Cooperation, Chemistry, and Corporate Ethics
Teamwork is a challenge for anyone, particularly within corporate environments where the pressures of time and budget are often a big consideration, along with developing client relationships and attempting to blend often wildly different personality types. In the new film Eating Buccaneers, released in Toronto on October 16th, the challenges of teamwork are taken to a whole new level.
Four people who work at a major advertising firm, along with one of their clients, are forced to work together after their airplane crash lands in the Canadian wilderness. Their client, who represents the chocolate bar brand Buccaneers, is thrown in with a wild mix from the advertising firm, including its smarmy CEO, Jerry, played by Peter Keleghan, and its hippie-ish Creative Director, Vanessa, played by Leah Pinsent.
Real-life couple Keleghan and Pinsent credit writer/director Bill Keenan for coming up with a concept that explores the dynamics of teamwork and the nature of modern relating.
“He said it was a huge budget and we’d be paid thousands!” Keleghan says with a big laugh, adding, “Well, we knew we’d be paid in nickels and dimes, and it wasn’t going to be hugely profitable. But we did know it was a very good script. Bill wrote it from whence he came –he was an ad agency executive, incredibly ambitious.”
Keenan, a one-time star of the advertising world, left it all behind to become a filmmaker. Together with his wife (who is one of the film’s executive producers), the pair managed to raise enough funds for the film through actively courting everyone from friends to their dentist. Once Keleghan and Pinsent had read the script, “we knew we had to do it, especially in talking with Bill about the whole thing.”
Keleghan is perhaps best known for his role as Ranger Gord on CBC’s Red Green Show, but he’s also appeared as CEO Alan Roy on Rick Mercer’s Made in Canada as well as news anchor Jim Walcott on The Newsroom. He has a knack for mixing authoritarian corporate smarminess with zany, manic comedy, a combination he uses to great effect in Eating Buccaneers. It’s being allowed the freedom to improvise, he says, that elevates his character in the film from being just another smart-ass executive stereotype.
“One of the greatest things about being on set is always having the opportunity to improvise or to experiment or to risk or to talk,” he explains. “So that at the end the day you know your ideas are going to be amalgamated in that chemical mix of everybody else, rather than have people say ‘You can’t say this or that.’ It sounds like some very stereotypical thing to say, but I had a really good time, we just got along, thanks to Bill creating that chemistry.”
Pinsent is quick to echo Keleghan’s comments, fully crediting Keenan for creating a trusting, fun atmosphere in which the ensemble had the creative freedom to fully explore and flesh out their characters. “We are the type of people that, when it comes from the heart, sincerely –which it did –there was nothing but wanting to be part of [the project].”
Keleghan distills the tension between Jerry and Vanessa down to competing world-views. “She reproaches me for being the guy with the big car, like, ‘Holy $#!t, you’re so vacant,’ and all I can hit back with is, ‘You with your yoga and tantric stuff, doing those breathing exercises!’ He’s a lost little kid.”
Both Pinsent and Keleghan have resumes filled with comedic or comedy-tinged roles. The pair worked together on Made in Canada, which aired from 1998 to 2003. Pinsent performed in This Is Wonderland, and ReGenesis, and was nominated for a Genie for her first film performance in 1984’s The Bay Boy with a then-unknown Kiefer Sutherland.
Despite her success, she worried she was being typecast in a series of roles that only showcased her ballsy, tough sides, not her comedic talents or what she calls her “spiritual geek” side. With Eating Buccaneers, Pinsent injects a good measure of her own personality and beliefs into the character of Vanessa. As with Keleghan, she avoids the making her character a stereotype; no mamby-pamby, flaky, New Age portrayal here, but rather, a complex, self-aware woman who recognizes her own shortcomings and that of her former lover, Keleghan’s Jerry.
“I can speak as an actor looking at other actors,” she explains, “and give them credit for making it more truthful than just whatever stereotype was presented. Then with Bill’s writing, with having material that made it more well-rounded for myself, I actually enjoyed, for the first time in a long time, somebody a little closer to my personal self than what I’d been allowed to play in the past. It’s kind of fun to explore that part of myself. I hope we all have these sides we’re able to bring forth and bring humanity to the so-called cliché.”
“We all have something to learn,” Keleghan says of the characters in the film. He admits some learned more than others, however. “[Jerry] didn’t learn as much as the others did,” he notes wryly. “We call up our own lives when we’re lost in the woods and it’s a metaphor for being lost in our own lives. Faced with death, we’re going, ‘What have I done? What am I looking for?’ This is what they were supposed to discover –everyone except me, who’s just attached to his Blackberry.”
