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schmericaPart One is here. This is a pretty random makeshift collection; again, feel free to point out more cool stuff.
Postcards From The Edge
By Don McKellar - Shift magazine, Sept 1998
With two feature films out this fall, LAST NIGHT and THE RED VIOLIN, Don McKelllar is adjusting to the glamorous life of a celebrity. In this exclusive diary from the Cannes Film Festival, he reveals what it's like to move at the speed of a star.
15/5/98
We're in the final stretch of a long, long line. We're flying economy. "Tell them you're going to Cannes and they'll give you an upgrade for sure." That's what they promised at the office, but I was skeptical. I'm never good at exploiting these things. Besides, we're flying Lufthansa.
Still, my producer, Danny Iron, feels obliged to grovel on my behalf. I wait with the luggage while he approaches the man from the airline and explains our glorious mission.
"Hello. Hello, sir. My friend over there... who you may recognize... or you may not... has directed a film, Last Night... is the name... which was selected for the Director's Fortnight... in Cannes... where we are going..."
"How wonderful! I wish you luck," the officer smiles, clearly impressed. "But if I bumped you up I would have to bump up all these people now, wouldn't I?"
16/5/98
My first day, rushing along the Croisette, weaving through the crowds. My other producer, Niv Fichman, is being honoured at a reception. I am late. Approximately eight times a day, every day for the next week, I will retrace this route, up and down this famous drag. Every time it will be crowded. Every time I will be late. The overwhelming throngs that clog the boardwalk, that congregate at the driveway of every hotel, seem strangely inured to the drama of The Biz. They are not having fun. Like a giant, impatient tour group waiting for its bus. A bikini-clad girl trots by in high heels, marshalling a passel of obliging paparazzi. A sash over her shoulder proclaims her Miss Ukraine.
This is the last time I will mention bikinis, paparazzi or breasts. I'm just trying to establish that they're all here, as you would expect, if slightly less epiphanic. (The famous bare breasts were a little elusive until I discovered that you could walk along the shoreline and look back at the private beaches.)
Next to the Olympics, this is the world's biggest media event. Unlike the Olympics, however, it happens every year. Four thousand journalists are here, and each and every one has penned a colourful piece about the human circus, the porno pushers, the starlets in leopard skin. My only advantage in writing this kind of story seems to be that I am not a journalist, I make so pretense at objectivity or accuracy. That's the card I intend to play.
17/5/98
Before I have another interview with someone else, I run into Roger Ebert relaxing with this wife. He asks me to join them and I sit down for a while and we chat about the festival, about how little it has changed during his tenure. About the movies and how they've changed so much. We discuss my script for 32 short Films About Glenn Gould and how it might compare with the Francis Bacon biopic that neither of us has yet seen. He is charming and surprisingly engaging. After a while he takes out a video camera and asks if he can film me for his Web site. Of course I consent. I chat with his wife about the weather and the price of local salads. Roger takes it in. I am also charming and surprisingly engaging. Surprising, I would say, considering that the man behind the camera, the world's most powerful film critic, has just told me that he will be attending my screening in an hour.
18/5/98
I remember my first festival outside Toronto: Turino, Italy, with Roadkill, in 1989. My first glimpse at this world of delights. My God, I couldn't believe it! They fly you over, they put you up, they feed you Italian food! What's more, they take you seriously, like a foreign filmmaker or something. They ask you probing questions. They put you on TV. They supply people to run around and please you. Attractive people, Italian people. To top it all off, I got a free suit out of the deal after the airline lost my luggage. Molto bene! My first suit. An Armani suit! (I was flying Lufthansa.) As I wandered about some castle garden with cult auteur Monte Hellman and our eager Italian guide, I remember thinking, this is a pretty good job.
Now, of course, I've seen it all. I'm old and hopelessly jaded. I sit around bars with festival hacks and whine about the canapés at the parties the day before. I drink from noon until night until morning, rosé and champagne, drinks that I would normally relegate to outdoor weddings or mock celebrations. I recognize the invisible web of petty humiliations that reinforce this impenetrable hierarchy. Or so I feel, anyway, at my lowest points of self-loathing, like after last night's shindig for Armageddon. Bruce Willis is often to blame.
19/5/98
This is what I do Tuesday:
Miraculously, I wake. Hung-over, though less than I ought to be, what with that cocktail party, the press conference, the reception, my premiere. What with that party on the boat. I try and wash myself - crouched in the tub, with one of those stupid hand-held showers the French stubbornly cling to, abjuring bourgeois curtains. I do this quietly so as not to wake Callum Keith Rennie, the star of my film who is, I imagine, sleeping in the other bedroom. He's sharing my apartment for the duration of his stay - not out of choice, you understand, but out of thrift. It's all the production can afford. Danny is sharing with Joe Boccia, my co-producer. Niv is sharing with Larry Weinstein. Sandra Oh, my other star, has her own room, because she's a girl.
I rush long the Croisette, lurching through the morning crowd to make my first appointment. I don't make it due to some confusion reading my timetable. My publicist bawls me out as she leads me back to my home base, the terrace of Le Grand Hotel. I spend the morning, as I have these past few days, parading around the hotel lawn getting photographed or taped for TV. The journalists and cameramen set themselves up at stations around the grounds, like booths at a country fair. My publicist directs me from one to the next, pumps with with coffee, and stops me when I ramble. This morning I face the French.
The French photographers have very clear ideas of what they want you to do. "Stand comme ça," they say. "Put your head against the tree. Hunch your shoulders. Look sad." They make instant personality assessments, sometimes insultingly astute: "Look like you are confused. You are tired with too much to drink." This morning, I go with the flow. I'm confident enough in my own identity to submit to their baffling proposals. A photographer from French Premier magazine suggests that my film is about subtle, quotidian nuances - he wants me to sip a cup of tea. Before long, I find myself lying in the garden as his assistant showers me with rose petals.
Callum and Sandra, who have been doing the rounds themselves, join me for the occasion of our fifth latte. Our celebrations are largely telepathic, weary old pros that we are. My French publicist takes the opportunity to slip me a compact camera and two extra rolls of film. La Libération has chosen me and a select few other lucky directors to shoot "A Day in My Life: 24 Hours in Cannes." Basically, free scab work for their paper. It's something I don't want to do. It's way too coy and self-referential to be walking around taking snapshots. Look how different the world is through my special eye! I might as well publish my diary from Cannes in some inane hip quarterly. And when I'm finished doing their job I don't even get to keep the camera.
Lunch is on a docked yacht with all the directors eligible for this year's Camera D'Or. An event that proves rather deadly. I arrive late and find myself in the last remaining seat at a table entirely occupied by the French - film school chums with a lot to catch up on. I decide to keep to myself as I eat, not that this requires much effort. Occasionally, one of the French will turn to me and condescend to explain some wondrous delicacy unfamilar to my New World palate. What shrimps are, for instance: "These are a kind of small fish from the sea. Well, not a fish exactly. You understand?" Mercifully, my publicist whisks me away before the final course.
This afternoon, back at the Grand - international press. Roundtables and a handful of solos, some with Sandra and Callum. It all goes pretty smoothly. I'm not at the stage yet where anyone has to talk to me unless they have some interest in my movie. Many, in fact, kick off their allotted time slot by announcing something like this: "First of all, I don't have to say this, but your film is one of my Top 3 so far." True enough, they don't have to say it, but I can't help noticing that those who do often find me more lively and revealing.
By and large - a difficult confession - I generally do like the press. Probably more than I should. At smaller festivals, when no one else is around, I've even been known to dine with a group of them. They work hard. They tend to like movies. I know it sounds sucky, but after you've done this circuit for a while you tend to develop acquaintances, friendships even. Your festival pals, as I like to call them. You meet them again and again - in Tokyo, Melbourne, Vienna. Every now and then, far from your families and home, you catch the scent of the noble destiny you share, reviewer and reviewed, and over apéritifs that someone else has paid for, you are English and German soldiers shaking hands on Christmas day.
On the way to my next appointment my publicist blows away my romantic vision. She tells me that some old soldier - Stallone, I think, or Arnie - had confided in her his rules of the game:
1) Make the journalist think you are his friend. The dutiful publicist keeps a record of each dupe's name, his wife's name, and where Sly last met him. Before each interview the publicist drops the low-down to Sly. He greets the interviewer with: "Tony, how's it going? Been a while since Aspen. Tell me, how is Judy?"
2) You compliment the journalist on something he is wearing.
3) You physically touch the journalist - once.
I'm a simplistic amateur. I shudder to think this might work.
We arrive at the Variety pavilion, where I am to participate in the Americas Panel, which used to be known as the America Panel until the "s" was added to accommodate the persistent inclusion of Canadians. My new friend, Roger Ebert, is the host. Before we begin, he takes me aside and informs me that I should check out his Web site. "You won't be disappointed," he adds enticingly. This little teaser keeps me going though most of the panel, which never really hits its stride thanks to a certain homogeneity among the panelists, and a certain lack of Siskel. Still, I feel rude ducking out as I do when my publicist waves to me from the back.
Across the Croisette, at my French distributor's office, I am ordered to change into formal attire. My formal wear is not a tuxedo per se but, ingeniously, the same black suit that I wear every day, with a different tie. I tested this system earlier in the week at the first Palais screening. All the competition screenings are black-tie events, but I thought I might squeak in with a dapper four-in-hand I had picked up back on Queen Street (at Boomer in exchange for this mention). By all accounts it's a nice tie, and a formal one to boot, what with its elegant black and white stripes. The doormen, however, were unimpressed. Two burly etiquette enforcers rushed over, delighted to turn me away.
