Director’s year of mutants and mistletoe
The Tree That Saved Christmas When: Dec. 3/Dec. 12/Dec. 23, Bravo
David Winning calls it the year of mutants and mistletoes.
Versatility has never been a problem for the hard-working, Calgary-born director of film and TV. For the past 30 years, he has produced a staggering amount of work in every style imaginable, from B-movies that had Bruce Dern battling swamp devils to 11 episodes of Sweet Valley High.
But even for a guy known for dipping into far-flung genres, this year has been a particularly varied one.
Bravo is airing his heartwarming new movie, The Tree That Saved Christmas, which follows another yuletide offering he directed called Paper Angels.
He also directed episodes of two tween series this year — Max and Shred and the upcoming Stanley Dynamic — for YTV and Nickelodeon.
In January, Superchannel will air Mutant World, a scifi horror flick about rampaging zombies in the apocalypse that Winning oversaw in Calgary and Strathmore early this year.
Such is the life of a gun-forhire director.
“It switches every year,” Winning says, in an interview from his office in Los Angeles.
“You never know where you’re going to be or what you’re going to do.”
Still, Winning says he has a particular fondness for those projects that his 91-year-old “dear old mom” in Calgary can watch. The Tree That Saved Christmas certainly fits the bill. It’s an earnest holiday film with Party of Five’s Lacey Chabert as a busy but unhappy big-city girl who returns home to Vermont, where she becomes embroiled in a fight to save the family’s Christmas-tree farm from nasty bankers who want to bulldoze it into golf resort.
“It’s very much like a Disney movie I might have seen … as a kid,” Winning said. “I think it has my record for the most hugs I’ve ever shot in a movie.”
Shot for the family-focused Up network in the U.S., The Tree that Saved Christmas was filmed over 11 days in Squamish and Maple Ridge, B.C. Shooting fast and with little money has been a staple of Winning’s long career, starting with his 1982 Alberta-shot debut Storm, which screened at Cannes.
The Tree That Saved Christmas is already winning praise, and from a fairly lofty source. New York Times TV critic Mike Hale chose it as one of five Christmas movies to watch this year.
“To think that a kid from the Prairies directed a movie that is listed in the top five in the New York Times,” Winning says. “It was completely by surprise.”
Winning isn’t completely new to delivering hearttugging festive flavour. Before he did this year’s The Tree that Saved Christmas and Paper Angels, which was based on country singer Jimmy Wayne’s song and novel of the same name, he directed 2002’s He Knows When You’ve Been Sleeping, based on Mary Higgins Clark’s Christmas fantasy.