The Unbearable Pretentiousness
of Being Don McKellar

by Mark Peranson

In his first real interview about his sophomore directorial effort Childstar, Don McKellar is worried about coming across as pretentious. There’s the paradox: nothing is more pretentious than a director worrying about sounding pretentious. Except maybe when said paranoid director is playing an experimental filmmaker with a beard. Who directs films with tempting titles like The Stupidity of God. Whose favourite film is Jean Eustache’s 1973 angst-ridden relationship epic, The Mother and the Whore. There is surely no dirtier word in the multiplex than Art.

Welcome to Canadian cultural politics, circa 2004. For many of our nation’s moviegoers, Don McKellar is the signifier of Canadian cinema, the reserved (at times repressed, often alienated) intellectual, the Everyman who appears in Everything—in 1998, Year of the Don, he was involved in no less than six films that screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, including his feature debut, Last Night. (This year, McKellar also has a role in Olivier Assayas’ France-Canada co-production Clean, and also helped out with the film’s English dialogue.) No Forrest Gump, McKellar has left his influence on the films of Bruce McDonald, Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg, François Girard, and many other Canadian directors. It’s little wonder it’s taken him so long to make his second feature (the long-anticipated—and undoubtedly pretentious—José Saramago adaptation Blindness having been moved to the back burner; the script, McKellar says, is in the process of finalization). For the multi-hyphenate most associated with Canadian film, who began his pre-career as an employee in the early days of the Toronto film festival, it’s heartening to discover that making Canadian cinema (as in, a cultural product unique, critical, and culturally distinct from American/Hollywood cinema) may be his most pressing concern. As is his vocal stance against current Telefilm Canada policy, established by the now-departed (to ruin the cbc) chief Richard Stursberg to shift the balance of funding towards films with commercial, rather than artistic, potential.

Childstar proposes a new metaphor for “runaway production.” The film begins as US sitcom Family Matters star Taylor Brandon Burns (McKellar claims the script’s origin lies in a meeting with an eerily mature Haley Joel Osment) arrives in Toronto to play the role of the President’s offspring in the American blockbuster The First Son. Accompanied by his savvy divorced mother and business manager (Jennifer Jason Leigh), they are picked up at the airport by experimental filmmaker Rick Schiller (the bearded McKellar), so naïve at his job that he holds up a sign with the young star’s name, and is horrified as his trip from the airport becomes a game of “dodge the uniformed schoolgirl.” Through circumstances well under his control, Rick ends up bedding Mom, becoming Taylor’s legal guardian and teacher, and taking on far more responsibility that the usual limo driver. Many Toronto in-jokes ensue (e.g., breakfast at Fran’s, a trip to Pioneer Village), as Childstar charts two awakenings, those of both Taylor and Rick, while delighting in the traditional pleasures provided by a film about filmmaking (“We’ll just fix it with voiceover”).

The prototypical example of the clash between text and subtext, the bipolar Childstar deftly walks a tightrope while juggling numerous balls in the air. Stunningly shot in widescreen by Québecois cinematographer and director André Turpin, the film looks unlike any Canadian film I can recall; as McKellar says repeatedly, it’s an attempt to bring back some of the formal pleasure he finds lacking in current independent cinema. But more crucially, it approaches its subject with a critical eye. Though it tempts the viewer with its image, Childstar disturbs with its content. It takes a while to sink in that the characters in Childstar evince an odd or off-putting psychology. They aren’t just in a movie; they behave as if they are in a movie. They interpret their surroundings in movie terms. They might come across as flat or underdeveloped, but that’s the danger of being driven by culture, instead of taking the wheel yourself. It’s an extremely fine distinction (some would claim too fine), one that McKellar worries some audience members might miss, or misunderstand.

