Interview with the Director - Solmund MacPherson

Tell us a little bit about your background in film making. We read somewhere that you grew up around the theatre. What effect did that have on you and your film making?

I think theatre affected me in more obvious ways with my previous film, Wolf in Dude's Clothing, which was very theatrical. Every frame was composed like a proscenium set. This film is so different and anti-theatrical that I'm not sure if there was an effect, maybe primarily it was a pendulum swing away from those old influences as I wanted to experiment with a new style.

We saw that when making Wolf in Dude’s Clothing, you used a lot of storyboarding. Was it the same process for Wildmen?

Very much so. I storyboarded the whole film on index cards, Julian and I spoke about them extensively, and then as soon as we started shooting I promptly lost track of them. I was doing too much personally on set, all the art department, special effects, sound sometimes, whatever, and I just gave up on the boards. I figured we have the elements together, we'll shoot what we shoot. After editing the film I went through my old boards that I hadn't looked at in months and was kind of shocked to see that we followed them almost to a T, the only scenes that differed were when we got kicked out of or lost a location.

You’ve created a beautiful world in the film, a world that both the audience and Sheridan Irwin’s character almost feel like voyeurs or bystanders to. What cultural touchstones or references did you use to shape your alternate-Toronto world?

I was still very new to Toronto when we made this film, so I was looking at the city like an alien. My attention grabbed onto things that someone who's lived here forever might take for granted. Like the constantly shifting skyline of cranes, the huge swarm of pigeons that used to have a gathering point on Bloor just West of Dufferin, how if you're new to the city it sucks you in like a casino and you wake up one day and a year has passed, but they're all subtler things. The explicit groundings are less Toronto specific, like the OJ trial footage at the beginning of the film, the use of recognizable voices during the hunter scene, the photos on the TV near the end from Abu Ghraib, Indonesia's drug user roundups, Maricopa County tent prisons. You're touching on something that was a conscious goal, to make it feel real, but I also wanted to make it feel enormous, so I had to expand the touchstones outside of Toronto.

It might have been Vimeo who described this as a “no-budget” film. How much of the guerilla-style feel of the film came down to the logistics of the shoot?

Probably all of it. The entire goal of the film was to see what kind of scale could be created from nothing. Can you tell a story about the rise and fall of a society in under 15 minutes? Can you trick the audience into thinking you spent a lot more money than you did? The editing and visual language were informed by the facts that we don't have permission to be in any of these locations so we need to shoot handheld, we need to be in and out in under ten minutes, and sometimes we may need to shoot without audio. All of those constraints were written into the script, primarily with dialogue prelap and postlap (or just straight up voiceover) being written in to cover locations that we probably couldn't get a boom mic into. Everything was downstream of this goal to create scale from nothing. I actually think that goal hurts the film in some ways, where I pursued it too childishly and didn't consider the bigger picture, but oh well.

This film was shot a couple of years back, but particular scenes and the general feelings of alienation seem as relevant today as ever. Were you trying to capture a particular moment in time with this film, or aiming for a more timeless film?

I thought we were making something very, very timely, and tried hard to push the film out quickly. Unfortunately it's only gotten more relevant as the years have gone by. Which is kind of depressing. 

How do you feel revisiting your previous films a few years on? Are you a director who is satisfied with the work once it’s done?

Miserable. I haven't made very many films and I learn so much with each one that it's extremely difficult to look back on old work positively. There comes a point where I no longer associate myself with the film anymore, and then I can enjoy it for what it is, but until I have a new film I'll still be miserably attached to this one.

What projects coming for you next?

If I discuss this publicly I will inevitably just be embarrassed when it doesn't happen.

Any message for our Melbourne fans?

Say hi to Caitlin and Iz!