Peter Stebbings would like you to take his movie seriously.[rssbreak]
The Vancouver-born actor (Traders, Cra$h And Burn) is at the Toronto Film Festival with his debut as a writer-director, Defendor.
The modestly budgeted movie stars Woody Harrelson as a Hamilton construction worker who uses duct tape, jars of wasps and a homemade arsenal to fight crime as a masked avenger.
It sounds like a comedy, and there are certainly funny moments, but the real surprise of Defendor is the integrity with which Stebbings handles his story, following what could have been a broad, spoofy comedy into some pretty dark places.
Did the seriousness of movies like Batman Begins and Superman Returns lead you to find an alternate take on the superhero mythology?
Some people might mistake it for a spoof, but it’s definitely not. I think it’s an homage to the superhero genre, and it kind of deconstructs it at the same time. I guess I really wanted to ask a couple of questions. Who would really do this? Who would put himself in those circumstances? And what would it really be like to fight crime as a hero? And I thought, “Well, you have to have a screw loose a little bit.” So I wanted to ask that question: what is it really like to change into your uniform in a phone booth? We don’t have that [literal] scene, but that kind of thing.
Once you had a script, was it easy to get the project off the ground?
It’s not easy, by any stretch of the imagination. The financial crisis hadn’t hit yet, but a lot of the mini-majors were already closing down, and people were tightening their belts. Certainly it didn’t fall classically into any one genre, so the independent film folk were, like, “I’m not really sure what to do with this.” We were in bed with ThinkFilm for a while then they went belly up. We had a target budget that we didn’t quite meet, but we were able to cobble together enough to do it. We shot it in 20 days.
And somehow you’ve got fight scenes and a car chase in there.
I can’t compete with those bigger movies in terms of action. It was never going to be an action movie per se. It was going to have action in it, but I had to focus on my strengths, which were character, story and performance.
You shot in Hamilton and let the city play itself. What led you to make that choice?
As an actor, I go out there all the time and shoot stuff because of the tax credit. But we’re always trying to make it something it’s not. Every time I go over that sky bridge, I go, “Wow, that’s so beautiful” – that whole industrial wasteland aesthetic – and I’ve always wanted to shoot there.
I think the setting is perfect. And the size is kinda perfect, too, for the small-town, small-hero, big-heart stuff.
Woody Harrelson said the two of you worked very closely to develop his character. What did you do?
We had a week of rehearsal, and we spent some time roaming the streets of Toronto to kind of inhabit the world. We went to a couple of dive bars, and I’d be like, “See that guy over there? That’s this world.” We hung out at CAMH we went shopping at Value Village and bought some of his clothes.
I took him down to the Riverdale Health Centre at Queen and Carlaw. We went to an addicts barbecue, and they were very generous with us there. We were in this office, and this woman comes in and she’s talking about this and that, and suddenly she was like, “Woody Harrelson? What’s Woody Harrelson doing here?” It was this beautiful moment he was, like, “Hi!”
And then the day before we shot, he invited me to his place to talk, and he said, “I’ve never been more unsure of what I’m gonna do in a movie than I am on this movie – but I’ve never been more okay with that.” And I thought, “I completely trust you, and I think you’re gonna knock it out of the park.”
If the movie’s a hit, where do you go next?
Certainly, there are plans for Defendor 2, you know, where there will be two Defendors.
Seriously?
Yeah. It’s a franchise. I have this fantasy where if the first one is successful, god willing, I’ll have more money for the second one. And I’ll probably fuck it up because I have so much money. And then I’ll go back to my indie roots for the third one.
Interview Clips
Peter Stebbings on being a first-time director:
Stebbings on directing Woody Harrelson:
Stebbings on the value of keeping things real:
