COLLECTIVE ON A ROLL WITH REELS
North Country Cinema gets set to screen its second feature film
The early feedback for Alexander Carson’s O, Brazen Age has included comparisons to two 1980s ensemble films, both of which have been regarded as being representative of various generations.
Reviewers have suggested it’s an “avant-garde version of The Big Chill,” a reference to Lawrence Kasdan’s 1983 baby-boomer lament; or an “art house version of St. Elmo’s Fire,” a reference to John Hughes’ blustery generation X staple that came out a few years later.
The notion that a film sets out to capture the zeitgeist of any generation is a bit of a pretentious one, so Carson is understandably cautious when addressing the question.
But he admits the comparisons — whether they be to St. Elmo’s Fire, the Big Chill or Ted Demme’s 1996 film Beautiful Girls — aren’t necessarily off base.
After all, all those films can be boiled down to a fairly simple premise.
They are about friends getting together and “working through some sh-t,” Carson says.
“I’m OK with that,” he says. “Normally we think of a comingof-age as being about people finishing high school or people finishing college or, in the case of the Big Chill, maybe it’s a little bit later and they’re in their early 30s. In the context of this film, this group of characters are meandering through this period that is not often focused on, which is post-university or even postgraduate school. The end of your 20s, which I found to be a particularly challenging time, when you’re supposed to have gotten this education and are equipped with the tools you need to succeed as an artist. With very few exceptions, I don’t think any of my cohorts of those ages were having any success at all.”
So while Carson’s assured debut film might have Shakespearean references (King Lear and The Tempest, mostly), intriguing visuals and ask existential questions about love, God and art, it is also a story about friendship centred on a group of artistically inclined millennials moping around Toronto.
O, Brazen Age is the second feature film produced by North Country Cinema, a now Calgarybased collective that formed out of Concordia University 12 years ago. It screens Saturday at the Globe Cinema.
Not surprisingly, the film shares a few characteristics with the collective’s first feature, Calgary native Kyle Thomas’ The Valley Below. Both were episodic ensemble dramas that relied on the cumulative expertise of North Country. But while The Valley Below was a neo-realist, Alberta Badlands set film that recalled the work of John Sayles and often seemed like a Springsteen song come to life, Carson’s debut is more openended and stylized, influenced by the more art house outings of Gus Van Sant.
“I think a common thread is an interest in personal storytelling,” Carson said.
“There’s an interest in family and a sense of place and geography and how that informs culture. I think there’s a connection in wanting to tell stories that reflect our own experience. Obviously we didn’t live all of the experiences that our characters go through, neither of us did. I don’t want to suggest that either movie is necessarily autobiographical, but I think it comes from a sense of something familiar, working with the same kind of maybe spiritual challenges that we probably have reckoned with at various points.”
Carson, who grew up in Ottawa but now lives in Olds, kept things familiar on set as well, using friends and family as cast. That includes his brother, Ben Carson, who plays drifting photographer Sam, and Kyle Thomas, who plays a relatively successful and married producer at an advertising firm. They are the among the group of artsy friends who drink, read each other poetry and generally muse about life, love, friendship and art.
While the actors can’t really be described as non-professional, they certainly didn’t come from central casting either.
“I knew I would get something (better) than if I just cast Toronto actors from a casting director,” Carson says.
“The types of people who get sent out for it wouldn’t have made the same type of choices. I think it was really about trying to find the right person for the part. I always felt the Sam character, the photographer and voyeur who is always on the outside of this group of friends. I thought he was a surrogate from my gaze, or where I wanted to position the viewer’s gaze during certain chapters of the film. I did end up auditioning a bunch of actors for that part but at the end of the day I thought ‘I think my brother should do this.’”
For Thomas, who also co-produced the film with Carson and fellow North Country member and filmmaker Cameron Macgowen, the chance to play a lead role in a feature film was “something new.”
“I spent most of my youth acting and thinking I was going to be an actor,” he says.
“The experience on working on Valley Below so intimately with actors and on performance and focusing on that, I felt I should give it a shot. Then you actually get on set and it’s like ‘Action!’ and it’s ‘oh, sh-t, I’m on the other side,’ But for myself as a director who likes to work with actors and performance and character, it was a great little exercise.”
Now that the collective has made two feature films in the past three years, Thomas says the experience has proven both pragmatic and inspiring.
In practical terms, it has allowed a group of like-minded artists to pool their talents and benefit from whatever cumulative attention each filmmaker receives.
The strong friendships between filmmakers, meanwhile, has also allowed them to be honest — at times, brutally so — when assessing each other’s work.
“We’ve become very good at saying ‘No, that sucks’ or ‘This has got to go,’” Thomas says with a laugh.
Moving forward, Thomas says the plan it to continue to evolve together as filmmakers.
“We have these two features that are very much passion projects and we made them in a very similar way that we made shorts because that’s all we knew how to do,” Thomas says.
“So that was an easy transition. But the next step after we finish (Carson’s) movie and start moving ahead, I think it will be a new chapter for North Country Cinema because we are now stepping into a world where art and commerce have to live together. Finding that balance will probably be a little difficult and a challenge. For us right now, we’re trying to figure out where our projects can fall somewhere in between, where we can create these meaningful projects in an independent way but dealing hopefully with bigger budgets so we can eventually pay off the credit cards from these two features.”