Berks Film Fest 2008: A Conversation with Shawn Linden

By Patty Mahlon
Reading Eagle Internet Services

If you ask Winnipeg-based writer/director Shawn Linden to describe his genre-crossing debut feature "Nobody" in one sentence, he'll say, "A man is chased and pursued in the streets by himself at a different moment in time."

If you ask me the same question, I'll say, "'Nobody' is the best, most interesting feature screening at this year's Berks Movie Madness Film Festival."

"Nobody" starring Costas Mandylor and Ed O'Ross plays at the R/C Theaters Reading Movies 11 & IMAX Friday Oct. 3 at 11 pm as part of the Berks Movie Madness Film Festival. Admission is $7.

Patty Mahlon: How did you come up with the idea for "Nobody"? I was really impressed by the writing throughout the film…

Shawn Linden: At the time I was really interested in a writer named Alain Robbe-Grillet, who made a number of movies but is probably best known for writing “In The Labyrinth” and these inward turning stories. And I always wanted to make a movie shaped after a Mobius strip. I don’t know if this interview will come out before or after people see the movie, but that essentially gives it away. I wanted to fashion a story around a geometric Mobius shape where the ending is the beginning, and it never really has a break. It’s just a continuous circle. So I had that in mind and just kind of combined a whole bunch of genres that I had grown up really liking. Things like film noir, some horror, a lot of sci-fi, some suspense and mystery, there’s some gangster… it’s really just a jumble of a whole lot of genres. It’s even nominated for a best fantasy award. So it’s just a lot of weird stuff thrown together. And that’s what I wanted to do. I thought I couldn’t do any real harm if I combined all of my favorite genres and try to fit them into something inventive.

“Nobody” is the type of story or movie that’s not meant to be watched once and then you forget about it. Ideally, the second time you watch the film is when you really catch everything. Some people get angry about that, but my kind of people really love that sort of movie.

PM: I understand you work in the film industry. Is that correct?

Shawn Linden: Yes.

PM: How’d you get started in films?

Shawn Linden: Ever since I was 15 or 16 I knew that all I wanted to do was make movies. And so I wound up just kind of doing anything in my power to get me from the point I was at to the point I’m basically at right now. Which is the point where I’m allowed to make my own films. I pretty much got into movies blindly and without much education regarding what avenues should be pursued. Instead of going to film school, which I had never really -- well, I’m not going to knock film schools -- but it didn’t seem like it would help me. Instead of film school, I studied philosophy and literature at university with the purpose of becoming a screenwriter. Once I got out of university, the only next step that I could see was the local film industry.

So through some teachers at school and from volunteering for a bunch of short films and from showing I was eager to learn and work and showing I was capable, too – I got fast-tracked into our union and into an art department. I didn’t really know what position I wanted to take up, and that took a little bit of time and deciding. I basically just wanted to be on set and learn how to make movies. I knew I couldn’t do that being a bouncer or a waiter or anything like that. As long as I was in the milieu I was happy. I got into it to learn how to make movies from the bottom up.

I’m also a friendly guy, and I made a lot of friends in the industry as well. That helped keep me going when I was very young, because young people didn’t usually get a lot of jobs. I made some valuable friends who wound up helping me and being on my film. They allowed me to keep working in the film industry, basically.

PM: What films have you worked on?

Shawn Linden: I’ve worked on… whoa, tons of films and television over the last seven years. I did some work on “Capote.” They shot a small amount of “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” here. I worked on “The Lookout,” which is a Scott Frank movie.

PM: I really liked “The Lookout.”

Shawn Linden: Out of the three films I just mentioned, that was the most Winnipeg-ish. It was filmed in some of the same streets we filmed “Nobody.”

PM: That reminds me: the first time I saw “Nobody” it was a hot July day. I think it was 95 degrees Fahrenheit outside. And as I was watching the movie, I had to put a blanket on, because it looked so damned cold.

Shawn Linden: (laughs) Oh, you should have been there. It was ridiculous.

PM: How cold was it? Because you can see everyone’s breath no matter where they’re at.

Shawn Linden: It’s a production value to have it that cold. The cold becomes an antagonist in the film. You see a lot of sweeping mists and stuff like that which is not done through special effects or lighting. It’s just super-cold air.

To a typical person, the cold was unbearable. To a Winnipegger, it was pretty unpleasant. We get two weeks of minus – I’m not good at Fahrenheit conversion from Celsius – but I’m pretty sure that once you get into -40 degrees Celsius, you’re in the negative Fahrenheit range. And it was -50 degrees once you got inside some of those boats in the marine museum because they were all metal. So yeah, we were uncomfortably cold, and it was all shot at night, and for the most part, in the outdoors.

Winnipeggers – and especially Winnipeggers in the film industry – are used to working 17 hours a day in the nasty cold. Of course, everyone on "Nobody" was working for free, so I’m sure they weren’t happy about the weather, but they weren’t really complaining about it.

