Friday, October 13, 2023

"A Canadian invasion at Sundance"/ "Birdland is less a gumshoe story, than it is a psychological portrait"

Jan. 13, 2018 "A Canadian invasion at Sundance": Today I found this article by Johanna Schneller in the Globe and Mail:


Creative Wealth Media

Last year, the Sundance Film Festival dropped a surprise title into their Tuesday night lineup: Get Out. It was received rapturously, became an instant cultural touchstone and is arguably the most important film of 2017.


This year, the surprise title in that Tuesday slot (Jan. 23) belongs to a Canadian company, BRON, run by spouses Brenda and Aaron Gilbert. They can't know whether their film will explode in the same way. They can't even say what film it is.

But since their company also has three other pictures blasting through Sundance's opening days, plus a half-dozen high profile titles ready for release, it looks like BRON itself is poised to break out. (The Sundance Film Festival runs from Jan. 18 to 28.)

"We're on a wild ride," Brenda said in a phone interview this week. They formed their company in 2010, consulting with film producers from their "very small home office." 

Now they have financial backing from Creative Wealth Media and 

a $50-million line of credit with Comerica Bank; 

a 20,000square-foot studio in Burnaby, B.C.; 

animation studios in Duncan, B.C., 

and London, Ont.; 

and offices and studio spaces in Los Angeles, New York and Toronto.


BRON - an acronym of their names, BRenda and aarON (they like that it sounds like "brawn") - 

creates, 

develops, 

produces 

and finances 

movies, television, animation and digital content. 

Sometimes they're in from a story's inception; other times, they come in later. Their 40-odd projects include 

the film Fences, which won an Oscar for Viola Davis;

the controversial The Birth of a Nation;

the excellent but underseen Beatriz at Dinner; 

and Denzel Washington's Roman J. Israel, Esq, 

written and directed by Dan Gilroy.


Although they've only done one Canadian film - Patricia Rozema's Into the Forest - they say they'd like to step that up.


Their 125 animators are developing The Willoughbys, voiced by Ricky Gervais, Terry Crews, Maya Rudolph and Martin Short. As well, they recently announced a TV partnership with former HBO executive Michael Ellenberg in a company called Media Res, which is behind Apple's first foray into television: The Morning Show, starring Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston.


Aaron, who grew up in London, Ont., and moved west at 20, had been film adjacent for decades, working in the music, animation and licensing businesses in Los Angeles and B.C.


But until 2009, when he helped a friend secure financing for the drama Daydream Nation, he'd never been on a set. Producing two "humble sci-fi movies," he says in a separate phone interview, taught him what grips and gaffers do, and he caught the bug.


"We quickly realized how much 

we loved assembling the pieces, 

making something special happen," Aaron says.


"There are easier businesses to be in. But I love finding an incredible 

script 

or article 

or story 

or writer. 

It became an addiction, a feeling we crave."


With zero track record, BRON's first job was getting access to talent. Producing 

Welcome to Me (2014), starring Kristen Wiig, 

and Rudderless (2014), starring Billy Crudup, 

put them on people's radar. 

Then came The Birth of a Nation. Although the film was welcomed by a wave of love at Sundance in 2016, it drowned when rape charges against writer/director/ star Nate Parker resurfaced.


"The end result, which was a situation we had nothing to do with, was disappointing and sad and hard to go through," Aaron says. "I'm still not over it, to be honest. But the making of the movie and the sale at Sundance helped put a light on BRON for sure."


"We said, 'Okay, where do we go from here?' " Brenda elaborates. "Aaron and I have been married since 1999. We have three kids" - a son, 17, and two daughters, 13 and 8. "We've been knocked down a lot, faced challenges, and they made us stronger. 

We saw it as an opportunity to communicate that we still believe in the kinds of films we want to make," 

which are ones that balance social and cultural relevance with commercial viability. 

(Any comparisons to companies such as Participant Media or Killer Films would be most welcome.)


"We want our films to be conversation pieces well beyond the theatre," Brenda says.


"There doesn't have to be consensus on the subject, but let's think about these ideas."


Fences and The Birth of a Nation deal with race issues.


