Horror short opens doors for Saskatoon-born filmmaker
When Saskatoon native Alexis Makepeace started the one-year program at the Vancouver Film School, instructors didn’t sugarcoat what to expect from the industry.
“They really break you down and tell you ‘As an indie filmmaker no one cares about you. No one wants to read your script. You’re bottom of the barrel and if you want to do this you have to be your own biggest fan,’ ” she said.
Rather than instil fear, the blunt advice made Makepeace confident she had chosen the right path. Now, her final school project has been nominated for a Leo Award and screened at festivals in Calgary, Berlin and Arizona. It has also been chosen to be part of We Are the Weirdos, a U.K. screening series run by film collective The Final Girls, which explores the “intersection between horror film and feminism.”
Sorry We’re Closed is a horror short with a satirical take on the fear of feminism. In it, a waitress takes her hatred of men to the extreme.
“I think the reason I wanted to make this a satire was to deliver a strong message about how silly the fear of feminism is. I thought ‘Why don’t we have the most radical feminist to the point that she’s killing every man she encounters and turns them into hamburgers.’ ”
“It’s only six and a half minutes, so even if you hate it and hate me you’ll probably get over it pretty quickly,” she added with a laugh.
Sorry We’re Closed was chosen as one of the Vancouver Film School’s final projects to be filmed that year (she graduated in 2016). Not all students see their work come to life.
But the shoot was far from easy. Her lead actress Jennifer Kaleta had been volunteering at the Pemberton Music Festival two hours outside of downtown Vancouver when her ride home bailed at the last minute. Makepeace and her producer Bradley Chernyk drove to get her at 1 a.m.
“I remember getting back as the sun was coming up,” she said.
Later, Kaleta ended up sick with food poisoning and was hours late to set. When she did arrive she spent a lot of time running to the bathroom to throw up. The cast and crew was exhausted.
“It was actually kind of nice that I was so sleep-deprived because I didn’t have the energy to be nervous,” said Makepeace.
Thankfully, the finished film got a great response from her instructors and a wider audience. Being accepted alongside the other films in We Are The Weirdos, which starts in late October in England, went beyond Makepeace’s expectations.
The short will also play at the Sitges Festival in Barcelona, which is screening the new movie by horror master Guillermo del Toro.
Makepeace, who grew up in Saskatoon, said there’s never been a better time to be a woman in film.
“There’s still a lot of work to do but I feel really lucky that I am even at a point where I have female directors to look up to. It definitely wasn’t always like that,” she said.