LF: Leonard Farlinger, director, writer and producer, New Real Films MG: Marc Glassman, editor, Montage Left: On the set of I’m Yours Leonard Farlinger (Canada, 2011) Below left: On the set of Trigger Bruce McDonald (Canada, 2010) Bottom left: Leonard Farlinger with Bruce McDonald Below: Farlinger with partner Jennifer Jonas (left) and actor Rachael Leigh Cook on the set of All Hat Leonard Farlinger (Canada, 2007)
LEONARD FARLINGER SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY I’m Yours (2011) Director, writer Trigger (2010) Producer Leslie, My Name is Evil (2009) Producer George Ryga’s Hungry Hills (2009) Executive Producer Otto; or, Up with Dead People (2008) Co-Producer Toronto Stories (2008) Co-producer All Hat (2007) Director Monkey Warfare (2006) Producer In the Dark (MOW) (2004) Director The Perfect Son (2000) Director, writer Collateral Damage (1993) Director, writer, producer Kumar and Mr. Jones (1991) Producer
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Photographs, courtesy of New Real Films
Odyssey In August (1990) Producer
MG: Your new feature drama I’m Yours does a lot of the things that people complain Canadian films never do. It has a really engaging storyline. You could argue that it’s a genre film, a road film. It’s an edgy film about people falling in love. Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night won five Academy Awards in 1934 with a film about a couple falling in love while on the road. Were you thinking about that film and others while you were working on I’m Yours? LF: It’s a bit of a hybrid and homage to a lot of my favourite films. I thought of Breathless, more than anything else, and Five Easy Pieces, but also Something Wild and all those berserk sexy ’80s movies. It’s got a piece of that and a piece of my own crazy personality. One of my pet peeves about independent movies in general, and it’s not specifically a Canadian thing, is that sex and romance are always tainted. It’s always a mess. And that’s just not interesting to me. I want people to have sex and to fall in love and for it to be okay. There’s a lot of that in I’m Yours. And my one agenda, if I have no other agenda, is that I didn’t want it to make it cynical. People are afraid that if they don’t make cynical stories that they’ll end up with something cheesy and stupid and not worth watching. That’s the real challenge. That was my mandate in the film—to make a love story that isn’t cynical. One of the things about all the movies Jennifer [Jonas] and I make [at New Real Films] is that, at their heart, there’s something redemptive about them. And that’s a choice. I have heard people say that the non-redemptive film is dead. Jennifer and I aren’t interested in having the kind of company that makes cold, contemptuous films. Because it’s too long to go through the process of making a film just to come out with a cynical answer. MG: For I’m Yours to work, there has to be some real chemistry happening with the leads. How did you make your choices, casting Rossif Sutherland and Karine Vanasse as your couple? LF: I saw Rossif in High Life, talked to him on the phone and cast him first. I went down after that and looked at all these super-hot American broads. Then someone thought of Karine and I loved her in Polytechnique and Emporte-Moi. She flew to Toronto from Montreal and it was the first time she’d ever done an English audition. And I thought, “You know what? It’ll be so much cooler if my female lead was French and exotic.” It’s like having Julie Delpy opposite Ethan Hawke in those Linklater films or Melanie Laurent in Beginners. It’s a neat way to do it, you know? Then it’s different no matter what. MG: Did you change the script after Rossif and Karine were cast? LF: The two of them changed the film because of who they are as people. In a way, I’m Yours was much broader before they were cast. It was much more ‘snappity-snap, funny line, funny line, funny line…’ We took all that out because what the actors were doing seemed so real. We started thinking when we were cutting the script, ‘Wow, it’s so cool when they don’t talk.’ When they just look at each other, you give the audience something to do. Instead of just sitting there, hearing people chat, going ‘I get it, I get it’... the audience can be surprised. Who cares what they’re saying, anyway? It’s what’s going on internally that’s more interesting anyhow. Whether or not you like Karine and Rossif, they both have very internal lives. They’re amazing to hang out with and amazing to watch perform and amazing to watch imbuing themselves in the characters. You give them ideas and they just start processing them. They’re re-
ally different. Karine is so experienced and knows how to hang out in front of the camera. She knows how to look beautiful and emotes to everything – basic stuff like waking up and being mad and being sexy and being passionate. That’s like breathing for her. She’s been doing it since she was 11 years old, right? And Rossif…how many Canadian leading men can you even think of that can do what he does in the film? That could actually sit there and objectify themselves enough to think, ‘All right, I can sit here and look at this girl and have her want me’ and not get fucked up about it? MG: It sounds like you ditched a lot of your script and allowed for quite a bit of improvisation. That shows a lot of confidence on your part. LF: You do get more confident. And you need to come to the point of just loving being on set. It’s a great place to be when you’re a director. Just to be there and get to watch all of these talented people doing amazing shit for you. I really liked what Karine and Rossif were doing. Rossif is such a serious actor and at the same time is such a beautiful guy in real life so he brings that to the role. To Karine, I kept on saying ‘You know, Karine, you’re in this movie and it’s so real what you’re doing.’ Always encouraging her to be herself. And they really liked and respected each other, which made all the difference. I let the process guide the narrative and accepted that in a character film, if it’s not going to be genuine for them, then it isn’t going to be real or interesting for anyone. MG: Do you think that changing the feel of the film will affect how I’m Yours does in the theatres? LF: The whole thing about making these small independent movies is to try and figure out some way to make them different, because they aren’t going to be American movies. That’s the painful truth about what’s getting financed in Canada and what’s not getting financed now. I think what’s easier to finance are derivative Americanstyle movies. And to a certain extent that makes perfect sense. We’re developing some of those kinds of movies ourselves. The goal we’re all trying to achieve is to generate real box-office numbers. It’s a laudable goal, but it might be ushering in the death of our national cinema. You remember that notion we had once upon a time that we were going to have a national cinema and national stars and that was the way to go? I think we’re skewing a bit more to wanting to make more American-like movies because they’re the ones that are successful. It’s probably not a good time to pitch a remake of Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould. We feel that we should be emulating their style and their approach to making movies. It’s reasonable, I guess, in the homogenized theatrical world where we’re getting to be more and more the same. And where independent films have huge Hollywood stars in them but are somehow still independent movies. It’s amazing how Hollywood has come back to the top, the way that it was in the mid-‘60s, before that revolution of filmmakers came along and changed everything. Now Hollywood is back in control again. MG: You feel that way even here in Canada? LF: Totally. Look at the theatres, man. Do we have five percent English-Canadian movies in the theatres? Is it one percent? It’s nothing. It’s because what is seen in most of our theatres is controlled. And it’s a subtle control. It’s not like the old Jack Valenti model, where the Hollywood guys were screaming, ‘We won’t make any movies up in Canada anymore if we don’t get our way.’ The truth now is that it’s what people have been bred and educated to want to see and they don’t even know about other movies because they’re not being told to watch them. MG: Do you feel limited by the kind of budgets you have to deal with here? LF: I guess so. It’s an interesting question. When the story is right and the location is great, I like to feel [like], ‘Yeah, you don’t have to bring fall 2011
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