A story to tell

Acting experience helps behind camera: director

Christopher Walken delivers a quiet, nuanced performance in the new drama Percy, playing a Saskatchewan farmer who runs afoul of agriculture giant Monsanto over some genetically modified seeds. But that doesn't mean director Clark Johnson wanted it that way.

“He said: I don't want to `Walkenize' this role,” Johnson recalls. “'Cause we kept saying, `Can't you just dance or sing in this bit?' He said: `I'm not doing that.'”

Johnson is kidding, of course. Or at least I think he is. Reached by phone from New York, the filmmaker is ebullient, cheerful and a little slapdash as he discusses his new movie. When I suggest this is not a very Walken-esque role he replies: “You kidding me? A guy from Queens as a canola farmer? That's typecasting!”

The director was born in Philadelphia but grew up in Toronto, where most of his family still lives. “I'm comfortably straddling the border,” he says. “I'm mainly in New York now because of COVID-19. I haven't been able to get up there since February.”

Percy is set in Saskatchewan but was shot next door in rural Manitoba. “The farm that we shot on was six generations of canola farmers,” says Johnson. “They were so in the spirit of Percy and Louise Schmeiser. That's what Christopher Walken tapped into. He learned to drive a combine on that farm.”

The Schmeisers are a real couple the agri-biotech conglomerate Monsanto sued in 1998 for allegedly growing the company's patented, pesticide-resistant canola without a licence. Percy Schmeiser maintained that the seed must have blown into his field from somewhere else, and refused to pay. The case eventually reached the Supreme Court of Canada.

Zach Braff plays Schmeiser's out-of-his-depth lawyer, a role Johnson says was originally going to Michael J. Fox. “Then he fell and broke his arm, poor guy, and had to bail.” On paper, Braff looks even less likely in his part than Walken, but he handles it well. “I just love the irreverence,” Johnson says of the performance. “If there's any quirky in the movie it's him, not Chris Walken.”

Johnson is likely best known as an actor — he played Detective Meldrick Lewis in seven seasons of Homicide: Life on the Streets in the '90s — but his storied career includes lots of directing (including five episodes of Homicide) and even stunt work, and his IMDb page lists his earliest credit as a driver in 1981's The Last Chase, a cheesy, made-in-Canada science-fiction film starring Lee Majors.

He explains that he first met Walken almost 40 years ago, on the set of David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone. “I was doing special effects,” he says. “I was the ninth special effects hand in a nine-effect team. “So I was around Walken all day every day, putting bullet hits on him, lighting his bed on fire, all those things that I did as a young effects guy.”

He also once drove Walken to the Genies (a precursor to the Canadian Screen Awards) in a year when Walken was presenting and Johnson was up for one. “He comes by his eccentric image honestly,” he says.

Being a longtime and continuing actor — he was most recently in the Canadian drama Tammy's Always Dying — gives Johnson an insight into directing that he relishes. “I have the same language as my tribe — my acting tribe — and a lot of times we cut to the issue way quicker, so that helps me. There's a lot of directors who don't speak `actor.' And they may need to go to nine takes just to see what they were looking for because they can't ask the question or make the suggestion.”

Johnson isn't sure what's next for him, but a long-gestating project he hopes to push forward is to tell the story of how his parents came to Canada.

“They were in the movement down there,” he says vaguely. “My mother got in a little tiff with the (the FBI) — in that she went to Cuba on a humanitarian mission but the U.S. government took her passport so she couldn't get back in the States.”

I want to know more, but our time is up. “Everybody has a story to tell,” he says before the line goes dead. “It's just in the telling. That's the key to what we do.”

The movie about Johnson's parents' life story can't come soon enough for this filmgoer.