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Andrew Cividino’s very good year

Andrew Cividino has been having a pretty good year. His first feature film, Sleeping Giant – a study of growing tensions between three teenage boys in cottage country expanded from his 2014 short – premiered at Cannes to rave reviews, and received an even more enthusiastic reception at TIFF. (It’s also just been included in TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten features list.) We sat down to talk about the movie just before its first Toronto screening.

Sleeping Giant was first produced as a short film. Did the material change or evolve when you made the feature version?

For me it was always a feature. I’d actually written a feature screenplay before we [made] the short, and I’d started casting for that I was determined to shoot that in the summer of 2013. And we found Nick [Serino, who plays Nate] and Reece [Moffett, who plays Riley], and then the financing fell through – and instead of going home with our tails between our legs we decided, “Well, let’s make a short. We’ll just pull some scenes from the feature and try to make a short out of this.” I think that kind of allowed for a bit more willingness to be brave with some choices, and how we approached scenes – doing more improv and trying to be a bit more impressionistic with it. 

Did the act of making the short version change your concept of the feature?

My first draft of that script was very Dazed And Confused-influenced. It felt a lot more presentational and movie-ish, and I think making the short opened me up to the possibility of a different approach to storytelling for this – one that was a bit more representational and felt more like eavesdropping and being along [for] the journey with the boys. Also, spending that summer working with Nick and Reece really changed my desire to make it just a film about Adam [Jackson Martin], and to make it much more about these three boys, the complexities of their relationships and where they’re all coming from – and not just have Riley and Nate be kind of stock characters serving Adam’s purposes in the story.

Sleeping Giant also has an awareness of class divisions that’s not often acknowledged in Canadian cinema. Adam is a city kid, and his family is comfortable Riley and Nate are a little lower on the economic ladder, and a little rougher. Was it difficult to comment on those differences without making the film explicitly about them?

It was important to me not to stereotype ideas of class: these boys come from very different backgrounds, and one is as alien to the other as the other way around. I really didn’t want to set a portrait of somebody who is lower in the socioeconomic spectrum as being from a family that is less functional or has less love. I mean, there’s a sense of middle-class normalcy to Adam’s family, but that to me was something I wanted to explore as being kind of a WASPy veneer for their family their problems are quite real. And on the other side of the tracks, this other family – although they have their problems and it’s not perfect, you can tell that there’s a family that does have a core of love and their own functioning routine, and everything works for them.

The interactions within the families feel very natural, too. Did you encourage improvisation on the set?

We implemented a fair bit of improvisation, which was something I really picked up doing the short – the confidence to feel that I could not totally make it, like, an unwatchable mess [laughter]. The balancing act there was that a number of story threads and character arcs all intersected at various points, and that really needed to be served, so that was one tugging force. And on the other end of that was the desire to allow the actors to bring their own voices to it, their own experience and their own input. It was kind of a tug of war between those things on a daily basis. There are certain scenes that are incredibly scripted – and not necessarily always the ones that feel the most scripted. But other scenes, we really let them run. I mean, the biggest example of that – and it’s definitely not a plot scene, but I was too charmed not to include it – was the hamburger dinner, where [Riley and Nate] are talking about putting their grandmother in a home. That scene was specifically set up to be about something very different, and as we started to improvise with it, they just took off in their own direction. There was so much joy in what they were doing, and it was so entertaining and funny, I thought, “I can capture what’s good about this family in this scene, and that makes it worth putting in the movie. I know I can lose the plot I had in here, and it’s not gonna kill things.” You just let it go.

Given that, how close is the finished film to the movie you set out to make?

Surprisingly close, actually. Much more than I would have been able to say even when we were halfway through the edit, I think. We captured, like, 70 hours of footage there was no going back up there. It’s a summer movie, it was shot in the summer, we’re up there for 20 days and when it’s over there are no pickups. So we just rolled and rolled and rolled, and left a mountain of footage – infinite choices, in some ways – in the edit. But we had the outline, the bare-bones structure even before it was a script, and I carried it around with me in my pocket while we were shooting. I called it a manifesto, which was not the right word for it, but it was basically 11 lines that I wrote back in 2011 about what I really wanted this movie to be, when I had the germ of it in my mind. The feel of it. And if you read those lines [now], what we were going for, it’s unbelievable how we somehow ended up there. We went the long way around with all the other stuff – the process, the story and everything – but I think we came close.

And now you have a movie that’s premiered at Cannes and playing TIFF, and you’re being hailed as our first breakout director since Xavier Dolan. Any pressure there?

I mean, like, hearing it come out of your mouth there’s still a great deal of novelty and surprise. Like, I don’t think it’s fully registered that that’s a perception of my work. I guess people treat shorts and features very differently. You know, I’m 32 years old and I’ve been making films under the radar for quite a while, but I’m glad I finally made the decision that come hell or high water, I’m gonna make my feature. I do feel pressure about what’s next. It’s weird, I talk a lot about it with my producer, Karen Harnish, who’s also a very close friend. You become aware of this idea that suddenly there’s a brand around you. I don’t know that it’s about making a particular type of movie, but opportunities have certainly come up recently where I could hop on a film with a budget I couldn’t have dreamed of [having] a year ago. 

Are you tempted?

I’m hungry to work, and I could be directing again right away, but they’re not the movies I’d want to watch, not necessarily the movies that I’d want to make. You end up in this kind of crisis of faith about it. There’s a lot of pressure, and I don’t want to just sit around for four or five years while my skills erode trying to think of what’s next.


See our review for Sleeping Giant here. 

Don’t miss our look at this year’s Cana­da’s Top Ten here.

This piece was originally published on Sept. 12, 2016.

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