Sneak peek into a live action movie set
Cast and crew shooting ‘The Young Arsonists’ reveal fiery production
When you think of Haldibrook Road in Hamilton at night, you think (if you’re an audio effects person) … crickets. Right?
Not lately. Last Friday there were 50 people around an eerie abandoned farmhouse on that bucolic thoroughfare, until three in the morning. They were at various times either frantically occupied in lively activity, almost as a single body, like ants trying to move a piece of croissant across a lawn, or hushed and still, like a panther lying in wait.
Then that old abandoned house seemed to erupt into a mass of flames.
“Caleb, seems the old Perkins homestead’s gone all ablaze.” “Chores in the mornin’, missus. Go back a-sleep. Just them movie folk agin.”
Such are the curiosities of a live action movie set. We don’t often get invited onto one, but we did recently when the good people at Borrowed Light Films and Hawkeye Pictures asked if we’d like to observe them making “The Young Arsonists.” It’s important people see what’s involved in independent filmmaking locally, the publicist said.
“The Young Arsonists” is the feature film debut of director Sheila Pye, born and raised in Millgrove, Ont., though she now lives in Madrid, Spain, who also wrote the story.
It’s a kind of primal psychological drama with thriller/horror elements and themes of adolescent ferocity, but the first scare I got was when I arrived at the movie shoot’s base camp of sorts and had to take a COVID-19 test, so standard now on sets. Thing is, I had to be at a family wedding next day and, of course, would have had to miss it if positive.
I wasn’t. The near Hitchcockian tension was relieved. On to the next adventure. Film publicist Ally La Mere drove me from the base camp to the set, the old abandoned farmhouse.
It was spooky enough, this dilapidated, drab white clapboard structure, rising lonely and unbefriended from the acres of low scrub around it, the flatness alleviated only by a sparse stand of uneven evergreens.
It became even more so as it unfolded its horrors. There was a sense of death and misery here, intensified the deeper one stepped into the interior with its old dusty piano with the chipped keys, the patchy rose wallpaper, torn and peeling off the rough plaster like shedding skin.
The crew had done a strong job of conjuring a mood.
There were signs everywhere of some awful descent into conflict, madness, perhaps violence. The fireplace hearth and mantlepiece were charred black. Writing was scrawled on the walls. Mess and squalor and disturbed objects everywhere. Neglected candles had poured their now dried wax over the edge of the piano and onto the keys, where it cascaded like a menacing frozen waterfall.
Up a flight of creaky, crooked stairs I was taken to a room where, sitting on an unkempt bed, I met … Sheila Pye, who seemed almost of a piece with the set, with her country Gothic aura.
“The house,” she said, “is like a character unto itself.” It is the house where someone close to the main character died, she told me. “Spoiler!” Ally the publicist cautioned.
“We want to create a world. The story is one I wrote 10 years ago,” Pye said. “It’s a personal story. As I was growing up (in Millgrove) we’d get bored and run around and get into abandoned houses.”
In the movie, five adolescent girls form a bond, as a way to transcend their desolate rural lives; the abandoned farmhouse they find becomes their refuge but, as the house has history, it becomes a place that also draws out their obsessions, deepest fears and desires.
“Our executive producer Martin Katz calls it, ‘Lady of the Flies,’ ” referring to ‘Lord of the Flies’ (the famous William Golding novel, about young boys turning savage on an island), said Pye.
I talked to Madison Baines, a York University film grad, who plays one of the characters. She’s a youthful looking 23, playing a 14-year-old. It is exhausting, she admits, shooting a movie but the most exciting work she’s ever done — “It feels like summer camp!”
Cast and crew lolled around before the shooting of the girls riding bicycles. They waited on makeup and everyone had that “movie set” look — both underslept (the bonfire shoot the night before went to 1 a.m.) and, at the same time, ready to pounce.
That night, once it was dark, they shot the big scene: the simulated house burning down. They used smoke machines and fire bars (like large barbecue venturi tubes) at every window, safely turning the flames on and off with propane valves, and recreating interior walls outside, burning them along with curtains, then dousing the flames.
The whole time a member of the fire department was there.
The shoot, which involved dozens of people, went until almost 3 a.m.
The various component pieces of the fire, shot separately, will all be melded together in post-production and intercut so it appears the house is engulfed. The magic of movies.
Agata Smoluch Del Sorbo, a producer who lined up funding and logistics (equipment rentals, insurance, for example) for “The Young Arsonists,” the budget of which is about $1 million, told me Borrowed Light Films was set up to raise the involvement of women and minorities in film.
“The Young Arsonists” has been picked up by Crave and the team hopes it will be shown widely in the near future.