BURNS TAKES A RUN AT HAUNTING DRAMA
‘Dark and challenging film’ explores mental health
Gary Burns has been an independent filmmaker long enough to know that there is one element more crucial than any other when it comes to low-budget projects.
How easily, or cheaply, can it be made?
So the Calgary-based director, best known for quirky films such as Waydowntown and Radiant City, doesn’t pull any punches when asked what the main impetus was behind his haunting new drama Man Running.
Vision is important, of course. But a lot of it came down to more mundane reasons.
“On a practical sense, we were looking at ‘what-can-you-do-fora-million-bucks?’ kind of thing,” says Burns in an interview with Postmedia. “We were looking for a low-budget film idea.”
Written with his wife, Donna Brunsdale, Man Running centres on Jim (Gord Rand), a depressed doctor who takes part in a gruelling 100-mile, 24-hour ultra-marathon through the mountains. The key question — What exactly is he symbolically running from? — is hinted at throughout the film. Through flashbacks, we see him befriend Robyn (Milli Wilkinson), a precocious but cynical and terminally ill teenager who wants him to help her die.
“We have a neighbour who runs in these ultra-marathons,” Burns says. “They are really extreme. I wasn’t really aware of them but they are popping up all over the place now. It was kind of a cool idea, a person running for 24 hours. Your mind will start wandering.”
Shot in Calgary, Canmore and the Kananaskis, Man Running will screen Monday, Sept. 24, as part of the Calgary International Film Festival. While budgetary concerns were key, the film is anything but commercial. It’s nonlinear, dreamlike and relentlessly dark, both literally and metaphorically. As the marathon drags into the night and the doctor becomes more exhausted, hallucinations and memories mix with the harsh reality of the race. The audience is left unravelling what is real and what is imagined.
“He’s thinking about what happened,” says Burns. “Is he thinking about what really happened? Is he thinking about what he wishes he’d done? Is he thinking about how he wishes he had done it differently? So I became really fascinated with this idea of repeating. We do it a couple of times in the film. You see a scene and then you see it again and it’s different the second time. Which one is real? Are any of them real? Or is he just fantasizing or imagining different scenarios?”
Assisted suicide is obviously a controversial and topical subject to tackle, but Burns said that wasn’t the starting point of the film. He was more interested in exploring mental-health issues and the inner-workings of a crashing, damaged psyche.
“I’ve suffered from depression,” he says. “(Mental health) is something there is a lot of lip service around. But it’s not something that is getting the kind of action from government that it needs. Everyone is talking about it but you don’t see a lot of resources thrown at it. I would say that was the main focus for me, that idea that if you’re struggling, what is going through your head.
“This guy is racked by guilt. He maybe feels he’s made a mistake, either by trying to help or not helping enough. That has repercussions for himself. Obviously, he suffers from full-on depression. This kind of crisis is enough to push him, possibly, over the edge. That’s what I was interested in exploring.”
When compared to 2000’s Waydowntown, Burns’ surreal urbanangst satire, or the sly genre-defying Radiant City, Man Running does seem like a significant departure for the filmmaker.
Like the marathon at the centre of the film, this is not easy terrain. Burns and Brunsdale explore physical and mental endurance, guilt, death, assisted suicide and depression, all anchored by the haunted performances by Rand and Wilkinson and enhanced by a chilly soundtrack by Matt Flegel and Scott Munro of Calgary’s Preoccupations.
“It’s a huge shift for me,” Burns said. “Everything I’ve done is basically comedy, even if it’s dark. I’ve never done a straight drama. It’s a different time in my life. Comedy sometimes comes off as a lighter art form or something. It’s not taken seriously. It wasn’t a conscious thing where I wanted to make drama. I just think I was ready for it.”
“The film is very dark and very challenging,” he adds. “I don’t think I’ve come anywhere near this before.”