CHILLING THRILLER
VIFF film will put you on edge
Ana Valine’s new film, Once There Was a Winter, is an anxiety-inducing thriller set mostly in an isolated, mouldy, mobile home that is so depressing you can almost see the desperation dripping from the door jambs.
“We weren’t in Yaletown, I can tell you that,” said Teach Grant, who plays Welder in the film shot up near Dawson Creek in northern B.C.
“Just being up there, being on location, being isolated, it made the experience feel authentic to us. I think it really helped us, the entire team, not just the actors, but I think the crew and everybody involved.”
While the location may have supplied some creative inspiration, it also provided some real concerns.
“The double-wide was every bit as dingy as you expected it to be,” said Grant, who moved to Vancouver from Ontario in 1996. “It was fine when we went in on the first day and they hadn’t turned on the heat, but then when they turned on the heat everything under the floors and everything in the walls began to sprout. I was taking a couple pills a day before going to set — Benadryl and I had brought an asthma inhaler.”
Shot over 17 days in Pouce Coupe (15 kilometres outside Dawson Creek), the film, which plays at the Vancouver International Film Festival on Sunday and Oct. 6, tells the story of two brothers with a dark history and an unsettled score. Getting in the middle is a woman (Kate Corbett) just known as Lady (the other characters also have simple monikers of: Welder, Hunter, Plumber). Lady works with Welder and after a day on the job tags along as Welder makes a stop at his brother Hunter’s (Juan Riedinger) trailer. The setting is snow-covered, dark and very isolated. He tells Lady to wait in the truck, but when he doesn’t come back right away she goes in. Yes, big mistake.
What she discovers is a mood you could cut with a Bowie knife. Soon things go from uncomfortable to unruly as long-standing resentments are buoyed to the surface on a lake of booze. There is no breath-taking in this one and you the viewer are in deep just minutes after Welder and Lady land at Hunter’s home.
“For myself, after Minute 10 there isn’t a comfortable moment in the movie,” said Grant, who is shooting the USA Network series, Damnation.
“I imagine audiences are going to be waiting for something to go horribly, horribly wrong. I think that was the case for all of us as we were trying to go deep and go into that vulnerable place.”
This exposure to a northern world had to be authentic for Valine. There was no room to fake the loneliness of the landscape.
“There’s a different rhythm there,” said writer/director Valine (Sitting on the Edge of Marlene). “That’s why I wanted to shoot there. The northern rhythm is slower and more deliberate. The actors really got the feel of that. They would go out on their own and absorb.
“Basically, we went down the rabbit hole,” Valine added. “The actors said after it was a tough shoot. It was the combination of the material and the isolation.”
For the record, Grant said after the shoot that he felt eviscerated and completely drained. So, yes, you could call it a tough shoot.
Lady’s situation is one Valine said she has been thinking about for a long time. She has memories of landing in the midst of a very male world and suddenly having to change the way she presented herself.
“In my late 20s, I worked up on the pipeline in northern Alberta,” said Valine, who has called Vancouver home for 20 years. “I had heard of a few situations and had some tense nights myself. It sat with me for years and years, and I basically let my imagination go
with it and I wrote it in three weekends.”
The kind of situations she is referring to aren’t something Valine wanted to expand on in this interview.
“I was the only female on the crew up there. You are in a very masculine world. It’s no place to sort of assert feminism and still be safe. So you have to kind of roll with a lot of it. I thought about that,” Valine said.
The film thinks about that. Its overarching theme is, how do women participate in the world and experience all the things men experience and remain safe?
“How do you say yes to adventures and say yes, I want to learn new things and experience new things. It’s really different for men. Men just do it without thinking twice,” Valine said.
Now that the film is out and heading to festivals, hopefully it will get a distribution deal for a wider release.
“There’s a lot of anxiety that goes with it. You put your heart and guts on the screen. It’s a very vulnerable place to be. So there are mixed feelings, for sure,” said Valine, who has optioned the Giller Prize shortlisted novel, The Cure for Death by Lightning, by Gail Anderson-Dargatz. “My films tend to be polarizing, so I expect this one (Once There Was a Winter) to be even more so. So, it’s OK, there is a relief that it’s done, but brace yourself for the onslaught. This one I am sure is going to push a lot of buttons for people.
“You don’t watch it with your head,” Valine added. “This one is made from gut and grind.”