Eye.net 2004

A crackpot piece of CGI surrealism by the director and stars of Cube, Nothing is a wildly inventive example of how much can be done with not much at all. Opening this weekend at the Royal Cinema, Vincenzo Natali's comedy about two men's triumph over adversity tells a universal story, minus the universe.

Our heroes are two losers who live in a house that's wedged between the lanes of a Toronto highway. Andrew (Andrew Miller) is a

twitchy agoraphobe who can't bear to be outside. His childhood pal, Dave (David Hewlett), is so badly treated by his co-workers and his girlfriend (Marie Josée Croze in a great cameo); it's hard to see why he'd venture far from the couch, either. All they really have is each other, an idea that is taken to extremes when they inadvertently and inexplicably wish the world out of existence. They, their house and their pet turtle now inhabit a mysterious space of white, bouncy, tofu-like nothingness. Understandably perturbed by this development, Dave and Andrew set out to explore this vast vastness in protective suits made of tinfoil and hockey pads. Then things get strange.

"I have to say that I like taking a very conventional kind of story then juxtaposing it against an abstract setting," says Natali during an interview with the director, Miller and Hewlett shortly after Nothing's premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last September. "Cube was basically a prison-escape story or survival story set in a geometrical world. This is really a buddy comedy set in a void."

It's the sort of audacious idea you might expect from Natali if you're familiar with the Toronto native's first two features: Cube, the micro-budgeted Canadian Film Centre project that became an internationally adored science-fiction hit, and Cypher, a canny thriller starring Lucy Liu that's still unreleased in North America, yet has inspired much praise in Europe and Asia. Natali developed the idea with his

two actor buddies before turning it over to Miller and his writing partner Andrew Lowery, collectively known as The Drews.

"It was The Drews who made it work," says Natali. "The difference between writing a six-page treatment and somehow fleshing it out

to a 90-minute film is massive. The treatment would have a line like, 'They stopped getting along' -- that's pretty much the second half of the movie. A lot of this seemed an easy thing to do conceptually but to dramatize that seemed virtually impossible. I pushed them and to their credit, the Drews went further than I expected. I've had this happen on every film I've done -- we had too much material. By the time we were getting ready to shoot the movie, we were desperately trying to contain the whole story in an hour and a half."

Just as The Drews pushed the premise to its limits in their script, Natali, the actors and a small crew had to wrestle with the task of bringing this scheme to the screen on a Toronto sound stage. "I was excited by the idea of shooting in a void," says Natali. "We really

had to rethink a lot of basic film grammar, how to stage that action and play with it. Normally when you're shooting a film, it's important to have a background."

They all bust up laughing. "A floor helps, too," says Miller. "And you so often take ceilings for granted."

"Vincenzo achieved the ultimate in director-actor relationships," says Hewlett. "He'd hang us from the ceiling like puppets and literally place us where he wanted us."

Hewlett then complains about the "30-foot atomic wedgies." Miller, who also co-produced the movie, describes the shoot as "deceptively difficult." "The set was oppressively hot and a pain to be in because you couldn't leave footprints," he says. "I had three layers of clothing on all the time."

"Who would've thought that tinfoil didn't breathe?" says Natali.

"It was really ridiculous," says Miller. "We had these self-cooling vests that Leslie Nielsen once wore playing Santa Claus. They wire

water through these coils across your chest."

"Which sounds great except you've got pneumonia in two minutes," says Hewlett. "It's like having malaria."

The production was so physically gruelling that Natali says the actors "literally crawled off the set."

"We honestly could not walk," says Hewlett. "It's like we were sponsored by Robaxacet. Every night we'd ask, 'How many of these are

you allowed to take?' It's funny because if you're working with friends on a film you like, it's very easy to relax and have fun and it's all a

big lovefest. And often in those cases the films don't turn out so well. The advantage of working with Vincenzo is that you know it's

always hell."

It can feel a little hellish to watch, too. Some critics at TIFF complained about having to spend time in the company of two crazed

losers who bicker as if they were Waiting for Godot's Vladimir and Estragon with X-Box addictions. But Nothing is so playful and

bizarre -- thanks in large part to the terrific effects by CORE Digital Pictures -- it needs that abrasive edge in order to stay grounded in

more familiar human realities. What could've been an overextended comedy sketch turns out to be an incisive satire about cohabitation, deprivation and what people think they need in order to be happy.

"As absurd as the film is," says Natali, "ultimately I think it's a very human story. It's not a cold film. On some level we'd engage the audience emotionally."

Besides, anyone who's ever had a psycho roommate who will be able to relate to Dave and Andrew's struggle to cope with each other when there's literally nothing left to distract them.

"We're hoping to appeal to those psycho roommates," says Hewlett. "If everyone in the world has one psycho roommate, then we can

sell a lot of tickets. The guys with the roommates, they're not gonna wanna go."