The actors, on the other hand, Costas and Ed… I mean, Costas is an Australian and Ed lives in California. Or rather, they both live in LA. And I don’t really think they had any conception of how cold the world could really get. There they are, working on the cheap for a low-budget film, but they were real sweethearts about it. Some of the outtakes – the profanities that just spewed out of their mouths after we yell cut, it all would make for a really funny joke reel. But to the end they were professionals about the weather, and not only that, they were sweethearts. They’re two of the nicest guys I’ve ever met.

PM: How did you come to cast them?

Shawn Linden: Well, we knew Costas as a friend of a friend from Vancouver. Once we had the script, we were looking for low budget possibilities... like an actor who might agree to come in and do a weird movie for next to nothing. And one of our first choices was Costas because we knew people who knew him. I sent him the script and we agreed to meet him in Vancouver to feel him out and see what he had to say about it. And we took him to my brother’s restaurant in Vancouver. My brother is an unbelievable chef, and Costas said, “If the movie will be half as good as this food, then you have a deal.” So that was that.

We became really fast friends after that. He’s a great guy, and a very close friend of mine now. When we got about a week away from shooting, we still had not cast Rolo. And we were having a lot of trouble casting Rolo, because our actors’ union was having a problem with us casting anyone but a complete unknown or a non-actor. So it was looking really bleak. Costas wound up becoming part of the discussion, and had said, “Well, why don’t you just let me hand the script around and I’ll get back to you in a couple of days,” and that’s exactly what he did. He asked me if I knew who Ed O’Ross was, and I said, “Yes of course.” Costas said Ed wants to do the film, and he’ll do it for next to nothing. And he’ll come down here to work in the freezing cold. Ed is a very close friend of Costas, and they’d always wanted an opportunity to work together, and I was glad they managed to do it in front of me, because it was a whole bunch of great fun, and watching the two of them was unbelievable.

PM: What was the shooting schedule like?

Shawn Linden: The shooting schedule was 17 days, and we got snowed out two of those days. It was cramped, and my first assistant director was a good friend of mine. He’s the top AD in the city, and one of the best in the country. Without him, the movie would never have been made. He was very strict about keeping everything to a definite schedule. We only went over 10 hours on one day. It was very focused and concentrated. We weren’t paying anyone, so we didn’t want to push people further than they were willing to go.

PM: The photography was really beautiful throughout the film. Was your director of photography somebody you had worked with before?

Shawn Linden: Three weeks into the film, our DOP got another job on a TV series. He was the person I had been collaborating with on the look and feel of the film and a lot of the camera movements. We’d been talking in-depth about it, and then suddenly he got this dream job and had to abandon ship.

So basically, we didn’t have a director of photography for “Nobody.” We won two or three cinematography awards, and all of those were awarded to “nobody.” Which is very appropriate.

Len Peterson, he sort of took over camera duties with our gaffer, so the first in line on camera and the first in line on lighting sort of banded together. The three of us hammered out a shot list of the movie front-to-back, and I think there were only two shots on the entire shot list that we never got. Everything was shot as it was intended to be shot.

I think the film looks beautiful, too, and I don’t mind saying it because it’s not all my doing. It was a real group effort. And I’m very proud of the way it came off. It looks a lot better than I was afraid it might.

PM: You’ve mentioned several times that most of the people working on “Nobody” went unpaid. What was the budget, and how did you raise the money?

Shawn Linden: Our intention was to gain only as much money as we needed to finish production. Then we’d put a rough assembly together and use that to get money from the government sectors and organizations in our country that are really helpful to filmmakers, but not always with filmmakers who come out of nowhere. I never even made a short film before Nobody.

Through my brother and Jamie Thompson we raised enough money to shoot it, which was a very small amount. It was shot for $100,000.

PM: That’s magnificent.

Shawn Linden: Yeah, that’s why I’m really happy about how it turned out. I’ve seen and worked on $100,000 short films that looked like garbage. I had my concerns, but I put in $35,000 of my own money, and my brother put in a chunk of his, and Jamie put in his own, and together we had enough to leverage the rest out of our richer friends. (laughs)

PM: So now that Nobody has had some time to flow through the festival circuit and pick up acclaim and awards, was "Nobody's" overall reception what you expected?

Shawn Linden: I was hoping to take the film and garner enough attention through the horror and sci-fi circuits to acquire distribution and get the movie well on its way. That was the original intention. Looking back on things right this minute, it seems like that has pretty much been achieved in one form or another.

I mean, I have a dozen awards on my shelf I didn’t have a year ago. And all of that stuff managed to get us attention to the point where we got ourselves some very strong sales agents and a distribution deal in Canada. I just got our very first producer’s fee check in the mail yesterday. As of yesterday, the film is starting to pay off. We’re still getting attention. We were just nominated for a couple new awards this weekend, and in the next two weeks we’re in another five or six festivals. So it’s still not even over.

