In the beginning there was the word. In the end, perhaps the word will be all that’s left. At the start of Pontypool we hear the disembodied voice of radio broadcaster Grant Mazzy (Stephen McHattie) filling the theatre. He wonders aloud about disquieting undercurrents in coincidence and connectivity in names and events, and we can already hear how easily his words might begin to collapse in their meaning. Words collide and words confuse. Language is robust and infinitely prolific, but human understanding is fragile. Pontypool images the world ending precisely where language and comprehension intersect, not with a bang or whimper but something rather like a bark.
On the way to work one abominable, very early February morning, Grant sees a woman approach his car, her words obscure. She slaps his window before receding back into the darkness. Shaken, he arrives at the studio, tucks into his stash of whiskey, and begins his highly enjoyable on-air shtick, the very masculine talk radio provocateur who “takes no prisoners.” But soon he and his colleagues will become prisoners themselves. Reports start coming in regarding crowds huddling around a clinic, riots without any apparent purpose, and murder. Something is infecting the citizens of Pontypool, Ontario, and it is spreading fast. Like gossip.
Adapted by Tony Burgess from his novel Pontypool Changes Everything, Canadian maverick Bruce McDonald’s latest feature is apocalyptic horror for the age of babble, a tension-riddled genre mind-fuck that does for the word what Videodrome did for the image. It has certain foundations in the bold proposals of William S. Burroughs and Marshall MacLuhan, in the claustrophobic scenarios of George Romero, in the irresolvable differences between English and French Canada—a theme it treats with pleasing irreverence. It harkens way back to the undead hi-jinx of McDonald’s very first foray into moviemaking, a high school horror flick called Our Glorious Dead. Just don’t call the rabid victims roaming the streets of Pontypool zombies. McDonald’s preferred term is “conversationalists.”
I met the always enthusiastic yet always relaxed McDonald on behalf of Vue Weekly one recent Friday morning in a Toronto bar. In signature cowboy hat—an accoutrement also worn by McHattie as Mazzy—he discussed Pontypool’s complex and prolonged genesis, his collaboration with cinematographer Miroslaw Baszak, with whom he previously worked on Roadkill, Highway 61, Dance Me Outside and Picture Claire, screenwriters Burgess and Noel Baker, who scripted McDonald’s cult favourite Hard Core Logo, the challenges of making a movie in such a stripped down setting, and the pleasures of persuasion in the world of independent cinema.
JB: Tony Burgess’ novel sprawls with locations, characters, layers of metaphor and even shards of autobiography. It slides from one impression to another along very tenuous points of connection. It would surely strike most filmmakers as uncontainable. I wonder how you all arrived at this point where you could just boil the premise down to its purest essence, to a chamber drama of sorts.
Bruce McDonald: It was a very long process. But what that attracted to me to it all the while was just that basic, crazy premise of the language virus. The funny thing about the dizzying amount of material in the novel is how in a weird way its unruliness was precisely what liberated us to just cherry-pick the few items we wanted and make up the rest. The only obligation was to stay true to the spirit of the book, which is the best way to approach an adaptation, really. Great books with lots of incident and ideas often seem like goldmines yet turn out to be traps. In any case it also took a long time because while Tony wrote the screenplay he was also learning how to write a screenplay. You know, a novel is closer to a garden, where a screenplay is more like a machine.
JB: Noel Baker told me that years ago he’d worked on a version of Pontypool with you guys that was actually much closer to the novel, but would have been a much more expensive project.
BM: Oh, yeah. And we haven’t thrown away that first script! In fact, the plan has been that if this one takes off we might do a little trilogy. Anyway, Noel was kind of Tony’s teacher. He’s a really great writer and a great pal. He introduced a sense of structural rigour that was foreign to Tony up to that point, a regime of tightening. Restrictions above all were tremendously useful for us in the process.
JB: Speaking of restrictions, I understand Pontypool began as a radio play for the CBC?
