Steven Griffin
Steven Griffin is a Canadian filmmaker and theatre creator. He is currently based in Toronto. He has directed numerous projects, including short films that have seen screenings at the Boston Shorts Film Festival, Toronto Arthouse Film Festival and Kingston Canadian Film Festival. His theatre work has been shown at the Toronto Fringe Theatre Festival, Toronto Queer Theatre Festival and soon to be the Hamilton Fringe Festival. His style revolves around the still and the deliberate, based firmly in an art history background and trusting that the decision to not do something within a frame is just as important as the choice to do something.
Black Deer In Blizzard
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Transcript
Welcome to episode 296 of Stageworthy. I’m your host, Phil Rickaby. Stageworthy is a podcast about people in Canadian theatre featuring conversations with actors, directors, playwrights, and more.
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Thanks for listening and thank you for your support. You can find Stageworthy on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at stageworthypod, and you can find the website with the archive of all 296 episodes at stageworthypodcast.com. And if you want to drop me a line, you can find me on Twitter and Instagram at philrickaby, and my website is philrickaby.com. My guest this week is Stephen Griffin. Stephen is the playwright and director of Black Deer and Blizzard, which appears as part of the Fringe starting July 14th.
So I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Black Deer and Blizzard. I had the privilege of talking to a couple of your actors just a couple of weeks ago, as we record this a couple of weeks ago. And they were talking about the show.
We talked about a whole lot of stuff. But I wanted to ask you about Black Deer and Blizzard. Can you give me the elevator pitch for the show? Oh, yeah, sure.
So I’d say that the elevator pitch for Black Deer and Blizzard is it’s a show about sort of truth and authenticity within a newsroom sort of driven by, you know, individuals such as like me and you. It’s kind of what I’d say is, is the elevator pitch for because like, in in its earliest form, this script and the script in the story in particular has taken on a lot of different forms as we’ve, as we’ve been moving through it, but it always kind of started off with this basis of some level of forgery and authenticity, originally sort of focusing more in the art world, but now has sort of transitioned more over towards the kind of like newsroom and new media and all that kind of stuff. So the main focal point was very much around that idea of, you know, the the merit of a forgery, or the merit of false information when it comes down to the feeling or the experience that it’s giving someone who’s ingesting it in a sense, and whether or not the authenticity of whatever it is that they’re experiencing is actually significant if it’s still giving them the particular, I guess, emotions that they would want to experience or the or kind of fulfilling the ideas that they have in their mind and already or their biases or whatnot.
So yeah, we’re kind of it’s the show sort of evolved very much from a sort of more art driven, sort of like high art, mostly like painting oriented world into something that feels a little bit more salient, at least now in terms of sort of being acknowledging that, especially in a local news capacity, especially in a small town capacity. You know, like, these sort of in a lot of cases, I feel like people would sort of view, you know, global news stations, or, you know, these global news conglomerates as the sort of like, total entities that all kind of have, I guess, like, you know, with this sort of long functioning pipeline. And in a lot of ways, it’s true.
But at the same time, it’s still made up of individual people all with their own biases, their own motivations towards things, and their own reasons for doing things. So we kind of wanted to really focus in on the idea of, like a local news station that is, you know, very much driven by the people who work there who live in this town. But at the same time, those people themselves have their own wants and their needs and their desires.
And how, you know, in a worst case scenario, the sort of significant news that you would be relying on could possibly be manipulated to better serve the people who are giving it to you for, I guess, very human reasons, similar to, you know, the way that, you know, other people not in the news, you know, would desire for, you know, a better job or, you know, moving out of a town or an upgrade in some respects. So yeah, yeah, one of the interesting things about about, you know, you think about like local news and how small towns at one time, every small town had its own little newspaper, and that’s happening less and less. And even more so, every small town once had its own radio station.
And now sometimes they have a transmitter that picks up stuff from other places and transmit to them. They might do a little bit of a news thing during the day, but it’s not, they don’t have their own programming so much anymore. So the nature of news is has been changing a lot over the last few years.
Have you have you given any thought, any thought to that in this project? Yeah, absolutely. I think that it’s, it’s, yeah, it’s really interesting. There’s sort of a lot of these little news stations, as they kind of dot up, we’ve, we’ve had the opportunity to talk with a lot of sort of smaller local stations, both in Canada and in the US, in doing research for this project.
And talking with them as well has been interesting, because especially from like a newspaper, newspaper perspective, obviously, you know, moving over towards digital media, newsprint is sort of going out of fashion a little bit quicker. But in a lot of cases, at least with sort of smaller town reporting, like it is very much predicated on the individual reporters being able to sort of go out and get the work that they need. And in a lot of cases, sometimes they’ll go on assignment, but for the most part, they’re kind of the ones out there looking for things.