But surely the best way to approach Childstar is to realize that McKellar would not waste his time only making a film about the miserable life of a celebrity (we’ll leave that to Denys Arcand). Childstar is very much about where Canadian film finds itself in 2004, in a second coming of crass commercialism, in a state of maturity that it hasn’t yet grown into. If the tax-shelter years saw an unabashed kowtowing to commercial concerns through the importing of American stars (many, expatriates) to star in films that would never see the light of day, the current cultural policy leans towards pushing Canadians to make films like Americans do. The many wrong-headed assumptions in this argument are brought to light through both the plot and the underlying theme of Childstar: that love/hate relationship that Canadians feel for Yankee culture. In making a film that intentionally creates the feeling of dissatisfaction, the almost painfully self-effacing McKellar thus comes to signify more than Canadian cinema; he signifies all of us. If this all sounds pretentious, where do I sign up?

scope: The last film you directed was A Word from the Management (2000), which is a film-festival film—literally, as it was made for the Toronto International Film Festival, and subject-wise. Childstar starts out (and ends) as a film-festival film as well. Both also predominantly feature the colour red. Is this a coincidence?

don mckellar: It’s a theatre colour, red. The theatre of war. You’re right; there is that connection between the two films. I realized at one point improbably enough that this film is a long elaboration of that short film, which is...odd. In the sense that both of them dealt in a sense with my disillusionment with cinema, with movie going, or the state of filmmaking—my love/hate affair with movies.

scope: In what sense?

mckellar: I have this ambivalence. While I feel like I’m in it, I love movies, but I just hate them and where they are now. I have a hard time seeing movies now in a certain way, but I used to be obsessed with movies, I used to see them nonstop when I was in high school and early university, and then something happened where I lost faith in them. There have always been crappy mainstream films, I suppose, but it’s when the sort of indie world seemed to collapse that it became kind of discouraging. They gave up on cinematic pleasure, filmic pleasure, and formal invention, and that to me was always crucial to my enjoyment of cinema. That seemed to be verboten in American indie films. They became solipsistic and happy in their isolation.

scope: I suppose at some point the direction of the audience became different, they became globally pitched...

mckellar: Yeah, the globalization of cinema is definitely one of the big problems. That was one of the things I was after with Childstar, the fact that none of the films are addressing us anymore. We’re all outside the movies now. There’s no particular audience.

scope: Who is Childstar addressing? Is it addressing a Canadian audience?

mckellar: I guess the distributor wouldn’t be happy if I said that! Childstar is an attempt to personalize it, and deal with issues that were personal to me, and deal directly with the movies, in the only way I thought I could, from a slightly outside feel. Because I feel like we all have that outside feel. It specifically uses Canada as a context, but certainly my experience going around the world to film festivals and promoting Last Night is that’s the universal experience. It’s even the American experience right now, feeling outside of cinema. Because there are these global machines that Americans feel alienated from. Seeing those American Teamsters in Los Angeles whining about outsourcing you sort of feel sorry for them, and, in a way, I can identify with them in a certain way because they feel excluded from their cinema.

scope: So it’s the same kind of issue - an issue of exclusion - whether it’s economic or political.

mckellar: Exactly. Obviously, culture and economics have been tied up, so I don’t think it’s as separate as it might seem.

scope: The film also comes out of a time when, as you said, you were having all of these conversations with Richard Stursberg about Telefilm Canada’s new policies.

mckellar: Oh yes, the film clearly comes out of my feelings about Telefilm or what national cinemas should do, or the response that national cinemas can make, or the situations they are put in. And obviously I feel that it’s pointless and naïve to take on American films head on. Or to condescend towards a perceived audience expectation. It’s pointless and humiliating. I tried, and lots of people have been trying, to change that policy. It’s a policy that Australia and England had, and then they were embarrassed about their national cinema, and then they reversed that policy. We’re behind by about five years. I was trying to explain to Stursberg that it’s not elitist. It’s actually the most practical policy is to do personal films; it’s what Canada’s always been able to do, and it’s why people would and should remain in Canada.

scope: At some point you must have had offers to move to the US and act or direct in American films...