BM: They’d asked me if I had any material and after racking my brains for a while I thought maybe there was something in this language virus idea. Which got me to thinking about Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds and that thing about only hearing terrifying things happening and not really understanding what’s going on. So we got rolling on this idea when it suddenly occurred to me that the radio play might actually make a pretty interesting movie, and the simplicity of the demands on location and personnel made it seem possible. Everyone got excited with the idea that we wouldn’t have to wait four years to make this movie—we could do it in three months. We considered opening it up to the outside world as we developed it, getting out of the one location, but it was Tony who insisted on just keeping it locked indoors, keeping it a sort of theatre of the mind.
JB: You think about how much of, say, Night of the Living Dead takes place within the house. The claustrophobia of the siege drama can really work for a horror film.
BM: Yeah. Every once in a while a hand will bust through. There’s that constant terror of knowing what going on right outside. And the noises. You think too about Repulsion or Assault on Precinct 13, these kinds of things, and you see how nicely Tony’s book weds itself to a certain B-movie-like energy.
JB: By enclosing the film almost entirely within the studio you not only ramp up the claustrophobia but also attune your audience to the smallest details and motifs. I’m thinking of the way you incorporate the simplest little things, like the boiling of a kettle to prickle the tension. And of course that kettle whistle pays off quite nicely later on when it becomes a prompt for an infected victim searching for a sound to imitate.
BM: People’s first instincts are so often about the big canvas. We tend to want to be able to go anywhere, shoot anything. It was actually kind of scary to think about shooting something in just one room. I was accustomed to these sprawling road movies where if you get bored you just go to the next town. Suddenly I was dealing with minutia, that little Joey Ramone doll that might say something about Grant Mazzy’s character, Lisa’s bracelet that was obviously made by a kid, the bottle of booze, the pills the doctor takes. All these little details become more important, more loaded. There are no costume changes, so you pick the one outfit and, bam, that’s the character. There are sections where we’d shoot everything in profile, some where the camera moves and others where it’s still, ones where we shoot through the glass, others where we stay inside. It just makes you reconsider what it really means for you when you use this lens, when you use this angle. It was fun to have fewer things to think about but to think about those few things in a much bigger way. It’s primal. It felt like we were making a film for the first time again. Miroslaw and I shot our first film together. 20 years later it felt like we were making our second first film together.
JB: Pontypool initially seems a significant departure from your movies so far, yet it strikes me as being interestingly linked to The Tracey Fragments, which immediately preceded it. Both films operate around the principle of fragmentation, of image in one and language in the other. Have recent years found you feeling especially eager to mess with these fundamental elements of movies?
BM: There’s something to this idea of collage. My life feels like a fucking collage. Sometimes I just wish I could focus on one thing, you know? I’m always developing different projects at once. My brain’s always filled with too much stuff. So maybe it’s a reflection of my own sort of scattered, voracious interests in disparate things.
JB: There’s also that element in your work sometimes where it seems like you’re just wondering what you can get away with.
BM: Sure. Both of these last movies were like that. The fact that I could convince people to get on board with them delighted me. I mean, I’m as fond of big dumb popcorn movies as the next guy, but there’s no lack of people working in that department. I work in independent movies. We’re like pirates. It’s not so much that I want to be intentionally obscure, but I like to sniff out something fresh, something that’ll wake up the neighbours a little bit. Pontypool was financed by this private guy and I think he was seduced by the genre nature of it and the containment. For him felt like a perfect first step into the film world. Yet the fact is that we’re making a movie about a language virus, which is pretty damned abstract and cerebral for a genre film. So we managed to convince this guy, we convinced the CBC, we convinced Maple Pictures, and hopefully we can convince an audience that’s there’s something pretty wild and interesting going on here.
Bruce McDonald: It was a very long process. But what that attracted to me to it all the while was just that basic, crazy premise of the language virus. The funny thing about the dizzying amount of material in the novel is how in a weird way its unruliness was precisely what liberated us to just cherry-pick the few items we wanted and make up the rest. The only obligation was to stay true to the spirit of the book, which is the best way to approach an adaptation, really. Great books with lots of incident and ideas often seem like goldmines yet turn out to be traps. In any case it also took a long time because while Tony wrote the screenplay he was also learning how to write a screenplay. You know, a novel is closer to a garden, where a screenplay is more like a machine.
JB: Noel Baker told me that years ago he’d worked on a version of Pontypool with you guys that was actually much closer to the novel, but would have been a much more expensive project.
