LUCIDMEDIA

Yesterday has a bright tomorrow

Written by Adam A. Donaldson Tuesday, 28 July 2009 09:50

It’s Saturday morning and Rob Grant, Justin Sproule, Scott Wallis and Mike Kovac are lounging in their hotel lobby. They seem a little distracted. It’s either because they’re tired having been out till two in the morning watching Vampire Girl Vs Frankenstein Girl, or because their movie, Yesterday, premieres in T-minus six hours. They needn’t have worried, Yesterday ended up selling out and playing to a packed house, expanding the film’s success on the festival circuit. And to think it all began with an idle declaration.

“Right before the third year I made a joke saying that if I don’t get into this other film program then I’d take that money for the tuition and put it into a movie,” remembers writer/director Grant. For Grant it was something said in the heat of the moment, for friend Scott Mainwood though it was an oath. “I was saying it kind of half jokingly, but as soon as I didn’t get into that program [Scott] said ‘we’re making this movie, and I have a schedule here.’”

The crew came together with connections through Vancouver’s Kaplan College Film School or mutual friends. Mainwood produced while Wallis and Kovac co-starred and co-executive produced. The film was shot during summer vacation between Grant’s second and third year, and according to Kovac they put the call out for help to anyone between the Pacific coast and the eastern border of Alberta. “We put a big call out to whoever would help us,” he says. “In some cases for the zombies themselves because we needed a big horde of zombies and we’d take anyone.”

The script, Grant says, came out of a bunch of ideas he had. Primarily he wanted to keep the movie in “old school zombie style,” meaning the slow and lumbering variety. “To me, there’s something scarier than something that’s slow and is still able to get you, there’s a lot more suspense building then,” says Grant. “It doesn’t make sense that people can do a 100 metre dash when they’re long dead.”

“All the sudden you die and everyone’s an athlete,” jokes Wallis.

More broadly, Grant has a specific idea of what he wanted to accomplish with this film. “I wanted to make a zombie movie that other people that don’t necessarily watch zombie movies will enjoy,” he explains. “One of the big influences on my while writing it was [Paul Haggis’] Crash, I really liked the idea of following different storylines all at once, not necessarily be a group of people stuck off the top.”

Adding to the appeal of making a zombie movie, as it is with many first-time filmmakers, is the freedom making a horror film grants you. “One of the reasons I really wanted to do [this movie] was because it was our first time out, we hadn’t done a movie before, and you can kind of get away with a lot more than going all out with a serious drama,” says Grant. “I think more people are accepting of the horror genre in that regards than they are other genres.”

Not that Grant and his crew were making it easy for themselves. Eschewing the indie film standard digital, Grant filmed his movie on actual film. An expensive endeavour despite the fact he was working at a post house and able to get transferring for free, so the only cost was the film. Still, it was a small price to pay for that old school look. “I still think film has a more credible look regardless of lighting,” says Grant. “I think it has more beautiful images off the top.”

Another side effect was that they needed to be prudent with how much they filmed, and as a result about 95 per cent of the film was shot in one take. “It was quite a gamble because it was however many weeks into shooting that we actually saw any images,” says Kovac.

On the plus side though, each shot was the beneficiary of extensive planning and rehearsal; the actors worked out their scene as Grant worked out the technical side of every shot with the Director of Photography. “We just rehearsed it over, and over and over, and then when we got it to a point where we were happy with it and we thought we could get it in one go, then we’d role as long as the DOP was ready,” explains Grant.

“I also appreciated the process that came out of this,” adds Kovac, “it forced us to consider what we were doing a lot more.”

To add to the difficulty factor, there was also some serious stunt work involved in the form of two car crashes. Grant wrote them into the script because he felt that there wasn’t enough production value. A couple of cheap cars bought off the internet for a few hundred bucks later, and they were ready to go.

“We didn’t even look for a stunt man, I just assumed I’d do it,” explains Grant. “My reasoning was that I wouldn’t ask anyone to do it unless I was willing to, so it was just a matter of lacing up the hockey gear for the T-bone car crash.”

By these standards of guerrilla filmmaking, hopping a plane to Montreal and putting your film in front of the eyes of hardcore genre fans is easy. “The reason we’re here is because how often are we going to get a chance to see something that we all created together on the big screen in front of an audience in a place we’re not from,” says Grant. “There’s something inspirational about a film that was made between the second and third year of school is getting out there.”