Samantha Swan and Christopher Comrie decided one day they were going to make a feature film. They were going to shoot it in Mexico. They were going to do it with the money they had and, damn it, it was going to be good. And it was. I was invited by a friend of the filmmakers to a screening in Toronto in June specifically because the friend knew I was a writer and that I would be interested in a local couple who had made a movie. I walked in blind and was pleasantly surprised to find a film rich in nuances and texture that was certainly on par with most of the similar dramas to come out of Hollywood in the last few years.
At the party afterwards I was able to speak to them, handing over my card and noting that I would very much like to sit down and chat to them about the momumental task of making this film (or any film), as well as the general “state of the art” of filmmaking in Canada. This is the first in a series of my conversation with them in late June at Cafe Brassiliano. For a full review of the Devil’s Tail, click here. The Devil’s Tail is honoured to be a part of the Moving Images Film Festival this weekend coming, where you can see a public screening of this wonderful film. Don’t miss it.
Samantha: Even though Trista is press I let her in on a little secret, the real secret is that Chris and I like to be interviewed together so we can try to stop each other from saying stupid things.
Chris: D’Oh!!
S: So she might get the sense that we’re kicking each other under the table.
C: Back a few years ago when I was concentrating on working on every Lindsay Lohan movie in town. Weirdly enough the nicest director I’ve ever met was Mark Waters, on that show. Because, you know the thing with professional movies with the above the line and the below the line people – they don’t mix. There’s like a concrete wall 200 miles thick. This guy was really approachable and he actually looked a lot like me. I had no idea until someone pointed it out to me but we both had the same haircut, we both wore the same stupid hat and the same big stupid glasses and we’re the same height. So at the Mean Girls screening here in Toronto for the crew, he wasn’t there, obviously, they just did it for the Toronto crew, which was a nice thing to do.
S: Can I do the impression?
C: And I went there and I thought you know this may be the greatest film I’ve ever worked on. I mean after however many goddamn years in film I’m watching Mean Girls I’m like, it’s a movie. I like it. It’s enjoyable. I’m laughing. And afterwards there’s all these giggly young teenaged girls sort of circling around us; swirling around me as I’m trying to get out and one of them comes up to me and says…
S: (putting on her best valley girl voice) So, it’s good to see you. So, um, hey do… do you remember me?
C: And I’m like, ‘No, not really…’
S: (valley girl voice) ‘Well, it’s good to see you again.’
C: And then she’s says, ‘What did you think?’ And she’s like all cokeheadish and like what’d you think of me and I thought, you know actors, it’s a hard life so I said, ‘I think it turned out much better than I thought it would and I thought you were particularly good,’ you know.
S: She was an extra.
C: She was an extra. She was like ‘Ooohhhhh…. thank you….’ So we kind of went what the hell was that and about 10 minutes later I was like ‘Oh! I look like the director!’
Trista: I was that credit on Imdb. I also saw that you have 34 accounting credits, Chris, and only one acting credit for Johnny Mnemonic.
C: (laughs) There was a very funny joke in some damn show where there’s a snow storm and the guy goes to a video store – some American sitcom – and he says ‘What’ve you got left?’ and the guy at the store says, ‘We have 25 copies of Johnny Mnemonic and 38 copies of the Making of Johnny Mnemonic.’ Yeah that was pretty startling. That was the worst movie I ever worked on…. in so many ways.
T: I can only imagine. When I was a kid I ran out to see that at the theatre because it was the latest thing and it was Gibson, and it was the next best thing to Hackers, and it was just going to be awesome. Then I get there and I was like, ‘Wow, this is crap.’
S: It was another one of those sad stories – and I say sad because it happens a lot, more than the average bear knows – it was a situation where, clearly, this was a first time director and he was finding his way and everything but there was a lot of interesting stuff that was being shot that never made it to the screen. There was a lot of studio interference and that kind of thing. It’s not always a bad thing but more often than not, it is.
C: He was having to find his feet from the New York art world to filmmaking. It’s a big jump.
S: Yeah, well to Hollywood filmmaking, and that’s a very different thing.
T: That was back when the Hollywood North thing was coming up too, and everybody was starting to get all, ‘well we’ll go to Canada and it’s cheap and they have lots of talent and nobody really cares what you do…’
C: It’s Frontierland basically.
T: Yeah!
S: Where’s it’s cold and the chicks are hot.
