Even his best friends told him not to do it -- but Bruce McDonald is goin' down the road again with a rock 'n' roll band.
The Toronto filmmaker's Hard Core Logo, a rockin' road comedy tinged with tragedy, opens here Friday.
The film has generated accolades since it screened in the Sudbury and Vancouver film festivals, and snuck into Toronto for preview screenings. Which made it even more ironic that McDonald was warned not to do the movie.
"It was a tough decision," McDonald says in an interview while he bellies up to the bar in the Horseshoe Tavern. "That was probably the biggest decision of all on this movie."
The fear was that Hard Core Logo, a fiction that chronicles the chaotic reunion tour of a defunct Vancouver punk rock band, would just repeat what McDonald had done so well before in his rock road pictures Roadkill and Highway 61.
"A lot of my friends were going: 'Uh, I don't know, you should maybe do something else!' Telefilm, they weren't crazy about the whole idea either," McDonald recalls.
"To me it was a very different thing. To me, this was a film about a 'marriage' that just happened to be about musicians. On the other films, they (the anti-heroes of Roadkill and Highway 61) go down the road and meet a nutty person and things happened. Here you're with the same people throughout -- and they are the nutty people!
"But, at one point, I thought maybe they (his doubters) were right because I had everyone telling me not to do this. I thought, well, maybe I should just produce this. I actually contacted a West Coast filmmaker and offered up the film. They wanted way too much money so I thought there is no other choice for me. It was me.
"However, until we started shooting, those doubts were still there: 'Jeez, am I just going over the same old ground?' But once I had everyone together I saw what we were doing, I started to get very excited.
"I saw it as less a road film and more of a film about these four guys in this 'box' -- the box of their band and the box of their history together."
McDonald now calls his stubborn streak his best quality. Once he siezes onto an idea, he sticks with it. Part of the credit for that tenacity is due to his exposure to near-legend Norman Jewison, the Canadian titan of Hollywood who was instrumental in guiding McDonald's early directoring efforts.
And McDonald just spent three days on board a cross-country train from Toronto to Vancouver interviewing Jewison for a CBC-TV documentary. McDonald has learned that, no matter what a filmmaker's personal style is on set, from loud yeller to his own approach as a soft-spoken persuader, the director has to be stubborn enough to fight for his vision. As McDonald did on Hard Core Logo.
"It's the only way to get a movie made. It's tough to make any movie. It's easier for me in a certain way because there's a little more respect now. I've done a couple of movies (three in fact) so there's a little more trust. But every film will have its difficult or controversial areas."
Such as deciding to do it in the first place.
PHOTO: Filmmaker Bruce McDonald thought twice about making yet another picture about a band on tour in his latest effort, Hard Core Logo. -- Norm Betts, SUN
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