And, you know, a lot of times those sort of bigger stories, people sometimes just end up kind of stumbling into and then it’s about sort of how much longevity you can kind of get out of those stories. So I feel like there’s something very, I know, there’s something very personally driven about having a lot of your work predicated on what you’re able to find and what you’re able to sort of create out of like the sort of small town setting that you might be in, which is sort of one of the things that in the basis of the show, you know, we kind of framed it in this sort of like, West Coast, like failing fishing town, where a lot of the industry is just kind of dried up and people have moved away and whatnot. So at least for a lot of our characters, it’s harder and harder to really find those super substantive stories that would be able to get eyes looking towards, you know, this small town or looking towards the station in particular, which in a lot of cases is going to make things difficult to build up any kind of real or any kind of like substantial credibility, without sort of kind of abandoning this smaller town with maybe a little bit less going on and moving to somewhere with a little bit more happening.
But obviously, there’s a lot of caveats with that as well, in terms of, you know, whether it’s monetarily or competition wise, or sort of networking wise, and who you know, in terms of being able to get out of that town that you’re in. So yeah, we, you know, we had the opportunity to talk with some really great people in the process for this show. So it’s been a really interesting and very fulfilling experience to kind of do a lot of the research and build it into the show itself.
Yeah, it’s funny, I grew up in a small town, or I spent my teen years in a relatively small town. And it had a newspaper. So, you know, so call it, which, I mean, there was a small town, there wasn’t a whole lot going on.
So they would like, mostly it was filled with like, special interest stories, but its entire function was advertising. It was like it was had more advertising than editorial or stories or anything else. It was entirely made up of advertising so much so that pretty much everybody on the street I lived on was like, I’m tired of this.
It’s just like getting flyers every day. It wasn’t even a daily paper. It was like every couple of days or something or every week.
And it was like, just like, how many ads can we squeeze into this thing? And so everybody just sort of was giving up on it. Because there was no actual content except for the advertisements. Yeah, and I think I think that’s definitely sort of there’s an aspect of that like in in the show itself in particular, again, it’s it’s this sort of like, especially in the context of something that’s maybe a little bit less regulated as like a local news station, because again, like, I don’t know, I’m sure you’ve seen plenty of like news blooper reels on YouTube, or whatever compilations and stuff like that.
And the majority of them all come from these small, relatively localized news stations, because in a lot of cases, you know, like not everyone has the the sort of, I guess, like the the something like a CNN or CNBC or whatever it might be. So the budgets for the local stations kind of vary dependent on the viewership that they get. So in a lot of cases, I feel like at least when it comes to those kinds of bloopers and whatnot, it sort of ends up coming down to, I guess, the oversight of it.
And the people sort of on the ground day to day really running the station as a whole. Yeah. So So yeah, I mean, there’s an element of the sort of there’s an element of like, that idea of, you know, sort of filling this newspaper with advertisements more so than the actual news for the sake of kind of keeping it alive, that very much sort of exists in a sense within the show itself of just like, kind of having to do what you need to do and possibly coming to a point where the station itself, even though it is based on having to, you know, explain the news either locally or globally to this small town in particular, kind of ends up inherently serving a different purpose based on the people who are actually within it running it on the day to day and the things that they need to do, because it’s a business like anything else.
And these people need to survive and they need to, you know, keep their livelihoods going. And they all have their sort of own motivations behind what they’re doing, which is obviously going to affect in this case, affect how the news is going to be coming out to the general public that they’d be sending it out to, which I feel like in a lot of cases is a lot more substantive in terms of the long term effects that it can do in the long term effects that it can have in the short term effects that it can then doing something say in some other kind of business, right? Yeah. Now, you mentioned the evolution of the play and how it dealt a lot at the beginning in the art world.
From talking with the actresses before, I know that it involves the art world. What’s your connection to the art world and what drew you to that as sort of like a Genesis for the story? I’m a I’m a massive art history nerd. It was kind of it was funny when I was in university.
I mainly studied film with a history minor, but I took some art history classes as well because I kind of I don’t know, I just had sort of an initial kind of curiosity about it because I’d always been a fan of going to art galleries and museums and whatnot when I was a kid. And I just like fell in love with it entirely. And I feel like it kind of from that capacity, sort of like learning that I liked art history very much came from the basis of learning that I liked film as well, because film to me very much functions as an amalgamation of a lot of other different art forms, including art history.
So now art history is something that I study equally as intensely as the sort of other artistic mediums, purely for the sake of it being able to be something that I can kind of add to my lexicon when it comes to doing film or theatre in terms of reference points, in terms of composition, in terms of colour, in terms of inspiration. But it sort of started there. And then the initial the initial sort of idea for the show was very, very different, and was sort of predicated initially on this idea of a sort of Francisco Goya-esque character who had recently died and was leaving his, I guess, all of his materials or whatnot to these three different women in his life.
