially for a Canadian film. Was assembling this cast important in getting this film into production?
NICHOLAS TABARROKYes and no. It was more important to me. It wasn’t as if this was an absolute line in the sand for the financing. It always helps make financing easier and better, but really it was a creative thing that Allan and I wanted. We just wanted these people. We wanted a high profile cast. Its sort of my philosophy of filmmaking is that you really want to aim high and get a high profile cast.
FILMCANWeirdsville really has a terrific soundtrack – one of things that Allan [Moyle] mentioned to me when we were talking about the film is that you had to take away some of his music budget in order to pay for other costs. I’m curious to hear about the process of selecting songs for the film and how that came together…
NICHOLAS TABARROKIt wasn’t quite as literal as Allan put it… though I suppose he’s right. Songs is one of those measurable budget line items, it can be $100,000, it could be $50,000 – it’s not like a piece of grip equipment or a camera, where it absolutely costs this much and there’s no getting around it. So it is one of the places that unfortunately get robbed in order to pay for other things. But the process was great. We had John Rowley as the music supervisor, who’s a fantastic guy and really just a fountain of knowledge for music, as is our editor Michael Doherty – and so are Allan and I for that matter. So really, we all contributed music. We probably selected, sifted through 400-500 songs to get to the 30 that we eventually chose. In certain cases – you wouldn’t know it if you heard it – but the songs that you’re hearing are maybe our third or fourth choice, because the first couple weren’t available. In some cases, the band had broken up and they didn’t want to work together anymore and they just didn’t want to give us permission. Another band just flat out refused to license their songs to films. But that’s my most fun part of the job – sitting around in the edit room with Allan, the editor and the music supervisor and we’ll take one scene and try four different songs against it. It’s a fun process and I really get off on it. We spent days and days and days doing that and I think we ended up with a great end result.
FILMCAN Allan was telling me a little bit about a new project that you’re working on, Nerds Vs. Vampires… what can you tell me about that script and how that production is coming along?
NICHOLAS TABARROKIt’s coming along great, its something we’re really excited about. The title says it all, Nerds Vs. Vampires, what more could you ask for? And it’s literal. It’s about this special sect of vampires who happen to be beautiful women, and not only do they have to feast on blood to survive, it has to be virgin blood. And where do you go to find a bunch of virgins? A sci-fi convention! So these three sexy vampires descend on this sci-fi convention and our little band of intrepid nerds figure it out and have to fight them off. It’s a really fun script, we’re developing it now, working on some initial casting ideas and we’re looking to shoot it next year.
