'Shoot It!'

• Shoot It! Hollywood Inc. and the Rising of Independent Film
• David Spaner
• Arsenal Pulp Press (2012)

[Editor's note: Suffering from the Oscar blahs? Can't relate to the box office smashes that cleaned up this year? Felt this way for a while? Writing film reviews over the past decade, Vancouver's David Spaner constantly asked himself: Why are the movies so bad these days? In his new book, published this spring by Arsenal Pulp Press, Spaner digs up some answers. Shoot It! chronicles the rise of the lacklustre Hollywood studio hit, and the alternative movement of independent filmmaking in seven different countries. At the close, Shoot It! is a tribute to rogue indies who've found ways to make movies on their own terms. In this excerpt from a chapter on Canada's independent film industry, Spaner interviews veterans like Sarah Polley and Don McKellar to unpack "the cultural war" behind getting their films noticed, the role of a quota system, and the secrets of Quebec success over the past decade. Rolling.]

In 2000, the Canadian government set a five-year goal for Canadian film: five per cent of the box office (from about one per cent that year).

However, "they didn't do anything about distribution or exhibition," Canadian actor and director Don McKellar noted. "Unfortunately, that policy put all of the onus on the films as opposed to the system in which those films live, where people are not able to access their own movies. It's also a little bit misguided because they're saying, 'Okay, let's make movies that can compete with studio-system movies,' which we just simply cannot do. They have $100-million marketing budgets."

It only got worse the following year when Richard Stursberg took over Telefilm and then announced: "We are generally not prepared to invest more than $1 million in a film if it does not stand a reasonable chance of making more than $1 million at the box office."

To director and actress Sarah Polley, Stursberg's vow to commercialize Canadian film was a declaration of cultural war. "I had come to awareness in this incredibly optimistic, creative environment, and when I was ready to start making my own films, I realized I was living in a world that didn't respect itself at all. 'Let's just toss out everything we've built and try to make films that look like they're American.' That was probably the first time in my life I really questioned my decision to stay in Canada. I thought, 'Well, if I wanted to make American films I would have gone to the States to do it.' I stayed here to make interesting Canadian films."

Quebec has the advantage of a de facto quota -- the French language -- that builds domestic audience. Since the 1990s, there has been a diverse parade of Quebec auteurs, including Jean-Claude Lauzon (Léolo, 1992), Robert Lepage (Le confessional, 1995), Lea Pool (Emporte-moi/Set Me Free, 1999), Louis Bélanger (Gaz Bar Blues, 2003), and Xavier Dolan (Les amours imaginaires/Heartbeats, 2010).

In Jean-Pierre Lefebvre's films, Quebec is a star. ("The only stories I know, the only people I really know, are in Quebec," he says.) His Les dernières fiançailles (The Last Betrothal, 1973) chronicles the dying days of a long, rural-Quebec marriage. Through meticulous pacing, Lefebvre recreates a country life filled with Quebec routine; Rose and Armand know each other's every nuance, and the audience slowly learns and savours their ways.

Denys Arcand has directed a string of noted features including Le déclin de l'empire américain (The Decline of the American Empire, 1986) and the Oscar-winning Les invasions barbares (The Barbarian Invasions, 2003). More recently, Denis Villeneuve has emerged with Maelström (2000), Polytechnique (2009), and Incendies (2010).

"Quebec films are based on a culture that has been established much longer than the English-Canadian culture, which is not easy to define because all its influences are more vertical than horizontal," Lefebvre says. "All my friends in Vancouver were more influenced by Seattle and California than by the East Coast."

Most of Canada rarely watches the country's top grossing movies, which are made in Quebec. But Lefebvre is concerned that the Quebec box office is dependent on local versions of American genre movies such as the comic cop movies Bon Cop, Bad Cop (2006) and De père en flic (Father and Guns, 2009). "I've got nothing against the fact that a film like Bon Cop, Bad Cop is made," says Lefebvre. "But it's not cinema that interests me. My concern is that it's too much one way, too much the commercial way. There's a star system and distributors want that actor, that director."

As president of the L'Association des Réalisateurs et Réalisatrices du Québec (the Association of Directors of Quebec), Lefebvre made headlines in 2006 when, after Telefilm's Quebec office announced it would fund only five features that year, he called for a 10 per cent levy on the province's box office, à la France. His proposal went nowhere. There is a systemic problem that won't be solved by simply replacing a commercially-minded Telefilm executive with a well-meaning one.

"It's because of the cowardice of all our governments," says Lefebvre, "especially the federal, that never wanted to enact laws to recuperate some of the money made by all the foreign films here. When you think of the billions of dollars profit that American movies are making in Canada, if only 10 per cent of that was used in production for Canadian film production -- boom!"

