LUCIDMEDIA

Documenting Visual Masterpieces: An Interview with Filmmaker Nick de Pencier

Written by Lisa M. Knapp Thursday, 04 June 2009 10:06

When it comes to the film industry, it takes a long time to get to the top. Toronto’s Nick de Pencier is a man that keeps climbing that staircase with fresh new ideas that blow his audience away. A director, producer, director of photography, and president of Mercury Films Incorporated, which he shares with his partner Jennifer Baichwal, Pencier is full of ideas and always sees his vision through to the end.

He’s worked on brilliant documentaries such as The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams’ Appalachia, which explores the politics of representation in Adams’ controversial photography; or the fascinating Four Wings and a Prayer, where follows and explores monarch butterflies lives and how they are being affected by man kind’s environmentally destructive habits. Pencier’s visions are stunningly beautiful and the result draws the audience in, making them want to learn and understand and view things in a way that they would not have thought of on their own.

I had the opportunity to interview Pencier not too long ago via skype. We talked about his life in the film industry, about his most recent project, Act of God, and about other projects that are on the go.

Lucid Forge: So how is life as a filmmaker treating you?

Nick de Pencier: It changes all the time and the highs are high and the lows are low and the reality is mostly quite unglamorous, contagion, administrative drudgery. But that is the means to an end of being able to get out there and be with my camera and be a hands-on filmmaker. It’s all part of a holistic circle I guess.

LF: Give me a little bit of a background on your history as a filmmaker.

NdeP: I always took photographs and always had an interest in film, but I started making films in university I guess. There wasn’t a film program at McGill where I went, so I kind of invented one and just sort of made films on my own, and then when I finished university I started working kind of two different congruent paths. One, I was a production assistant, coffee getter, and sand bag schlepper on feature films in and around Toronto for a couple years. I worked on set, worked in the offices, worked my way up a few of the different department hierarchies.

At the same time, I started making films that were mostly modern dance films; actually, performance films. I had a bunch of friends that were dancers at York University that started their own dance companies when they finished there [and they] needed their dances archived. We made the sort of things you would see on Bravo, or dance films as they were becoming interesting.

Through that I translated my interest from stills photography into video and film and ended up shooting for hours and hours and decided I really liked it. I started doing more shooting and producing and less working on the big sets and it kind of tipped over into a bit of an accidental career as a filmmaker.

LF: That’s great that you tripped onto that. You have a beautiful vision and give the audience a full taste of that. Tell me about your most recent project.

NdeP: The film that I have been working on over the last two or three years is a documentary with my partner Jennifer Baichwal and it’s called Act of God. It’s about people who have been struck by lightning. I am the producer and the cinematographer and Jennifer is the producer and director.

LF: Tell me more about the film.

NdeP: It’s about people who have been struck by lightening, but not in the way that maybe the Discovery Channel or a more science approach would take. It concentrates on more metaphysical effects of being struck, so it brings up issues of chance and fate and the arbitrary universe and the subjects who have survived this cataclysmic event all have something to articulate from the other side of this.

It’s almost an art film. There is very little science in it, very little explanation of how lighting works, and there is no dramatic recreations. It’s really people telling their stories and there is music and image that support those. So in a way it’s almost an experimental film. I hope people like it and people get to see it.

LF: How did you come up with the idea for the film?

NdeP: I know a guy in Toronto who is a playwright and actor who was struck when he was a teenager. That was 20 years ago now and he wrestled with this event for a long time internally and knew that at some point he wanted to try to write about it and that took him a long time. He wrote a play called Act of God about this event and being struck and this friend right next to him that was killed and all the questions that it brings up; why him? Why not me? What if we had been standing somewhere else? What if the lightning struck somewhere else? All those sort of issues.

It started with his play I think, it kind of resonated a lot of those issues and we realized it might be an interesting arena to explore some of those broader philosophical issues but still have a visually compelling film that should be a film, you know. [It’s] not a book or a radio play, because lightening as a metaphor is so powerful but is also visually very powerful. So we worked really hard to get very [effective] visuals and sounds of storms and lightening to accompany these stories and to make the viewer appreciate the impact of a storm while they are watching the film.

LF: Do you have anything planned for your next project?

NdeP: There are a couple things brewing. Jennifer and I made a film on Edward Brutinski called Manufactured Landscapes and we have in development another documentary project with him. He is doing a book and a big photo exhibit on images of oil; oil production, oil refining, the uses of oil…which I think is an interesting topic these days. So we are working on that, it’s in development.

Also right now we are working on a project with the writer Joseph Boydon. It would take place at the Mosany Moose factory in Ontario right at the mouth of the Moose Rivers that flows into James Bay and it’s about Green Power. There is a bunch of hydroelectric dams that are being proposed for that area that will have a lot of effect on the local communities and their way of life. In lots of ways it will affect the rivers, but it will also be potentially a huge boon in development and influx of money and jobs, and everything. They’re facing major changes in the community and at the same time the big cities in the south are hungry for Green Power, and hydroelectric qualifies for Green Power, so it’s interesting that the government now has a real solid initiative to make our energy generation clean and also to meaningfully involve First Nations and stake holders and all of the electric projects they do. It would be a documentary that involves all those themes.