mckellar: Oh yeah, I had lots of offers, and I tried to explain to him that the reason I stayed here was pragmatic. It was because I could make films with control and autonomy and that’s a luxury, and my American friends were always envious of it. And even if the films Stursburg greenlighted are successful, there’s no repeat formula. Canadians don’t want, say, gross-out comedies. My feeling is that this is the worst of both possible systems, having bureaucrats deciding commercial films. I’d rather one or the other.

scope: How in particular is this attitude reflected in Childstar?

mckellar: I think the film is full of a certain kind of ambivalence about the movies, and it’s about searching for your own voice within this overwhelming machine. Beyond a solely cultural level, it has an allegorical level about...American...imperialism.

scope: I sense you’re a bit hesitant to discuss this allegorical level for fear of coming across as pretentious. But isn’t it more interesting and crucial to you than, say, the fate of a child star in Hollywood?

mckellar: Yes, well, the film isn’t about that, in particular. I find it difficult to talk about the film because that’s what people first assume. And, yes, it is about that, but on the other hand it was never about the poor little rich kid’s plight. Right from the beginning I wanted to never sink into the sort of expected formula and the sentimentality that goes with that. It’s more about making movies. Again, I don’t want to sound too pretentious, and it is about him finding the voice, but to me what’s interesting about the child-star phenomena is that it’s an exaggeration or acceleration of what a lot of people are feeling. Trapped in popular culture. Circumscribed by this all-encompassing machine that doesn’t allow them to find their own ability to express themselves.

scope: One general concern you must have is that you’ve made what, on the level of the text, has the potential to be populist, you know, the whole idea of a child star coming to Canada—people like kids, there’s conflict—but that’s not what the film is really about.

mckellar: I am interested in the characters, and what happens to them, but I also wanted to make it partially about the experience of seeing movies, or about moviemaking. It was consciously against the current trend to do vérité-style shooting, the sort of new dready realism, and I wanted to put stuff in movies that looked cool, and make you think about how you frame your life in terms of the movies and how these characters do as well.

scope: This leads into a character psychology that is somewhat flat, a consequence of the fact that all the characters pattern their lives after the movies. They behave the way that people in the movies behave. Or the way that they think they should behave, based on how people in the movies behave.

mckellar: Some of the characters do more so than others, like the American agent. Others I would like to think they are less the case, but they are all within this machine. I would like to think there is some complexity within the characters. I wanted to make sure the characters are not black and white. I think they’re all trying to negotiate this world, and they’ve all figured out their strategies—some are successful, some aren’t. I wanted to give Jennifer’s character the benefit of the doubt. She is doing what’s best for the kid, which is presumably something a mother should do. And it’s what we’re told mothers should do. Being a child star is sort of the ultimate of something that we’re told is good—to be young, rich, and famous—and once that’s achieved, then what?

scope: Let’s talk about your character and why you have a beard.

mckellar: The beard is of course a symbol that he has artistic pretensions.

scope: You avoid giving a comic performance.

mckellar: I don’t think any of them are comic performances, I didn’t want to do that. I wanted the film to have the feeling of a pop-movie world, this kind of Frank Tashlin-type world, but exactly without that kind of performance. So that people are realistic within those roles. I wanted all the actors to take seriously those parts, to have these vérité people living in this big-budget world.

scope: The way the film handles celebrity is to pretty much take it as a given. Can Canadians treat celebrity in a different way than Americans?

mckellar: I do think so—it’s always that Canadians have that distance. And when you say it’s like the making of an American film, I think it’s true, that Canadian films are closer to the making-of than to the movie, it means we’re more conscious of our separation. That’s always been one of our strengths, this sort of mediation. And this film was meant to allow you to question it and see the mechanics.

scope: That brings me to your CBC sitcom Twitch City, and it seems that you can draw a line from there to this self-aware genre piece. Childstar reminds me much more of Twitch City than, say, Last Night.

mckellar: I definitely felt that at times, the connection to Twitch City, quite strongly, because Twitch City was about guy who watched television, and used it to form his personality. But not in a dumb way. He didn’t see himself as conquered by it, he saw himself as manipulating his environment. And it was all about manipulating his life for his own ease and comfort...and that is partially what my character is doing in this movie, trying to find his place, responding to this American culture, the fact of celebrity. There’s also a sort of similarity to the vocabulary, the kind of humour.

