Canadian filmmaker Terrance Odette is the man behind the critically acclaimed, independent movies Heater and Saint Monica,and has recently completed a third called Sleeping Dogs. The movie is about a deaf man who flees his hospital room to save his dog from being put to sleep and the orderly that is tasked with bringing him back. Odette shot the film on a low budget in his hometown of Kitchener, Ontario, using local actors, both novice and professional, to bring his vision to life. Sleeping Dogs is currently on tour across Canada and through Latin America as part of a Toronto Film Festival screening program. I recently got a chance to talk to Odette from his home base in Toronto.
AAD: The story seems kind of personal, where did the idea come from?
TO: The story didn’t start off personal - it became personal. I think it started off as a desire to tell a story of the same type of characters that I’ve dealt with before in my other films. About the people who grow between the sidewalk cracks, yet still manage to have a life of sorts. Basically it was the idea of a blind guy trying to escape from the hospital to go and save his dog from being put down at the pound and everything else grew from there and that stuff comes through exploring the shape of the place that I live. At the time I was living in Toronto, but I’d always wanted to tell stories that take place where I come from – the Kitchener-Waterloo area.
Was that always an intent for you, to do a film project there?
Yeah. When I started off a long time ago, naively or not, I thought that what I was interested in, and not seeing much of it in Canadian film, were what I call the medium cities. In Canada, we have a couple of big cities and I think that in these peripheral cities like London, Kitchener, Waterloo, there’s a different type of life and it’s not that sort of European-based idea of a strong urban centre. For my story, I wanted to geographically show a disconnect, the streets that I show in Kitchener I purposely chose the ugly stuff and shoot at strip malls and lonely suburban stuff. And we didn’t have to ask anyone to get off the streets when we shot in suburbia to make it look lonely, it just was, nobody was around.
You really think of life in Toronto, for example, as going out to all the different places.
Oh, yeah, you go at anytime of night and then outside of the bigger city area you can’t do that. You’re in your car, you go to the malls and places that are very functional. They’re not designed for any sort of sitting around to enjoy while having a coffee. In a strip mall you get a liquor store, a variety store, a Subway and a Tim Horton’s of course. You go there, you get it and you leave.
Were you motivated by any kind of sentimentality in going back to where you grew up to shoot?
I probably felt some nostalgia, I think, having known the area and not lived there for a long time. It was both nostalgic and functional. I had such a low budget to shoot with, I just had a Canada Arts Council grant and I had to make a film for what’s nearly an impossible amount of money, so the first thing I needed was free locations and I had great demands. I was trying to create a hospital setting and you can’t do that without money these days. Also the area’s not burned out on film people; you’re not seeing all the orange cones the night before and all the film trucks pulling in the next day and that’s a good thing.
Was there any particular artistic reason that you wanted to use first-time actors in some of the roles?
Well, there’s a problem when you don’t use ACTRA and you’re looking for middle-aged actors because a lot of middle-aged actors who are worth their salt will have worked enough where they are in the union. I’m willing to work with anybody that fits the role and is able to pull it off, so for me I didn’t even look for first time actors, I kind of knew I was going to have to. We only had four or five people try out for the lead role so I just had to be open to what I was looking for because I know I wasn’t going to be able to draw from a pool of actors. We lucked out with Brian Stiller, he was about the right age but we still had to lower the [character’s] age slightly. He had read it differently and that is what impressed me. I wrote it much more as the stereotypical grumpy old man kind of thing and that’s the beauty of acting and actors, they can bring you fresh response to what you have written. It was a tall order for him to do because this was his first professional role and it probably won’t be his last.
Do you put a lot of time and effort into working with the actors and working together to develop the part?
I like to think that I do, but in reality we don’t have the time. It’s just budget and time constraints. You don’t have the money to rehearse or to do extra shots; you pretty much have to go at it. So we talk a little bit about it, but hopefully the role as its written can be enough to inspire the actor to pick-up on something to go with. But it’s really like how Orson Welles says that making a film is like presiding over an accident and that’s pretty much what you’re doing. I also find that the editing process is where you can really help shape a role and when you’re making low budget you really have to leave yourself open to changing your vision.
There are always the general challenges of being an independent Canadian filmmaker, but you had the benefit of having your movie as part of the Toronto International Film Festival. Did that help with distribution and promotion and all the other things that come after a film’s completion?
Yeah, that always helps and I’ve been very fortunate with my films to have gotten into and have great support from Canadian film festivals. It really helps with the general audience and people looking for niche films like the ones I make. Something like Toronto, which is arguably the most important film festival in the world now, it helps if you have that stamp on it for people looking for a DVD or going out to the rep house, even if you know the politics of a film festival. There’s good support in Toronto, but I’ve also got really great support from the Vancouver film festival and others as well.
You have a number of dates for Sleeping Dogs lined up in South America and Latin America, how has the film been received in these places?
I don’t know yet, it just started January 16th on a little tour. This is all through the Toronto International Film Festival Group, which is the umbrella company of the Toronto Film Festival. They allow a film, a Canadian film especially, to tour and be seen and they do this outside of Canada too. They liked the film and they said that if I could provide a Spanish subtitle then they would put it on the circuit with four other films. So we took advantage of it and got our film subtitled, which was a whole new experience having a film subtitled and having somebody else figure out what it means in a whole other language.
The other benefit of this tour is that I might pick up some funds that will allow me to pay for getting the Spanish subtitles put on, which I can also use on the DVD and that can help out the international sales agent take it to other markets, so it was really more of a marketing ploy than anything. And it’s not something that most films would bother to do, especially on our budget because it’s expensive. It was close to $4000 for me to do it and that was cheap because there was about half the normal dialogue in it and you pay per line. Hopefully it will open up to sell a bit, but maybe also open up my films to other markets.
You’ve got me curious now, what is the process for getting your movie subtitled?
I found several people around the world that do it and there’s a company that does it in Montreal. You have to get the screenplay transcribed, which you have to do for closed captioning anyway, and you send it to them and they translate it. They watch the film, make decisions and get back to you. They then take the translation and physically place it in the film because in a subtitled film you’re only reading about half the amount of what they’re saying. Then I take one of the finished prints and send it to New York in this case, and they literally laser on the subtitles onto the film. So it’s a bit of risk for a film like ours, but if it pays for itself on this tour – great, or if it generates one sale in Latin America or Spain then it was certainly more than worth it.
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