Finding Dystopia in Saskatchewan
LIKE MOST PEOPLE, LOWELL DEAN HAS A COMPLICATED RELATIONSHIP WITH WHERE HE’S FROM. “I hate to fall into the obvious category, but it’s definitely love/hate,” the director says of his home province. “I go back and forth. I think the less I see Saskatchewan on the big screen, and the harder it is to get films made there, the more my pride really grows.”
To be sure, Dean’s not one to back down from a filmmaking challenge. His fourth feature, the post-apocalyptic thriller SuperGrid, follows two instalments in his internationally renowned WolfCop series, but it was no easy feat. “There was nothing easy about the film,” he says. “We jokingly said, ’It’s just a movie about two brothers in a car, why is it so hard?’ But the reality was it was a 17-day shoot, we had just over a million dollars and we had many locations, armies, tanks, explosions and chase scenes.”
There was one surprisingly simple task that worked, however — finding post-apocalyptic shooting locations in the Prairies. “It was actually shockingly easy,” Dean admits. “We just had to really find the worst parts of the province, and show Saskatchewan in a gross way, which we seem to have a habit of doing.”
That said, Saskatchewan has a way of coun- tering the grossness by looking, well, picturesque. “It was a beautiful summer when we ended up shooting,” Dean adds. “The hardest decision was ‘Do we keep it this green and lush? Do we let the Prairies look this beautiful? Or how do we take it down a notch and, through colour timing, close it up a bit?’ We found a nice balance.”
By making the province as ugly as possible, Dean managed to make SuperGrid as believable — and surprisingly relatable — as possible. “The world can be a really dark, bleak place,” he says. “The apocalypse doesn’t seem that farfetched anymore, so it’s nice to see a cautionary tale and maybe see the good guys win.”
REPLICAS
This PG-13 recut of Deadpool 2 features Fred Savage re-enacting his character from The Princess Bride. It’s the sort of pandering that skates the line between fun and irritating.
Keanu Reeves clones his dead family and Silicon Valley’s Thomas Middleditch says some nerd stuff in this hokey sci-fi flick.