And the whole show sort of focused around the will being read out in terms of who was getting what and the conflicts that sort of arised over that. And I think that the nature of it from a, I guess, from a more like painting or I guess, yeah, from a more like painterly standpoint, very much came from the idea of whether or not the genuine article in a painterly context really has a lot of merit if you know that it’s the genuine article or not. And one of the things that sort of helped evolve from what the initial pitch was into something like this was Orson Welles’ documentary F for Fake, which is a really fantastic movie kind of following this one art forger who lives in Ibiza, who is like, I guess, like the primo Picasso forger.
And his sort of kind of interesting takes on the art world and how it is that it seems as though in a lot of cases, the only real way we know, at least from like a very sort of high society art perspective, that something has merit is when people within that industry say it has merit. And if you can kind of get past them in terms of whether your work is genuine or fake, then whatever they sort of decide on, so if you like kind of have your fake painting, but then the art critics don’t really see anything wrong with it, and they call it the genuine article, then they tell everybody else that it’s a genuine article. And then when they look at it, the general public just assumes that it is the genuine article.
And whatever experience they take from that is the experience they have with what they think is the genuine piece of art. But you know, it to be told that that piece is fake, it kind of comes down to whether or not that actually matters in the grand scheme of things, if it gave you the experience that it gave you, or if saying that it’s fake or real, negates that emotional experience, that emotional response that you had. So that’s kind of the basis of where the show started in terms of what is the effect of the truth and knowing what the truth is and sort of being directly lied to.
And the experience of, I guess, like the perceived truth that you have, and then learning the appropriate truth, and whether or not that sort of changes the feelings you had initially. And that question kind of evolves from the question evolved out of a sort of more painterly artistic capacity into something a little bit more personal, and again, a little bit more relevant, and a little bit more substantive in terms of the damage that could be done with it, moving into like a newsroom capacity compared to, I guess, like a gallery capacity. As somebody who you sort of described yourself as sort of like having this love of film, being a film guy, studying film, was this always going to be a play? Or was it one time when you first started conceiving of it, was it possibly going to be a film? Personally, I kind of like to keep my film and theatre work relatively separate.
I’m trying to… One of the great… It’s sort of weird to say one of the great things about the show, given the sort of state of the world that we live in. But I guess one of the opportunities that we were able to take advantage of with this show, given coronavirus, was the fact that we had to adapt the show into something that was less traditionally theatre. And in a lot of cases, I like to sort of keep my theatre work and my film work relatively separate.
I sort of like to explore different topics. I like to explore different tones. I tend to lean a little bit more comedic in some of my theatre work more so than my film work.
But this was a really interesting opportunity because it was something where we couldn’t really get around not merging the film aspects with the theatre aspects. So this show originally was always planned to be a theatre show. But in terms of how we’ve had to adapt it into a sort of more digital platform, it’s been really fun being able to experiment and try to find that balance between something that is both quintessentially film and quintessentially theatre.
Because I think for me, the most important part of this was not wanting to just turn this into a film and shoot it how I would traditionally as a film. I still wanted to maintain the integrity of it being a theatre show. But it was about finding ways in which I could take advantage of the digital medium that we’d be shooting it in while still maintaining its integrity as a theatre show.
And it was a really great time. And I think we struck a really, really strong balance with the show as it exists right now. Can you tell me a bit about walking that line? Because there is… I mean, one of the problems with this, being sort of stuck doing digital theatre, which is on a screen, is the fact that we’re all struggling with walking that line between film and theatre and how you keep something that’s meant to be theatre still feeling like theatre when it’s on a screen.
Tell me about that line and how to keep from going too far over the line into film and how to keep it as theatre. Yeah. To be honest, I feel very fortunate to come from a decently strong film background, at least in the context of this show, because I know that in terms of when we were going over how would we adapt this into a digital format, I didn’t really have any… I didn’t feel like I really had any roadblocks in terms of feeling like I didn’t know which direction to go.
I kind of had an idea as to how I would do the show and how we would shoot the show in a digital format the second it kind of came up as an option, I think because of that background that I had. I have a lot of sympathy and a lot of empathy for a lot of other theatre makers who maybe don’t have that background trying to adapt given the environment that we found ourselves in and kind of trying to find this… Again, trying to find that middle ground, especially in a Zoom theatre capacity of how exactly do you take advantage of that. There’s actually this great… I have some friends in a production company that’s Kingston-based called 6AM Productions that did a really amazing job creating murder mysteries on Zoom, where they effectively used the breakout rooms as different rooms of the location that they were in, and they would have people sort of cycle through with an individual actor in each of the rooms and kind of very Clue-esque.
And that was something that I saw that I thought was really fantastic, because it was truly like taking advantage of the medium of Zoom to best create as kind of close to somewhat of a theatre experience as possible, instead of just kind of doing sort of like a live reading that I know that a lot of people have done. And I kind of took some inspiration from that. But at least for me, it was… In a lot of ways, it was something where I knew that from a digital capacity, I didn’t really want to do anything on Zoom, because I knew that I had the ability and the training to be able to very comfortably kind of slip into a… I guess a more traditionally film theatre show kind of style.