scope: Were you concerned about making the film too funny?

mckellar: A little bit, for sure. The script was a bit gaggy at first, and then I pulled back. My own taste is that I like comedy to surprise you. I hate the feeling of working for comedy, of being desperate for laughs. Failing at jokes is always upsetting. My biggest fear is that just by the name and people’s expectations of child stars they’ll think there will be wall-to-wall laughs at some stoned teenager...I have some of those laughs, too, but people will realize quickly that’s not that kind of movie. It’s definitely going back between funny and serious throughout.

scope: It really seems that the film is divided—it’s of two minds throughout, in a way—it’s the whole bipolar thing.

mckellar: To call it bipolar is very accurate.

scope: And the kid is a rather odd symbol, as he symbolizes both American and Canadian culture at the same time, as he’s maturing ahead of his time—if you say Telefilm is forcing Canadians towards a commercialism they aren’t ready for. Even in his sitcom, he’s playing the adopted son.

mckellar: My initial idea was to make this charismatic monster, and I became more empathetic to him. You’re right that his situation is like our situation in that he’s growing up and in that adolescent sense he is Canadian, it’s true. He’s not really the enemy, I don’t think. That would be the agent, or maybe Dave Foley’s character.

scope: One of my favourite scenes is when he asks Rick for his favourite movie.

mckellar: Every American director that I know, they always want to make good movies. I’ve never met someone, say, who wants to make schlocky action movies, or just pure entertainment. I told Stursberg, “You know, I’ve never heard any American be as crass as you are.” I’m talking about the sleaziest agents I’ve met, the sleaziest producers. Every American I know has ambition, they want to do quality films. They just have a different sense of what that is, or they don’t have the resources. Or get corrupted. I know so many young directors who make a film, then go down and get a good deal, and they say they’re just doing it so they can make their quality film...

scope: Their Blindness.

mckellar: Yes, that’s it. But it just never happens.

scope: Another genre that you seem to be playing with is film noir, as about halfway through Rick becomes a detective, and then in the hospital there’s that scene with the agent, which is clearly a noir scene.

mckellar: That was definitely a kind of model in my head for the character. Yes, about halfway through he becomes a detective, it definitely plays with that idea...The set-up with Jennifer may sort of lead into it, but, yeah, it happens about halfway through. I did always think of it that way, about Rick being put into his movie, finding his movie; he’s sort of finding his character from the beginning, and forced to act. He’s not entirely passive at the beginning, but there’s no reason for him to act; he’s the outsider finding his way. I’ve always been interested from Highway 61 (1991) on in turning this passive notion on its head. I definitely thought of Rick as a Canadian protagonist who had to take on a role.

scope: With the complicated nature in the sense that this role comes from American popular culture. Are these issues resolved for you? If you’re going to continue to make major motion pictures, you have to deal with these structures.

mckellar: Exactly. It’s this sort of post-postmodern situation—if I can again sound pretentious—that we’re in this condition, and we can see it, and we’re smart enough to have some views and judgments. But how do we move on? And a hint of that was what I was trying to get at with Rick at the end. I have come to terms with it a bit. This whole Telefilm debate is good for one’s resolve. It’s given me a much stronger sense of what kind of movies we should be making as Canadians.

scope: Can we talk about the genesis of the story of the The First Son?

mckellar: I just sat down with the storyboard guy and talked through the whole plot. It was quite easy to do. Right from the beginning I thought how could I represent the film within the film without showing actual scenes, so I thought of this idea of a really compressed pitch with the entire plot, so you would always know where you stood.

scope: How long did it take you to come up with the plot?

