Talking Movies with Top Men

(Photos Denisa Kraus)

What other band could possibly be a better choice for the opening night of the 10th Vancouver Island Short Film Fest than a techno quartet that named themselvesafter a line in an Indiana Jones movie and base their shows on iconic movie imagery.

Do you prefer short films or features?

Paul (Carpenter): I don’t think I necessarily prefer one thing or the other. But I find fewer short movies because they’re not as widely promoted, so whenever I find a good short film, especially an animated one, I feel this rush of excitement.

Brendan (Holm): I really liked the Spike Jonze short film we watched the other day. It’s this robot love story. (“I’m Here”). Super sad.

Chris (Thompson): I really like the film festival, because, in order to find good short films, I go through the Oscar nominees from previous years, and 90 percent of them are terrible. The Academy is broken, and consists of old rich Hollywood people that are not in touch with real life. There’s a lot of politics involved, and they don’t understand what people go to the movies for.

Liam (Gibson): Smaller festivals are far more interesting in this sense.

Brendan: They actually put an effort into acquiring local shorts which is crucial.

Liam: I feel like the big budget films are in this endless recycling phase: “Ok, let’s make the seventh iteration of Batman in the last ten years!” In short films, actual new things can happen.

Chris: Mostly because they are completely separate from Hollywood and they don’t need that room full of producers to okay it… I don’t know why my idea of Hollywood is an image of a room full of producers saying “no” to things. (laughs)

First film you remember watching?

Brendan: Lion King.

Chris: The first film I remember going to see was Casper The Friendly Ghost.

Liam: I don’t know if it’s actually my memory of if it’s been told to me so many times that I think I remember it, but it’s watching Alladin – when the cave opens its big mouth. I was too young to be able to say it’s scary so I said it’s “hairy” and ran out of the room.

Paul: I doubt it was the first movie I remember seeing, but it’s one of the earliest attachment I made to a movie – My Neighbor Totoro. It’s basically a Japanese Disney. I watched that movie so many times growing up. 60 times, guaranteed.

What’s the most disturbing movie?

Liam: Pink Flamingos, by John Waters.

Chris: I know it’s a comedy – and a really good one – but there is one death in it, and it’s so unexpected and gruesome that it caught me off guard and genuinely disturbed me.

Brendan: There’s two I can think of. First one was Beautiful Mind. It freaked me out because of my age at the time; the schizophrenia aspect was really eye opening . And then, in later years, it was a movie made by the band Dog Days we played with at Crace Mountain. It’s this indie movie about abuse and relationships, and it’s pretty goddam terrifying.

Paul: Dancer In The Dark. I remember finishing that and then spending at least a full day in the worst funk afterwards.

Liam: I cried so much when watching that movie but then I felt manipulated into feeling sad.

Paul: It was engineered to be disturbing, so that you could not help feel anything but this crushing remorse and the guilt you didn’t deserve.

What film changed your life?

Chris: Hook. The part where the little boy is stretching Peter’s face to look for the younger peter made me think in a different way about age and death and that a person can be more than one person in their life. I also tried to convey that to other people when I was six, but I just didn’t have the vocabulary for that.

Paul: That would be so adorable..

Liam: And upsetting..

Paul: For me it’s Totoro again. It was a real mark shift in the sense of enjoyment and real connection to imagined worlds and stories as opposed to passive entertainment.

Brendan: The Room changed my life. It made me realize that there is really horrible art out there and people seek it out.

Liam: LOTR – because of the music. It was one of the first movies I ever saw where I was as invested in the music as in the film itself. It certainly was incidental music meant to accompany the action but it had a life and development of its own that coexisting with the movie and I found that very exciting.

Which film could you watch over and over without getting tired of it?

Chris: There’s not many movies I could watch twice in a row, but Back To The Future is one of them.

Paul: Die Hard and anything by Wes Anderson. Die Hard is straight up the best action movie ever made, and Wes Anderson’s movies are so delightful and charming I will not get tired of them.

Liam: I watch The Dark Crystal by Jim Hanson always every year and I enjoy it every time.

For the last three shows you put on – all this year – you used theatrical performance based on movie themes (Le Voyage Dans La Lune, Metropolis, Aliens). Why?

Chris: For the iconic imagery. I suggested Trip To The Moon because it was silent, and every time we tried to have a dialogue in our previous shows, it didn’t work. Nobody could understand what was happening. So doing something based entirely on silent imagery seemed like a good idea.

Liam: It did a lot of good things for our performances. It made us shift our perspective on how to convey what we wanted to convey on stage. It was also nice that we didn’t have to write a narrative and only boil down a story from another source.

Paul: Whenever we tried to write our own narratives in the pasts they meandered at best and never made complete sense even in our heads. We were loosely stringing together some inside jokes with the hopes that they might make other people laugh as well. Switching to having pre-existing narratives that we just have to figure out how best to communicate and work with our aesthetic – it really helped us develop the craft.

Brendan: It’s interesting to have a script but also a look that’s already dedicated to the film, and characters and sets involved in the story, to be able to convey that look on stage in a simplified way. We learn from it a it. It’s good to have these boundaries to stick with no matter where your imagination might go – you have to stick it underneath the bracket.

Chris: We’re starting to be good at making stage productions, so watching other people who are good at that is an excellent way to learn that.

Where does originality come into play?

Liam: I think it bubbles up from between the cracks, because, inevitably, our adaptations are markedly different. (laughs) It’s not like one of our goals is to show our originality in such and such fashion. It’s rather a byproduct of our attempt to solve any problem.

Paul: With our budget, means and tools, trying to replicate certain things – we’re not going to be able to faithfully, so the originality of it is the problem solving on how to recreate the iconic moments or certain feel, but with our means.

Liam: Some of the unexpected things that arise from our attempts to solve problems are things that we can latch onto in the future. An idea that didn’t really convey a specific moment in one film could work well in our next production and we can use that again.

Chris: Literal adaptations don’t always work. Spiderman doesn’t work on stage. They were trying to adapt the Sam Remi movies literally onto the stage. It doesn’t work. It’s theatre. So everybody hated it. And that guy broke his leg.

Aside from sci-fi, which is very theatrical and works well with your style of music would you ever consider a different film genre?

Chris: Documentary. We’ve talked about it in the past.

Paul: I don’ think we could get away with much else. We’ll never do a period drama. We rely on the things happening to be very visually strong – that’s why sci-fi is so great, because it has the whole aesthetic structure you can lean the story on and help people suspend their disbelief. Sci-fi is the easiest way to communicate a story and build mood with no dialogue and only through pantomime.

Chris: But our next show is going to be original. It may be very abstract so I don’t actually want to talk about it.

Still, could you give us a sneak peek? How about describing it in one word?

Chris: Camouflage.