BACKCOUNTRY written and directed by Adam Macdonald, with Missy Peregrym, Jeff Roop, Nicholas Campbell and Eric Balfour. A D Films release. 91 minutes. Opens Friday (August 28). See listings.
Actor-turned-filmmaker Adam Macdonald had this idea about infusing a survival picture with emotional honesty: take an urban couple whose camping vacation doesn’t go as well as they’d hoped, then throw in a predatory black bear and see what happens next.
The result is Backcountry, starring Macdonald’s Rookie Blue co-star Missy Peregrym and Heartland’s Jeff Roop (the director’s real-life cousin). It’s a gritty, desperate sort of movie.
Macdonald says he saw his movie as “Open Water in the woods,” played out with the raw realism of Derek Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine. And that meant pushing his stars to fight.
“We let them improv and stuff,” Macdonald says during a press day at TIFF 2014. “And I was changing it here and there to find the tension in the relationship. It was always to make it more than just a survival movie, through their relationship.”
“Sometimes he’d reference our relationship,” Roop adds. “We’ve obviously known each other for many, many years, and sometimes he’d go ‘Jeff,’ and he’d reference a past relationship from his own life, and not necessarily a good one. He’d say, ‘You know what? I don’t know if this cou-ple will make it, even if they get out of the woods.’ And I was just like, ‘Oh, wow. Yeah. Okay, we’re gonna go there.’”
And then there’s the bear thing.
“The nucleus of the story is to have a woman find her strength in the wild,” Macdonald says. “If we get lost in the wild, our true colours are going to come out really fast.”
I think about it for a second and decide I’d probably climb the nearest tree and wet myself.
“Exactly!” Macdonald laughs. “And the wild serves to ignite that strength that’s building underneath her.”
That strength comes with a generous helping of terror, which Peregrym managed to experience before she even left for the shoot.
“I said yes to the project,” she recalls, “and then a couple of weeks later I had a panic attack. Honestly, right before leaving. It was like, ‘What did I do? What did I say yes to? I don’t know what is gonna happen here – I don’t know the places I’m gonna have to go to truly be present in this.’”
“It was just one thing after the other,” Roop says. “A waterfall, a bear, the emotional thing, and running, and falling – it was this emotional ride and a physical one at the same time.
“I’ve never done so much heavy breathing,” Peregrym says.
“For 16 days of shooting,” Roop laughs.
“That’s exactly right!” Peregrym adds.
“It was terror. It was just complete fear, and I put myself through that for essentially three weeks… and then I wept for four days afterwards. Truly. I couldn’t stop crying, because I actually went through that. I was that intense for that shoot. There wasn’t an easy moment.”
Check out our review of Backcountry here.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