mckellar: Really fast. And of course when I was trying to get money for Childstar, Americans would always say, “Tell me again about The First Son thing?” As soon as I sat down and talk about it, I realized I had the whole story. I didn’t have to work it out with graphs. He’d say, “Then what happens?’ And I’d say, without thinking, “Well, it turns out that the Secretary of State is a traitor...” We all know what’s going to happen. I’ve been talking about my reluctance to resolve things, and my main feeling about these blockbuster films is that they’re completely formulaic. I’ve felt for years these films are playing this perverse game with the audience and twisting exact expectations and audiences don’t even want that surprise any more, it’s all just variations.

scope: It strikes me that something similar is at the heart of Clean.

mckellar: You mean in the sense that it is a genre story, in a way.

scope: And that you expect the characters to behave a certain way, and they don’t, and you’re put off by how they don’t behave as you expect them to.

mckellar: You’re aware of it, you think, gee, he’s supposed to be crying here. Talking to Olivier I feel he has some similar issues. There are things he loves about the movies, even big blockbusters, and there are things I love about genres, and at least I feel, and I think there’s some evidence with Clean, that it’s impossible not to enter into those comparisons. I know in a way he just wanted to tell a simple story, not make a genre film, but I also know that at times when he was directing he’d say, well, the genre thing to do is that, and I’m not going to. And I found myself doing the same.

scope: Did you plan out the way Childstar was shot?

mckellar: One of the feelings you have today is that these blockbusters are completely pre-shot, and it’s becoming more and more so with cgi and the possibility of duplicating their storyboards exactly. With that being the case, the natural response would be a handheld, non-structured look. For us there was no plan; it was always looking at the scene and then trying to find a way of framing it. Ironically it looks pretty pre-planned, but it was an on-the-spot dedication. It’s always what I felt was one of the fun things about filmmaking—coming up with the solution, the problem solving of how to do the shot. That in part comes from working with David Cronenberg, who never has storyboards, or any pre-set idea of how he’s going to shoot.

scope: You always wanted to shoot in ’Scope?

mckellar: We came up with the idea early on, and it had to do with being about movies, framed by the movie ratio—it was a Cinemascope world. Also we thought it would allow us to isolate characters more, framed within frames, you know?

scope: It gives the film a very glossy look. And it reverses expectations, as the more vérité look we associate with true to life, and documentary, while glossy we associate with big budget, Hollywood. Seeing a Canadian film that looks fantastic is a bit of a shock, isn’t it?

mckellar: That definitely was a strong desire of mine, to make a film that delivered on that sort of filmic pleasure. And it’s also not André’s normal way of shooting. I think that was part of the thing, because, like I say, it’s about making art...The kind of shooting we were doing with hard linear, “unmotivated” (at least by character) camera movement, highly structured shots, etc. is pretty rare in Hollywood movies these days, I think. Certainly, the film doesn’t look like a normal Canadian film, it’s stylized and feels “cinematic,” I would say. But I wasn’t really trying to contrast “Canadian” movies to “Hollywood” movies in that way. I think that would probably be naïve. I was trying to present these characters, to greater or lesser degrees, surrounded by and circumscribed by The Movies and American popular culture. That’s kind of a given.

The challenge is trying to articulate a personal voice, find a sense of belonging or purpose, within that inescapable environment. I think that this gets back to a question you had at the very beginning: it’s not just that the movies have become less challenging or provocative since Jaws (1975), it’s also that they became overwhelmingly dominant features on the cultural landscape. They dominate and in some ways oppress social discourse. They are unavoidable, on top of being largely vacuous, and the alternative cinema, such as it is, has largely failed to step up to the plate. Failed to engage on larger social, political issues. Failed even to explore more challenging filmic or aesthetic questions. And this failing is much more recent than Jaws. Atom Egoyan was telling me how he feels the alternative to mainstream culture is now more clearly present on television, for instance, and I think he’s right.

scope: In a way are you saying with Childstar that the best that we can do as Canadians is make a good-looking film that’s about the making of a big-budget Hollywood film, instead of actually making said big-budget film?

mckellar: I don’t think it exactly looks like a big-budget American film, as that’s just as likely now to have handheld cameras. Some Americans who were considering investing thought it was impossible for us to approximate what it would look like to shoot an American film because they said we couldn’t afford to rent the equipment, hire the extras, build the sets so that it’s even believable that you’re shooting an American film. Which was a really complicated criticism—that we couldn’t even afford to do a “making-of” film. But there was some truth to it. I wrote it knowing the White House sets were there, because that would have been prohibitively expensive. I also explained that blue screen makes it a lot cheaper. If you look at the making of The Lord of the Rings films, you just see an empty studio with a blue screen. And oddly enough that’s the most hi-tech thing you can do.

