>> Director Thom Fitzgerald's career flourishes as The Hanging Garden wins over audiences worldwide

by MATTHEW HAYS

Thom Fitzgerald can be forgiven for losing it. The 29-year-old Halifax-based director and writer recently found his mind and body buckling under the stress of the spotlight glare. He is, after all, reaping the rewards of one of the most auspicious feature debuts in Canadian film history.

The Hanging Garden, his modestly budgeted ($1.5 million) quirky tale of a gay man's return to his home town a decade after his apparent suicide, has already won 17 major awards (including four Genies) domestically and has just won a fest prize in Argentina. A bidding war ensued after the The Hanging Garden's critical smash reception at the Toronto International Film Festival last September, resulting in a $500,000 US sale to MGM for the film's U.S. distribution rights.

Since then, Fitzgerald has been hard at work on his next project, Beefcake, a documentary on the history of gay muscle magazines from the '50s (the film is being backed by Britain's Channel 4, and local gay porn guru and Concordia film studies prof Tom Waugh will be making an appearance). His brief breaks in between shooting have been swallowed up with visits to other film fests to present the film and to conduct some 2,000 interviews with media around the world. He will be stopping in Montreal for the premiere before taking off to Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, where Garden will have its U.S. premiere.

"We stopped shooting Beefcake on Dec. 19th," recalls Fitzgerald, "and on Dec. 20 I had pneumonia. I just allowed myself to get caught up in the tidal wave. My three-dimensional life faded away--I feel like I became a character in the press for a while."

The soft-spoken filmmaker was as surprised as anyone when The Hanging Garden began winning over audiences. "In no way was I thinking I was making a populist film--I thought it was opaque and illusive. I thought I was making it for a very core group of film lovers."

The success is all the more surprising when one considers the plotline of The Hanging Garden: a gay (one strike) Canadian (two strikes) film about a 20-something man who returns to his Nova Scotia town in a desperate effort to reconcile with his intensely screwed-up family, a decade after apparently committing suicide. Fitzgerald's twisted imagination has the mature, self-assured, svelte protagonist Sweet William (played by Traders' Chris Leavins) interacting with his younger, 350-pound incarnation (Troy Veinotte) prior to the suicide. Catholic imagery abounds as William's demented grandmother obsesses about her grandson's same-sex encounters; William's father is alcoholic and haunted by his son's death. And in the story's strangest twist, William's sister is marrying the same man William loved during his adolescence. All this and a cameo by young upstart Maritime fiddler Ashley MacIsaac.

Perhaps the biggest question hanging over The Hanging Garden is one of suspension of disbelief--audiences are usually not prone to huge flights of fancy. But Fitzgerald's leaps in narrative logic haven't drawn much criticism at all. "I actually think audiences crave the opportunity to participate and think a little bit," he says. "It's been a while since mainstream movies allowed audiences to make some of their own choices. In general, the best we can hope for is a rapid succession of thrills. To be able to ponder and interpret is a bit outdated. But I'm hoping it will come back in vogue."

If The Hanging Garden's plot sounds difficult to describe, Fitzgerald's style, a mixture of realistic acting fused with a decidedly unrealistic storyline and colour-coded set and costume design, is similarly difficult to place. The Canadian cultural theorists have sunk their teeth into Garden; after all, it fits perfectly into the great Canadian body of film theory, which suggests our national cinema is overwhelmingly focused on outsiders and losers and based on failure, rather than success, as is film south of the 49th parallel. But there's a hitch: though Fitzgerald has lived in Halifax for the past 10 years after moving there to study at the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design, he was born and raised in New York state--roots which are particularly surprising, considering the film's organic connection to its landscape. "You're a lot freer to think in a place where you're not constantly having cultural references being jammed down your throat," Fitzgerald says of the move to Halifax. "It seemed like nobody in New York could look at a piece of art and simply enjoy it. I didn't want to know the difference between modernism and postmodernism." (An interesting quote in itself, as those are two more categories which The Hanging Garden seems caught between.)

The other obvious hook is how Fitzgerald's sexuality plays a role. The gay Sweet William is one of the most interesting and dimensional gay characters created onscreen in the past decade, and Fitzgerald's style, which consistently draws attention to the medium of film, ties in neatly with the work of other gay directors like John Greyson, Derek Jarman and Bruce LaBruce. The trouble with that slotting is, Fitzgerald isn't entirely gay. "I don't really even know what gay film is anymore. My own Kinsey identity is pretty fucked up too. It always has been. I've never identified myself as gay, but I'm such a big fruit that people assume I'm a Kinsey six. I'd be proud if I was a Kinsey six, though."

Fitzgerald sighs while pondering the two categories he doesn't quite fit into. "Canadians think they have a unique perspective on the events of the world and gay people think they have a unique perspective. I don't know-- I've never made work as anybody else but me."

Fitzgerald is resigned to the inevitable speculation that The Hanging Garden is somehow autobiographical. "I've learned there's no way to avoid it. Sweet William is an alter ego. When I decided to be closer to my family and make some kind of reconnection, I thought what better way to do it than in my imagination: it'll all go swimmingly if I do it on paper rather than in real life. That was the motive for the screenplay.

"Now people will watch Beefcake and assume I'm some huge muscleman."

For the record, his mother is someone Fitzgerald is extremely close to. The self-described mama's boy lived off a credit card she loaned him during the leanest six months of the creation of the film. She's terribly proud of the end result, but has found it difficult to read everything the press has taken to printing about her son. "My mother reading about my sex life is uncomfortable. What mother wants to read about that?"

But the most difficult process for Fitzgerald came with the actual filming of The Hanging Garden. "I enjoy writing. Directing sucks. It's a pleasure to imagine things all the time, but having to boss people around on a film set is just totally not in my nature. You have to be able to explain your thoughts at the drop of a hat, or bullshit that you know what you're doing. It's in my nature more to ask questions than give directions. I'm not a general. I'm a corporal, at best.

"I lost my cool once on the set. So I set off for an hour for a walk to let off steam. I returned and everyone was just going about their business, setting up the next shot. No one had even noticed that I'd left."

The Hanging Garden opens Jan. 23