Interview: Bruce McDonald on Pontypool
Hardcore Logo, Queer as Folk Director Discusses New Horror Movie
Feb 23, 2009
Bruce McDonald is considered the bad boy of Canadian film, a director who isn't afraid of messing with what people expect a Canadian film or director to be.
Whether it was the punk rock road film Hard Core Logo (considered one of the greatest Canadian films of all time) or his announcement after winning a Toronto International Film Festival prize (won for 1989's Roadkill) that he'd spend his winnings on "a big chunk of hash," McDonald is the Canuck equivalent to cheerfully trashy directors like Robert Rodriguez or Quentin Tarantino.
Now he returns with Pontypool, an intense thriller in the vein of Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later. Based on the 1998 bestseller Pontypool Changes Everything by Tony Burgess, it follows a trio of workers at an Ontario radio station, who discover a language-borne virus is turning the people around them into violent zombies.
In Part #1 of this exclusive interview, Suite 101 sat down with McDonald to discuss the process behind making the film, and why he used the book's author to write the script.
S101: What drew you to Tony Burgess‘s novel Pontypool Changes Everything?
McDonald: “Michael Holmes, the editor of ECW, the company that published it, said, ‘Hey, you should check this out. Maybe there’s a movie here.’
I loved the idea of the language virus. I never heard of anything this strange before but familiar in that sort of Andromeda Strain, end-of-the-word, I Am Legend kind of way. I’ve always loved those sorts of stories; there’s just something so epic and terrifying about that.
“So I met Tony at a reading and I said, ‘Hey, what do you think of playing in the movie world?’ He was excited and we hit it off. He’s become a great collaborator and a pal; a really funny, generous guy. I’ve kept him employed for many years on this project, actually.” (laughs)
A lot of directors dread having the author working on the script because they may not be aware of the differences between what works in a book and what works on screen. How did you avoid that?
“I was very patient because this was Tony’s first screenplay. I brought on another friend, Noel Baker, who wrote Hard Core Logo. He was Tony’s first teacher. It took Tony some time to come around to the rigour of the screenplay and to understand that this is not a document that is meant to be read, it’s meant to be shot. There is that fundamental leap that you have to make.
"It took quite a while for him to be confident because it’s a weird collaborative process writing a screenplay. You’ve got producers saying, ‘This is too expensive’ or ‘write an Academy award scene for the actor so they can show the clip’ all these weird things (laughs). Tony was used to sitting in his room, writing books (imitates typewriter on the table)."
You’re describing a lot of what’s going on. It’s not just the dialogue –
“Oh yeah, yeah! And I think a great screenplay writer can write what you’re actually seeing. Novelists don’t necessarily do that: they write what you’re feeling. But in a screenplay, you can’t write what somebody’s feeling, you have to say it or the character has to do something because you don’t have the privilege to sit inside their minds the way you do in a book. So it’s an interesting curve.
"I did my best to help Tony try to understand why we do draft after draft after draft. This went on for 7 years: we went through so many drafts and different producers and co-writers and got it to a point where we were sort of happy but it was expensive. It was more than a million dollar movie.
"Towards the end of that process, CBC Radio contacted us and said, ‘We’re looking for people to do radio dramas’ and we’re like '. . . Really?’ (laughs)
When I was watching Pontypool, that really struck me: it felt like a radio play on the screen. It reminded me of Orson Welles’ 1938 radio play War of the Worlds –
“Yeah, yeah! That was really funny because when they contacted us, I was like ‘F**k! What’s a radio play?’ And the first thing I thought of was War of the Worlds. And I thought of the language virus because that was from radio, and words and talking, and I thought, ’Maybe there’s a way to fit Tony’s ideas into a War of the Worlds-type thing.’ You know: one setting.
"And from that, it happened pretty quickly. Tony liked the idea and he wrote the script really quickly. By now, he’s a bit of a pro at writing scripts! (laughs). So we exploited that notion of Theatre of the Mind and I thought of films that took place in one room, like My Dinner With André and . . .”
Reservoir Dogs -
“Right! It’s all in the warehouse pretty much. The Blair Witch Project is not in a room but it’s in the same forest, in one place. Death and the Maiden . . . Roman Polanski’s been great at doing these very contained dramas. It’s a challenge for the director and the photographer and the design team . . .”
But it’s also liberating because those limitations become something you can bounce off of. Do you find that?
“Yeah, that was actually a surprise. I went from initial ‘Yikes!’ to ‘This is actually kind of cool’ because when you got a big broad palette and when you run out of steam on a scene you go cross-town, or go to a diner or go to another city.
"But when you’re in one place, the details suddenly become very important. Our world was created by a whistling kettle and a bottle of booze. It was a great way to focus ourselves, to get intense in one place. It was a great muscle to exercise.”
(In Part #2 of this interview, Bruce McDonald discusses why Pontypool is not really a zombie film)
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