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Interview with David Hewlett and William Phillips
Interviewed by Gemma Files
David Hewlett, star of the Perspective Canada 2001 selection
Treed
Murray, is joined by the film's writer/director
William Phillips in a
room at the downtown Toronto Hotel Intercontinental.
Both men look surprisingly fit and rested, and maintain a witty
back-and-forth
banter throughout the interview.
(to Hewlett): First off, I'd just like to say how much I've always wanted
to meet you.
Hewlett: Really, me? Why?
Because it seems like you've been in almost every Canadian movie
I've ever seen, man. You're ubiquitous.
Phillips:
The Ubiquitous Mr Hewlett.
Hewlett: Hmmm, yeah. Well, thanks a lot--I guess I've always kinda
liked to think of myself like the Eric Stoltz of Canada.
Which is funny, because now I live down in L.A., I see him out walking his dog almost every day. There he'll be,
and I'll just have to walk on by, politely pretending I don't know who he
is.
And he does the same, I'm sure.
Hewlett:
No, I don't actually think he has to pretend.
(to Phillips): So. I saw your short film Deep Cut a while
back, the one you did through Norman Jewison's Canadian Film Centre--
which I really loved, by the way—
Phillips:
Thanks.
--but I can't help but notice that it
too is about a cross-cultural, class-oriented kind of clash between an
uptight businessman and
a street thug.
Phillips:
Yeah, that's true. But I'd just like to point out that this isn't just some
kind of habit with me--it was really a lesson I learned
from my friend Vincenzo Natali, who used his time at the CFC to do a short film called
Elevated—
Hewlett: --which I was in, weirdly enough—
Phillips: --and thereby showcase his ability to shoot cheap under
pressure, to deal with problems of theme and process, which
then really
helped to get him the backing he needed in order to do his first
feature, Cube.
Hewlett: Yeah. And that's what the Canadian film industry really
needs more of, people who come into this knowing that this is an
industry, this is a business,
and what making a short film can do for you, ideally, is to prove beyond a
shadow of a doubt you'll definitely
be able to shoot at least fifteen
minutes of whatever feature-length project you're working towards.
Phillips:
That being said, I must admit I kind of miss the short film format, too. The
other day, I remember, I was telling my wife how
much I'd really love to
make one more short film, but the fact is that nobody's ever going to let me
do that again.
Hewlett (shakes head): Too high-profile, man. Way, way too
high-profile now.
Phillips: So yeah, making Deep Cut was definitely all about
creating something which would give everybody a sense of what I wanted to do
with a feature film. Plus, it teaches you to do everything cheap and fast
and good, which came in handy when Treed Murray finally got up off
the ground. For my other short, Milkman, the film that just keeps on
giving--I'm still hearing from people about that film, years later—
Hewlett
(Leans forward, confidentially): I was in that one, too.
Phillips (ignores him): --on Milkman, I shot maybe
fifteen pages in two days, and that was mainly because I didn't know enough
to
know you couldn't do that. So ignorance helps. But making shorts
also teaches you that you really don't have the money to waste on
disorganization, and that came in handy, too.
Hewlett: Oh yeah. 'Cause you know, we had to constantly be going back
and forth between the real tree in the park, which was
sometimes subject to
outside factors like weather, and the fibreglass tree set they built in the
studio. So we'd be doing pick-ups sometimes weeks apart, reaction shots
which were supposed to be to something that'd happened during a three-minute
scene weeks earlier, and had to be made to match the footage which was going
to get cut in so it looked like that thing you were reaction to had happened
just a second before. So...you gotta remember your lines for a couple of
weeks straight, that's all I'm saying.
No more class struggles in your next project, then, I'm taking it.
And no more trees.
Phillips:
Oh no. I'm exorcized of those themes, definitely. Actually, I just finished
a rewrite for a script that's over at Alliance Atlantis, Foolproof,
and that's a completely different kind of idea. It's about these three
friends who have this game they play with each other
where they figure out
how to get into buildings that are supposedly impregnable, to hack into
these buildings physically the same way hackers hack into a computer system.
they pick a target and make a plan of how to rob it, but they never intend
to do the robbery itself.
And then of course they lose the plan, so what
happens then? (Pause) Anyways, it'll be different. I've got a lot of very
different ideas I'm working on.
Hewlett:
And they're all going to star me.
Phillips: Yeah, probably.
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