"Non, non monsieur! Papillon! Bow tie!"
I toyed with them for a while, acting indignant and extravagantly depressed, but then, when push came to shove, I reached into my pocket and whipped out my emergency clip-on bow tie. It warded them off as if I had pulled a handgun. Clothing here is a weapon. Thankfully, I'd been warned.
The get-up is needed for the seven o'clock screening tonight, but before I get there we make a brief stop at the Ontario party sur la plage. It is felt that the Canadian press will be offended if I neglect to make an appearance at what is in essence my party. But I can't imagine anything more insulting than the 10-minute "celebrity walk-through" that I have been allotted.
Most of the Canadian press guys are there. You usually find them hanging around in packs. Several of them even share apartments in Cannes, which is vaguely endearing, considering they work in competing publications. My own relationship with the Canadian media is odd. They're assigned here to cover me, not to review me, and this is against their natural breeding, a curse as much as a blessing. On the one hand, if they like my film, they don't have the luxury of "discovering" me, and this is unfortunate because my film works best as a found gem. On the other hand, if they hate it, they're not allowed to ignore me, which more than a few must resent.
I have my reservations as well. I know that every time I get some nice press in the motherland, a handful of letter-page blowhards or bitter assistant editors will accuse the paper of picking favourites and sucking up to the home boy. This explains my slight reticence to seek out the press. It's also a bit of a shame. Despite the odds, I believe that most of them are likable and fair, wanting the best for their national cinema. (The obvious exception is anti-Canadian John Harkness from Now magazine in Toronto, who once warned me, in a room full of witnesses: "I hold grudges, y'know. I hold them for years. I can make or break a career in this town!")
Anyway, I brush them off. Ten minutes - five after I make it past the doorman. I grab a glass of champagne, get my picture snapped, take two sips and announce my departure. No one seems to notice or care.
My main event of the night, the one that justified the bow tie, is a ludicrous charade at the Palais. All of the Camera D'Or gang, us first-time directors, have been corralled in a back room where the elaborate and incredibly important proceedings are explained to us. We are to walk in an orderly fashion up the red carpet as they read out our names. We must maintain our assigned order. We must stop when the person in front of us stops, and slow if they start to slow. Otherwise we may start walking on top of one another, I suppose; injuries might result, and an international incident.
I'm assigned a lovely chaperone, Chloe, whom I must stick with no matter what happens. Chloe has been trained in this difficult walking business and knows exactly what to do should disaster strike. We are marched out front and up the daunting steps to the world's most exclusive cinema. The cameras click wildly. I look around at my tremulous peers stepping in perfect formation: a small indie nation as they light the Olympic torch. Our names are read out over the speakers. (Mind you, the order is fucked because of the poor American slob who was sidelined for trying to wear jeans with his tux.)
The selection tonight is John Boorman's The General, but I won't see a frame. It's all been a clever ruse. As soon as I get through the door Chloe grabs my hand and runs, literally runs with me, down a corridor, through the basement and out to an idling car where Callum and Sandra are waiting. We have a TV show to do way at the other side of town. I change my tie as we drive.
After the show I am rushed to another, a cerebral talk show that the host describes as "very French." It goes to air live and, to my surprise, runs significantly longer than it's suppose to - half an hour into overtime. This is something unheard of in regularly scheduled programming back home. "Very French," I'm told.
Still, this quaint French custom has made me very late for a date with Sandra back in the city. She has been waiting for almost an hour in the lobby of the Carlton while Morgan Freeman, Matt Dillon et al traipsed past her on their way to the ballroom, to the dinner we'd been asked to join, according to the invitations in my pocket. She's dressed up and pissed off. Our places have long since been given away. A disapproving waiter reluctantly ushers us to the only remaining seat at a table that is otherwise filled with French critics. Another chair is brought from the kitchen so we don't have to take turns sitting.
After the very nice dinner, we rejoin our whole team at a party for the Francis Bacon biopic. This is when I remember the camera in my pocket. There are few remaining hours in my allotted 24, and by this point, it looks like none of them will have sunlight. I can't even figure out how to work the flash. Desperately, I click off a roll and a half: screaming starlets, boiling crowds, cameramen filming us backlit by klieg lights. I shoot Callum looking impossibly cool. I shoot Sandra dancing, looking for all the world like she is having a fabulous time. Some girl forces me to hand over the camera. She gets in tight on her friend's tattooed ankle. It's the shot I am certain they'll publish.
22/5/98
Days later it all crashes down, seemingly out of the blue.
Callum and I have just finished lunch at the swanky Hotel du Cap, an ultra-exclusive haven half an hour along the coast, and I'm feeling pretty okay. I've gotten ovations and great reviews. The film has been sold to most major markets. Harvey Weinstein, the president of Miramax, has requested a private screening this afternoon, thanks in large part to advance word from Roger Ebert. Sharon Stone is holding court two tables over. My publicist, who is working for Ms. Stone now, hovers against the railing nearby. Behind her, the Matisse-worthy sea.
Just then, however, for some inexplicable reason, as I glance down at the frolicking rich folk tanning at the side of the pool, the luxury starts to close in. I'm suddenly feeling trapped by this glamorous ultra-exclusiveness and I don't have a car or a boat to escape in. A week's worth of rosé rises in my throat. I start feeling queasy and dirty.
Don't worry, I don't expect your pity, and believe me I'm not complaining. I'm just trying to relate a crucial part of the semi-celebrity backwash that I wouldn't feel honest ignoring. It's the part when you look around at the privilege and bullshit and ask yourself: What am I doing?
It never stops me for long. It never stops anyone.
Two tables over I notice Sharon Stone leaning in to touch her journalist friend.
23/5/98
I win an award. Thank God for that! Imagine the humiliation of coming home empty-handed. The actual trophy is awkwardly large and - ungrateful as this sounds - stupid-looking. Everyone tells me it will get me an upgrade if I show it at the ticket counter. Danny makes the effort with the Lufthansa guy in Nice.
"Let me tell you a little story," the guy replies with a sigh. "Last week some Americans were coming home from Cannes. They too had won an award and asked for an upgrade. We told them... No! In any case, the plane is full."
"Not much of a story," says Danny as we get back in line.
I shrug. "If the plane is full, it's full."
******
Macleans.ca
April 08, 2005
Molly Parker finishes the sentences
Wishes she'd invented TiVo
JOHN INTINI
In researching her role on Deadwood -- HBO's acclaimed and raunchy Western drama that's now in its second season -- actress Molly Parker opted to beef up on her reading (A People's History of the United States) instead of watching the entire John Wayne catalogue. The 32-year-old, who was born in Maple Ridge, B.C., recently finished Maclean's Associate Editor John Intini's sentences.
I'D LIKE TO BE IN A CELEBRITY BOXING MATCH WITH . . . someone really scrawny. I punched my brother right in the face once when he tore up the cover of my Bon Jovi Slippery When Wet album. I was 11 and he was 9. I've never hit anyone since.
I WISH I'D INVENTED . . . TiVo. You never have to watch commercials again.
I GET ITCHY THINKING ABOUT . . . bird mites. Last year, a bird built a nest infested with mites in my house. And one morning, I woke up with mites crawling all over my face. It was like a horror movie. I almost burnt everything in my house.
THE FUNNIEST THING ABOUT GROWING UP . . . on a hippie farm was milking goats with my dad every morning. He once said I turned out so well because they weaned me on goat's milk.
THE LAST TIME I HURT MYSELF . . . was getting into my corset for the show. I bruise easily. I'm like a peach.
ESSENTIAL PARKER
1. In 1996, won a best-actress Genie Award for her portrayal of Sandra Larson, a necrophile, in Kissed.
2. Played Hope on CBC's Twitch City (created by Don McKellar), in 1998.
3. In 2002, played Amy Foley, in Men With Brooms, along with Paul Gross.
******
Living with L.A.
Molly Parker is smart enough to put her Canadian pride aside and go where the work is, even if the place is, well, complicated
National Post
3.29.2000
Molly Parker, a prolific and talented actress, may have the proper Canadian humility about things, but she also understands that it's hard to become a great actress living in Toronto. Right now, the intense, pale-skinned brunette is living in Los Angeles, where she's filming Wayne Wang's The Center of the World, a character piece based on a novel by Paul Auster. The film will most likely be another impressive example of the kind of edgy independent features Parker's been starring in since she was a teenager in Vancouver (including Kissed (1996); The Five Senses ('99) and Sunshine ('00)). Currently, she can be seen playing Billy Crudup's socialite girlfriend in Keith Gordon's Waking the Dead and opposite Don McKellar on the CBC TV series Twitch City.
Q. Do you remember deciding you had to be an actress?
A. I remember having a very sort of Pollyannaish moment. I was studying and taking acting classes in Vancouver, and it was just so fun. I remember thinking, 'This is so cool because you can do this forever and never get good at it.' You can keep challenging yourself and learning to do it until you die, and the work would still be interesting. And it still is. Ten years later I'm much more cynical, but the work still excites me. I'm doing a project now and I can't believe my life is this good.
Q.Do you like L.A.?
