LUCIDMEDIA

Interview with Saul Rubinek

Written by Mark R. Hasan Monday, 20 April 2009 14:28

In 1998, Rubinek stepped behind the camera and directed the black comedy Jerry and Tom. His fourth directorial effort is the indie film Cruel but Necessary (2005), which made its debut on DVD earlier this year via Critical Mass and Anchor Bay/Starz.

A film about obsessions, betrayal, and ultimately healing, Cruel but Necessary is a very clever film shot on digital video from the perspective of its holder, Betty Munson. Whenever she turns on the camera, that’s what we see, and little by little we’re privy to the end of her marriage to a two-timing husband, her emotional breakdowns, as well as her passionate efforts to raise her son Luke.

Produced by Elinor Reid (Rubinek’s wife) and written by star Wendel Meldrum, Cruel but Necessary also feels like an improvised film with naturally neurotic characters and dysfunctional family members, but as you’ll learn from our Q&A, Rubinek’s film is a meticulously rendered work.

Mark R. Hasan: I was pleasantly surprised that Cruel but Necessary is a story that uses video technology not to create horror, nor as some kind of narcissistic film about a serial killer, but as an integral part of a social drama, and I wonder if that was one of the aspects of the script that really appealed to you?

Saul Rubinek: Wendel Meldrum is a Canadian actress I’ve know for thirty years who came to my wife and I with these series of monologues [that] weren’t defined. They’re spoken by a rather kooky, odd, sometimes intelligent, sometimes bafflingly ignorant woman, and Wendell said ‘Look, I’ve created this character. What do I do with this?’

Over about almost a year and a half, we developed a script, so it was appealing from a character’s point of view, but also interesting when we asked, ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting if, while she was filming herself and her philosophy, her life kind of contradicted what she was saying?’

MRH: In one of the interviews on the DVD, you said that you had been approached by three companies that were interested in making the film. You had a specific budget, but they all wanted a different leading actress, and then I think it was your director of photography who said, ‘Well, we shot ten minutes. Why don’t we do this nine more times?’

I thought it was funny because it kind of reminded me of Orson Welles doing Citizen Kane (1941), and how the test footage actually became scenes in the finished film. Your film has a bit of that spirit, but at the same time when you decided to make it on your own, it had the spirit of a lot of independent filmmakers who basically just get a camera, use existing locations, and then sort of similarly use improvised dialogue and scripted dialogue, and find the film as they’re shooting and editing.

SR: I think we found the film in the scriptwriting in this case. A lot of it. We knew it was a very well-written script by her, and I have to give a tremendous amount of credit to Elinor, who really worked on the development of the script much more than I did with Wendell.

We didn’t do 54 days of shooting in order to find the movie; we did 54 days of shooting because we didn’t have the money to shoot it any other way. We knew where we were going.

You can be an independent filmmaker; you grab a camera, go out and start discovering the movie, but the truth is that without a script of some kind, without a compelling story and certainly not without actors, you can’t do it.

I challenge you or anybody to point out ‘This is improvised, this is not improvised, and this is scripted.’ … Probably the thing I’m proudest of is you can’t tell what part of it is improvised, and what part of it isn’t.

MRH: The look of the film surprised me because it’s really beautiful. I don’t know if you had a set decorator there, but the colour schemes in specific shots from scene to scene are well balanced. It’s just not you using the bare essentials of a bare location; you put a lot of time into making sure there were specific colours reflecting specific moods.

SR: We were able to prep a week in advance – sometimes more – for a 2-day shoot, and then we would go onto the set and we’d work sometimes for 4 hours just figuring out how we’re going to shoot it; what would make it visually interesting.

MRH: Was it hard to market the film once it had been done?

SR: We got into Montreal and San Jose Cinequest and Seattle, Vancouver, Winnipeg and a couple of other places, and got some awards and good reviews, [but] Toronto and Sundance wouldn’t have us. I was kind of surprised, because I was part of the Toronto Film Festival for so long, and I just think they didn’t like it. I know that there are politics involved, but I honestly think they didn’t like the movie, which surprised me.

We spent a year editing it, a year going to festivals before we could even find anybody who was willing to show it anywhere, and it was only by happenstance that I realized after the fact, ‘Wait a minute. We’re all Canadian.’

The reason that you’re talking to me, and that it actually has a DVD release and it’ll be on cable and on TV in Canada… is because of that odd thing: we’re all Canadians, and it has some value to a distributor selling it in the marketplace in Canada.

To read the full article see here: http://www.kqek.com/exclusives/Exclusives_Rubinek_1.htm