MAKING MOVIES IN A PANDEMIC
Fish Griwkowsky goes behind the scenes
Twelve-hour days in the 30 C-plus sun, 15 takes to get that one line of dialogue and camera angle just right … and three self-swab, instant-result COVID -19 tests up the nose every week for all — welcome to the world of indie filmmaking, pandemic style!
A crew of 25, and I, are now in the thick of Week 2 of filming Trevor Anderson's long-awaited first feature, Before I Change My Mind — a 1987, small-town Alberta coming-of-age film I co-wrote with the award-winning director, starting with a tiny spark amid the meat sweats in a steak house at Sundance Film Festival back in 2016.
Now, more than seven years later, I'm able to share a behindthe-scenes dispatch from up in the bleachers of a north-side gymnasium full of teenage extras in gym uniforms — girls on one side, boys on the other.
It's a big moment in the story as we watch the first narrative encounter between the leads, Robin, played by nonbinary actor Vaughan Murrae, and Dominic Lippa's bully-with-benefits character, Carter.
“When our hero Robin shows up at a new school,” explains Anderson in the fleeting seconds between “let's go again” takes, “none of the other kids can tell if Robin is a boy or a girl.
“We're used to seeing movies where that would become the whole point — gender, gender, gender — and there would usually be some kind of traumatic reveal at the climax.”
For this story, however, we wondered what would happen if the audience never explicitly learned Robin's gender.
“It would free up space to ask a different question: What kind of person will Robin become? What kind of actions will they take to become popular? At whose expense?” Anderson muses. “That's a question we can all ask ourselves.”
Even before we started shooting, it was announced our script was on the annual GLAAD List, chosen by the Los Angeles non-profit NGO that helps lead the conversation about LGBTQ representation in media.
Nick Adams is the director of transgender representation at GLAAD, and Anderson doesn't hold back.
“I love Nick,” he says. “He's amazing. One minute he's helping Oprah get the Elliot Page interview right, the next minute he's cheering us on up here in northern Alberta. Oprah loved Nick so much she interviewed him on camera about his behind-the-scenes work.
“We're so lucky he's taken an interest in our show. He has been an invaluable resource and is becoming a great friend.”
Lining up some of the local production ducks closer to home, the film is produced by Alyson Richards and Edmonton's Katrina Beatty, the latter playing a junior high basketball coach introducing the kids to the concept of safe sex at the onset of the AIDS pandemic with the awkward pairing of a condom and a banana.
It's 4 p.m., eight hours here — and at another location on the west end involving a number of gorgeous vintage bicycles — and another four hours lay ahead to get all the angles. Overtime looms.
These long days are forecast all week and, indeed, every weekday into August.
That might sound like hard work, and it is, especially under the N95 mask everyone in the crew wears every working second on the job.
But filming is also like watching a crystal palace grow in front of you, shard by shard … pure magic, really, already moved to tears by some of the in-person performances captured on film, and even in rehearsal.
We shot the film's final scene in a whirl of artificial rain and fire in the dark — it looked so good a bunch of us were speechless.
Our crew of art technicians includes the wonderful hand-held cinematographer Wes Miron — rider of an electric one-wheel around the realm between setups, and occasionally while shooting — and St. Paul mosaic artist Eric Spoeth as first assistant director, basically an inhumanly calm dungeon master who keeps all the dragons running on time.
Also aboard is legendary local costumer Leona Brausen at the peak of her powers, making this period piece look legit, which means dressing older people a little earlier than '87 — the same way we all start to fashion lag as time wears on.
“It's a combination of what Trevor remembers and my experiences at that time,” says Brausen, in charge of some 400 separate individual looks.
She notes how fast fashion is taken for granted now, unavailable in '87, especially in small-town Alberta.
“In the '80s, if I wanted anything cutting edge, I'd have to fly to New York and buy it,” she says.
The outfits came, “a lot from my basement and a lot from thrift stores for the last year and a half — doing it blind because you don't know if it's going to fit anyone,” Brausen says, adding with a laugh, “I call it psychic shopping.”
Speaking of outfits, you'll often hear how people wear more than one hat in indie productions, and I've been hustling triple duty for Briana Kolybaba's art department, including unearthing old tech like an Apple //e out of my mom's proverbial basement.
One of the major set pieces is a three-storey fort shaped like a rocket ship. Carpenter Kevin Bowman led the crew, including my wife Dara Huminski and Whyte Knight owner Mike Perrino, that built this beast on an acreage south of Beaumont in 37C heat, finishing roughly in time for filming to begin.
Also providing a couple dozen drawings Robin makes through the film, the first week for me was like running up an avalanche, but filmmaking is an absolute dream. It's as breathtaking to see all this collaborative talent working together as it is hilarious to watch all the young actors and adult crew trying their best not to swear in front of each other. But let's let Anderson have the last word here.
“I made short films instead of going to film school,” he says. “I love shorts so much I wound up making them for 15 years. To me, this is like a really complex, 90-minute short.
“That's how I have to think about it to be able to sleep at night.”