A. I've been coming down here for the last three years, on and off, and basically hating it. But I've changed my head space about it, and now it's all right. It's a complicated place. It's funny and weird and strange. The weird thing about being in L.A. is that for myself and all my friends, you're only here to work. Your focus becomes about that, and it's hard to do anything else social. Living anywhere else you have an ability to step away from it, which is really important.
It's easy from outside to go, 'Oh it's the centre of evil.' It's the epicentre of consumerism. You can't just walk around and meet people. But I have a community of friends now, basically all Canadian actors, all from home - Callum Keith Rennie, Sandra Oh, Eric McCormack. We're all down here and we all want the same thing. So you can stop being sort of shameful about wanting it. I think in Canada you're sort of forced into feeling shameful about wanting to be successful. And here it's like, 'What's the big deal?' Just by coming here you make that admission, and then you can move on.
Q. Will you be able to resist moving down there for good?
A. I'm trying. It's not easy. It's very expensive to live away from here and try to participate in doing movies. It means that I fly back and fourth to Toronto. But it's not that I could just sit in Canada and have a fabulous film career. Even if one is working more than anyone else in Canada, it still wouldn't be enough work. There's just not enough work. And I want to go anywhere that I have the opportunity to work with great people on great material. That's way more important to me than having some kind of idea about Canada. At the end of the day I want it to be my home. I'm trying to have it all.
Q. What was Michael Winterbottom [whose upcoming Wonderland was nominated for best picture in England] like to work with?
A. He's really nice, but I only talked to him around twice before we started shooting. I call it method directing. I see it more and more. Like Mike Leigh. When I got to London he had lists of things he wanted me to do. So I would trip around the tube and buy groceries for an entire week and go to birth classes. Every actor has a different way of working, but for me I think it was actually crucial.
Q. Do you enjoy the travelling?
A. I've gotten to go to all kind of places I wouldn't have gotten to go to. That's fun. But it's always work and it gets lonely. I remember being very lonely in London.
Q. Do you read your press?
A. I don't read stuff that's written about me anymore. I just get really tired of hearing my own voice. It's really boring, and it doesn't matter how much they like you, and it doesn't matter how good the writer is or how much they like you, I am never going to read something and go, 'gee I really think they captured me.' It's not what I'm going to show, and it's not what they're going to get.
Q. Who have you most enjoyed working with?
I just made another movie with Lynn Stopkewich, who directed Kissed. It was so exciting to be able to work with he again. It's wonderful to be able to find someone who wants to work with you more than once, because then you have a creative relationship based on a knowledge of each other. You don't have to be polite. I would do a scene and look at her and look at her and she'd go, 'Eh, I guess it was OK.' But you know there's intense respect and love for each other. If you know that, you can go as far as you need to.
And I would work with [Sunshine director] István Szabó again. He was just beautiful. He loves actor s more than anyone I've ever met. He's been making movies for 25 years and he has important stories that he wants to tell and that have value and that's what he cares about deeply. He inspires confidence and has an understanding. I think lots of directors are afraid of actors because they don't understand how we do what we do. They don't know how to get what they want, and so actors become enshrined in this weird way. Like how can you make yourself cry? Acting can be incredibly confusing and incredibly enlightening, which is why actors tend to be more self-aware. And which unfortunately leads so often to self-obsession. But on the days that go by that I don't like actors and I don't like myself, I remind myself that it's incredibly courageous thing to do. Even if you're playing someone else, it's still your soul. And it's about tapping into different parts of yourself that most people don't go near.
******
Reality chick
She won't play airheads.
She shrugs off the press.
She lives in Hogtown, not Tinseltown.
It's no way to become a star - or is it?
Sarmishta Subramanian gets real with elusive actor Molly Parker
Chatelaine
October 1998
A picture speaks a thousand words. Okay, it's a bit cliché! In an old '50s-style trailer by a lakeside cabin in British Columbia's Interior, a little girl and her brother are at play on an improvised stage. It's just a curtain over a table that coverts to a bed. But a little Henry Parker plays his part, which is to get on his hands and knees, and Molly plays hers, which is to get on Henry's back, open the curtains and say "Ta-da!" There's not much of a story, just a simple act of being "onstage." The trailer is the scene of later theatrics - Molly and a school friend hold crying contests here to see who can produce tears first (Molly always loses) - but this scene is the prototype.
Skip ahead several years - though not too many, because even today, Parker is only 26. Now she has seen the inside of more trailers than she can remember. She's had big trailers for little parts (the part of Glenn Close's prim daughter-in-law in the Emmy-winning Serving in Silence) and the little trailers for big parts (her Genie Award-winning role as a necrophiliac undertaker in the controversial film Kissed). She doesn't hold crying contests anymore, but if she did, she'd probably win.
That's because Molly parker is one of the brightest lights on the Canadian film scene these days. Hailed as "luminous" and "reminiscent of Debra Winger in her prime," she took Cannes by storm two years ago with her breathtaking performance in Kissed; the film continues to tour at film festivals the world over. Since then, she's starred in Under Heaven, an adaptation of Henry James's The Wings of the Dove, which screen at the Sundance Film Festival this year; Waking the Dead, a Jodie Foster film due out this winter; and the quirky CBC comedy series Twitch City. Her stock is high and getting higher: she's played opposite the likes of John Malkovich and Lorraine Bracco (in Ladies Room, a film about three stage actresses confronting the realities of aging). Recently, she joined Arnold Schwarzenegger and Drew Barrymore on the roster of William Morris, L.A.'s hotshot agency. This fall, she's in Budapest for her first high-profile lead role in A Taste of Sunshine, director Istvan Szabo's saga about three generations of a Hungarian Jewish family, which casts her opposite the devilishly talented and rather easy-on-the-eyes Ralph Fiennes.
She is, in other words, a rising star. But that's one role she won't play. In a business where it's all too easy to believe your own hype - and everyone else's - Parker keeps a clear eye and a cool head around the glitz, the glam, the sheer shine of the job. A pragmatist, she accepts those as a necessary evil in her life (one reason she hasn't moved to Los Angeles, the path of least resistance - and greatest remittance - for many Canadian actors). She doesn't seem to care whether she lands big in Hollywood roles. In a world where size is sometimes the only thing that matters, she's turned down a few big parts, instead choosing smaller projects with more challenging roles. As for fame, she's not yet a household name, and that's just fine with her. Which is to say, she's shrugged off the rules of showbiz - and seems to be making it anyway.
The set of Ladies Room is a study in entropy. A clutter of lights, cameras and cables crowds the soundstage, and nobody seems to know exactly where the actors are or what scene will be shot next. At a moment's notice, the crew moves camp, dragging along a tangled heap of equipment, their shouted repartee and laughter ricocheting around the Usine C theatre in Montreal's east end. In this chaos, I am waiting to meet Molly Parker and I am worried.
With good reason. Yesterday, several days after my appointment had been made final, her agent called to cancel. Things on the set were hectic; Molly was a little stressed; this just wouldn't be the right time. I did what any self-respecting writer would do: I begged. So I am here, notebook in hand, a flutter in my stomach, bracing myself to meet the high-strung artiste.
When I spy her, she's traipsing down the hall, a gaggle of teenage girls in tow. They're giggling and wisecracking, and for a moment I am confused: that's Molly? Then she walks over and introduces herself. Even dressed down - denim jack over a black laced-edged full slip, hair in a bun, Japanese schoolgirl bangs framing her face - she radiates a quiet elegance. (That's 13 years of ballet. She couldn't shake it off if she tried). She smiles warmly. "I'm going to show the girls my trailer. Wanna come?"
It's that simple. The girls (ballet students who play dancers in Ladies Room) chat for a while, then leave. Molly and I hang out there for the next few hours, talking. This trailer scene is a preview of the way things will go: Molly will hedge and try to call off every interview we set up - she's got an audition soon and needs to focus (true), she'll be in Budapest (not true). Once we're talking, though she will be charming, funny, thoughtful (when we meet for lunch, we almost switch restaurants twice because she suggests the places may be too loud for my tape recorder). At the end, she will laugh and say something along the lines of "Well, that was a lot less painful than I'd anticipated."
The truth is, Molly Parker probably isn't thrilled that this story, or any other about her, has to be written. Pragmatism (and she's got a strong dose of it) dictates some publicity is necessary; her almost impossibly good-humored nature dictates she must be nice about it: that doesn't mean she's going to bare her soul. If it all sounds a little like your typical star-seeks-privacy tale, it's not. For one thing, she's not a star yet - at least not of the class that needs no press. For another, in Parker's case, it runs deeper than that: "I don't want people to know about me," she tells me, with a half smile that makes Mona Lisa look like a grinning floozy. "The more people know about me, the less they will be able to see me as any character. It's dangerous to my work." It's also contrary to her personality: if Parker doesn't want to be typecast as an actor, she really doesn't want to be defined as a person.
About her background, this much seems clear: she had something of an idyllic childhood. She was raised on a farm in picturesque Pitt Meadows, B.C. ( "Not a dairy farm, but like a hippie farm with chickens and goats," notes Parker, who grew up a vegetarian and is still one today.) Her parents, who owned a retail seafood store, reveled in their kids, "wanting to know everything I thought and treating us like people and not like children who were just supposed to do what we were told. They took us everywhere. I almost never had a babysitter and if I did, it was my grandmother."
