Director picks horror script for its appeal to teenagers
Sprung hopes 10,000 Dawson students will cross the street to see it
A freak hailstorm pelted the streets of Mile End on Tuesday afternoon as Guy Sprung explained the significance of a mystical turtle to his feature film debut, the Blair Witch Project-inspired thriller The Hat Goes Wild.
“It’s out of all rationality,” he admitted, “but suddenly you’re in the point of view of the turtle, asking, ‘How the hell did that happen?’ It’s not serious, but it is serious. It’s a way of being serious by not being serious.”
Which pretty much sums up The Hat Goes Wild. How else do you explain why a local theatre luminary chose the basest of film forms, horror, to launch his feature fiction career.
Sprung has flirted with film in the past, he reminds me, shooting documentaries for Radio-canada, TéléQuébec and CBC, and TV dramas for Global, TVO and Bravo. He is the currently the artistic director at Infinitheatre, the latest step in a theatre career that has brought him across the country and overseas, to England, Egypt, Germany and Russia.
All of that seems rather out of step with a hand-held splatter film about a group of young adults who go on an ill-fated canoe-camping trip, getting wrapped up in a mess of dead bodies, drugs and turtle wisdom.
For Sprung, the concept worked on two levels: as a way to get financing, and as a way to connect to his target audience.
“The challenge was trying to find a format, which was teen horrorthriller,” he said, “and then use that and exploit it … I would never have got the funding if I hadn’t conformed to that format. I played the game.”
And he played it well, getting a modest $250,000 from Telefilm to go ahead with the project, which he then took to producer Yanick Létourneau of Périphéria Productions to help him bring it to the screen.
The format also helped him explore deeper questions about how young people view the world around them.
“I have three kids,” Sprung said. “When my oldest daughter turned 18, she took a bunch of friends up north to a cabin. There were 13 or 14 of them, they all slept in one room. I was amazed at their fabulous lack of any judgment.
“They coupled, uncoupled, their high school drug dealer came – they didn’t think (what he did) was right, but so what? They didn’t judge him. And they nearly burned the cabin down.
“As a parent, I felt totally responsible. I thought: ‘I haven’t done my job. Where do they get their sense of the universe from?’ So I started making notes.”
Like a modern-day The Breakfast Club, the story features a range of personality types – the jock, the conflicted girlfriend, the drug dealer, the sensitive Sikh, the awkward girl and the wild girl.
“They’re all caricatures, in a way,” Sprung said. “But there was a deliberate attempt to penetrate that. Each of them ultimately does something you don’t expect …. The backstory for each of them is important – what forms their character?”
The result is a film that he hopes goes beyond its flashy plot points to convey observations about what it means to be young and carefree at a critical point in life, i.e. the transition between childhood and adulthood, while trying to shake off inherited emotional baggage.
“It’s partially about the parents,” Sprung said, “even though they’re not in the story. Each one of those kids has a different relationship to their parents …. There’s a sense of curiosity as a parent – where does this come from? As parents, we are responsible.”
But while there are serious moments in the film, they are woven into a storyline that never strays far from the sensationalism of its premise. An early scene involves one of the characters losing a finger in an accident. After much confusion and panic, the severed digit is put on ice, the hand is bandaged up and things proceed as normal. It’s part of a running commentary about how kids can brush things off, Sprung said.
“When (the film) screened at the Rendez-vous du cinéma québécois, I was really gratified because the younger people in the audience were laughing. It’s meant to be funny. Oh, the poor finger – that’s hilarious. And from the screenings we’ve had, it’s the 20-year-olds who understand it.
“That’s why it’s great that it’s opening at AMC Forum, right next to Dawson College, with 10,000 students just across the street. I hope it will capture their imagination and they’ll talk about it, talk about the characters.”