IRONSIDE’S INDIE FILM TAKES AIM AT ISOLATION
Canadian actor is in Strathcona County on a 24-day movie shoot
Let’s call it the Ironside Moment. You’re munching popcorn, 20 minutes into some Hollywood blockbuster. And then! That stone face — those jack-o’-lantern eyebrows — that demon smile!
Michael Ironside is in the house again — yes! — a tough-guy icon and human Easter egg, with true method-actor chops, joyfully slipped into a staggering number of major film and TV productions.
The actor’s 120-plus theatrical releases include David Cronenberg’s 1981 horror classic Scanners (Ironside’s basically boiling on the poster); a hands-on role fighting Arnold Schwarzenegger in Total Recall; he gets supremely bugged in Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers; grates against the machines with Christian Bale in both The Machinist and Terminator Salvation. Hell, he’s even a naval captain in crisis in X-Men: First Class.
I fell fully in love with this stern mercenary as Ham Tyler on V back in 1983. Thirty-plus years later, intergenerational, he’s Captain Cold’s dad on TV’s The Flash, more than 1,800 hours on screen the actor guesses.
You get the sense directors like to collect him.
For when Ironside appears, you know something bad is around the bend — often him, often hell-bent. And, man, can that guy get mutilated and murdered on screen like no one else: a real Canadian anti-hero.
“I spent my whole career dying in pieces,” Ironside said, face to face in a century-old brick farmhouse east of Fort Saskatchewan, the walls stuffed with blank-eyed taxidermy and parlour portraits. It’s the busy, active set of Knuckleball, written and directed by Calgary’s Mike Peterson. “We are in makeup,” Ironside pauses, rubbing his naked scalp, “and hair.”
Sure enough, death is in the air here, too. A plastic bin marked “blood” safely out of the shot lines is one clue — the gored-up face of Ironside’s co-star Munro Chambers another. And horrors in the root cellar I won’t even talk about.
The story of an extended family gone wrong, Ironside plays ex-ballplayer Jacob, grandfather to 12-year-old Luca Villacis as Henry. Both actors joke Knuckleball is a bloody version of Home Alone.
Ironside quickly admits Jacob dies, too, of a heart attack — which sets up the premise.
But here’s the thing. Jacob’s still around for the whole movie.
And let’s stop there with the spoilers, which Karen Dinwiddie, Ironside’s wife of more than 30 years, ribs him about. “Don’t give the whole thing away,” she laughs. Their affection is palpable, peppered with kisses.
“What we’re really trying to do with this film is talk about parenting and the damage that can be done with secrets and lies,” Ironside says. “God’s a bearded man who sits on the clouds, and babies come by storks.
“The truth is always best, is what I think is the underlying theme here. Being emotionally and physically and spiritually truthful.”
Sitting on an iron bed and stained mattress upstairs, Peterson, a veteran of more than 75 film fests, doubles down on that idea.
“If you don’t deal with the past it’ll always come back. This is an extreme version of that,” he says with a little smile.
The more than $1-million, Alberta indie film production is employing a lot of Edmonton talent as, Peterson says, “crews are slim right now — and the location is perfect.” It’s a 24-day shoot, stretched out because Villacis is protected by restrictions on the hours young actors can work.
But Peterson isn’t complaining — some of the footage during a few days of recent hoarfrost are as beautiful as I’ve ever seen shot in Alberta, seriously. “We’re trying to make a marketable film people want to watch,” Peterson says.
Both from Toronto originally, Ironside and the director first met, oddly enough, driving separate vehicles in Los Angeles after the actor spotted Peterson’s Alberta plates on his pickup. They had a conversation through several intersections, the then-intern promising he’d make a movie with Ironside someday.
When Peterson sent him the script over a decade later, Ironside laughs, “My agent said, ‘Evidently you met this fellow on Laurel Canyon and was in his pickup truck?’ And I remembered it!
“I take about 100 unsolicited scripts a year — this one was exceptional. It had all those kind of organic discomforts people go through.”
Ironside said the first script leaned more on shock value, but went back and forth with Peterson fleshing out the characters.
“I usually test writer-directors,” Ironside, who turns 67 on Sunday, said. “I’ll make up something super obvious that won’t work for the film. If they agree to it I say, ‘I’m gonna pass.’
“I said some absurd thing and I heard a pause on the other end of the phone and he said, ‘I don’t think that would work.’ Good! Some people will bend over backwards — you can’t make a film that way. “They’ve got to be in charge.”
“As a director,” says Peterson, “I’m thinking about the macro — but (Ironside) gets right in there on the micro.
“He told me a story about his father, heard him say something once, and I basically stole it and put it in the script. I know there have been some heavily emotional times for him, seeing his father in his own performance.”
This seems true of more than the character, then. “He’s complicated. We learn a lot about him in the film.”
Peterson adds, heading to the ominous root cellar, “I’ve got a young boy. So just as a parent, you think of these awful scenarios.”
Ironside also suggested casting Chambers — his co-star on the impossibly solid Turbo Kid — for Knuckleball. Peterson describes Chambers’ role as “a Caliban-type character when the king dies.”
Under a few pancake layers of gore, Chambers jokes about Ironside.
“You know, he’s got some chops. And I think with a little more experience he’s going to go far.
“No, seriously, he’s phenomenal. How can you say no to something like this?”
“I convinced him to do it!” Ironside laughs. “Now he’s looking in the mirror saying, ‘What the f--k?’ But if he’s going to be a goodlooking kid, smiling all the time, well, you get slotted. Why not do this character and show that whole extreme range?
“I’m really proud of the work we’ve been doing. I really am. The idea of the isolated human being. I get sick, we survive — you know what I mean? If the ‘we’ isn’t in our lives, we’re in trouble. The world is getting so polarized. We’re celebrating our differences, talking about what’s wrong with everybody. A lot of finger-pointing.
“A lot of films celebrate our differences instead of our similarities. This (film) is a microcosm of what happens when people don’t actually communicate. The next generation, the kid in this film, is the end result of all our bullsh--t. If we’d been more responsible …
“I know that sounds kind of highbrow and s--t, but a film needs that kind of base. Then you can throw all the blood and musical numbers you want on it. “But it needs integrity!” The door opens and someone with a walkie-talkie (understandably) scolds us — we’ve been too loud and it ruined a take in the hellhole scenario below.
“Hey, I’m just trying to sell the product here!” Ironside growls with a smile, and keeps on whispering.