You could call it progressive parenting: Lynne Stopkewich, Parker's friend and director of Kissed, calls "a 60's experiment gone right." The point is she got her family's unconditional support for whatever she wanted to do. At 3, she started ballet (she'd taken to pléing around the house) and danced three times a week until she was 17. Her schools included the Royal Winnipeg Ballet of Canada. At 14, she discovered her other passion: acting.
Her acting career began with the usual fare - high school plays, drama club - except that a year later, her uncle, an actor, took her to his agency. She says she seldom worked at first, staying on only because "I thought it was fun, having to go to auditions." But over the next few years, she got small roles in television series and movies of the week. As even the low-key Parker will admit, her dedication was unstinting. "I didn't have a nervous breakdown for a year I didn't even go to university. I just worked."
What she did, when she finished high school, was cash in her acting scholarships and bursaries, and then she took a three-year course with Mel Austin Tuck at Vancouver's Gastown Actors' Studio. On the side, she took supplementary voice and singing lessons and had roles in TV series such as Neon Rider. At 18, she was among the youngest in her class. "It was so exciting," she says, her blue-green eyes growing translucent the way they do when she's fired up about something. "It was real acting. It was really working on a scene, having somebody teach you."
And for Parker it's the scene work matters, not the spotlight. She acknowledges that "it's a pretty neat feeling to be onstage or in front of a camera, to make people believe something, feel something." But what moves her is the cerebral side of her job, "the psychology of the characters, the relationships. Because people are fascinating," she continues, then, perhaps catching herself in a cliché, adds with a giggle and a flamboyant wave of the hand, "and I'm fascinating and I just get to be fascinating all the time."
In the refuge of her Ladies Room trailer - she hasn't yet been called for her scene, a closed-set love scene - we continue to talk about quitting smoking (Parker has turned to the NicoDerm patch, after many years), Mike Leigh films (her favourite director, he rehearses with his actors for months. I ask if this is common. "Yes," she quips, "in Russian theatre 50 years ago..."), the zodiac. She confesses that she sometimes figures out the signs of her characters to get inside their heads. This is something of an obsession; she also tries to figure me out when we realize we're both the same sign : Cancer. "Are you a list-maker?" she demands "I bet you are." (It's true.) Of her, I can't help thinking that if every star in her business were half as grounded, a lot of L.A. therapists would be out of business.
Of course, Parker doesn't live in L.A., which is one reason (or perhaps a sign) that she's so level-headed ("Sometimes sadly so," she muses, "I'm just so rational..."). She lives with her partner, Matt Bissonnette, a filmmaker, in Toronto. "Los Angeles is a company town," she says. "You can't go anywhere without somebody thinking they know you or should know you. The desperation is palpable." Staying in Toronto means having an almost normal life, with friends besides actors and interests besides acting - gardening (her new love), listening to music, reading. "I really love being an actor, " she explains, "but there are lots of things that I really love. It's not the be-all and end-all." She couldn't do it all the time, she adds, because "it would make me such a boring person."
Lynne Stopkewich puts it this way: "Some stars do what they do because their egos need to be stroked, or for love, for approval. Molly is the antithesis of that." What drives her is passion for the work - which means script, story, characters. That was true for Kissed, the career move of her lifetime - although that's certainly not what it seemed like then. The role, after all, was to play a necrophiliac, a taboo to beat all taboos. Parker who'd never had an on-screen love scene, had to do several, well, unusual sex scenes. And Stopkewich was a first-time feature filmmaker, with minimal funding.
But Parker read the script and was fascinated by the part. She was tiring of playing women who were "wives, daughters, girl-friends, all defined in relation to men." ("It's still amazing to me how many scripts I see that in the first scene, the woman is walking around her apartment naked," she observes.) This character - notwithstanding her propensity for walking around a mortuary naked - was a strong woman, and the role was undeniably challenging: Parker faced the daunting task of finding common ground with a person most of us would dismiss as weird or sick. Her Sandra Larson is poetic and complex, an eminently sympathetic character.
"I think women have to make the films they want, to be represented the way they want," says Parker. That's one reason she's taken on Ladies Room, directed by Gabriella Cristani. But compelling parts aren't confined to films by women: she's found an equally intriguing role in A Taste of Sunshine. Ralph Fiennes plays all three male leads; Parker's character, Hannah, is a Jew who falls in love with one of Fienne's characters, converts to Catholicism, and in a bitter irony, faces death. "It's interesting, in terms of one's lineage," says Parker, "what gets passed on and who breaks patterns and who doesn't, and what we do in reaction to our parents or in spite of them."
Of course, those are things Parker won't reveal - she's determined to keep her family life away from the hungry media maw. "I want my parents and friends to have normal lives. I don't want them to ever become 'Molly Parker's mother' or 'Molly Parker's father,'" she explains. But it is also a fear of what they might reveal about her? Parker admits that's part of it.
And here, she might almost, almost sound like a hard-nosed worldly celeb - except that Molly Parker is sitting across from me, with a red lollipop in her mouth ( her new smoking substitute), worried that she's getting too comfortable with me and saying too much. "It's much better to be a mystery," she says simply. "Doesn't everybody want to be mysterious?"
******
Wilby Wonderful Press Kit
LOCATION
MacIvor always planned to shoot the film in his home province of Nova Scotia, but he hadn’t expected to end up on the South Shore. “I was always imagining we’d be working in the North end of the province, closer to Cape Breton, but we heard about Shelburne and the Film Centre facility and went up for a scout. We loved it immediately. The studio was great and Shelburne was a perfect Wilby. After our preliminary scout, I began a re-write to accommodate the great locations I found in Shelburne.”
A refurbished naval base, the Shelburne Film Centre (nicknamed “Camp Wilby”) became residence, production office, dining hall, recreation centre, and home to the cast and crew. MacIvor thought it was a great facility, and the added bonus of having the entire cast and crew spend time together off screen was invaluable to the development of the team mentality that imbued the shoot. “So often during filming everyone just heads off at the end of the day and the shoot can become just another gig. But what we had going on was more of an experience–a community was formed–and we were all part of it, from drivers to hair and make-up, from actors to producers. It was a great time–Camp Wilby will be long remembered.”
CAST
For the role of Duck MacDonald, MacIvor turned to friend and fellow actor Callum Keith Rennie. During our observation of life in Wilby over this twenty-four hour period, Duck becomes something of an unexpected hero. A born Islander, Duck still remains something of an outsider and he is comfortable in that position. “ Callum is similar to Duck in a lot of ways,” says MacIvor. “I think of them both as angels, but in the old sense of an angel, the kind with armour and wings.” Rennie, a Genie Award-winning actor, admired the way the storylines came together with such humour and heart. “I hadn’t played this kind of character before. There is a kindness and gentleness to him. He doesn’t have a lot of conflict, but he has deep concerns and hopes,” says Rennie. “I have known Daniel for fifteen years, and I am really happy to have this opportunity to work with him. He is very adept at getting what he wants. He has a way of getting his ideas across with gentleness.”
******
Paul Gross is back in the saddle
Plays lead in Daniel MacIvor's Wilby Wonderful
Richard Ouzounian, The Toronto Star (excerpt from Wilby Wonderful website)
On this particular day, Gross beams with the quietly satisfied look of an actor who has two projects he's proud of about to reach the public eye. The first is Daniel MacIvor's latest film, Wilby Wonderful , which opens in Toronto this Friday after having had its premiere last month during the film festival. It's a typically MacIvor-esque view of the human situation, in which he presents us with the inhabitants of a small island community on the East Coast as their lives seesaw from comedy to tragedy before our eyes. Gross plays Buddy French, the local police officer, who is facing a variety of midlife crises: marital, career and ideological. There's a strong streak of the loser in Buddy, which makes it an odd choice for everyone's favorite winner, Gross, but the actor didn't have a moment's hesitation about playing the part. "I got a script through my door and I sat down to read it in my kitchen. Got to the end, picked up the phone and said, `I'll do it.'" Interestingly enough, although Gross "had admired (MacIvor) for so many years as both a writer and performer, I had never met him. I'd never even spoken to him." And although it was the quality of the writing that first snagged the attention of Gross, it was the rest of the cast that had been assembled that clinched the deal, with performers like Rebecca Jenkins, Sandra Oh, James Allodi and Maury Chaykin all along for the ride. "You'd have to be a fool not go with a cast like that," laughs Gross, "it was absolutely the most delightful movie experience I've ever had." The film was largely shot at a decommissioned Canadian Forces station at Shelburne, N.S. and Gross describes it in a phrase as "Camp Wilby." "We slept in dorms and there was a huge kitchen where you could have cooked for a battalion. We had movie nights, ping-pong tournaments, go-karts, fireworks. In fact, the movie had to work around our social calendar." But according to Gross, even the work wound up having a playful air to it. "MacIvor creates an amazing atmosphere for actors to work in. Far better than I've ever been able to do," he confessed, referring to his own numerous stints as a director. "We did a lot of talking about the scenes in advance, but when we actually came to work on them, it all fell together so easily. I can't even remember him directing us on set, and that's the greatest compliment I can offer a director."
******
Don McKellar quotes
Sandra Oh quotes
Sandra Oh Timeline
A ton of Don McKellar articles
Paul Gross, Chart, 2005
The Callum Keith Rennie Interview Project
Wilby timeline: The shoot ran from July 21 to Aug. 25, 2003 in Shelburne, NS, dubbed "Camp Wilby" by cast and crew.
