THE LOCKPICKER directed by Randall Okita, at the REEL ASIAN FILM FESTIVAL Wednesday (November 16), 6 pm. TIFF Bell Lightbox 2. 105 minutes. reelasian.com.
The Lockpicker drips with so much authenticity, it almost feels like a dreamy documentary.
That’s because when Toronto writer/director Randall Okita set out to make his first full-length film, a dark coming-of-age story, he was determined to tackle it the only way he thought he should: by filming almost entirely in real local classrooms during the school year. He also made sure to cast actual teens in the key roles.
“Why would I rent an empty school and hire 30-year-old actors who speak like how they believe kids speak?” Okita says.
In The Lockpicker, Hashi (Keigian Umi Tang) wants to leave town after his friends fall victim to violence. He roams around the halls of his school, the real-life Central Toronto Academy on Shaw, as bullying, stealing and depression threaten to bury him.
Okita, an award-winning shorts director, and his crew worked with CTA’s principal and teachers while filming in classrooms for more than two years, focusing their sessions during winter months. Okita calls it an “open book” process, which allowed students to visit a classroom that was being used as a filmmakers’ hub to ask questions about the film or the technical side of shooting.
“As someone who has experience working with youth and educating students about filmmaking, this was natural for me,” he says.
Students at CTA felt so comfortable with Okita and his team that they dispensed with the usual auditions for lead actor. Tang, now 20, on a break from his media arts class, ran into producer Jason Lapeyre, whom he worked with as a grip on a past project, in the hallway. Tang says he then “stalked and followed Jason until he met up with Randall, and then Randall gave me his card.”
Of the young actor’s first performance, Okita says, “Keigian has this thing – it’s indescribable. It’s the spark we needed for this film.”
Okita isn’t just tooting his own casting director’s horn. Tang’s emotionality in The Lockpicker comes from a deep well of realism, as if Tang weren’t acting but simply stepping into the state of a teen he could have been had things taken a violent turn.
Okita’s approach did present challenges. Working with non-actors meant a lengthier shooting schedule than usual. Also, Okita had to roll with a few unexpected punches.
On one of their first days of shooting at the school, they were filming dozens of students moving through the halls, leaving school and getting on a bus the crew rented.
“The students are excited,” Okita recalls. “The AD is wrangling all the kids, and we’re choreographing these long hallway shots, moving out of the school and getting on the bus. We have a picture car, a bus that looks like public transit, with our driver. The teachers are excited, the cast is excited. We do some rehearsals. It’s very complex, and we reset everything to shoot. And then we back the bus into a police car. Crunch!
“There was a moment when we thought, ‘This might be it. We might get shut down.’ But it turned out okay – the officer was incredibly nice, and we were able to keep shooting.”
While the open-book process wasn’t easy, Okita wouldn’t have it any other way. “I don’t want to do easy things. I see it like cooking: I don’t want to do the same thing every time. I want to do something engaging and nourishing and satisfying, a project that will also self-educate.”
The Lockpicker arrives after two successful years for Okita. His most recent short film, The Weatherman And The Shadowboxer, a blend of live action and digital animation, won TIFF’s Short Cuts Award for best Canadian short in 2014. In 2015, he received the Toronto Film Critics Association’s Technicolor Clyde Gilmour Award, which gave him $50,000 to put into The Lockpicker.
His experience with this embedded-in-the-trenches process has led Okita to advise other filmmakers: “If we claim to make films about and for certain communities, then I don’t understand why we don’t make these films with those communities. It’s youth in this case, but it could apply to race, gender, sexuality.”
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