KF: It’s great. Ben and I sort of became accidental collaborators. I really knew I wanted to direct. Ben really knew that he wanted to shoot. That helped right away because the people you meet in film school usually also want to direct. So I think that those partnerships can often be more difficult because there’s sort of a struggle. Ben and I had a really good balance, knowing exactly what we wanted to do. And then it’s always been a very complimentary process that’s been very easy. I think we’re both really ambitious and want to push the envelope of what we can do, especially in school with regard to what you’re allowed to do because lots of schools have these strange built-in restrictions. It just grew over time into a partnership that grew into a close friendship, but that was why the partnership worked so well because I think we really both just trust each other. Even on something like Hello Destroyer; I think that film only worked the way that it did because of how close that bond became in terms of our way of operating. When shooting, we don’t do storyboarding and traditional stuff like that. A lot of it is based on conversations we’ve had, and having a sense of knowing each other and knowing the project very intimately. Growing together creates shorthand when you finally come around to making something that is incredibly valuable.

As Canadian artists, I sometimes feel like we suffer from an inferiority complex. We may not want to be pigeonholed as stereotypically “Canadian” in our work. We tend to compare ourselves to the American film industry. I don’t know if you ever feel that? Watching Hello Destroyer, even though it was about hockey, which is something very Canadian, I felt like I was watching an international film rather than a Canadian or North American film. Is that a feel and look you were trying to achieve? What types of films do you feel influenced the tone and feel of Hello Destroyer?

BL: I think Kevan and I are mainly influenced by cinema in general. I don’t think either of us identifies as what the Canadian film industry considers “Canadian filmmakers.” Obviously we’re both Canadian. We’ve never been specifically influenced by one thing. Me, coming from Scandinavia and having one set of sensibilities—and obviously Kevan and I, our sensibilities are quite aligned—I think those combined sensibilities brought us to what ended up being Hello Destroyer. Does that make sense, Kevan?

KF: Yes. I know what you mean. One thing that Ben and I have talked about a lot is the self-imposed limitations. It’s like a self-fulfilling prophecy of Canadian film to me, especially in Vancouver. I think Vancouver can have a particularly weird complex because it loves that moniker of Hollywood North. Vancouver— in particular— making films that try to mimic Hollywood. The problem is that you really don’t have the resources to do Hollywood films. Even if you get an okay Telefilm budget, you don’t have the same breadth. So, if you’re making a little rom-com that you want to be a Hollywood version—the Hollywood version zings because it has enough production value to work—the Canadian version just come off as more of a TV movie. So, I think we were very aware of that. And like I say, I think a lot of it is a self-fulfilling prophecy or a self-imposed thing about how Canadians think about Canadian film, Canadian audiences and Canadian filmmakers. I think the Canadian films that are really loved are the films that embrace truly being Canadian in a way that is unabashed. I genuinely think the comedy Fubar is one of my favourite Canadian films because it’s so aggressively and assertively Canadian. There’s something about that individuality that has a lot of power. The idea of making a “hockey film” was to a degree a bit of a tongue-in-cheek, fuck you act because the hockey film is traditionally the worst type of Canadian film. Also, most hockey films that come out of Canada say nothing about Canada at all. They don’t feel at all connected to Canada or Canadian culture. I wrote a long letter to Cameron Bailey (film critic, and TIFF festival programmer) about this, that TIFF posted, talking about this problem. But I think there is some really great stuff; if you look at Ashley McKenzie’s film Werewolf, the stuff that Kazik Radwanski does, Sofia Bohdanowicz. There’s definitely a new wave of Canadian cinema that has happened in the last five years that is just more confident and not afraid to be Canadian. I really hate work that is this pseudo-Canadian stuff, where it’s not America, it’s not Canada, and they’re afraid to have an identity. And I think that’s been a problem for a long time, is we’re sheepish about our identity and feeling cheated to be Canadian, and then we end up making films that don’t have much personality or identity. So I think that’s a big part of what Ben and I wanted to do, is be aggressively Canadian as a way of making clear where we’re from and about the story we’re telling, and what the world is that the film is

About.

Yes. Perhaps that’s it. Hello Destroyer is more genuinely Canadian in that way.

KF: I think so. That was the feedback that I liked about Hello Destroyer. That’s why it doesn’t actually have much hockey in it. If you’ve actually lived that type of experience at all in Canada, it’s something that really is a lifestyle. It’s not just about the fact that it’s hockey, and it’s this game. It’s much more about all that comes with it, and the pressure that comes with it. Even the environments that come with it, which are dominated by a lot of people who come from blue-collar families and have this rural experience. I grew up in Banff, so it’s not a very rural place, but I spent a lot of time in rural Alberta. There’s something about that part of the country that just really speaks to me as this strong sense of Canadian identity, and I think that’s very much what I was interested in.

Kevan, you wrote and directed Hello Destroyer. What’s the experience like being both the writer and director?

KF: To me that was just a thing of necessity. When I got into filmmaking, I didn’t necessarily think that I wanted to write at all. But, I knew the types of stories I wanted to tell and I didn’t see other people doing them. I didn’t have writers that I’d met and was really excited about the work that they were doing, and I knew very specifically the types of stories I wanted to tell. So writing became a bit of a necessity. I like writing because I think it actually helps with directing. When you write a script, it’s the fastest way into the DNA of the project because you spend so much time thinking about it. And the thing that’s so useful about that, when you’re directing, it gives you this huge safety net of really knowing what your film is about and is important to your film thematically. Especially for the way that Ben and I work, we make a lot of decisions in the moment and on set. It puts us in an advantageous position because it give you that flexibility to change things on the fly if you want to or need to because you just go back that idea of “what is the purpose of this?” and how does it function in relation to the film. So, that was something that I always held on to. I don’t particularly love writing. It’s always a slow process for me. It’s a real roller-coaster of ups and downs. Sometimes it feels great, and sometime it feels like torture. But I appreciate it because you get to know the work so deeply.