So when we went about sort of threading that line, at least for me, one of the things that I really enjoy about theatre is this sort of inherent artifice of theatre. It’s the fact that in a lot of cases, you’re very present of the fact that you’re in this space, you’re very present of the fact that we’ve got these lighting cues, and everything’s up on a grid, and we’ve got entrances and exits and whatnot, where I feel like in a lot of cases, film is very much… In a lot of cases is very much really focused on trying to sell you a very sort of realistic kind of in the moment story that’s very present and very much like creating a world. And I know theatre does that in the same way, but I still feel like in a lot of ways, there’s just, again, the presence of being in a space in general, I feel like just creates a sense of inherent artifice of understanding that you’re watching a show.
And I think it’s, again, it’s one of my favourite aspects of theatre, because you can kind of sort of see a lot of that stuff working. And then there’s the moments when you sort of don’t see it working, where it really kind of clicks for you. And that was kind of the line that we were trying to tread there, where it was sort of like, how do we allow the artifice of theatre to come through, but in a way that still feels quintessentially sort of a part of the show.
So what we ended up doing was instead of going with a traditional theatre space, which was the original plan, we actually ended up finding a really great sort of small rehearsal space instead, that has these great vaulted ceilings with wood beams and kind of like roughed up walls that felt very fitting for the sort of rundown local news station that we wanted. And we spent a lot of time sort of building out our fixtures and whatnot in there. And what we kind of ended up settling on is this idea that each scene was going to take place in the space in its entirety, and we would effectively be shooting things in long single takes that would then sort of cut on turnarounds.
So we’d like move to a wall or a curtain or hyper-focus in on a certain object and then spin around, and then we’d be onto the next scene and the set would be different, and we’d sort of merge those cuts in a very like kind of Birdman, Revenant sort of way. So that’s kind of what we landed on. And considering that in itself is inherently very film, in a sense, one of the things that I really wanted to do was really allow the space to have a character, both in a in-universe context as well as sort of an out-of-universe context.
And we did the same with a lot of the fixtures that we had. So we had like a variety of fixtures sort of in the ceiling as well as kind of planted on the ground or whatnot. But it was something where when we were moving through, I never wanted to really feel worried about having to like work around fixtures or work around shadows or anything like that.
And at least for me, it was something that I found really fun to work with, because it’s incredibly complementary in a lot of contexts, and especially now since we’ve shot it at this point. So going through the editing process, the sort of presence of these fixtures kind of lends itself to an in-universe capacity of fixtures that would be in a studio, like inherently be in a studio. The wiring, the labelling, all that kind of stuff, the way it’s kind of all sort of scattered across the space in this messy sort of in-universe studio capacity.
But at the same time, it also is that present artifice that I really wanted to bring in. And then from a film standpoint, it also gives me these really beautiful, present, practical lights that are giving us, from a camera capacity, really nice flares, a lot of really nice backlight. So we sort of wanted to embrace the space that we had, embrace the gear that we had, and kind of really aim for that line of allowing that sort of theatrical artifice in to function in both the sort of in-universe and out-of-universe context.
I think one of the things that I find interesting is the way that we perceive theatre. I always think about theatre, and you’re right, there’s an artifice to it, because we all understand that we are in this room. And we’re not going for necessarily realism, because realism doesn’t necessarily work when I have to project to the back row.
There’s also this wonderful sense of suspension of disbelief that an audience in a theatre brings that they don’t bring to a film. In a film, if I say, and now we’re in space, and we don’t actually have effects that make it seem like we’re in space, the audience goes, well, that’s really cheap and shitty. But in a theatre, if I say, now I’m in space, the audience goes, okay, we’re in space, all right.
And they just go with it. And I always find that sort of this wonderful thing about theatre is that the audience just, if you tell this is where we are, this is what we’re doing, this is who we are, people just go with it. Yeah, absolutely.
And I think that, again, I think that suspension of disbelief and just it’s that initial acknowledgement when you step in, and then allowing yourself to be like, okay, acknowledged, now let’s really fall into it and enjoy the ride that this show wants to take us on. And I think that’s inherently a kind of element that we rely on in this as well, because leaning into this idea of it inherently being a theatre show, and having a lot of these elements very practically placed within the space, it’s almost like this tug of war of being pulled in and pulled out and pulled in and pulled out. But after our first scene of setting everything out and getting an idea of the soundscapes and the space and the lights that we’re using and whatnot, I feel like it’ll be relatively easy for people to kind of forget the fact that they are looking at all of these inherently just sort of placed lights that are specifically meant to be lighting the show itself and just kind of fall into this idea that this is a sort of beat up studio, right? This is this kind of like rundown space where these lights would be present.
And even though they are feeding the space that we need to shoot in with light, they’re still sort of just kind of present and can kind of be forgotten about or be moved past or whatnot. So yeah, again, it was a really fun experience to be able to kind of find that line. Now, one of the things that I love to talk to people about is their artistic origin stories, their theatre origin story, like what draws somebody to this particular form.