The distribution process has taken a little bit longer than I expected, but yeah, I think I’m happy with how things have gone. I’ll be really happy when I’ve paid off all of the volunteers who worked on the film. Because that’s a source of guilt for me. Even though they’ve forgotten about it and are my friends, there’s nothing I’d rather do then pay everyone. And if anything can parlay into making another film with more resources that aren’t from my bank account, I’m for it.

PM: What advice would you offer other new filmmakers or directors about promoting a finished film?

Shawn Linden: Hmm. We were never that great at promoting our film. It’s been a weakness of ours, and it’s just because I’m so busy with other things. We’re getting into a new festival twice a week, and it’s too hard to pay for all this stuff, basically. So we didn’t do all of the things you should do when you go to a film festival. You should have one-sheets or flyers. You should have posters. You should have a very comprehensive website and it should be constantly updated with any kind of awards or press. You should be on top of all this stuff. You should know what kind of film you have and where it would stand the best chance of succeeding. Like, what kind of festival is the best place for your film. Do you try Sundance, or do you pepper the country at mid-level genre festivals? It all depends on what kind of film you actually have.

These are all things that I wish I’d known about before I started, because we didn’t do any of those things. And we’re still not. A film is like a big hungry baby that will eat everything you have.

PM: So what’s next for you?

Shawn Linden: In the last month I’ve optioned three screenplays. It’s been amazing, because I’ve been writing for almost ten years. I guess I’ve just been waiting to be able to make a first film. It’s really hard soliciting screenplays, especially if you’re a young guy and you don’t really know the process, and you don’t want to be taken advantage of. So I just figured that I would try to cross that bridge once I had something in my hands I could show people. It took ten years, and then suddenly in the span of a month three of the things I had written were picked up. I’ve gone from having a stack of scripts up to my knees that I didn’t know what to do with to almost having an empty plate. I’m so looking forward to that, because there’s nothing I love more than writing. I love making up stories. And I love the prospect of being able to sit down with no other work to worry about.

PM: Do you prefer writing to directing?

Shawn Linden: One of the optioned scripts is for me to direct. Writers don’t get enough recognition for my ego. (laughs) I mean, I don’t want people taking credit for my writing, so I’m a director by default. I’m not sure about producing. I hated producing. I had to do that with “Nobody,” and I found producing runs counter to my skills set.

PM: Is the optioned film you’re set to direct another cross-genre movie?

Shawn Linden: Yes. There’s a little less science fiction in it, but it’s got very much the same kind of genre mishmash. As long as it’s a good movie, I’m of the opinion that you can really do anything. You don’t have to stick to any one kind of style. I like to tell stories about stories, and you can hit any genre you want when your story is about a story.

In “Nobody,” the story is completely aware that it’s a fiction. So its self-awareness is part of the structure. The enemy in the movie isn’t any one character, but it’s the story itself.

PM: Yeah, some of my favorite dialogue is when Costas talks about the rules of the reality he’s experiencing…

Shawn Linden: That’s exactly it! He says, “Regardless of whether or not this is real, it still has some kind of cause and effect mechanism.” If you can learn the rules, you can learn to work within it. It shows that he’s the consummate pro even when he’s being tormented in the midst of his own unreal nightmare. He’s still trying to cover all the angles and stay really cerebral about it.

You know, the film was originally wall-to-wall voiceover at one point in time. When it was finished, Costas had recorded an hour of hardboiled narration. We found that the audience was falling in love with Costas’s voice. He has one of the nicest, deepest, gravelly voices I’ve ever heard. When he was talking all the way through the film with this flowery, dense, poetic dialogue, the audience wasn’t watching what was going on. By explaining more through huge amounts of voiceover describing exactly what was going on so the story didn’t seem as obscure, it had the opposite effect and made the story a lot more confusing because people were missing the visual cues.

PM: I thought the limited narration worked very well. That reminds me: one of my favorite scenes in the movie isn’t actually in the movie. It’s on the teaser on the DVD. The mirror/reflection bit. What happened to that?

Shawn Linden: Oh wow. I had to kill my own baby with that. That was the scene the whole story was inspired by. We built a very complicated set just for that scene.

We went to great pains and lengths and cost – money we didn’t have – to cut a hole that was shaped like the mirror with a very involved camera drift. There was a lot of thought that went into that shot. At first you think he’s looking at his own reflection, but then the camera moves through the mirror so you realize it’s not his reflection, and then it moves down and he sees an image of himself.

As it turns out, all of that was cool when the film had a voiceover, because suddenly it’s at the end of the movie and he’s been talking in a voiceover throughout the whole thing, and now he's talking right at the camera. At that moment, he’s talking to himself directly. I always loved that scene, but without the voiceover it no longer fit. I had to take it out, but it was always my favorite scene. And the only way to keep that shot in existence was to give it to the trailer. I’m glad you liked it. I really love that shot.

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Audio: Mike Faust also interviewed Jamie Meltzer on WEEU's "Feedback"

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