Jordan Canning isn't new to the Toronto International Film Festival -- her short film "Seconds" won the fest's RBC Emerging Filmmakers Competition in 2012. But "We Were Wolves" marks the first time the promising Canadian writer/director took a feature to TIFF.
Shot over the course of two weeks at their cinematographer's family cottage in northern Ontario, the indie drama was a labour of love for the small cast and crew, who found themselves handling multiple jobs, everything from craft services to lugging gear around the isolated island they shot on. Peter Mooney ("Rookie Blue") stars as Nick in the film, a responsible young father trying to settle affairs after his dad's death, when his estranged, slacker older brother Danny (co-writer Steve Cochrane) shows up out of the blue with his own ideas on what to do about their father's cottage. Longstanding grudges and years of resentment bubble up over that weekend, spurred on by the appearance of their attractive older neighbor Kathleen (Lynda Boyd, "Republic of Doyle").
Moviefone Canada sat down with Canning, Mooney and Cochrane during TIFF to talk about them coming together to make "We Were Wolves," and how they managed to get through being stuck on an island together for two weeks, emerging with a finished feature film without any (major) injuries.
Moviefone Canada: How'd the idea for this come about? Why'd you decide you wanted to make it your feature debut?
Jordan Canning: The first spark, really, came from the location, which is the cottage on this island, on Stoney Lake. The cottage belongs to the family of our cinematographer Sam Pryse-Phillips, and I'd been there with Sam over the summer. It's a very special place. It's been around for 100 years or something. There's a shot in the film of the doorframe with all the heights -- that's real, that's Sam growing up with his sisters. So there was already so much history in this place that I said OK, well, if Sam and his family agree that we can shoot there, let's write something that fits with that location. And Sam and his parents said yes, so once we had that, the story started to be built around it.
I wanted to write something about brothers for a long time. I had this weird thriller idea about brothers that never really happened, but I loved as a starting point, two estranged brothers who are seemingly quite different, but clearly connected for so many reasons. And I had this image of them going out in a canoe with a box of ashes. So I had these rough ideas, and then once Steve and I started working together, and once we knew Peter was going to play Nick and Steve was going to play Danny, then we started writing it and building the story with what we had. And it came together really fast. We wrote it in like a month and a half. And then we were shooting it a month and a half later pretty much. So we just barreled through, but that was what was so exciting about it. Once we started writing, we had this little window of time where [Steve] had time off from "Lost Girl," [Peter] had a little hiatus from "Rookie" and Lynda, it was Thanksgiving week, so she was off "Doyle."
Peter Mooney: She literally had the week off. These circles just overlapped very briefly, for this window.
Canning: I guess it could've easily fallen apart, but it's a testament to the team that we put together that we pulled it off and nobody drowned.
Steve Cochrane: I was writing two scripts for "Lost Girl" at that time. You had "Space Riders."
Canning: It was nuts. But we were going to be living together for 14, 15 days, so I kind of handpicked the crew. There was only going to be eight of us anyway, and in that kind of environment, you're going to be secluded on an island, you can't have any egos or divas. The personality mix had to be really perfect, because we weren't going to be able to escape the island, or each other. So I handpicked this crew, a lot of them were my friends.
What about the third cast member? Did you write that role with Lynda Boyd in mind?
Canning: She was the last one [cast]. I don't know why we didn't think of her from the get-go, but Kathleen was a little bit more foggy. I didn't quite have my head wrapped around that character. I had a running list of actresses started, and then I don't know, it just hit me over the head like a hammer: Lynda. Both Steve and I have worked with her on "Doyle," and not only is she an incredible actress and perfect for the part, but she is the coolest, most chill actress around. Her and our hair/makeup artist Oriana [Rossi] were making us snacks while we'd be out shooting. Everybody was just in it. We got to the island and everybody just said, OK, we're going to do whatever it takes to get this made. And we did. Without a whole lot of strife.
Mooney: It was pretty amazing. The island was too small for egos, one big one on there would've wrecked everything.
Canning: Well, we would've drowned them. On purpose.
Mooney: And then this would've been a very different story, from behind plate glass.
Cochrane: A couple more days shooting, someone might have died, I think. There were some serious injuries going on at times. [Laughs]
But any off-screen tension between Steve and Peter would translate pretty well, right? Steve, did you try to stay in character off-camera?
Canning: [Laughs] Thank God, no.
Mooney: It would've been a much shorter shoot because we would've murdered each other.
Cochrane: Danny is not all that different from the voice that goes on in my head every single day, to tell you the truth. My life basically is suppressing Danny, that's what it is in a lot of ways. I live like Nick, but I'm Danny on the inside. So I just tried to behave when I wasn't shooting. [Laughs]
Canning: You were pretty good.
Cochrane: I was pretty good.