So for you, we’ve talked a little bit about film and it sounds like these things may dovetail, but what’s your what what initially what was your first exposure to theatre? What made you want to to do things with theatre? Hmm. Yeah. Yeah, that’s interesting.
I think I mean, like to be like, in all transparency, I do consider myself very relatively new to theatre. This is realistically only the second show that I’ve directed and written in a theatrical capacity, which is, again, very exciting. But I know that I sort of have a lot to a lot of growing and a lot of work to do in terms of experimenting and I think finding my own voice in theatre in particular.
But I would say that like from from a baseline capacity, again, I was always very interested in film. And I didn’t really know that I wanted to sort of be a writer and director of film until about first year university. And then once that sort of went off, I kind of it kind of steamrolled into other things.
And I do have to stop you. I do have to stop for one second, because I’m always fascinated by those things that to derail people and derail people and send them into the arts. So you didn’t know you were going to be a theatre, a filmmaker into film.
So what were you planning to do in university and how did you get derailed? Oh, God, I think what I was. I think I was going to probably end up being like a history teacher or history professor or whatnot. I always had like a I don’t know, as a kid, I wanted to be like a paleontologist.
And I always had a very big interest in in ancient histories in particular. So I always focused really heavy in those subjects. In particular, I had some friends who did some sort of film stuff in high school, and I would like help them with it.
But it was never something I really took seriously. And film for me through most of my high school years was just a hobby. I just watched a lot of them.
I did a lot of research on them and whatnot. And then I kind of had a friend in my first year, basically just come over to me early in our first semester and say, Hey, I’m in this film class, like, it’s super fun, you should take it. And I was like, Okay, and then I took the class.
And then when in the second semester, when I took the second half of the class, we had a, because I was very fortunate to go on an exchange in my first year university to the to the UK. So we had a, we had a sort of little like film class challenge over the course of one of our sort of field study trips, where it basically said to, like, you know, get into groups make a five minute film that includes like this object, this line in this place. And I just kind of decided to do it on a whim, because I thought it would be a lot of fun.
And then we ended up sort of winning that kind of small little class competition and want a pizza and some drinks and stuff like that was just a lot of fun. And that was kind of the thing that sort of spurred me on to wanting to, I guess, study film and take film in a more serious direction, like from a actual kind of like practical production standpoint versus just like a, I guess, a research and study standpoint. Um, so yeah, so that’s kind of how I ended up getting into that.
And then I feel like film for me was always very part and parcel with theatre in terms of learning how to be a proper director. And I was lucky enough to have a lot of friends in the theatre department in Waterloo in particular. So we kind of sort of bonded over that when I sort of found film, and they kind of found theatre and I went to see a lot of like their theatre shows.
And, um, and then my girlfriend at the time was in that program and was one of the actors in a lot of those shows as well. And she kind of like gave me a little bit of a push towards like, maybe doing it because you know, she really like she was kind of farther on the other end where she very much was very, very theatre oriented, but not really very film oriented. So she kind of gave me a bit of a nudge into being like, Oh, you know, like, it’s realistically, it’s kind of the same thing.
And I was kind of already sort of deciding that I wanted to try it out. So I kind of just applied to the 2018 Toronto Fringe Lottery on a whim, and just happened to get it. And then I kind of just came to the conclusion where, because, you know, most of the time when I apply for things, I don’t expect to actually get any.
And then it, it popped up. And I was like, Yeah, okay. And I just sort of, I just just kind of decided to go for it.
Did you have a project at the time? Or were you like, Oh, shit, now I got to come up with something? I had, well, actually, funnily enough, like I had some experience writing, I had some experience writing plays. Most of them were actually for housemates of mine’s theatre class, where I would, I kind of wrote his assignments for him as practice for me. And then he would give me his feedback on my stuff, his name on it.
So it was helpful for a time. But I had, I had like the, I had maybe a couple of drafts of a show, sort of geared up, but like nowhere near 100% ready. But I’ve never been a very patient person.
So I kind of just decided to apply for it anyways, and continue to work on the show. So by the time I agreed to do it, he was in a confident enough place where I felt like, okay, I maybe need like another month or two of work on this. And I think we’d be really solid.
Sure. And then yeah, and again, my, my girlfriend at the time gave me an introduction to a friend of hers, who had directing experience. And we sort of came together and co directed the piece.
And she she taught me a massive amount. So I’m very, very thankful to her for that. And, and then yeah, and then we ended up doing the show in fringe, and it went really well and kind of spurred me on to want to continue to do theatre as well as film for the sake of, I guess, stretching and flexing different muscles.
And maybe kind of trying to find a way in which I can coalesce both both specific, I guess, like both specific muscle groups from film and from and kind of merge them together into, I guess, one like collective, like directing body. I don’t know, this metaphor is kind of falling apart on me a little bit here. I apologize.