Postcards From The Edge
By Don McKellar - Shift magazine, Sept 1998
With two feature films out this fall, LAST NIGHT and THE RED VIOLIN, Don McKelllar is adjusting to the glamorous life of a celebrity. In this exclusive diary from the Cannes Film Festival, he reveals what it's like to move at the speed of a star.
15/5/98
We're in the final stretch of a long, long line. We're flying economy. "Tell them you're going to Cannes and they'll give you an upgrade for sure." That's what they promised at the office, but I was skeptical. I'm never good at exploiting these things. Besides, we're flying Lufthansa.
Still, my producer, Danny Iron, feels obliged to grovel on my behalf. I wait with the luggage while he approaches the man from the airline and explains our glorious mission.
"Hello. Hello, sir. My friend over there... who you may recognize... or you may not... has directed a film, Last Night... is the name... which was selected for the Director's Fortnight... in Cannes... where we are going..."
"How wonderful! I wish you luck," the officer smiles, clearly impressed. "But if I bumped you up I would have to bump up all these people now, wouldn't I?"
16/5/98
My first day, rushing along the Croisette, weaving through the crowds. My other producer, Niv Fichman, is being honoured at a reception. I am late. Approximately eight times a day, every day for the next week, I will retrace this route, up and down this famous drag. Every time it will be crowded. Every time I will be late. The overwhelming throngs that clog the boardwalk, that congregate at the driveway of every hotel, seem strangely inured to the drama of The Biz. They are not having fun. Like a giant, impatient tour group waiting for its bus. A bikini-clad girl trots by in high heels, marshalling a passel of obliging paparazzi. A sash over her shoulder proclaims her Miss Ukraine.
This is the last time I will mention bikinis, paparazzi or breasts. I'm just trying to establish that they're all here, as you would expect, if slightly less epiphanic. (The famous bare breasts were a little elusive until I discovered that you could walk along the shoreline and look back at the private beaches.)
Next to the Olympics, this is the world's biggest media event. Unlike the Olympics, however, it happens every year. Four thousand journalists are here, and each and every one has penned a colourful piece about the human circus, the porno pushers, the starlets in leopard skin. My only advantage in writing this kind of story seems to be that I am not a journalist, I make so pretense at objectivity or accuracy. That's the card I intend to play.
17/5/98
Before I have another interview with someone else, I run into Roger Ebert relaxing with this wife. He asks me to join them and I sit down for a while and we chat about the festival, about how little it has changed during his tenure. About the movies and how they've changed so much. We discuss my script for 32 short Films About Glenn Gould and how it might compare with the Francis Bacon biopic that neither of us has yet seen. He is charming and surprisingly engaging. After a while he takes out a video camera and asks if he can film me for his Web site. Of course I consent. I chat with his wife about the weather and the price of local salads. Roger takes it in. I am also charming and surprisingly engaging. Surprising, I would say, considering that the man behind the camera, the world's most powerful film critic, has just told me that he will be attending my screening in an hour.
18/5/98
I remember my first festival outside Toronto: Turino, Italy, with Roadkill, in 1989. My first glimpse at this world of delights. My God, I couldn't believe it! They fly you over, they put you up, they feed you Italian food! What's more, they take you seriously, like a foreign filmmaker or something. They ask you probing questions. They put you on TV. They supply people to run around and please you. Attractive people, Italian people. To top it all off, I got a free suit out of the deal after the airline lost my luggage. Molto bene! My first suit. An Armani suit! (I was flying Lufthansa.) As I wandered about some castle garden with cult auteur Monte Hellman and our eager Italian guide, I remember thinking, this is a pretty good job.
Now, of course, I've seen it all. I'm old and hopelessly jaded. I sit around bars with festival hacks and whine about the canapés at the parties the day before. I drink from noon until night until morning, rosé and champagne, drinks that I would normally relegate to outdoor weddings or mock celebrations. I recognize the invisible web of petty humiliations that reinforce this impenetrable hierarchy. Or so I feel, anyway, at my lowest points of self-loathing, like after last night's shindig for Armageddon. Bruce Willis is often to blame.
19/5/98
This is what I do Tuesday:
Miraculously, I wake. Hung-over, though less than I ought to be, what with that cocktail party, the press conference, the reception, my premiere. What with that party on the boat. I try and wash myself - crouched in the tub, with one of those stupid hand-held showers the French stubbornly cling to, abjuring bourgeois curtains. I do this quietly so as not to wake Callum Keith Rennie, the star of my film who is, I imagine, sleeping in the other bedroom. He's sharing my apartment for the duration of his stay - not out of choice, you understand, but out of thrift. It's all the production can afford. Danny is sharing with Joe Boccia, my co-producer. Niv is sharing with Larry Weinstein. Sandra Oh, my other star, has her own room, because she's a girl.
I rush long the Croisette, lurching through the morning crowd to make my first appointment. I don't make it due to some confusion reading my timetable. My publicist bawls me out as she leads me back to my home base, the terrace of Le Grand Hotel. I spend the morning, as I have these past few days, parading around the hotel lawn getting photographed or taped for TV. The journalists and cameramen set themselves up at stations around the grounds, like booths at a country fair. My publicist directs me from one to the next, pumps with with coffee, and stops me when I ramble. This morning I face the French.
The French photographers have very clear ideas of what they want you to do. "Stand comme ça," they say. "Put your head against the tree. Hunch your shoulders. Look sad." They make instant personality assessments, sometimes insultingly astute: "Look like you are confused. You are tired with too much to drink." This morning, I go with the flow. I'm confident enough in my own identity to submit to their baffling proposals. A photographer from French Premier magazine suggests that my film is about subtle, quotidian nuances - he wants me to sip a cup of tea. Before long, I find myself lying in the garden as his assistant showers me with rose petals.
Callum and Sandra, who have been doing the rounds themselves, join me for the occasion of our fifth latte. Our celebrations are largely telepathic, weary old pros that we are. My French publicist takes the opportunity to slip me a compact camera and two extra rolls of film. La Libération has chosen me and a select few other lucky directors to shoot "A Day in My Life: 24 Hours in Cannes." Basically, free scab work for their paper. It's something I don't want to do. It's way too coy and self-referential to be walking around taking snapshots. Look how different the world is through my special eye! I might as well publish my diary from Cannes in some inane hip quarterly. And when I'm finished doing their job I don't even get to keep the camera.
Lunch is on a docked yacht with all the directors eligible for this year's Camera D'Or. An event that proves rather deadly. I arrive late and find myself in the last remaining seat at a table entirely occupied by the French - film school chums with a lot to catch up on. I decide to keep to myself as I eat, not that this requires much effort. Occasionally, one of the French will turn to me and condescend to explain some wondrous delicacy unfamilar to my New World palate. What shrimps are, for instance: "These are a kind of small fish from the sea. Well, not a fish exactly. You understand?" Mercifully, my publicist whisks me away before the final course.
This afternoon, back at the Grand - international press. Roundtables and a handful of solos, some with Sandra and Callum. It all goes pretty smoothly. I'm not at the stage yet where anyone has to talk to me unless they have some interest in my movie. Many, in fact, kick off their allotted time slot by announcing something like this: "First of all, I don't have to say this, but your film is one of my Top 3 so far." True enough, they don't have to say it, but I can't help noticing that those who do often find me more lively and revealing.
By and large - a difficult confession - I generally do like the press. Probably more than I should. At smaller festivals, when no one else is around, I've even been known to dine with a group of them. They work hard. They tend to like movies. I know it sounds sucky, but after you've done this circuit for a while you tend to develop acquaintances, friendships even. Your festival pals, as I like to call them. You meet them again and again - in Tokyo, Melbourne, Vienna. Every now and then, far from your families and home, you catch the scent of the noble destiny you share, reviewer and reviewed, and over apéritifs that someone else has paid for, you are English and German soldiers shaking hands on Christmas day.
On the way to my next appointment my publicist blows away my romantic vision. She tells me that some old soldier - Stallone, I think, or Arnie - had confided in her his rules of the game:
1) Make the journalist think you are his friend. The dutiful publicist keeps a record of each dupe's name, his wife's name, and where Sly last met him. Before each interview the publicist drops the low-down to Sly. He greets the interviewer with: "Tony, how's it going? Been a while since Aspen. Tell me, how is Judy?"
2) You compliment the journalist on something he is wearing.
3) You physically touch the journalist - once.
I'm a simplistic amateur. I shudder to think this might work.
We arrive at the Variety pavilion, where I am to participate in the Americas Panel, which used to be known as the America Panel until the "s" was added to accommodate the persistent inclusion of Canadians. My new friend, Roger Ebert, is the host. Before we begin, he takes me aside and informs me that I should check out his Web site. "You won't be disappointed," he adds enticingly. This little teaser keeps me going though most of the panel, which never really hits its stride thanks to a certain homogeneity among the panelists, and a certain lack of Siskel. Still, I feel rude ducking out as I do when my publicist waves to me from the back.
Across the Croisette, at my French distributor's office, I am ordered to change into formal attire. My formal wear is not a tuxedo per se but, ingeniously, the same black suit that I wear every day, with a different tie. I tested this system earlier in the week at the first Palais screening. All the competition screenings are black-tie events, but I thought I might squeak in with a dapper four-in-hand I had picked up back on Queen Street (at Boomer in exchange for this mention). By all accounts it's a nice tie, and a formal one to boot, what with its elegant black and white stripes. The doormen, however, were unimpressed. Two burly etiquette enforcers rushed over, delighted to turn me away.