C: It’s still very similar here actually. I mean the more things change the more they stay the same. Filmmaking up here isn’t as fun as it used to be. It’s become more corporate. You know we used to be a lot of deranged, fun people back in the day. Just a bunch of anarchists. I would go to work in a tutu and some tights – nobody would blink twice. You know my sister’d be throwing rubber chickens at people in the office, it was great. ‘Cause you never left the office. You were understaffed so you were there like 16, 17 hours a day. You’d go insane.
S: Well, when you got your ass painted for Three to Tango….
C: Yeah, well when I got my ass painted for Three to Tango that just demonstrated the change. I’m still old school and they were like we need 30 asses to be painted for this gag for… what’s that guy’s name?
T: Matthew Perry.
C: Matthew Perry to do a very ‘Chandler-esque’ joke. He’s in an art gallery, he sees all the asses on the wall, you know there’s a flag Israel on one, he says ‘Oh I had no idea things were so hairy in the Middle East.’ So I got to be the Israel because, well, my ass is hairy.
T: Excellent.
S: And Chris was excited. He was like, ‘I’m gonna get my ass painted with the flag of Israel!!’
C: Naked! So people start coming in and they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re getting your ass painted. That’s so sad.’ And I was like, ‘Who are you?’ We would have been drawing lots and killing each other if this was back in the 80s.
S: He phoned me up and said, ‘What happened to all the freaks?’
T: Yeah I think they all went to offices and decided to “grow up’ and get ‘real jobs’. I’m so glad you guys didn’t.
C: Yeah, it’s a hard road.
T: Yeah, back to your story of how you never left the office I find it interesting that your filmmaking went exactly the same way. Never left the set, lived there and what not. What was it about Devil’s Tail – this movie, this script – that Sam brought you that really made you want to make it?
C: I think the thing that astounds me about the movie is, in a way, how impulsive it was and how spontaneous it was. Sam gets these fires lit under her, God knows from where, and she was like, ‘I think we should make a movie – right now.’ It was as simple as that. There was a slowdown happening. She’s always got piles of notes and I said ‘Oookay,’ and uh, ‘Sure,’ and she just started planning the whole thing. We didn’t have a screenplay yet. And she said, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll get it. I’ve got it. It’s all here.’ I got very stressed out, but over a period of five or six weeks we were just sort of going it could be this, it could be that. She was able to tie in, very organically, a lot of personal concerns of mine – things that we sort of returned to over and over again in our work. It was scary because I would never recommend to anybody who is inexperienced to just, you know, throw something together. We felt it was in us from all the plays we’d done and all the shorts we had done and we just figured, well, we’ll write it and we’ll see on December 17th. We set a date – and this was early November – and we’ll see what we have then. I’m sure we’ll have something. I think it all really came together in the last 36 hours before the reading with the cast. Sam stayed up for 36 hours and wrote the last half of the film and all the outstanding key scenes and pulled all of the themes together. I went to work the day before thinking, ‘Ohhhh. This is not gonna happen.’ When I went to the read through I was like ‘Okay there’s enough there.’ We knew where we were going and so we just proceeded. So it really was just ‘We have to make it now’. It was this feeling like we could be dead next year. (laughs) Honestly. I mean it wasn’t like ‘I’ve got this great idea.’ It was like, ‘I have a very strong desire to make a movie – right now.’ We have a limited window of opportunity.
S: To be fair it also partly has to do with the way I work anyway. And I absolutely understand why Chris would say I don’t want to say to some brand new, inexperienced filmmaker, yes it’s all very casual and we don’t give a shit and we just throw things together at the last minute, but of course nothing could be further from the truth. We were able to work like that because of the years behind us developing stories and working with actors and this partnership as well (gestures to Chris). The truth is I was working on a script where these concerns were all simmering and bubbling together and a number of the characters existed, but the way I work is, because I always have more than one script on the boil but I tend to work somewhat intuitively. So I give myself deadlines when I don’t have them. If I’m not doing something on commission or on assignment, if it’s something that’s self generated, then I’ll find a reason to give myself deadlines and I’ll work on everything and I’ll also see which one emerges, which one takes over. I might be working on three scripts at a time but sooner or later one of them is going to take over. Then that becomes the thing that we need a deadline. My favorite deadline of all is the deadline of production. That’s my favorite deadline. Because I love to develop through production and I love to develop for production.
C: And you’re in an enviable position because –
S: Because we do it!
C: Most writers that you know they write screenplays or plays. They’ve got a drawer full of stuff. Never going to see the light of day. And since, because I thought Sam was a good writer, I just started directing her stuff. I think there’s one thing that you finished that you think you wanna make that we haven’t made yet.
S: That’s right.
