Rossi hopes to film The Envelope
Playwright Vittorio Rossi has banged his head against Telefilm Canada’s door before, and hopes to bring his battles to the screen with the help of Kickstarter
Vittorio Rossi isn’t looking to make any friends at Telefilm Canada.
The noted Montreal playwright — who has been a mainstay at the Centaur Theatre ever since his first play, The Chain, premièred there in 1988 — is on a bit of a campaign to skewer our country’s public film-funding agencies. His most recent play, The Envelope, which was presented at the Centaur last season, told the story of a playwright not unlike Rossi trying to make a film of one of his plays and running smack into the idiocies of government film financing in Canada.
Now he’s in the midst of an effort to adapt The Envelope for the big screen, to take his highly critical work right into the film world he’s lambasting.
We had lunch the other day at Da Franco, the Italian restaurant in Old Montreal where he hatched the idea for The Envelope. It’s a favourite spot for folks working at the Centaur, which is just around the corner, and the idea for the play began percolating on one of many nights when Rossi and other theatre types were bemoaning the pathetic state of the English-Canadian film biz.
When I told him The Envelope skewers the film industry, he took issue with my choice of words.
“Oh, no, no, you’re actually being too nice,” said Rossi.
“At its heart, I’m trying to tell a story, and in that story, you’re going to see hopefully a journey which takes us into this world of financing of Canadian film. We do not have Hollywood here. What we have is government funds, essentially.
“I’ve been through that system on two occasions and … it’s not fun at all. You have to meet certain technical requirements. It has nothing to do with art at all.”
Given his point of view, it’s perhaps not surprising that he didn’t knock on the door of Telefilm, Canada’s federal film funder, to try to get financing for his movie.
Instead, he’s going the real indie route. He has turned to Kickstarter, the popular crowdfunding platform, and has started a campaign designed to raise $107,000 — the bare minimum he believes he needs to produce The Envelope.
As of Monday, he’d raised only $8,715 from 52 donors.
The Kickstarter campaign lasts 45 days and is set to end Nov. 15.
Rossi will direct the film and has already snared some prominent actors, notably Mark Camacho, Howard Rosenstein, Brett Watson and Guido Cocomello, who had a role in the stage version of The Envelope.
Rossi figures Kickstarter and other crowdfunding services may well be the way filmmakers break free of agencies like Telefilm and Quebec’s SODEC.
Most of Rossi’s plays — including The Last Adam, Carmela’s Table and The Carpenter — are directly inspired by his roots in Montreal’s working-class Italian community. But The Envelope draws just as much from his own life. Both times he tried to develop film projects, he ran into what he felt was the brick wall of the public funding system.
One of the projects was a proposed film adaptation of his play Scarpone. He’d snared Sopranos star Michael Imperioli — who had acted in two of Rossi’s plays in New York — and he had also brought on board world-renowned Italian cinematographer Dante Spinotti (Heat, L.A. Confidential). He also had the backing of major Montreal distributor Remstar.
All to no avail when it came to convincing the public-funding gatekeepers.
“All I remember them talking about was, ‘It still reads like a play,’ ” said Rossi. “I said, ‘Well, it’s not a play. I’ve opened it up. There are seven or eight locations instead of just one.’ (And they said) ‘Yeah, but there’s still a lot of talking.’ I said, ‘If you understood filmmaking …’
“Think of Woody Allen. Woody Allen has budgets and he still keeps it very talky. Let’s start with the classic: 12 Angry Men. It’s 12 men in a f---ing room talking s--t. Nobody got bored. It’s a classic and it worked. Another modern example is Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. Once you remove the botched-up jewelry heist, you’re in a big warehouse, somewhere, talking.
“I knew we weren’t going to get a lot of money (for the Scarpone adaptation). That, all told, we’d maybe have a total budget of $2 million or so. When you have that kind of money, it cannot be about locations. You have to limit the locations and keep the focus on actors.”
Rossi points to one of the most loved films in the history of American cinema, The Godfather.
He underlines that producer Robert Evans managed to convince his bosses at Paramount Pictures to take a chance on a young filmmaker, Francis Ford Coppola, who hadn’t proved himself, and a seasoned actor, Marlon Brando, who most in Hollywood figured was washed up.
“If they’d approached this with (the same mindset as Telefilm), Coppola doesn’t get the job and we miss out on a brilliant film. You can’t just make these judgments based on technical requirements. That’s the difference between bureaucracy and what we’re trying to do as artists.”