"Non, non monsieur! Papillon! Bow tie!"
I toyed with them for a while, acting indignant and extravagantly depressed, but then, when push came to shove, I reached into my pocket and whipped out my emergency clip-on bow tie. It warded them off as if I had pulled a handgun. Clothing here is a weapon. Thankfully, I'd been warned.
The get-up is needed for the seven o'clock screening tonight, but before I get there we make a brief stop at the Ontario party sur la plage. It is felt that the Canadian press will be offended if I neglect to make an appearance at what is in essence my party. But I can't imagine anything more insulting than the 10-minute "celebrity walk-through" that I have been allotted.
Most of the Canadian press guys are there. You usually find them hanging around in packs. Several of them even share apartments in Cannes, which is vaguely endearing, considering they work in competing publications. My own relationship with the Canadian media is odd. They're assigned here to cover me, not to review me, and this is against their natural breeding, a curse as much as a blessing. On the one hand, if they like my film, they don't have the luxury of "discovering" me, and this is unfortunate because my film works best as a found gem. On the other hand, if they hate it, they're not allowed to ignore me, which more than a few must resent.
I have my reservations as well. I know that every time I get some nice press in the motherland, a handful of letter-page blowhards or bitter assistant editors will accuse the paper of picking favourites and sucking up to the home boy. This explains my slight reticence to seek out the press. It's also a bit of a shame. Despite the odds, I believe that most of them are likable and fair, wanting the best for their national cinema. (The obvious exception is anti-Canadian John Harkness from Now magazine in Toronto, who once warned me, in a room full of witnesses: "I hold grudges, y'know. I hold them for years. I can make or break a career in this town!")
Anyway, I brush them off. Ten minutes - five after I make it past the doorman. I grab a glass of champagne, get my picture snapped, take two sips and announce my departure. No one seems to notice or care.
My main event of the night, the one that justified the bow tie, is a ludicrous charade at the Palais. All of the Camera D'Or gang, us first-time directors, have been corralled in a back room where the elaborate and incredibly important proceedings are explained to us. We are to walk in an orderly fashion up the red carpet as they read out our names. We must maintain our assigned order. We must stop when the person in front of us stops, and slow if they start to slow. Otherwise we may start walking on top of one another, I suppose; injuries might result, and an international incident.
I'm assigned a lovely chaperone, Chloe, whom I must stick with no matter what happens. Chloe has been trained in this difficult walking business and knows exactly what to do should disaster strike. We are marched out front and up the daunting steps to the world's most exclusive cinema. The cameras click wildly. I look around at my tremulous peers stepping in perfect formation: a small indie nation as they light the Olympic torch. Our names are read out over the speakers. (Mind you, the order is fucked because of the poor American slob who was sidelined for trying to wear jeans with his tux.)
The selection tonight is John Boorman's The General, but I won't see a frame. It's all been a clever ruse. As soon as I get through the door Chloe grabs my hand and runs, literally runs with me, down a corridor, through the basement and out to an idling car where Callum and Sandra are waiting. We have a TV show to do way at the other side of town. I change my tie as we drive.
After the show I am rushed to another, a cerebral talk show that the host describes as "very French." It goes to air live and, to my surprise, runs significantly longer than it's suppose to - half an hour into overtime. This is something unheard of in regularly scheduled programming back home. "Very French," I'm told.
Still, this quaint French custom has made me very late for a date with Sandra back in the city. She has been waiting for almost an hour in the lobby of the Carlton while Morgan Freeman, Matt Dillon et al traipsed past her on their way to the ballroom, to the dinner we'd been asked to join, according to the invitations in my pocket. She's dressed up and pissed off. Our places have long since been given away. A disapproving waiter reluctantly ushers us to the only remaining seat at a table that is otherwise filled with French critics. Another chair is brought from the kitchen so we don't have to take turns sitting.
After the very nice dinner, we rejoin our whole team at a party for the Francis Bacon biopic. This is when I remember the camera in my pocket. There are few remaining hours in my allotted 24, and by this point, it looks like none of them will have sunlight. I can't even figure out how to work the flash. Desperately, I click off a roll and a half: screaming starlets, boiling crowds, cameramen filming us backlit by klieg lights. I shoot Callum looking impossibly cool. I shoot Sandra dancing, looking for all the world like she is having a fabulous time. Some girl forces me to hand over the camera. She gets in tight on her friend's tattooed ankle. It's the shot I am certain they'll publish.
22/5/98
Days later it all crashes down, seemingly out of the blue.
Callum and I have just finished lunch at the swanky Hotel du Cap, an ultra-exclusive haven half an hour along the coast, and I'm feeling pretty okay. I've gotten ovations and great reviews. The film has been sold to most major markets. Harvey Weinstein, the president of Miramax, has requested a private screening this afternoon, thanks in large part to advance word from Roger Ebert. Sharon Stone is holding court two tables over. My publicist, who is working for Ms. Stone now, hovers against the railing nearby. Behind her, the Matisse-worthy sea.
Just then, however, for some inexplicable reason, as I glance down at the frolicking rich folk tanning at the side of the pool, the luxury starts to close in. I'm suddenly feeling trapped by this glamorous ultra-exclusiveness and I don't have a car or a boat to escape in. A week's worth of rosé rises in my throat. I start feeling queasy and dirty.
Don't worry, I don't expect your pity, and believe me I'm not complaining. I'm just trying to relate a crucial part of the semi-celebrity backwash that I wouldn't feel honest ignoring. It's the part when you look around at the privilege and bullshit and ask yourself: What am I doing?
It never stops me for long. It never stops anyone.
Two tables over I notice Sharon Stone leaning in to touch her journalist friend.
23/5/98
I win an award. Thank God for that! Imagine the humiliation of coming home empty-handed. The actual trophy is awkwardly large and - ungrateful as this sounds - stupid-looking. Everyone tells me it will get me an upgrade if I show it at the ticket counter. Danny makes the effort with the Lufthansa guy in Nice.
"Let me tell you a little story," the guy replies with a sigh. "Last week some Americans were coming home from Cannes. They too had won an award and asked for an upgrade. We told them... No! In any case, the plane is full."
"Not much of a story," says Danny as we get back in line.
I shrug. "If the plane is full, it's full."
******
Macleans.ca
April 08, 2005
Molly Parker finishes the sentences
Wishes she'd invented TiVo
JOHN INTINI
In researching her role on Deadwood -- HBO's acclaimed and raunchy Western drama that's now in its second season -- actress Molly Parker opted to beef up on her reading (A People's History of the United States) instead of watching the entire John Wayne catalogue. The 32-year-old, who was born in Maple Ridge, B.C., recently finished Maclean's Associate Editor John Intini's sentences.
I'D LIKE TO BE IN A CELEBRITY BOXING MATCH WITH . . . someone really scrawny. I punched my brother right in the face once when he tore up the cover of my Bon Jovi Slippery When Wet album. I was 11 and he was 9. I've never hit anyone since.
I WISH I'D INVENTED . . . TiVo. You never have to watch commercials again.
I GET ITCHY THINKING ABOUT . . . bird mites. Last year, a bird built a nest infested with mites in my house. And one morning, I woke up with mites crawling all over my face. It was like a horror movie. I almost burnt everything in my house.
THE FUNNIEST THING ABOUT GROWING UP . . . on a hippie farm was milking goats with my dad every morning. He once said I turned out so well because they weaned me on goat's milk.
THE LAST TIME I HURT MYSELF . . . was getting into my corset for the show. I bruise easily. I'm like a peach.
ESSENTIAL PARKER
1. In 1996, won a best-actress Genie Award for her portrayal of Sandra Larson, a necrophile, in Kissed.
2. Played Hope on CBC's Twitch City (created by Don McKellar), in 1998.
3. In 2002, played Amy Foley, in Men With Brooms, along with Paul Gross.
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Living with L.A.
Molly Parker is smart enough to put her Canadian pride aside and go where the work is, even if the place is, well, complicated
National Post
3.29.2000
Molly Parker, a prolific and talented actress, may have the proper Canadian humility about things, but she also understands that it's hard to become a great actress living in Toronto. Right now, the intense, pale-skinned brunette is living in Los Angeles, where she's filming Wayne Wang's The Center of the World, a character piece based on a novel by Paul Auster. The film will most likely be another impressive example of the kind of edgy independent features Parker's been starring in since she was a teenager in Vancouver (including Kissed (1996); The Five Senses ('99) and Sunshine ('00)). Currently, she can be seen playing Billy Crudup's socialite girlfriend in Keith Gordon's Waking the Dead and opposite Don McKellar on the CBC TV series Twitch City.
Q. Do you remember deciding you had to be an actress?
A. I remember having a very sort of Pollyannaish moment. I was studying and taking acting classes in Vancouver, and it was just so fun. I remember thinking, 'This is so cool because you can do this forever and never get good at it.' You can keep challenging yourself and learning to do it until you die, and the work would still be interesting. And it still is. Ten years later I'm much more cynical, but the work still excites me. I'm doing a project now and I can't believe my life is this good.
Q.Do you like L.A.?