Metaphors do that all the time. That’s fine. That’s fine.
Yeah. So, you know, you start doing, doing, you know, you did, you did the fringe, or how was that as a first fringe experience? How would you, how would you say that that fringe was for you? Because it can be pretty, I mean, doing your first fringe can be pretty stressful and frightening. Yeah, I mean, like, I, I loved it.
Like, to be completely honest, I’m, I’m a, I’m a, I’m a huge fan of the the fringe format. I’ve always been someone who really loves the kind of independent spirit of things, especially in film and in theatre, and the kind of this sort of make it work mentality. And I really, I really enjoy the work.
I really like kind of getting in the dirt and and and kind of getting your hands dirty and busy with all of the little things that you need to do to kind of cobble the shows together and kind of pulling together a nice, strong, small little team and making it happen. So at least in terms of a first fringe, like we had a, it was a two person show. We had a, I think, yeah, two person show.
We had a four person, including myself, like crew that we had more or less. And, and it was, and it was, it was just a really, really, it was a really great experience. It was stressful, and it was hectic.
But by the time we ended up kind of landing on doing the show, I was just very, I don’t know, it was, it was, it’s a really nice experience, because it’s something where, and I feel like a lot of people would feel this way in terms of theatre, but it’s, it’s, it’s very momentary in a lot of senses, where like the show goes up, and it happens, and then it’s over. And that’s kind of it. And at least for me, as a, like, as a filmmaker, it’s something where I, for so much of the, for so much of my projects, it’s sort of like from conceptual idea, all the way to sort of the final edits and festival submissions and that kind of stuff.
So it can be like a lot more long winded of a process. And by the time you get to the point where the the actual short is finished, or let’s say hypothetically, like the short at this point is done, then it starts to, you know, get sent out to festivals or whatnot. And you’re still waiting, like, you know, months and months to sort of hear back from these things and finding out if it’s going to get screened.
So in a lot of cases, it feels like the project has a lot longer of a life. But it was really nice being able to just sort of have this condensed set of time to really like buckle down and focus in on the work and get really granular with a lot of things and sort of have that stress and have that have that anxiety around it. But then by the time the show shows up, it’s just kind of out of your hands.
And I sort of went and I sat in the theatre. And for the first for the first show, I just sweat, like, like a maniac. I was just like, super nervous.
I want to make sure everything went well. I was just like, absolutely, like coded by the end of the show. Because it’s just like, it’s, it’s incredibly, it’s incredibly stressful for me.
But it’s kind of and I’ve gotten better at handling that. Now, but at least in that context was really stressful. By the time the show was done, I just sort of really breathed out and was really proud of everything that the team had put together and, and the actors did on stage.
And again, we got at least for the first the first show in particular, we got a really great response from the crowd. And yeah, I don’t know, it was really, it was a really great experience. And again, I really like that kind of that sort of really personal, very interconnected, very like independent spirit of pulling things together in like a fringe capacity.
And, and at least in this particular, at least with this show in particular, obviously COVID added a substantial amount of other stresses and, and problems that we kind of had to overcome. So I would say that we were probably dealing with less healthy amounts of stress this time around would probably be like an understatement of that. But at the same time, like that same spirit is there.
And I was really, really happy to kind of encounter that a second time with this show. You know, thinking about, about, you know, the first time that an audience sees a show, there is not a show that I’ve created in the last 10 or more years, where the first performance was not an exercise in, I need to get to the first laugh or the first reaction, so that I know that everything is okay, because I don’t know if this is good anymore. Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely. It was funny, I had, because I had, like, I was the predominant writer on that first friend show. And our my co director, Megan Landers, who again, is fantastic.
I, I was talking to her about it, you know, we’d been rehearsing the show for ages, and we’ve been going over and blah, blah, blah. And then we went to the first show. And I had specifically sort of written a show to be like, kind of funnier at the at the first half, and then sort of teeter off as we got into more serious territory as it went on.
But, you know, we’d been rehearsing the show for months at this point. And she’s read the script about a million times. And, and we went to the first show.
And we got a lot of like, really solid laughs, which again, was like a big relief for me. But I, we stepped outside of the theatre afterwards. And she came over to me and she was like, I had no idea that the show was so funny.
He’s like, Megan, we’ve been working on this show for months. And you tell me this now. I mean, here’s the thing.
I get it because you spend, so, you know, you start rehearsing the show for a long period of time. At the very beginning, all the jokes are landing. You’re like, oh yeah, this is, this is funny.
And after a while, those can’t possibly be funny anymore. Right. So you can forget.
And she probably remembered that those shows that the jokes worked, but you physically forget the laughter. You physically forget what it sounds, what it feels like until you get an audience that hasn’t read or watched it a million times. And that’s part of the process.
That’s why for me, every time it’s been a thing, I’m always like, I need to get to that first laugh. I get that first laugh. I know we’re going to be okay.