Canada, a US 'cultural colony'

In Quebec, there's enough cultural activism to stare down budget cuts, but English-Canadian filmmakers seldom unite to fight. The better ones are on the left, and Canada does have feisty politics -- including the closest thing to a North American Paris '68 (with a near-general strike in Vancouver 1983) and more than 1,000 protestors arrested during the resistance to the G8 Summit in Toronto in 2010 -- but when it comes to Canadian film, weariness has set in because its advocates have been summarily dismissed by the government, exhibitors, and distributors for so long.

"I've always felt like whenever I've said something political that there's a bit of, 'Oh, there she goes again,'" says Polley. "If I was in any other country, that would be expected. When I was talking to filmmakers in Spain about a quota system they went, 'Of course, we're all fighting for it together, aren't you?'"

Polley points to the MAPL (Canadian Music, Artist, Production, Lyrics) quota of 1971, requiring radio stations to devote 25 per cent of air time to songs with Canadian content. "The music that we had to listen to at the beginning was not so great, but an industry got built upon it, and we ended up with a really vibrant, successful music scene."

Adds indie director Larry Kent: "I think the need creates good stuff, and good stuff creates better. I don't believe Canadians don't want to see Canadian culture. There isn't a people in the world that doesn't want a mirror to see what they look like, but the mirror, to more and more Canadians, has become American. In cinema, we're a cultural colony. The studios are determined not to allow a Canadian cinema because they've always considered Canada as part of the American domestic market."

Filmmakers who dare mention the quota in public have been dressed down by the film establishment. "I was definitely given some hints that the comments I made [at the Genies] could have negatively influenced how much my film was seen," Polley says. "I definitely felt that it had pissed people off."

But Polley and other Canadian filmmakers continue to speak out.

"I think the best idea is the quota system," says director Bruce Sweeney. "It would work. It becomes institutionalized."

McKellar mixes his support for incentives for exhibitors with the Q word, saying that they need "real financial incentives, or they need to be forced with some kind of quota, or maybe both."

Adds Vancouver television producer Chris Haddock: "Some very radical moves could be productive -- and the quota system in TV and movies is one of them. You'd get a better quality product. People would figure out a way to make the quality product to fill the quota."

He has no doubt that a quota would be bitterly fought by U.S. studios and their Canadian subsidiaries.

"As they do with any good Canadian idea, including Medicare," he adds. "It would be vicious. It's not going to be easy."

Minor cinema

There are nationalists who bang the drum for English-Canadian filmmaking -- but theirs is a commercial Canadian filmmaking. Toronto actor-director Paul Gross's films try to do for English Canada what the local hit Good Cop, Bon Cop did for Quebec. His curling comedy Men with Brooms (2002) had a production budget of $7.5 million and a huge (for a Canadian film) advertising budget of $1.75 million. It opened in 207 Canadian theaters and made $4.2 million, losing only a few million, which somehow made it the success story of the year according to its producers. Gross's 2008 Passchendaele ($4.5 million) was another big-ticket film, but the stuff of 1950s' studio melodramas.

It is the auteur films such as Atom Egoyan's The Sweet Hereafter and Polley's Away from Her (2006) that strike a chord internationally, and domestically when given half a chance. Last Wedding had a long run, even though it had virtually no marketing budget. A Canadian filmmaker can have a movie open strong after years of work, only to be pulled to make way for a U.S. release.

"It happens time and again," says McKellar. It happened with McKellar's Last Night, a smart, funny look at an extended ensemble (including Polley and Sandra Oh) spending their last night on planet earth.

"When Last Night opened it was making lots of money," McKellar says, but it was pulled to make way for Universal's Meet Joe Black (1998). There is a Canadian ritual of funding (in search of that elusive domestic hit) imitations of bad American movies like Goin' the Distance (2004) (see American Pie, 1999) or Intern Academy (2004) (see Police Academy, 1984). Canada's auteurs are often lumped with foreign-language films and U.S. independents as "the other" cinema.

"I've recently heard certain people go on rants, saying, 'We have to get away from this kind of auteur model,'" Polley says. "I don't know what they're talking about; I have not felt for a long time that at any public funding agency you are required to do anything other than convince them your film will be a successful Hollywood-type film."

So Away from Her became a "love story" in Polley's pitch.

"I got a phone call before I got funding. 'You're saying it's a love story, but it's not ending the way a love story traditionally ends. So what genre is it?' I said, 'Why is this a question with an independent film -- what genre it is? I don't know.' And she said, 'Can we say it's a movie about love, instead of a love story?' It's so weird that we have to fit into these categories when we're trying to do something that hopefully isn't in a category."

While Tom Scholte became a Canadian indie mainstay, he also found himself auditioning for unsatisfying work in Vancouver's U.S.-based service industry. So he restructured his life -- teaching acting at UBC, performing on stage and in Canadian films, and making his directorial debut with the Dogme-inspired Crime (2008), a bare-budgeted, bare-knuckle film made for under $30,000 from a UBC research fund.

"I'm saying 'yes' to minor cinema. Let's be a minor cinema. I don't care if people say that's being backwards. Maybe if some day we get a quota system that will change, but for now it means making small films and getting them out in the world."

[Tags: Film.]