Select Page
Interview with author/actor Quinn Cummings

Interview with author/actor Quinn Cummings

QuinnC

This weekend I got to interview Quinn Cummings; the archive of our talk is below. I first “met” Quinn via Twitter where she expanded my vocabulary and exposed herself as a fellow cat magnet and admitter of awkward acts. She also happens to be an Oscar-nominated actress (for her role in The Goodbye Girl when she was 9 years old) and now an author with three funny — and occasionally poignant and educational — books to her name.

Notes From The Underwire is my favourite. It covers her acting childhood and her life with Consort, daughter Alice, and various animals today, while The Year Of Learning Dangerously is my favourite title, and taught me that almost everything I assumed about homeschooling is wrong. Her latest is Pet Sounds, a collection of animal stories mostly culled from her blog, The QC Report, and with proceeds going to an animal shelter in Los Angeles.

Check out the interview and if you’re so inclined, please make a donation to Kids Help Phone in advance of the soon-to-be-launched 2nd almost-annual charity auction (tell them TV, eh? sent you). Note this is the archive of the livestream so … yeah, ignore the first couple minutes or so.

The Trotsky: Just another feel-good comedy about a kid who thinks he’s the reincarnation of an assassinated Marxist

The Trotsky: Just another feel-good comedy about a kid who thinks he’s the reincarnation of an assassinated Marxist

Before it even premiered in Canada, The Trotsky had earned its writer/director a Writers Guild of Canada award along with accolades from various film festivals. Jacob Tierney, whose previous film Twist was a gay update on Oliver Twist, this time focuses on a Montreal high school student (played by Jay Baruchel) who thinks he’s a reincarnation of Leon Trotsky.

The First Weekend Club had a screening of the film in Vancouver on Tuesday, with a funny and charming Tierney introducing the film via Skype video chat to an audience who chose one of Canadian film’s best efforts over the Vancouver Canucks’ last gasp. Before some good-natured rivalry (“I understand you have a professional sports team out there”), the Habs fan compared his two features.

“I think they’re not that different, which I know on the surface is ridiculous,” he said. “I think they both come from adolescent impulses. Twist is a film in which everything that can go wrong does go wrong. The Trotsky is a movie in which everything that can go right does go right. Not to ruin the ending. I consider those both to be adolescent ideas, that the world is either black or white, one or the other.”

Now 30, Tierney wrote The Trotsky years before it was filmed. “I really struggled to stay true to the impulse when I wrote it, when I was young, that I really wanted this kid to win. I wanted to give him absolutely everything he wanted. I felt the movie owed it to him.”

His unconventional upbringing factored into the subject matter, which is both a comedic and poignant take on class struggles and youth disaffection. “My parents were Maoist travelling hippies and I grew up in China and India and all over the place,” he explained, looking to his Vancouver-based sister Brigid for confirmation … and expressing amused shock that she wasn’t in the audience as expected (a hockey fan, perhaps?)

“We came back to Canada and now my father’s this big capitalist producer. So I think I was acutely aware of class because I watched my own family march from the working class into the upper middle class – which is generous – let’s say above that now – my whole life. So I’ve always been aware of that. I don’t think you make a movie about a guy who thinks he’s Trotsky unless you think of things like that.”

The Trotsky opens Friday across Canada.

Passenger Side Takes An Eccentric Ride Around LA

Passenger Side Takes An Eccentric Ride Around LA

This post is a rerun, originally published on Blogcritics in July 2009. I saw the movie and interviewed the brothers last year at the LA Film Festival. Now, it’s being released in theatres in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal and you must see it – great film, great soundtrack.

Passenger Side Takes An Eccentric Ride Around LA

It’s fitting that Passenger Side, a film about a day-long road trip around Los Angeles and environs, had its premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival. It’s also fitting that I saw it two hours after arriving in Los Angeles after being the passenger on a week-long road trip. But the LA of Passenger Side is not the LA of a tourist, unless that tourist were particularly fond of transsexual prostitutes, middle-of-nowhere gas stations, and low-rent porn shoots.

Beyond the seemingly disjointed scenes of LA’s underbelly and a couple of plot twists I can’t reveal, there is little plot to share. Former addict Tobey (Joel Bissonnette) calls on writer brother Michael (Adam Scott of Party Down) to drive him around Los Angeles supposedly for a series of job interviews, encountering a series of oddball characters along the way.

“The film has a very limited narrative,” writer/director Matthew Bissonnette agreed. “A guy shows up, says he’s doing one thing, it turns out he’s doing another thing, which turns out to be a third thing. It’s a 1-2-3 plot, so it’s much more about the relationship between the actors.”

That third thing made me wish theatres had rewind buttons, since it forces the audience to re-examine events, but the heart of the film is the poignant and unexpected revelations of character rather than plot. Michael is too much an observer of life, not enough a participant. Tobey, whose past is the subject of the road trip, has perhaps participated a little too much. The costs of their life choices, however, are not quite as predictable as the brothers or the audience might think.

The Bissonnette family is well-represented in Passenger Side – Montreal-bred Matt and Joel are brothers, and Matt’s dog even has a role in the film. Canadian-born, LA-based brothers making a film about Canadian-born, LA-based brothers invites the most obvious of questions: are the characters modeled on the men?

In one scene, Tobey expresses his dismay at the fact that Michael’s failed novel paints the protagonist’s brother as a screw-up. Joel denies he had the same reaction to the script. “They’re both characters which are perhaps hybrids of both of us and neither of us. And then once we started shooting, there was a whole lot of Adam Scott.”