I know this show is okay. Always for the first time that I perform it in front of an audience. Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it’s just like, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s the same with, it’s the same with a lot of my film work as well. We’re like, I made, um, uh, 20, 2019, I made like this kind of like small little, uh, kind of like sort of cold case inspired thriller sort of thing.
And it’s like a small, like 10 minute little thing that pretty much just builds up to this very like ominous, uh, very like sort of visually suggestive, um, kind of moment. And for me, I was like, I, looking at over whatnot, I was like, okay, I think this works. I think, you know, I think this works.
I think this lands really well. It’s kind of slow paced, but I feel like the build is really proper, but I was really nervous because we had a screening coming up and I didn’t really know how people were going to react to it because it is kind of, it’s, it is without a doubt a bummer and, um, and kind of not a super feel good movie, but we got to the point where that sort of moment came up and it landed. And then I kind of heard everybody go quiet.
And then I heard one woman like see through her teeth, like a kind of like, and I just like, I just, I wanted to just sort of like stand up and cheer in the theatre. Just like, yes, yes. Like, because it just like, and again, it’s, it’s, it’s that sort of thing.
I think that’s, I think that’s really like one of the best moments of, uh, sort of like my, I guess like my film career, my theatre career is really being able to kind of like put all this work in and then sort of have it land in the way that you want it to. And especially in a theatre context where, you know, you’re hearing it so many times over and over and over again. So yeah, I completely understand why she wouldn’t think that it would be funny, but I, I just thought it was hilarious just because it was like, I was like, you know, like, you know, you’ve read this script over about a million times.
You gave me like a bunch of edits. I was like, you really had no idea. Like, what do you think of me? You know, it’s funny about those, those moments of, of when, you know, the audiences are silent or when there’s a reaction.
Cause you know, we think about those, those moments when the audience laughs. Oh yeah, that’s great. But there are moments when silence can be just as, just as riveting, unless it’s a comedy, in which case it’s not so good.
But yeah, an audience where it’s not funny is not the same kind of silence as an audience. It’s super engaged because an audience that is, is, is not with it and doesn’t think it’s funny. They shift a lot.
Yeah. And they move around a lot. They don’t, you know, I’ve watched audiences and some shows that haven’t been so good.
They look anywhere but the stage. They look at the rigging, they look at their watch, they try, you know, all of these things that those are giveaways that the audience is not engaged, but when an audience is dead silent and dead still, you know, you’ve got them. Oh, absolutely.
Yeah. I mean like we, what was it? There was, there was, oh, I just had it. Yeah.
Oh, sorry. That was it. Sorry.
So one of the other reasons that I love having a focus on, having a focus on painting in particular, in terms of a lot of the, the, the reference points that I go to is I’m inherently someone who really likes to shoot in a kind of minimal way. And I really love the way that as a medium, sort of painting kind of like holds you hostage in a lot of sense, in a lot of senses. When I was in, I went on a family vacation to Amsterdam like about two years ago now.
And I didn’t get the chance to, or we didn’t get a ton of time in the, in the main Rijksmuseum. But when we did go, I got, I got a little bit of a chance to go see Rembrandt’s Night’s Watch. And I remember like I, I was a big fan of Night’s Watch, but I’d never seen it in person.
And I didn’t realize how big it was. And then I went and I, and I, I stood in front of it and it was truly like one of, it was truly like a moment, like a sublime kind of moment where I just sort of stood in like awe and just kind of stood in like really leaned in and just stared at it for like a good amount of time. And it’s that way that painting in particular sort of forces you to just sort of sit and look at it.
And even though it’s not really doing anything, it’s not super active, you’re still going over every little detail in a lot of cases, really like looking at the pigments, really looking at the brushstrokes, really getting into it and sort of processing your feelings. And it’s something where I’ve always been someone in a lot of my film work to put a lot of weight on small gesture, because if you can kind of keep relatively still or static, or at least distant from your subjects in the films, then the smallest movement feels like the biggest jump. And I think that that’s something that has the ability to really hijack an audience’s perception and really hijack their, their, their eyes in a film to really like allow the anticipation of movement from stillness to pull people in to really wait for something to happen, whether or not something does end up happening or not.
Which is something that in that same, the same film that I had mentioned, where the woman seethed was kind of, it was sort of an exercise in that same vein, where a lot of it was very, it was very still, it was very measured, it was kind of very quiet, was just sort of like a slightly naturalistic kind of like nighttime soundscape. And we were getting a lot of those same kind of things of just people like really kind of leaning in and staying quiet because they were anticipating some kind of movement or action. And, you know, like the slightest movement of like one of our actor’s arms, you know, felt gigantic in the space of really just sort of locking down into something Tableau-esque that really like kind of pulls an audience’s attention to it.
Right? Yeah. Yeah. I’m just as we start to draw to a close, one of the things that I’ve been asking everybody about for the last year and five months is about, is about joy.