Tully, due in April, from writer Diablo Cody, director Jason Reitman and star Charlize Theron, takes on postpartum depression. 

The Front Runner - also due in 2018; also directed by Reitman - stars Hugh Jackman as Gary Hart, a politician brought down by social media before the term social media existed.

The upcoming The Red Sea Diving Resort, starring Chris Evans, is an action thriller, but tells the real-life story of Mossad missions that saved 30,000 Ethiopian Jews. 

And The Nightingale, Jennifer Kent's followup to The Babadook due in August, tells the story of a female ex convict and an aboriginal man making their way through 1825 Tasmania.


As well, Brenda is launching BRON Life, a label focusing on "films that hit on the humanitarian level," 

and helped found Drawn Together Vancouver, a grassroots organization dedicated to getting more women into the upper echelons of the animation business.


It's no surprise to hear that she's an insomniac. "My friends are a little worried," Brenda admits, laughing. "I don't sleep a lot. I get up at 5, but I've been known to be up earlier, sending out e-mails. I try to exercise. I try not to e-mail when I'm exercising. But it's hard not to. I can stay in the studio for 14, 16 hours at a time, and never see the outside. People tell me about the weather." She laughs again. "I give great advice. I never take it."


At Sundance, BRON's films will premiere on four consecutive days: Saturday evening, it's Leave No Trace, from director Debra Granik (Winter's Bone), about a father (Ben Foster) and daughter living off the grid - not legally - in a nature reserve near Portland, Ore. 

Sunday at midnight it's Assassination Nation, from writer/director Sam Levinson, billed as "a one thousand-per-cent true story about how the quiet, all-American town of Salem, Massachusetts, absolutely lost its mind."


Monday afternoon it's Monster, starring Jennifer Hudson and Jeffrey Wright, about a 17-yearold honours student charged with murder. And Tuesday, it's the surprise drop.


"We're going to be taking our vitamins," Brenda says. "And we'll try to take a step back.


These moments go by quickly. I want to take it all in."


As Aaron puts it, "I hope we can sustain this for a long time."


https://www.pressreader.com/canada/the-globe-and-mail-bc-edition/20180113/282780651908755




Jan. 25, 2018 "Birdland is less a gumshoe story, than it is a psychological portrait": 

Today I found this article by Johanna Schneller in the Globe and Mail:


In what many would consider a shocking development, a renowned Canadian filmmaker approves of a Telefilm initiative.


The filmmaker is Peter Lynch, 60, best known for the documentaries Project Grizzly (1996) and Cyberman (2001); his first full-length feature, Birdland, opens in select cities on Friday.

The initiative is Telefilm's new Talent to Watch program, which will support 50 films a year at $120,000 (maximum) apiece, 

and will automatically green-light the second projects of filmmakers whose first features play top-tier festivals, contributing $500,000 per film.


I'm being cheeky, of course, but Lynch is sincere. He's feeding me coffee and pastries at his house on Toronto's west side. His dog scrabbles around. His cat leaps onto the table periodically. Lynch is a talker, but a generous one; he's about enthusiasm, not ego.


"Telefilm's direction with these microbudget features is the right one," he says. "To have more people in the mix, from every kind of background, age, gender, race, history, will create a hotbed of talent. 

And the idea that a second feature should happen more quickly – that's a key thing, to capitalize on any momentum."

Here he snort-laughs, because capitalizing on momentum hasn't been his style. In the 1980s, as video was exploding, Lynch created and ran an international festival, Video Culture. Sponsored by Sony, it showcased experimental artists including Nam June Paik, Twyla Tharp and Laurie Anderson. 

As fun as it was for six years – jet-setting to Japan, hanging out with artists – Lynch was facilitating other people's projects. About to turn 30, he optioned Brian Fawcett's short-story collection Cambodia: A Book For People Who Find Television Too Slow.


"I raised a lot of development money. Bruce McDonald was going to edit it," Lynch says. "I was cocky. But I over-researched it, to the point where I was avoiding making it. It became a liability."

Instead he made a documentary short, St. Bruno, My Eyes as a Stranger. 

He made a short feature, Arrowhead, starring Don McKellar. 