Canning: But I mean, when we were shooting the bonfire scene, we were all having a beer; it was a very informal and organic process, which is what made it so special. And that was all the way through. Everybody was pitching in. Like, Peter was holding up his own diffusion, and everybody was doing five different jobs. But it worked pretty seamlessly.
Mooney: And it felt like we needed that. The only way this film could've happened was that everyone did chip in like that.
Canning: Yeah, everybody was on the same level. We were just like a family doing this together. It wasn't, Oh, keep the actors over here and they're just going to sit.
Cochrane: No, we were lugging gear.
Canning: It was like, "Peter, can you carry this please?" [Laughs]
Mooney: The crew came over with gear in a barge every morning from the hotel on the mainland where they were staying, so that had to be loaded out and in, and everyone just rolled up their sleeves and jumped in.
Steve, I know you and Jordan had already worked together before on "Republic of Doyle," but what about Peter? Did you know each other going into this?
Mooney: Steve and I met at the first read-through. But then the process of filming was so ... we were sleeping in bunk beds and chopping wood together, so everything that happened off-screen really played into the on-screen relationship between the two brothers.
Canning: Yeah, you got to know each other pretty quick, which I think really reads. It feels like you guys have a lot of history together on-screen too.
Were you always planning on having Steve co-star?
Cochrane: It's funny, Jordan approached me about co-writing it, I think you had a rough outline. And we started going back and forth, and then when I did my first pass on a bunch of scenes, I was like, there's no frigging way I'm not playing Danny. So then I was about to have a meeting with her, and we were sitting down and I was about to say it, and she was like, "So I want you to play Danny." And I was like, "Yes!"
Canning: [Laughs] Yeah, that was part of my pitch. I was like, OK, he'll co-write it with me. I hope, I hope he will also play Danny.
Cochrane: Yeah, just the story of brothers, it was something I grew up with. It was a dynamic I'm really familiar with, so when I started writing it, it just started coming out of me in such a natural way. It was all stuff that I was so familiar with and I knew exactly what the intonations of it were and where the subtleties lie, I was desperate to play it after I wrote two scenes. I was just like, I want to play this guy really bad. Because I've been writing and directing, so I haven't really been doing [acting], so this was an amazing experience for me, coming back to acting and getting a chance to play something that was that meaty. It was great.
Canning: Oh man. I mean, you guys feel a lot of feelings in this.
Mooney: Yeah, it's a real feast, this movie. It was such a great thing to tackle a script that has 11 and 12-page scenes that have a half-dozen shifts within that scene, it was so rewarding. Really challenging, really, really tough. Every day was a challenge. But so great to have that big feast, something that meaty, that huge to dive into.
Does having a co-writer and being able to bounce lines off one another help when it comes to writing all that bickering between the brothers?
Canning: We endlessly bickered. [Laughs] Having done this with Steve, I'm kind of addicted to writing with someone now. Both of us write really fast. That's partly why we were able to power through this so quick. He would've stayed up all night writing a pass, and I was like, well, I guess I'm writing all day this next one. And just to have these two voices worked really well with this one. I think if you find the right collaborator, you're golden.
Cochrane: The most fun I had too was throwing stuff in the script that I knew would make her uncomfortable, and then waiting a couple days to get an email like, "Um, about this line..." [Laughs]
Canning: No, I would just cut it out of my pass, and you'd be like, "I really think we should leave that in." So we compromised on some things.
What were some of the ones were too much?
Canning: [Laughs] There was one joke from the get-go that I knew I didn't want in there. And we tried it. We shot it, and still ... I got notes back on it.
Cochrane: [Laughs] Honestly, I didn't see if it worked or not.
Canning: I got notes back from lots of people that it wasn't working.
Cochrane: From who?
Canning: From people.
Cochrane: Oh, yeah. Moms.
The father sort of haunts the movie in a lot of ways. And I don't remember if we ever even get a good look at a picture of him.
Canning: It's actually Peter's dad and Peter and his brother. You don't see it up close, you see it from far away.
Mooney: You see a brief flash of it.
Canning: That was intentional, for sure. The box of ashes and the cottage itself just is full of Dad's ghost. But the box of ashes were always this symbol that carries through the film, that has this weird power over them in the way that each brother interacts with it.
Cochrane: I think it was a really good decision not to show the father. Because he exists in Danny's mind in a different way, he exists in Nick's mind in a different way.
Mooney: There actually isn't one that's the same for both of them. They see a totally different man.
Cochrane: And I like that it shifts for the audience too. He looks different in your mind when you're watching the film in different places.
Canning: What I love about the relationship between the father and the two brothers is that it's so complicated. It's just so layered, the relationships in this family. That's what I love about it, and that's why I don't think the dad could be there. There's as many pieces to him as there are ashes in that box.
"We Were Wolves" screened at the Toronto Film Festival.
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