Because I feel like we’ve all had moments of, of, of great joy during this time, but we’ve also had moments of, of, of, of misery, of doom scrolling, of fear, of all of these different things. So I like to sort of end on a note of joy. So I’m curious if you could share with me something that’s been giving you joy recently.
That’s good. Um, I don’t know. I mean, I’m a, I feel like joy is such a specific word and I’m trying to kind of really like nail down something that is very expressive of, of joy in particular.
Um, I don’t know. I mean, like it’s like the dealing with coronavirus has been very up and down for me, as I imagine it is for a lot of people when we sort of initially were put into a lockdown. Um, I tried to really take advantage of it as best I could because knowing that sort of everybody was kind of stuck at home.
Um, I really just tried to jump into getting into like as, as best habits as I wanted to, as like, you know, I wanted to develop some habits and, um, and I wanted to take advantage of the time that we had to be able to get into those, those habits into like a disciplined capacity. So, um, you know, I was waking up early. I was working on grants or scripts or whatever it might be.
Um, and was doing really well for about three or so months. And then I was lucky enough to be able to start going back to work and, um, and getting more work again. But then there was a point in time, um, up until relatively recently, I guess about a month ago, a month or so ago where I was, um, kind of back out of work for about two months.
And I was like really just in a really, really like really awful place. Um, trying to kind of deal with, um, having gone back to work and then all of a sudden not really having that anymore. And the kind of very stop starty nature of everything.
And there was just a lot of stress that was kind of piling on. And I don’t know, one of the things that I’ve relied on in a case is to kind of keep me steady is some level of a routine. But in those two months in particular, I found a lot of my release kind of coming from, um, reading and running.
Um, which is something that like, I feel like maybe a decade ago, if you said that I’d say that I’d probably wouldn’t believe you. Um, but it was, yeah, it was, I’ve, I’ve been, um, I’ve tried to sort of be an active runner for a good part of my, uh, I guess a good part of like my adolescence and my adulthood now. Um, but it’s just something where I’ve, I’ve, I’ve gotten to the point where I’ve done it so much and it feels so part of my routine that it just very much to me feels like that ability to kind of stop thinking for a little bit and just kind of go out and just kind of, I don’t know.
Um, I guess like hurt myself isn’t probably the thing, but you know, like kind of, it’s, there’s something about running that’s inherently kind of, so she, you know, like a runner’s high capacity, kind of like very trance, like in a sense where you just kind of zone out and you’re just kind of clocking whatever’s ahead of you and you’re just kind of going. And that to me was incredibly helpful as a way to kind of get out of my head, um, as we were sort of going through this. And then I sort of started every morning trying to at least read something.
And I usually oscillate back and forth between, um, the books that are a little bit more, um, I guess like craft oriented, um, and then, um, just sort of like more fun books. So, um, well, I just finished, um, Norwegian Wood by, uh, uh, Haruki Murakami, which was really fantastic and I really enjoyed it. And, and again, it’s, it’s sort of like those small sort of solaces in that two months that I had where I just kind of, you know, I’d wake up and I’d get my coffee and I’d do a bit of reading for about 30 minutes to an hour before I started any, um, proper work.
Um, and just that kind of calmness in the morning and being able to sort of set my day off in a right pace. And then by the time I’d get to about lunch, you know, I’d be stressed out again and spiraling and whatnot. So then that’s when I’d kind of break and go for my run.
And I’d sort of refined that peace and that solace in just being able to kind of relax and zone out again. And then I’d cycle back for like the second half of my day. Um, and then, yeah, and then just kind of, um, allow myself a bit of freedom in the evening.
So yeah, I’d say that in an interesting way, my, like my running and my reading habits that I had developed over quite a while have kind of come into a new space given that two months that I had in particular and given coronavirus in particular as well. Yeah. So just in closing, could you tell me and, and, and, and give us a sense of like, where will we be able to find Black Deer and Blizzard? Ooh, okay.
So you will be able to find Black Deer and, or Black Deer and, oh my goodness, Black Deer and Blizzard. There we go. Um, as a part of the digital Hamilton Fringe, um, which is going to be running in mid July, tickets are available now.
You can go to the Hamilton Fringe’s website and check it out there. Um, and the links will be attached to all of our social media accounts, which are all Black Deer and Blizzard focus as well. Um, and yes, we’ll, we should have it, um, up on Hamilton’s digital fringe come, uh, mid July.
It should be running for about a week and a half. Um, and again, one of the best things about, uh, the digital fringe capacity is the fact that there is no, um, sort of theatre seat limits and there’s no, uh, I guess, location or travel limits because you can just purchase the show online and view it at any given point in time that you have it from anywhere you want, as long as you’ve got a computer screen. So, uh, you know, we encourage everybody to, um, you know, take the opportunity to see the show and take advantage of that digital format.
That’s great. Well, Stephen, thank you so much. This has been great.
Well, yeah, thank you. I really appreciate you having me on and chatting. Yeah.
Thank you very much.