But I guess what I’m saying is we can’t avoid those other films, Hollywood movies. There is pleasure in that kind of movie and that kind of filmmaking; it’s exactly what you’re saying that I was trying to argue with, that to have a good-looking shot is not serious, or not something that independent cinema should do. There is pleasure that people take from big Hollywood movies, and I’m aware of that, and like I said it’s also my reaction to independent cinema and its lack of ambition. So, to do that isn’t a compromised or low-budget version of an American film, it’s just that’s our world, and we have to find our way through it. And we can’t be afraid of using the language.

scope: What were some of the films in particular that you thought about?

mckellar: I thought about a whole bunch of films, but then when André came we watched some, but nothing seemed appropriate. So I don’t think there’s an exact model. We knew that we wanted to make a cinematic poppy type movie with rich visuals and an accelerated narrative feel. Personally, I’ve just always loved films about filmmaking...

scope: Do you have a favourite?

mckellar: I suppose it would be Contempt (1963).

scope: Which is also in ’Scope. Why don’t you admit that this is your Contempt?

mckellar: You’re just trying to make me seem more pretentious than I am. Contempt is the best of those, sure. The tension between the personal and the formal aspects of the film are so brilliantly articulated. In the context of my film that’s what interesting. In the context of Godard though it’s such an unusual film, with those long takes...I guess there is some kind of influence in this film, as I also used bold, primary colours. And Godard’s ambivalence is in every frame, his difficulty in dealing with selling out, and absolutely refusing to do so. Working with a source, his resentment and his contempt for a kind of movie making. That tension is there in every frame.

scope: So it is an apt comparison.

mckellar: I suppose it is in a way. It also falls into a genre, but doesn’t play into a genre in that sense. And it counters that with an amazing complexity...Childstar is a hard film to talk about without being pretentious. Even to talk about making art is very hard to do, even superficially, without sounding pretentious.
scope: Isn’t there is something wrong about a culture where that is the case?

mckellar: Absolutely. It also reflects the way Telefilm has made being auteurs, or “authors” as they called them in their last press release, and the use of the word art as admitting to your elitism, a shameful confession. We’ve all had those meetings with Stursberg where we tried to avoid the terms “art” or “culture”...and it’s pathetic that we can’t talk about it.

scope: What is the ideal film that we should be making?

mckellar: I don’t know if there’s an ideal—it’s just that films that have ideas aren’t necessarily pretentious. When I grew up I loved French New Wave films because they were entertaining and exciting too. That’s what people like Stursberg forget, that movies can be exciting on a filmic level or an intellectual level, and that’s entertaining. I hate the idea that it’s supposed to be a contradiction. I don’t like purely barren formal films either—I hate the suggestion that’s the other option. Childstar isn’t exactly a model in the sense that it’s reflective. But I hope it raises possibilities.

scope: One more question. Was The Mother and the Whore always in the script as your character’s favourite film, or was it a nod to Reg Harkema, who edited the film?

mckellar: It was a nod to Reg. We had something else in the first draft...I think it was Numéro deux (1975). Now that’s pretentious.

Childstar

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Certainly, the film doesn’t look like a normal Canadian film, it’s stylized and feels “cinematic,” I would say. But I wasn’t really trying to contrast “Canadian” movies to “Hollywood” movies in that way. I think that would probably be naïve. I was trying to present these characters, to greater or lesser degrees, surrounded by and circumscribed by The Movies and American popular culture.

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Childstar