But if Keleghan’s character is comedic, he also represents a ruthless side of business that prevails in the corporate world. While Keleghan says such a cut-and-dry, profit/loss perspective is necessary for to survival in the corporate world, Pinsent doesn’t necessarily buy into it, which leads the pair to engage in a kind of back-and-forth discussion that echoes the exchanges between their characters in Eating Buccaneers.
“The psychopathic corporation,” he says, “they’re supposed to be unforgiving.”
“No, that’s not true!” Pinsent says in protest, adding the observation that “people like Jerry happen to bully themselves in the end…”
“… but they get the job done,” concludes Keleghan. “If you work for a faceless corporation that makes sure the share price is up, the productivity is there. Jerry does his job. He may be lost and lonely, but that’s his job. It’s unfortunate for all kinds of people in the world, but his character is a product of that big business society. If they don’t have any kind of morality or guilt they kind fire people with impunity.”
No matter which side of the corporate ethics-spectrum viewers may find themselves, there’s no denying that the chaotic team of city-slickers in Eating Buccaneers will seem familiar. Those whose work involves a reliance on teams will find much to laugh at and relate to. Even Pinsent can connect with the kind of back-biting and intense rivalry depicted in the movie –though thankfully, not in the particular instance of filming Keenan’s work. Yet the memories of being involved in less-than-stellar team projects remains.
“The longer you’re on a set,” she explains, “the more … ‘controversial’ is not the right word, but when you’re volatile with each other, and the show is going nowhere – I’ve witnessed this myself – there’s a dictatorial director, producers who are only thinking about the money, actors are thinking about their close-ups or whatever, and it becomes very vacant. You can’t wait to get off the island, but you have to get through it.
“Hopefully, as people, you either seize the day or the opportunity and say, moment to moment, ‘What can I learn from this?’ or you fight all the way. No matter what, in any office or community where you’re working together, there’s a circle of people you’re always going to have to deal with; people who will either drive you crazy, or teach you something.”
It’s a lucky bit of happenstance that found Pinsent and Keleghan shared a wonderful mutual chemistry with their fellow cast members. Shannon Beckner plays the perky assistant Andrea with sparky, sassy energy, while Jeff White is charming as the wise-cracking copywriter Doug. Neil Crone, as The Pilot, is hilarious with simple, dead-pan delivery, while Steven McCarthy, as the nervous client Stewart, turns in a multi-layered, affecting performance. The good chemistry within the ensemble easily transfers onscreen into scenes that are both comic and touching. “We were there as a team,” Pinsent remembers, “and we would play together. There were no egos but onscreen.”
That egolessness extends to the couple’s off-screen relationship, and both Pinsent and Keleghan found they could draw on their own personal chemistry, as well as a shared work ethos, in working on Eating Buccaneers. “God knows, I think we have the best relationship ever,” he says. “This is the second marriage for both of us, we’ve a lot of baggage and experience, and we both have a theory about comedy: play it straight. If you don’t find truth in any character, you’re going to lose the engagement of your audience. You have people investing in whatever emotional or comedic thing you do.”
Keleghan had no problem drawing upon personal experiences to inform the emotional tenor of various scenes. The heart of emotionalism realism is best reached, he feels, when the actor can employ his or her own life to whatever is at hand.
“When I’m on top of Shannon Beckner (as Andrea) and trying to make Vanessa jealous, I have to draw back to my own method acting, and say ‘Hey, what about this? You better pay attention to me, you’re not going to make me do the dishes again.’ So here I am with whatever childish thing my character would go into, to make my ex jealous… it’s all those bits and pieces of layering. You can always tell after a few years of being in the business, whether what’s imprinted on a film is truthful and good. The other thing that passes on, that gets imprinted on final product is where you know they’re speaking the truth. There’s a chemical reaction…”
Both actors see the film as a larger metaphor about self-awareness. Pinsent sees the journey of the characters as vital to gaining understanding into their own lives and those around them. “With the journey out of the woods, we all go through enlightenment about priorities and caring and humanity,” she explains, “all those things in your life to be put in place to make you a better human being. Bill comes from the ad world but he and his wife Tracy are also people who have explored aspects of their lives, especially their spiritual natures, so he put that into his work and world when we were filming.”
The message of Eating Buccaneers is a simple, if classic one.
“The irony, without giving anything away,” says Pinsent, “is that the solution is in our own front yard, or backyard. You don’t need a trauma to make it happen to be who we want to be.”
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