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 Before Juno rocketed her to fame, Ellen Page starred in director Bruce McDonald's The Tracey Fragments, which debuts on DVD this week. |
Call it intuition, or skill, or just good luck, but Canadian filmmaker Bruce McDonald found Ellen Page for his film The Tracey Fragments just before the movie Juno rocketed her into Oscar territory and Hollywood stardom.
"I had never seen her in anything until I saw her in The Tracey Fragments, really," McDonald tells Sun Media, just as his film makes its DVD debut this week.
"What I saw in her was the excitement that she was creating around her in the projects she was coming off then. We met as she was coming off X-Men and Hard Candy."
McDonald felt the electric charge. Other people he respected were raving about her performances. So he met her, liked her and cast her in The Tracey Fragments as a 15-year-old Winnipeg teen going through a coming-of-age crisis. There was no audition.
"She looked great. She loved the material. She was smart. She had just turned 18 when we started this project. So it was just one of those things. Obviously, she knew what she was doing and I didn't need to audition her. She had been doing this for a while and she had great references from people I greatly admire. Then it was amazing to watch. So, yeah, we were lucky."
Now, the Toronto-based director is proud of how Page is maintaining her down-home Halifax sensibilities in Hollywood, even through the Oscar buzz. McDonald and his Tracey crew buddies were astounded by what happened to Page during that period.
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"Because, it's incredible how crazy people go," McDonald says of the fame rocket. "I've never really seen it with somebody I know and have worked with. When you see it, you think, 'Okay, now I get it, now I see the power that it can have, and how it can change everything.'
"So we sit back and watch her on Letterman and all these different shows. And we think, 'That's our girl! She's carrying herself well!' And she hasn't turned into one of those Melrose Avenue skanks."
There are "fragments" of Page among the extras on the DVD that debuted this week. A making-of featurette shows her on set.
There are also short re-edits done by fans in an on-line competition. They had access to the rushes. Most fans played it far straighter than McDonald did in bringing novelist and screenwriter Maureen Medved's story to the screen. McDonald tells the Tracey Berkowitz story in multiple images, which appear simultaneously on the screen, each image a different part of, or perspective on, the story. They are literal fragments of the girl's chaotic life as she goes searching for her lost little brother.
"Ours is the Hendrix version, where it's all crazy strange," McDonald says of the way The Tracey Fragments looks and sounds on screen.
The five contest winners, however, offered something that McDonald calls "the acoustic version."
While the versions in the DVD extras are all shorts, some enterprising types even re-edited the entire film into a more linear, comprehensive story, McDonald says. "We were thinking at the time of doing it ourselves and just ran out of steam."
Those cuts are not on the DVD, unfortunately. McDonald says he has not had time yet to watch them all and assess their impact. "But I just think it's a fascinating thing for me and the writer to watch -- and for Ellen to watch. Maybe we'll enter one in some film festival and have Tracey Unplugged. For Ellen Page fans, they might be curious."
McDonald's music metaphors are commonplace. He is wired into music and directed the rock-on-the-road film Hard Core Logo.
"It is like jazz, where you take a very simple melody and you kind of Coltrane it up, or you Parker it up. You put a lot of frills and thrills in but you still now you're going down the same river of sound."
DVDs lifeblood of Canadian films
DVDs are crucial for the survival of domestic filmmakers, says indie Canadian director Bruce McDonald.
"It actually allows the film to last," he says of the DVD debut this week of his latest opus, The Tracey Fragments. It is an intense personal drama starring Ellen Page, of Juno fame.
"The fact is, a lot of Canadian movies, especially independent Canadian movies, will maybe run a couple of weeks ... tops. So people who mean to see it don't see it."
The DVD release gives the film its real life, McDonald says.
"Most people will see it on DVD. It's almost as if the theatre is the festival audience and these are the people who spread the word. But the biggest audience is going to be on DVD."
That is why it is worth taking pains to show a film in the best possible transfer on DVD, including in the proper and original widescreen ratio, McDonald says. Then add extras, the "second layer on the box of chocolates."
A McDonald commentary is missing from those treats on Fragments.
"I'm still shy about it a little, at least about doing commentaries, because I don't quite know what to say."