C: Okay, let’s make it a play, let’s make it a play, let’s make it a play, let’s do a short and now the feature. But all the things that you mention in the review the sort of lazy ass sociopathology, racism, classism, sexual politics, these are all things that we sort of keep revisiting and they just found a completely new form this time. And that’s why. If we felt there was no meat to the story – if it was just an exercise –
S: We wouldn’t have gone through with it.
C: After that it was like jumping out of an airplane. Okay, we’re going to hit bottom in this many weeks so we just have to do what we can while we’re doing it.
S: Again, one of the ways that we work – we work until the work is done. So we don’t stop working. So for example, that hairy 36 hours that Chris was talking about was of course the 36 hours prior to the first rough draft read through. Whenever I finish a script – finish meaning whenever I get what I consider to be a readable draft together that I think is fit for other human eyes – the first thing I organize is a reading with actors where I get to sit there and just listen and make notes. Because although I’m an actress and I’m an actress first, writing and acting are really quite inextricably bound for me. And I’ve spent a few years in Second City as well where I was doing partly scripted, partly improvised stuff. I’m not always in my own work, but I’m often in my own work and even in a case like The Devil’s Tail where Chris wanted me to be in it, certainly sitting at the read through, I’m not an actress. I’m the screenwriter and I sit and I listen.
C: And you really, really didn’t want to be in it.
S: But you convinced me and I’m glad. But I just listen and take notes. That’s something I would love to tell new writers and new filmmakers. The first thing you do when you get that script written is please don’t think the first draft is the last draft. Please have a reading.
C: No. Stuff was re-written every spare moment up until shooting. Normally we’d develop a piece for months in advance of the actual production and keep rewriting it based on people, bodies and space doing things but that was all reversed. We had so little time that we shot what we had and we didn’t have any time to do reshoots, so it’s like we did the reshaping and the fine tuning of it all in post, which is also unwise, however, it worked.
S: Well I wouldn’t characterize it as unwise I just think it’s a different process. And certainly I was writing because I love actors and I love to write for actors. The known quantity for us was the Canadian actors that we had worked with before but I was always very committed to it being a truly North American project. It’s one of the things that I think is special about it as a little no budget indie is that I felt like we were able to do things that a big budget Hollywood film either can’t or won’t do. And it being truly North American and having characters that are from Canada, the US and Mexico played by actors from Canada, the US and Mexico I think is very special. Once they were cast I kept writing. I just didn’t stop. I was like, ‘Oh, this is my Eddie?’ Let me have at it then.
T: I understand from what you just spoke about that you didn’t actually want to be in this film?
S: Mmm-hmm.
T: Okay, so why did you end up playing Kate and why didn’t you want to play her?
S: As much as I hate to admit this, I will confess that some of the reasons why I didn’t want to play her in the first place were entirely personal and the reason why I hate admitting that is that I find that somewhat embarrassing. I pride myself on my professionalism. I’m a pretty ballsy actress, I’m pretty kinetic. I’m never happier than when I’m doing fight scenes of love scenes and really dig into a scene. So I’m very rarely chicken-ish as an actor. I had personal reasons for not wanting to play the part and I hate saying that because I think that having kind of personal reasons for not wanting to play a part is actually absolutely the wrong reason to not play it. Absolutely the wrong reason to turn away from it. Because Chris has worked so much with me in terms of directing my writing and as an actor as well I think he was able to see that. He was able to point that out and say, ‘If you give me good enough reasons for you not to play the part I’ll take it very seriously. But I haven’t heard any of those reasons yet.”
C: I also said that if you didn’t do it I was going to cast someone really lousy in the part just to annoy you.
S: Now that makes me sound terrible. The real reason is we got to the point where I said I don’t know, I have some feelings about this and one of the ways that he convinced me was – because he knows I trust him and respect him as a director completely – he said, ‘I really would like you to play this part and if you don’t, I’m not sure I want to do it.’ So when he said that – it sounds silly – but it becomes more ego-less when somebody talks to you like that. You can be afraid of playing a part or you can talk yourself out of playing a part sometimes for the right reasons, sometimes for the wrong reasons. So when he put it in those terms and said, ‘No I have considered this and I know you don’t have to play it. I know we can cast someone else but I think you should and I would really prefer it.’ Then I was able to say, ‘Well if that’s what you want.’ It was like I could subvert my own nonsense.
C: You saw my point though.
S: I did.
Come back next Wednesday for TFS’ In Conversation with Christopher Comrie and Samantha Swan. Part 2 is now available.