“It was the easiest film I’ve ever made in part because the narrative is so simple, but also because the actors were both so strong,” asserted Matt, who was named one of 10 young American moviemakers to watch by The Independent (yes, they know he’s Canadian: they designate him “almost American”).

Since both characters are enormously likable, and their barb-laden relationship unfolds effortlessly, it’s easy for the audience to go along for a ride where nothing much seems to happen. When Michael describes his next, unfinished novel – one that bears some resemblance to the non-plot of the movie at that point – Tobey comments that it sounds boring.

“That’s a little Brechtian type of thing, if you want to get fancy about it,” Matt said. “In film school that’s what they’d say: it’s a Bertolt Brecht moment. It’s a difficult thing in a film that doesn’t have a lot of story, to sense when the audience might be zoning out on you. I hope that the way this film works is that just as we’re reaching that part, you have the end of the film, which pulls it all together.”

“I fell in love with the movie again watching it the other night,” actor brother Joel admitted. “It’s hard to define: it’s a road movie, it’s a movie about two brothers, in a sense it’s a love story.”

“I liked the confined space. It set the tone – a very intimate conversational tone. We’re not overtly talking about anything really deep, but there’s a very definite close, comfortable relationship between the brothers. You get the impression these are guys who have spent a lot of time together, and that’s aided and abetted by the space itself, which is intimate.”

“The difficult thing was I never got to drive,” he joked, explaining that his acting options were limited. “There was a lot of putting on of the seat belt.”

“The visual aesthetic was very much defined by the confined narrative. I’m always interested in combining disparate elements,” Matt explained, sounding very much like the indie filmmaker he is. “So if you have an intimate, talky film, you want to open it up visually to the extent you can and turn the viewer outward. It was an interesting thing, when to be on the actors and when to pull back.”

He also talked about balancing the film’s broad laughs with more nuanced humour, and populating the soundtrack with both more and less familiar tunes (including, naturally, Wilco’s “Passenger Side”).

“I think balance and juxtaposition are how cinema works. You have three basic elements you’re juggling – sound, story and picture – and you want to make them not all the same, because that’s dull.”

Theatrical distribution will partly depend on the reception to its festival appearances, but even if Passenger Side doesn’t end up in a theatre near you, it will eventually be available on DVD and, at least in Canada, television. The Movie Network and Movie Central will broadcast it, as they have Bissonnette’s two previous films, Looking for Leonard and Who Loves the Sun. “They pre-licenced this one, which they don’t usually do with smaller films,” the writer/director explained. “But they liked it and they were completely instrumental in getting the movie made.”

As Canadian as the funding is – Telefilm is also involved – Passenger Side is a fascinating glimpse of Los Angeles as much as it is an enjoyably voyeuristic look into these two characters’ lives.

“I don’t know if there’s a Canadian sensibility because I don’t know what that is,” Matt laughed in answer to my obligatory Cancon question. “It has a sensibility that Joel and I are familiar with. Because the people who made it are Canadian there’s something there, but I wouldn’t know what that something is.”

Interview with Passenger Side writer/director Matthew Bissonnette and actor Joel Bissonnette

My latest at Blogcritics, after a long absence:

  • Passenger Side Takes An Eccentric Ride Around LA
    “It’s fitting that Passenger Side, a film about a day-long road trip around Los Angeles and environs, had its premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival. It’s also fitting that I saw it two hours after arriving in Los Angeles after being the passenger on a week-long road trip. But the LA of Passenger Side is not the LA of a tourist, unless that tourist were particularly fond of transsexual prostitutes, middle-of-nowhere gas stations, and low-rent porn shoots.” Read more.

Random pop culture thoughts

Random pop culture thoughts

It’s been a while since I’ve done a roundup of my recent relevant Twitter activity so here’s some of my latest pop culture thoughts, in 140 characters or fewer:

  • Web Therapy web series by Lisa Kudrow/Don Roos is pretty funny – and not geoblocked.
  • Mostly loved Curious Case of Benjamin Button, though a little slow, a little puzzling in its themes, a little Forrest Gumpy.
  • I’m quoted in article re: TV marketing (re: ZOS on Air Canada). Weird to be interviewee instead of interviewer.
  • Loving new music purchases TV on the Radio, Deerhunter, Mates of State. Mostly discover music via TV shows and popcandy. Me=unhip.
  • Been watching Gavin & Stacey so if it’s remade by a US network I can be smug and say it’s not as good as the original. Love it so far.
  • Neighbour gave me Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Like Harry Potter for adults. Not my usual read but I’m enjoying.
  • Bakugan makes no sense to me [it’s a tv show like Pokemon or Yu-gi-oh, but also a game I was “taught” over the holidays]. Doomed to feel intellectually inferior to friend’s 8 year old. But I’m totally smarter than the toddler.
  • Book gifts I received – The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, and Troublesome Words. Is it possible I’m a nerd? Nah.
  • No energy to write year review so Twitter version: TV sucked, best movie, Slumdog MillionairePredictably Irrational most interesting book.
  • So I can’t get away with just saying TV sucked? Fine. Writers strike hurt 2 seasons. Bit disappointed in fave shows, no new shows to love.

Want to follow me on Twitter? I’m here.

Slumdog Millionaire – my pick for best movie of the year
Listen now: Casey Walker of The Adrenaline Project and My Million Dollar Movie

Listen now: Casey Walker of The Adrenaline Project and My Million Dollar Movie

Casey Walker, a director with The Adrenaline Project, is also raising money for his romantic comedy in an unusual way: by selling frames of the film for $10 each. See more at My Million Dollar Movie.

Listen in the player below, visit the show site, or subscribe via iTunes or with any other program via the TV, Eh? feed. (The interview starts at 6:30 – slight connection glitch).