The talking dead

Bruce McDonald on Pontypool, his smart, scary and entirely independent new take on the zombie movie

HOST WITH THE MOST: Stephen McHattie

by MATTHEW HAYS

Bruce McDonald seems endearingly out of place as he sits down to discuss his latest film in a swank, five-star Montreal hotel. Amid the offerings of mineral water, the Toronto-based filmmaker sits in torn jeans, a t-shirt, cowboy boots and his trademark leather cowboy hat. In a business that inspires so much stress, McDonald is some kind of freakish bundle of laidback Zen.

Looking at McDonald, I can’t help but recall his acceptance speech at the 1989 Toronto International Film Festival, where his feature Roadkill won the best Canadian film. He vowed that the $25,000 award money would go toward “a big chunk of hash.”

This irreverence is in full view with McDonald’s latest feature, Pontypool, a film many are calling his best. From a screenplay by Tony Burgess (adapted from his novel Pontypool Changes Everything), this low-budget wonder has a cynical radio host (Stephen McHattie) doing his best to piss people off in the small Ontario town from which he hosts his show. As the day grinds on, callers phone McHattie in escalating states of panic, as some kind of zombie-esque virus appears to be causing widespread havoc throughout Ontario and Quebec.

There are waves of infection, and then carnage, as the newly infected turn their rage on the uninfected. But what’s most disturbing, in true existential fashion, is precisely what McHattie and his producer (Lisa Houle) can’t figure out. What’s the virus that’s spreading across North America? What should they tell the BBC when the news organization calls to find out precisely what’s going on? This is the bit of brilliance that lies at the gut of this movie: Pontypool is truly horrifying for what it doesn’t show us. We’re left, with our two central characters, to wonder what the hell is happening amid those screams and gasps of phoned-in terror—and as the Hitchcock cliché goes, that’s often far worse than having the filmmaker illustrate it for us.

Reversing the carnage

“For me, some of those old movies where you never actually saw the monster, they were the scariest,” explains McDonald. “Now we see everything. If you look at The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, I don’t think you ever see a chainsaw hit the flesh.” I point out that it’s a bit weird to be citing the original Chainsaw Massacre as an example of restraint, given the twisted carnage in that film, considered a new high in its day. “You’re right,” McDonald says. “It’s an indication of just how filmmakers have come to be expected to show so much, in such detail. I loved the idea of going in the other direction.”

Pontypool is anchored by a superb performance from McHattie, who many will remember as one of the beyond-evil thugs at the opening of A History of Violence, who Viggo Mortensen is forced to waste. (And his turn is matched by the equally excellent Houle, who manages an intricate balancing act of strength and vulnerability.) Grad student theory heads will also find reason to rejoice; Burgess’s script is not the work of a thoughtless zombie. Some have pointed to Pontypool as an intellectual zombie movie—amid various rants, McHattie drops references to iconic author Norman Mailer and theorist Roland Barthes. No spoilers here, but the ultimate reason for the epidemic is another part of the film’s genius.

As McDonald tells it, bringing Pontypool to the big screen has been a longstanding dream. He and Burgess had made several efforts at securing funding over a decade, to no avail. Then CBC Radio called McDonald in November of 2007, asking if he had any ideas for a radio play. It struck McDonald that the idea of the calamitous zombie assault might work well as just that—a kind of reworking of Orson Welles’ famous War of the Worlds broadcast—about a radio station attempting to make sense of the snowballing Apocalypse. But then McDonald’s radio idea led to another epiphany. “We realized this would be a lot of fun as a low-budget movie, that we could shoot it really easily and quickly. It meant changing things quite a bit, and relaying the ideas in a different way.”

Calling on Cronenberg

McDonald says he thought about various one-set movies as he envisioned the big-screen Pontypool, including Polanski’s Death and the Maiden (1994) and Sidney Lumet’s Twelve Angry Men (1957). He also thought of the horror productions of Val Lewton, including Cat People (1942) and I Walked With a Zombie (1943), where the horror was often implied rather than spelled out. But it also struck McDonald that, while he loved to experiment, he’d never taken on horror—in a country like Canada, no less, that has such a rich tradition with the genre.

“Yes, we did consult with Cronenberg,” McDonald confirms. “He read the script for us and made some comments. He was very helpful. He advised us to keep the script short, no more than 80 pages. It was great to have his input, because of course we were looking at some of his ’70s films, like Rabid and Shivers, which were made with great ideas and little money.”

While McDonald and Burgess were hammering out a radio play and a screenplay, McDonald was working on a documentary. During a film shoot at a tavern, he stepped out for a smoke, and bumped into Jeffrey Coghlan, a producer McDonald was acquainted with. “Jeffrey asked what I was working on, and I told him about this low-budget horror that I was hoping to do. He asked me how much it would cost, and I said about a million. He said, ‘Okay, no problem.’ And I thought, ‘You’re so full of shit!’ But he was very excited about the fact that it was low-budget and horror and could be done relatively quickly. He talked to Ambrose [Roche] and Jasper [Graham], and then they got together the money.”

As well as being both smart and entertaining, and proving that the cinematic zombie renaissance hasn’t been eaten to the bone, Pontypool is also unusual for the tale behind its funding. Not only did McDonald land over a million in backing during a casual conversation over a smoke, but he and his producers made the rather radical decision to proceed without any government backing, nor a TV or distribution deal—something very, very rare in the Canuck film milieu.

“We could have gone to Telefilm and asked them what was left in the pot,” McDonald says. “But that would have meant waiting until the fall. We wanted to shoot the film right away—like in the spring, and then have it ready to go at TIFF. Sometimes the very idea that something is possible is attractive to people. Can we do this? Yeah. That kind of DIY, this-is-possible, hypnotize-the-tribe thing sets in. You know what? We can do this, not in five years, but in a few months. That can create a lot of energy in people.

“There was also a fundamental leap I had to make as a filmmaker and producer. I just met this guy outside a bar who says he can raise a million dollars for me. Then the next morning, in the cold light of day, I’m either going to go the traditional Telefilm route or I could hitch my train to this crazy Irish guy I met in a pub and hope he’s not full of shit. I decided to roll the dice and go with this guy.”

With all the wild-eyed, insane energy of a character in a horror movie, Pontypool wrapped its 15-day shoot, was rushed through a harrowing editing session and managed to squeeze in under the wire for September’s TIFF. “It certainly was close,” McDonald concedes. There, Pontypool took off, igniting both crucial critical acclaim and word of mouth among civilian festgoers. Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote a love letter to the film on the magazine’s Web site during the festival. “I have to get that one printed and framed,” McDonald says.

“I’m just really happy that people are getting it. Audiences find it funny and scary. That’s really been a great thing. People seem to love Pontypool. That’s very cool.”

PONTYPOOL OPENS THIS
FRIDAY, MARCH 13