Film is a visual medium. I find that so many films these days are driven by an abundance of witty, or funny dialog, and/or over-the-top visual effects. You don’t seem to be afraid to have long periods without dialog and let your characters go through periods of silence. The character’s affects and simple movements, along with the way their surroundings are filmed and lit, then tell the story. In Hello Destroyer, the main character, Tyson, even talks about his uncomfortable childhood experience with silence. What do the silences in Hello Destroyer tell us about the characters in your film? Is Tyson looking for human connections that perhaps he’s afraid, or doesn’t know how, to pursue?

KF: Yeah. The silence factor to me was his inability to communicate. A lot of the tragedy of that character is his inability to reach out and make a connection because of the way that he’s grown up. The final note of the film is quite literally a scream for help in a way, the sound of the horn. But, getting to that sound and being able to be heard is something that happens in such a destructive, self-harming way because he doesn’t have the tools and facilities to do that. And I knew he was never going to be a particularly articulate character. That was part of his difficulty. I think both Ben and I liked the idea that he wasn’t an articulate character. Jared Abrahamson is super-talented physical actor and is really great with nuance. He has this incredible simultaneous effect of being imposing and also fragile in his physical acting, which makes a huge difference. You can’t necessarily do that with every actor. But—Ben can also speak to this to—before we did Hello Destroyer, we did a bunch of music videos, and narrative music videos. They were a great tool in terms of telling stories without dialogue because we tried to tell stories that weren’t literal interpretations of the lyrics. And I think both Ben and I really love strong visual storytelling, where the visuals are really about storytelling and not about visual aesthetics and a sense of showmanship. I think we both like to watch. We like a sense of patient cinema.

BL: We also came up at a time where good visuals wasn’t a given. It was something you actually had to work for. Those who had access to 35mm, and knew how to use it, could make things that look the way they’re supposed to. But now, everybody can make good visuals. If you make the bad visuals at this point you’re just a bad Director of Photography (DP). It sounds weird, but making good imagery is pretty much a given at this point. But I think a lot of DPs and a lot of filmmakers forget the idea that you have an actual responsibility with language, and this is truly related to our conversation about schools and how a technical school can differ from a school like Emily Carr. With my education, and the fact that I got to work with Kevan and the people we went to school with, you actually start to think about things in terms of how you actually start using the camera as a language tool rather than something that’s visual. Films that stand out today, it’s not visual. Sure, some films might look better than others. But, the movies that stand out, physically use the camera as a blocking tool or a tool to push the narrative forward in a way that’s different. And that’s where I think it gets interesting.

KF: And that was a time where my biggest influences were definitely New Hollywood Cinema. I really loved that, and there’s a lot of that in there. Ben was much less of a movie nerd than I, so he hadn’t watched a lot of that older cinema. But I think the stuff that we really connected on together, and helped form a lot of our visual language, was a lot of Scandinavian cinema. Oslo, August 31st, was a huge influence for both of us, and also stuff that was on the festival circuit that we started watching together. Oslo, August 31st, if you compare that to Hello Destroyer, you can see the influence and the sensibility. That’s also a very patient movie with a fairly inexpressive character in a lot of ways. I like people sitting with visuals and forcing them to think for themselves a little bit.

Ben, you’re not afraid to use creative and uncommon camera angles in your work, even for establishing shots, along with darkly lit sets. For example, in the scene where Tyson sits down with the head coach and the team’s lawyer after the incident, we never see Tyson head on, only from the side. And sometimes we see Tyson in reflections. How do you feel this sets a tone for Hello Destroyer?

BL: This is something that Kevan and I didn’t talk that much about. We just went into it with our intuition from every else we’d done. A lot of the times Kevan and I have worked together we’ve never sort of talked about stuff like—you know how a lot of directors would say “I need to see the character’s eyes because it’s important, I need to see what they’re feeling to be able to feel what they feel.” In our work, it’s never really been about that. We have both had an understanding that what you leave in the shadows, what you leave unseen, is something that still remains in the audience’s imagination. It actually makes audience members engage with the film in some ways. I think there’s also a reverse thing with a lot of people who might feel they don’t connect with a character because they don’t see his face. And then there might be people who feel like they’re more engaged because they’re forced to use their brains as part of engaging with the film, which I feel is way more interesting as a mode of filmmaking than the reverse. Obviously there are times for both. In terms of how we physically approached this film, I think a lot of it was just mine and Kevan’s tastes merging into what this became, because we never really had super-long, in-depth conversations about what each shot meant. It was in the vein of what the film is trying to say. A lot of it is Tyson reflecting on himself.

KF: To that point, Ben and I made a bunch of short films before this, and I think a lot of the visual stuff was discovered more during those shorts. And by the time we got to Hello Destroyer, it felt pretty second nature to us. In a lot of those shorts, just like Hello Destroyer, were similar characters that had a separation from people around them, or isolation. That’s the type of character I’ve often been interested in. So, if you look at all of the films, I think we like imposing dark frames because there’s a weight to those too. It helps to communicate that idea of the weight of the world on characters. When you do have a character that is not hugely expressive, you need the medium to do that. I think Ben and I like it to feel natural, that it’s not so heavy-handed in the way that we are expressing that, but that it’s more over the course of the film that you feel that. Sometimes it’s a simple as an aesthetic thing, where once in a while—you asked about some of the framing decisions—Ben and I just want to see things that we haven’t seen that much before. We never talk about three-point lighting or shot reverse shot. I don’t think either one of us is particularly interested in any of that.