After collaborating for close to a decade, local filmmakers Dylan Akio Smith and Kris Elgstrand can look back at the inauspicious beginnings of their creative partnership and laugh. Well, at least consider laughing.
On the first project we ever worked on together, Kris delivered a 19-page script and we could only shoot 10 of it, recalls Smith. So our introduction to working together was us cutting the shit out of...
Dylan and Brad [Dryborough, the lead actor] cut the shit out of it, interrupts Elgstrand.
The awkwardness of that initial encounter seems to have suffused their subsequent dark comedies, which tend to elicit equal measures of uneasy laughter and anxiety. Doppelg盲nger Paul, their remarkably ambitious second feature, opens with Karl (Tygh Runyan), an intense loner, confronting his supposed doppelg盲nger: Paul (Dryborough again). Despite the fact they look nothing alike, Paul sees his stalker as a kindred soul. When he convinces Karl to let him edit his epic tome, A Book About How Much I Hate Myself, it initiates a chain of events that allows Smith and Elgstrand to indulge their alternately cerebral and silly impulses.
Appropriately, this marks the first time the filmmakers have co-directed. As Elgstrand, who once again handled scripting duties, shares, it was Dylans idea to take that idea of collaboration thats baked right into the story of the movie and let it out in the process of actually making a movie.
Recognizing how personally invested Elgstrand was in the material, Smith wanted to preserve as much of the writers intention as possible. Consequently, the evocative Bill Frisell songs Elgstrand listened to while writing found their way onto the soundtrack. Furthermore, West End coffee shops in which the script was penned became locations in the film.
While Doppelg盲nger Paul sees Elgstrand revisiting his fascination with characters just trying to find a connection and ease their burden, Smith immediately recognized something new in his collaborators work. A lot of Kris writing is inspired by the theatre, he suggests. This time, Kris was playing around with cinematic devices. Whats really different between cinema and theatre is the manipulation of time and space. I was excited when I read it. There was so much going on.
Much of what goes on unfolds in locations that will be instantly recognizable to longtime residents, be it Stanley Parks abandoned polar bear enclosure or the gazebo at First Beach Park. Furthermore, there seems to be a particular West Coast strain of melancholy that colours the proceedings. While it was never intentional, Smith admits, when I watch it, I feel that it is a 麻豆传媒映画movie and has a 麻豆传媒映画experience.
If the films sights are familiar, its playful genre-shifting, inventive structure, and melodic rhythms are quite unlike anything else to be found in Canadian cinema. Were trying to create an experience that feels a little more like our experience, explains Smith, before clarifying, it doesnt feel like real life. Its too meta and tweaked for that. But, hopefully, it has some resounding life quality to it.
Doppelg盲nger Paul opens March 16 at the Vancity Theatre (1181 Seymour).