A. I've been coming down here for the last three years, on and off, and basically hating it. But I've changed my head space about it, and now it's all right. It's a complicated place. It's funny and weird and strange. The weird thing about being in L.A. is that for myself and all my friends, you're only here to work. Your focus becomes about that, and it's hard to do anything else social. Living anywhere else you have an ability to step away from it, which is really important.
It's easy from outside to go, 'Oh it's the centre of evil.' It's the epicentre of consumerism. You can't just walk around and meet people. But I have a community of friends now, basically all Canadian actors, all from home - Callum Keith Rennie, Sandra Oh, Eric McCormack. We're all down here and we all want the same thing. So you can stop being sort of shameful about wanting it. I think in Canada you're sort of forced into feeling shameful about wanting to be successful. And here it's like, 'What's the big deal?' Just by coming here you make that admission, and then you can move on.
Q. Will you be able to resist moving down there for good?
A. I'm trying. It's not easy. It's very expensive to live away from here and try to participate in doing movies. It means that I fly back and fourth to Toronto. But it's not that I could just sit in Canada and have a fabulous film career. Even if one is working more than anyone else in Canada, it still wouldn't be enough work. There's just not enough work. And I want to go anywhere that I have the opportunity to work with great people on great material. That's way more important to me than having some kind of idea about Canada. At the end of the day I want it to be my home. I'm trying to have it all.
Q. What was Michael Winterbottom [whose upcoming Wonderland was nominated for best picture in England] like to work with?
A. He's really nice, but I only talked to him around twice before we started shooting. I call it method directing. I see it more and more. Like Mike Leigh. When I got to London he had lists of things he wanted me to do. So I would trip around the tube and buy groceries for an entire week and go to birth classes. Every actor has a different way of working, but for me I think it was actually crucial.
Q. Do you enjoy the travelling?
A. I've gotten to go to all kind of places I wouldn't have gotten to go to. That's fun. But it's always work and it gets lonely. I remember being very lonely in London.
Q. Do you read your press?
A. I don't read stuff that's written about me anymore. I just get really tired of hearing my own voice. It's really boring, and it doesn't matter how much they like you, and it doesn't matter how good the writer is or how much they like you, I am never going to read something and go, 'gee I really think they captured me.' It's not what I'm going to show, and it's not what they're going to get.
Q. Who have you most enjoyed working with?
I just made another movie with Lynn Stopkewich, who directed Kissed. It was so exciting to be able to work with he again. It's wonderful to be able to find someone who wants to work with you more than once, because then you have a creative relationship based on a knowledge of each other. You don't have to be polite. I would do a scene and look at her and look at her and she'd go, 'Eh, I guess it was OK.' But you know there's intense respect and love for each other. If you know that, you can go as far as you need to.
And I would work with [Sunshine director] István Szabó again. He was just beautiful. He loves actor s more than anyone I've ever met. He's been making movies for 25 years and he has important stories that he wants to tell and that have value and that's what he cares about deeply. He inspires confidence and has an understanding. I think lots of directors are afraid of actors because they don't understand how we do what we do. They don't know how to get what they want, and so actors become enshrined in this weird way. Like how can you make yourself cry? Acting can be incredibly confusing and incredibly enlightening, which is why actors tend to be more self-aware. And which unfortunately leads so often to self-obsession. But on the days that go by that I don't like actors and I don't like myself, I remind myself that it's incredibly courageous thing to do. Even if you're playing someone else, it's still your soul. And it's about tapping into different parts of yourself that most people don't go near.
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Reality chick
She won't play airheads.
She shrugs off the press.
She lives in Hogtown, not Tinseltown.
It's no way to become a star - or is it?
Sarmishta Subramanian gets real with elusive actor Molly Parker
Chatelaine
October 1998
A picture speaks a thousand words. Okay, it's a bit cliché! In an old '50s-style trailer by a lakeside cabin in British Columbia's Interior, a little girl and her brother are at play on an improvised stage. It's just a curtain over a table that coverts to a bed. But a little Henry Parker plays his part, which is to get on his hands and knees, and Molly plays hers, which is to get on Henry's back, open the curtains and say "Ta-da!" There's not much of a story, just a simple act of being "onstage." The trailer is the scene of later theatrics - Molly and a school friend hold crying contests here to see who can produce tears first (Molly always loses) - but this scene is the prototype.
Skip ahead several years - though not too many, because even today, Parker is only 26. Now she has seen the inside of more trailers than she can remember. She's had big trailers for little parts (the part of Glenn Close's prim daughter-in-law in the Emmy-winning Serving in Silence) and the little trailers for big parts (her Genie Award-winning role as a necrophiliac undertaker in the controversial film Kissed). She doesn't hold crying contests anymore, but if she did, she'd probably win.
That's because Molly parker is one of the brightest lights on the Canadian film scene these days. Hailed as "luminous" and "reminiscent of Debra Winger in her prime," she took Cannes by storm two years ago with her breathtaking performance in Kissed; the film continues to tour at film festivals the world over. Since then, she's starred in Under Heaven, an adaptation of Henry James's The Wings of the Dove, which screen at the Sundance Film Festival this year; Waking the Dead, a Jodie Foster film due out this winter; and the quirky CBC comedy series Twitch City. Her stock is high and getting higher: she's played opposite the likes of John Malkovich and Lorraine Bracco (in Ladies Room, a film about three stage actresses confronting the realities of aging). Recently, she joined Arnold Schwarzenegger and Drew Barrymore on the roster of William Morris, L.A.'s hotshot agency. This fall, she's in Budapest for her first high-profile lead role in A Taste of Sunshine, director Istvan Szabo's saga about three generations of a Hungarian Jewish family, which casts her opposite the devilishly talented and rather easy-on-the-eyes Ralph Fiennes.
She is, in other words, a rising star. But that's one role she won't play. In a business where it's all too easy to believe your own hype - and everyone else's - Parker keeps a clear eye and a cool head around the glitz, the glam, the sheer shine of the job. A pragmatist, she accepts those as a necessary evil in her life (one reason she hasn't moved to Los Angeles, the path of least resistance - and greatest remittance - for many Canadian actors). She doesn't seem to care whether she lands big in Hollywood roles. In a world where size is sometimes the only thing that matters, she's turned down a few big parts, instead choosing smaller projects with more challenging roles. As for fame, she's not yet a household name, and that's just fine with her. Which is to say, she's shrugged off the rules of showbiz - and seems to be making it anyway.
The set of Ladies Room is a study in entropy. A clutter of lights, cameras and cables crowds the soundstage, and nobody seems to know exactly where the actors are or what scene will be shot next. At a moment's notice, the crew moves camp, dragging along a tangled heap of equipment, their shouted repartee and laughter ricocheting around the Usine C theatre in Montreal's east end. In this chaos, I am waiting to meet Molly Parker and I am worried.
With good reason. Yesterday, several days after my appointment had been made final, her agent called to cancel. Things on the set were hectic; Molly was a little stressed; this just wouldn't be the right time. I did what any self-respecting writer would do: I begged. So I am here, notebook in hand, a flutter in my stomach, bracing myself to meet the high-strung artiste.
When I spy her, she's traipsing down the hall, a gaggle of teenage girls in tow. They're giggling and wisecracking, and for a moment I am confused: that's Molly? Then she walks over and introduces herself. Even dressed down - denim jack over a black laced-edged full slip, hair in a bun, Japanese schoolgirl bangs framing her face - she radiates a quiet elegance. (That's 13 years of ballet. She couldn't shake it off if she tried). She smiles warmly. "I'm going to show the girls my trailer. Wanna come?"
It's that simple. The girls (ballet students who play dancers in Ladies Room) chat for a while, then leave. Molly and I hang out there for the next few hours, talking. This trailer scene is a preview of the way things will go: Molly will hedge and try to call off every interview we set up - she's got an audition soon and needs to focus (true), she'll be in Budapest (not true). Once we're talking, though she will be charming, funny, thoughtful (when we meet for lunch, we almost switch restaurants twice because she suggests the places may be too loud for my tape recorder). At the end, she will laugh and say something along the lines of "Well, that was a lot less painful than I'd anticipated."
The truth is, Molly Parker probably isn't thrilled that this story, or any other about her, has to be written. Pragmatism (and she's got a strong dose of it) dictates some publicity is necessary; her almost impossibly good-humored nature dictates she must be nice about it: that doesn't mean she's going to bare her soul. If it all sounds a little like your typical star-seeks-privacy tale, it's not. For one thing, she's not a star yet - at least not of the class that needs no press. For another, in Parker's case, it runs deeper than that: "I don't want people to know about me," she tells me, with a half smile that makes Mona Lisa look like a grinning floozy. "The more people know about me, the less they will be able to see me as any character. It's dangerous to my work." It's also contrary to her personality: if Parker doesn't want to be typecast as an actor, she really doesn't want to be defined as a person.
About her background, this much seems clear: she had something of an idyllic childhood. She was raised on a farm in picturesque Pitt Meadows, B.C. ( "Not a dairy farm, but like a hippie farm with chickens and goats," notes Parker, who grew up a vegetarian and is still one today.) Her parents, who owned a retail seafood store, reveled in their kids, "wanting to know everything I thought and treating us like people and not like children who were just supposed to do what we were told. They took us everywhere. I almost never had a babysitter and if I did, it was my grandmother."