Then he made Project Grizzly, and that took off, playing festivals, earning a Genie nomination. 

Twenty years later, it's still popular; in the first two weeks of 2018, he received five requests to show it theatrically.

But did Lynch grab that bottle of lightening, run to the United States and amass his fortune?

 No. He made The Herd, a docudrama about a reindeer drive in the 1930s. 

He made Cyberman, which presaged Google Glass.

"I was having fun. I didn't notice the time ticking," he says. 

"Some of the things I pooh-poohed I maybe should have jumped on."

He continued to write scripts, though, and a few years ago, he finally committed to just making one already, no matter what it took. 

He chose Birdland, a moody tale of a detective named Hood (Kathleen Munroe, of Call Me Fitz) who installs cameras around her house to spy on her cheating husband, whose lover is sleeping with someone else, who ends up dead. 

He calls it post-noir. He uses words such as abstract, existential. The timeline is fractured. The pace is so dreamlike, it flirts with inert.

"I wanted to force the audience to be in the state of the characters' stream of consciousness and feel their loss of control," Lynch says. 

"I see it more as a psychological portrait rather than a gumshoe story."

He also wanted to explore big themes: 

the capacity for denial. 

The unreliability of memory. 

The ubiquity of surveillance. 

How people knowingly self-surveil by participating in social media. 

How we think we're controlling our own personas, when in fact they're controlling us. 

How, "in the age of post-truth, with Donald Trump impinging on our psyches, people tell what they prefer to be true," Lynch says. 

There are real birds, dead birds, stuffed birds and characters named after birds; they represent "our uneasy relationship to nature and the fragility of existence."

And because we're "colonized by the tropes of the detective genre," Lynch continues, he gives his woman protagonist both the agency and the lunacy that are "normally the purview of male detectives. We're used to watching men go off the rails, but when a woman does it, it makes us uneasy."

He shot it in a brisk 18 days, for a bargain $1-million. But even then, he had to call in favours: His artist friends got him access to shoot in Cadillac Fairview towers and at the Royal Ontario Museum; an architect pal lent him his condo; his production designer moved into his house; his wife, Caroline Christie, is his film editor.

Which all leads back to why a program such as Talent to Watch is so vital to Canadian culture. "Nowadays, even a $4-million feature needs a big star," Lynch says. "You're either David Cronenberg, Atom Egoyan or Sarah Polley, or you're doing microbudgets. 

To economically survive in Canada, most filmmakers want to get into television. So they make a calling-card feature, but only to get into TV."

Naturally, Lynch thinks television needs to be radicalized, too. "The last vestiges of TV as we know it should be taking risks now," he says. 

"They should be going, 'Let's apply the Netflix streaming model – we don't care what 80 per cent of people think about this, we care about the 20 per cent that love it.' 

Instead, they're just paying each other big salaries from the last bit of advertising they can squeeze out. Instead of being game-changers, we're about managing risks.

"It's our biggest crime, in a general sense," he goes on. "Television should help with access and momentum. Why don't our networks show indie dramas that play at TIFF? There's an appetite for them. It's within our reach to nurture filmmakers, the way British TV did for Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, or Germany for Wim Wenders and Michael Haneke. 

TV could help Canadians create a voice, and not just be a glorified camera jockey/traffic cop. We'll show Fargo, but we disguise Canada. Why are we hiding our voice?"

Quixotic to the end, Lynch is currently cobbling together funding for his next feature, Galveston, based on Paul Quarrington's novel about storm-chasers on a Caribbean island on the eve of a hurricane. "It's a no-exit story, and a love story in the age of global warming," he says. He's also working on a four-part series about Henry Hudson, with Sex Pistols on the soundtrack – "not your dad's history channel," as he puts it.

"Robert Lepage said that so much about the arts in Canada is stamina and bloody-mindedness," Lynch says, "because it doesn't make sense as a business proposition."
So why do it? "I'm just obsessed," Lynch says calmly. "I'm maniacal. I'm deluded enough. I'm so far down the road, I'm beyond the point of no return."

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/film/canadian-filmmaker-peter-lynchs-birdland-is-no-gumshoe-story/article37724101/

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