BM: Oh, yeah. And we haven’t thrown away that first script! In fact, the plan has been that if this one takes off we might do a little trilogy. Anyway, Noel was kind of Tony’s teacher. He’s a really great writer and a great pal. He introduced a sense of structural rigour that was foreign to Tony up to that point, a regime of tightening. Restrictions above all were tremendously useful for us in the process.
JB: Speaking of restrictions, I understand Pontypool began as a radio play for the CBC?
BM: They’d asked me if I had any material and after racking my brains for a while I thought maybe there was something in this language virus idea. Which got me to thinking about Orson Welles’ War of the Worlds and that thing about only hearing terrifying things happening and not really understanding what’s going on. So we got rolling on this idea when it suddenly occurred to me that the radio play might actually make a pretty interesting movie, and the simplicity of the demands on location and personnel made it seem possible. Everyone got excited with the idea that we wouldn’t have to wait four years to make this movie—we could do it in three months. We considered opening it up to the outside world as we developed it, getting out of the one location, but it was Tony who insisted on just keeping it locked indoors, keeping it a sort of theatre of the mind.
JB: You think about how much of, say, Night of the Living Dead takes place within the house. The claustrophobia of the siege drama can really work for a horror film.
BM: Yeah. Every once in a while a hand will bust through. There’s that constant terror of knowing what going on right outside. And the noises. You think too about Repulsion or Assault on Precinct 13, these kinds of things, and you see how nicely Tony’s book weds itself to a certain B-movie-like energy.
JB: By enclosing the film almost entirely within the studio you not only ramp up the claustrophobia but also attune your audience to the smallest details and motifs. I’m thinking of the way you incorporate the simplest little things, like the boiling of a kettle to prickle the tension. And of course that kettle whistle pays off quite nicely later on when it becomes a prompt for an infected victim searching for a sound to imitate.
BM: People’s first instincts are so often about the big canvas. We tend to want to be able to go anywhere, shoot anything. It was actually kind of scary to think about shooting something in just one room. I was accustomed to these sprawling road movies where if you get bored you just go to the next town. Suddenly I was dealing with minutia, that little Joey Ramone doll that might say something about Grant Mazzy’s character, Lisa’s bracelet that was obviously made by a kid, the bottle of booze, the pills the doctor takes. All these little details become more important, more loaded. There are no costume changes, so you pick the one outfit and, bam, that’s the character. There are sections where we’d shoot everything in profile, some where the camera moves and others where it’s still, ones where we shoot through the glass, others where we stay inside. It just makes you reconsider what it really means for you when you use this lens, when you use this angle. It was fun to have fewer things to think about but to think about those few things in a much bigger way. It’s primal. It felt like we were making a film for the first time again. Miroslaw and I shot our first film together. 20 years later it felt like we were making our second first film together.
JB: Pontypool initially seems a significant departure from your movies so far, yet it strikes me as being interestingly linked to The Tracey Fragments, which immediately preceded it. Both films operate around the principle of fragmentation, of image in one and language in the other. Have recent years found you feeling especially eager to mess with these fundamental elements of movies?
BM: There’s something to this idea of collage. My life feels like a fucking collage. Sometimes I just wish I could focus on one thing, you know? I’m always developing different projects at once. My brain’s always filled with too much stuff. So maybe it’s a reflection of my own sort of scattered, voracious interests in disparate things.
JB: There’s also that element in your work sometimes where it seems like you’re just wondering what you can get away with.
BM: Sure. Both of these last movies were like that. The fact that I could convince people to get on board with them delighted me. I mean, I’m as fond of big dumb popcorn movies as the next guy, but there’s no lack of people working in that department. I work in independent movies. We’re like pirates. It’s not so much that I want to be intentionally obscure, but I like to sniff out something fresh, something that’ll wake up the neighbours a little bit. Pontypool was financed by this private guy and I think he was seduced by the genre nature of it and the containment. For him felt like a perfect first step into the film world. Yet the fact is that we’re making a movie about a language virus, which is pretty damned abstract and cerebral for a genre film. So we managed to convince this guy, we convinced the CBC, we convinced Maple Pictures, and hopefully we can convince an audience that’s there’s something pretty wild and interesting going on here.
No comments:
Post a Comment