You could call it progressive parenting: Lynne Stopkewich, Parker's friend and director of Kissed, calls "a 60's experiment gone right." The point is she got her family's unconditional support for whatever she wanted to do. At 3, she started ballet (she'd taken to pléing around the house) and danced three times a week until she was 17. Her schools included the Royal Winnipeg Ballet of Canada. At 14, she discovered her other passion: acting.
Her acting career began with the usual fare - high school plays, drama club - except that a year later, her uncle, an actor, took her to his agency. She says she seldom worked at first, staying on only because "I thought it was fun, having to go to auditions." But over the next few years, she got small roles in television series and movies of the week. As even the low-key Parker will admit, her dedication was unstinting. "I didn't have a nervous breakdown for a year I didn't even go to university. I just worked."
What she did, when she finished high school, was cash in her acting scholarships and bursaries, and then she took a three-year course with Mel Austin Tuck at Vancouver's Gastown Actors' Studio. On the side, she took supplementary voice and singing lessons and had roles in TV series such as Neon Rider. At 18, she was among the youngest in her class. "It was so exciting," she says, her blue-green eyes growing translucent the way they do when she's fired up about something. "It was real acting. It was really working on a scene, having somebody teach you."
And for Parker it's the scene work matters, not the spotlight. She acknowledges that "it's a pretty neat feeling to be onstage or in front of a camera, to make people believe something, feel something." But what moves her is the cerebral side of her job, "the psychology of the characters, the relationships. Because people are fascinating," she continues, then, perhaps catching herself in a cliché, adds with a giggle and a flamboyant wave of the hand, "and I'm fascinating and I just get to be fascinating all the time."
In the refuge of her Ladies Room trailer - she hasn't yet been called for her scene, a closed-set love scene - we continue to talk about quitting smoking (Parker has turned to the NicoDerm patch, after many years), Mike Leigh films (her favourite director, he rehearses with his actors for months. I ask if this is common. "Yes," she quips, "in Russian theatre 50 years ago..."), the zodiac. She confesses that she sometimes figures out the signs of her characters to get inside their heads. This is something of an obsession; she also tries to figure me out when we realize we're both the same sign : Cancer. "Are you a list-maker?" she demands "I bet you are." (It's true.) Of her, I can't help thinking that if every star in her business were half as grounded, a lot of L.A. therapists would be out of business.
Of course, Parker doesn't live in L.A., which is one reason (or perhaps a sign) that she's so level-headed ("Sometimes sadly so," she muses, "I'm just so rational..."). She lives with her partner, Matt Bissonnette, a filmmaker, in Toronto. "Los Angeles is a company town," she says. "You can't go anywhere without somebody thinking they know you or should know you. The desperation is palpable." Staying in Toronto means having an almost normal life, with friends besides actors and interests besides acting - gardening (her new love), listening to music, reading. "I really love being an actor, " she explains, "but there are lots of things that I really love. It's not the be-all and end-all." She couldn't do it all the time, she adds, because "it would make me such a boring person."
Lynne Stopkewich puts it this way: "Some stars do what they do because their egos need to be stroked, or for love, for approval. Molly is the antithesis of that." What drives her is passion for the work - which means script, story, characters. That was true for Kissed, the career move of her lifetime - although that's certainly not what it seemed like then. The role, after all, was to play a necrophiliac, a taboo to beat all taboos. Parker who'd never had an on-screen love scene, had to do several, well, unusual sex scenes. And Stopkewich was a first-time feature filmmaker, with minimal funding.
But Parker read the script and was fascinated by the part. She was tiring of playing women who were "wives, daughters, girl-friends, all defined in relation to men." ("It's still amazing to me how many scripts I see that in the first scene, the woman is walking around her apartment naked," she observes.) This character - notwithstanding her propensity for walking around a mortuary naked - was a strong woman, and the role was undeniably challenging: Parker faced the daunting task of finding common ground with a person most of us would dismiss as weird or sick. Her Sandra Larson is poetic and complex, an eminently sympathetic character.
"I think women have to make the films they want, to be represented the way they want," says Parker. That's one reason she's taken on Ladies Room, directed by Gabriella Cristani. But compelling parts aren't confined to films by women: she's found an equally intriguing role in A Taste of Sunshine. Ralph Fiennes plays all three male leads; Parker's character, Hannah, is a Jew who falls in love with one of Fienne's characters, converts to Catholicism, and in a bitter irony, faces death. "It's interesting, in terms of one's lineage," says Parker, "what gets passed on and who breaks patterns and who doesn't, and what we do in reaction to our parents or in spite of them."
Of course, those are things Parker won't reveal - she's determined to keep her family life away from the hungry media maw. "I want my parents and friends to have normal lives. I don't want them to ever become 'Molly Parker's mother' or 'Molly Parker's father,'" she explains. But it is also a fear of what they might reveal about her? Parker admits that's part of it.
And here, she might almost, almost sound like a hard-nosed worldly celeb - except that Molly Parker is sitting across from me, with a red lollipop in her mouth ( her new smoking substitute), worried that she's getting too comfortable with me and saying too much. "It's much better to be a mystery," she says simply. "Doesn't everybody want to be mysterious?"
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Wilby Wonderful Press Kit
LOCATION
MacIvor always planned to shoot the film in his home province of Nova Scotia, but he hadn’t expected to end up on the South Shore. “I was always imagining we’d be working in the North end of the province, closer to Cape Breton, but we heard about Shelburne and the Film Centre facility and went up for a scout. We loved it immediately. The studio was great and Shelburne was a perfect Wilby. After our preliminary scout, I began a re-write to accommodate the great locations I found in Shelburne.”
A refurbished naval base, the Shelburne Film Centre (nicknamed “Camp Wilby”) became residence, production office, dining hall, recreation centre, and home to the cast and crew. MacIvor thought it was a great facility, and the added bonus of having the entire cast and crew spend time together off screen was invaluable to the development of the team mentality that imbued the shoot. “So often during filming everyone just heads off at the end of the day and the shoot can become just another gig. But what we had going on was more of an experience–a community was formed–and we were all part of it, from drivers to hair and make-up, from actors to producers. It was a great time–Camp Wilby will be long remembered.”
CAST
For the role of Duck MacDonald, MacIvor turned to friend and fellow actor Callum Keith Rennie. During our observation of life in Wilby over this twenty-four hour period, Duck becomes something of an unexpected hero. A born Islander, Duck still remains something of an outsider and he is comfortable in that position. “ Callum is similar to Duck in a lot of ways,” says MacIvor. “I think of them both as angels, but in the old sense of an angel, the kind with armour and wings.” Rennie, a Genie Award-winning actor, admired the way the storylines came together with such humour and heart. “I hadn’t played this kind of character before. There is a kindness and gentleness to him. He doesn’t have a lot of conflict, but he has deep concerns and hopes,” says Rennie. “I have known Daniel for fifteen years, and I am really happy to have this opportunity to work with him. He is very adept at getting what he wants. He has a way of getting his ideas across with gentleness.”
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Paul Gross is back in the saddle
Plays lead in Daniel MacIvor's Wilby Wonderful
Richard Ouzounian, The Toronto Star (excerpt from Wilby Wonderful website)
On this particular day, Gross beams with the quietly satisfied look of an actor who has two projects he's proud of about to reach the public eye. The first is Daniel MacIvor's latest film, Wilby Wonderful , which opens in Toronto this Friday after having had its premiere last month during the film festival. It's a typically MacIvor-esque view of the human situation, in which he presents us with the inhabitants of a small island community on the East Coast as their lives seesaw from comedy to tragedy before our eyes. Gross plays Buddy French, the local police officer, who is facing a variety of midlife crises: marital, career and ideological. There's a strong streak of the loser in Buddy, which makes it an odd choice for everyone's favorite winner, Gross, but the actor didn't have a moment's hesitation about playing the part. "I got a script through my door and I sat down to read it in my kitchen. Got to the end, picked up the phone and said, `I'll do it.'" Interestingly enough, although Gross "had admired (MacIvor) for so many years as both a writer and performer, I had never met him. I'd never even spoken to him." And although it was the quality of the writing that first snagged the attention of Gross, it was the rest of the cast that had been assembled that clinched the deal, with performers like Rebecca Jenkins, Sandra Oh, James Allodi and Maury Chaykin all along for the ride. "You'd have to be a fool not go with a cast like that," laughs Gross, "it was absolutely the most delightful movie experience I've ever had." The film was largely shot at a decommissioned Canadian Forces station at Shelburne, N.S. and Gross describes it in a phrase as "Camp Wilby." "We slept in dorms and there was a huge kitchen where you could have cooked for a battalion. We had movie nights, ping-pong tournaments, go-karts, fireworks. In fact, the movie had to work around our social calendar." But according to Gross, even the work wound up having a playful air to it. "MacIvor creates an amazing atmosphere for actors to work in. Far better than I've ever been able to do," he confessed, referring to his own numerous stints as a director. "We did a lot of talking about the scenes in advance, but when we actually came to work on them, it all fell together so easily. I can't even remember him directing us on set, and that's the greatest compliment I can offer a director."
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Don McKellar quotes
Sandra Oh quotes
Sandra Oh Timeline
A ton of Don McKellar articles
Paul Gross, Chart, 2005
The Callum Keith Rennie Interview Project
Wilby timeline: The shoot ran from July 21 to Aug. 25, 2003 in Shelburne, NS, dubbed "Camp Wilby" by cast and crew.
