GARY BURNS
Born 1960, Calgary, Alberta
A former construction worker who turned to filmmaking at the age of 30, Burns remains something of a lone wolf on the Alberta landscape howling at the moon. A guy who generally works alone and steers clear of the “film scene,” Burns makes movies that appeal to his own personal brand of darkly comic wackiness. “I don’t really know what’s going on in Alberta from a film standpoint. I’m not a part of it. I’m not really part of anything. I don’t crew. I don’t work in the industry. My friends have nothing to do with the film business. I don’t even go to see movies. I’m guess I’m just another alienated Canadian filmmaker,” says the man who used to sandblast oil-rig equipment.
A graduate of the University of Calgary’s drama program, Burns decided to enroll in the film program at Concordia University in Montreal in the hopes of turning his passion for storytelling into a career. After graduating from Concordia in 1992, he began putting the pieces together for his first feature, The Suburbanators, a layered study of the generic strip mall universe where people seek comfort at the butt end of a big fatty — if they can get their hands on one, that is.
Picked up by the people at Troma Entertainment (the ones who spotted the talents of Matt Stone and Trey Parker), the film established Burns on the cult film circuit — but failed to make a dent in the mainstream. Kitchen Party, his second feature, was another look at the subtle dramas that unravel between the cracks of the social veneer as it contrasts one last blowout bash before Scott (Scott Speedman) goes to college with a somewhat tamer, but no less dramatic, party where his parents are spending the soirée.
Kitchen Party fared somewhat better, earning Burns the title of best emerging western director at the 1997 Vancouver International Film Festival and a great review from The New York Times when it screened as part of the New Directors series put on by the Museum of Modern Art — but it tanked commercially. “My real problem is that I can make pretty much anything I want. I made two movies that no one saw…. Where else but Canada would I get a chance to make a third?”
With the 2000 release of Waydowntown, Burns finally emerged from the primordial soup of the Canadian film scene with some legs to stand on. Winner of the Citytv award for best Canadian feature at the 2000 Toronto International Film Festival (which comes with a cheque for $25,000), the man from “Wild Rose Country” may finally be looking at a rosy future. Not that he’s counting on it. He’s learned enough about the Canadian film scene to know expectations are a bad thing, but Waydowntown was clearly his most successful film to date with decent theatrical runs across the country and a respectable box-office tally that put the low-budget film in the proverbial black.
The film was also picked up for an American release (by indie distributors Lot 47), which puts him in a rare Canadian category, indeed. “With Waydowntown, I wanted to make a movie that people actually saw. It’s one thing to go out there and sacrifice everything to make a movie, but it would be really nice to actually make a living at it… Not that I’m complaining. I feel very lucky to be one of the few people in this country who is able to make the movies I want to make, but you go to so much effort to make them that you want other people to see them, too. But if it’s a choice between making movies that I don’t care about, or can’t control creatively, then I’d rather do what I’m doing right now… In that respect, the Canadian system is preferable to American one, but when you’re told that your movie has a marketing problem because it’s identifiably Canadian — which I was told with Waydowntown — it’s easy to get a little frustrated, because Canadians don’t seem all that interested in seeing Canadian movies. Quebecers watch their own movies, but English Canada is so overwhelmed by American movies that have $20 million marketing budgets that it’s hard to compete.”
Marketing and money problems aside, Burns is a proud Canuck and his movies are steeped in Canadian sensibilities. From the hosers who tool around suburbia to his questioning of the superhero myth, Burns’ characters will often knock the land down south with subtle jabs at the prevailing consumer ideology with comments such as “Is your car your penis?” Burns says that’s just his own ideas coming to the fore more than any premeditated poke at the muscle-car mentality down south. Besides, most of his barbs are aimed at the metaphorical mirror.
In Waydowntown, for instance, Burns slams the plus-15 skywalk system as he tells the story of a bunch of young office workers who make a bet as to who can stay inside the longest. The story originated as a one-page grant proposal about architecture that used digital video cameras to record different points of view, but after he heard about Timecode (the Mike Figgis film that used the four-camera idea to capture the lives of four Angelenos), Burns transformed his story into a slightly more orthodox narrative that features a central character and several intertwining plotlines.
“I don’t know how I write. I come up with these characters and then I just build from there. But I know I’m comfortable with the episodic technique where you have a bunch of people doing parallel things. I block out the storylines and the characters and see how I can make them fit together… When I made Waydowntown, I didn’t know anything about corporate culture, all I know is that they’re pumping out way too many law students. I was more interested in how the plus-15s destroyed downtown Calgary. If you walk through downtown Calgary on a Sunday, it looks like a neutron bomb hit — the buildings are standing, but there’s no one around,” said Burns at the time of Waydowntown’s millennial release.
“It’s pretty sterile, so I thought it would make for a good backdrop for this story about a bunch of faceless people who have to work within it… like ants in an ant colony. The drama doesn’t come from events, but from the human interaction — and if I had to describe my sensibilities, that’s it: I’m interested in drawing out characters through human interaction — without some life-threatening event, or psycho killer,” he says.
“That’s the beauty of making film in this country: You can do exactly the opposite of what’s expected, just for the sake of it.”
– Katherine Monk
FILMOGRAPHY: The Suburbanators (1995), Kitchen Party (1997), Fuck Coke (1999), Waydowntown (2000), A Problem with Fear (2003), My Life as a Movie (TV movie, 2003), Cool Money (TV movie, 2005), Northern Town (TV Series, 2006), Radiant City (2006), The Future is Now! (co-director, 2011).
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