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About Last Night >> A doomsday scenario from Don McKellar by MATTHEW HAYS
McKellar himself, as one of Last Night's protagonists, attempts to get out of a claustrophobic family gathering; Callum Keith Rennie decides he must experience every sexual act imaginable; Sandra Oh has car trouble on the way home from one final encounter with her husband; and David Cronenberg, as an anal corporate type, puts in one final long day at the office, phoning each and every client to inform them that his company's service will be delivered, right up until the End. It all sounds pretty grim, and indeed it is, but McKellar's talent lies in his ability to straddle the line between absurd comedy and gut-wrenching angst. McKellar's style is a bizarre Woody Allen-Harold Pinter hybrid, a mixture of his own self-depracating humour and dark imagination. "What I was hoping was to draw people into that irony and humour," McKellar says, "and then all of a sudden make them think, 'Omigod, he's really going to go through with this.' There's a sense of horror there." McKellar has left an indelible mark on the Canuck canon in the past decade. He wrote the screenplays for Roadkill and Highway 61, the quirky cult comedies that put director Bruce McDonald on the map (McKellar acted in both). He also co-wrote 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould (with François Girard), the experimental biopic that won a bevy of international awards (and a handful of Genies at home). McKellar won a Genie himself for his intriguing performance in Atom Egoyan's Exotica. Earlier this year, McKellar won critical raves and respectable audience numbers with his six-part TV series, Twitch City, a stylish examination of the life of a slacker TV junkie. His busy career reached some kind of peak at the Toronto International Film Festival last month, where McKellar appeared in no less than four films at the event, a record: he co-wrote and acted in The Red Violin, Girard's much-anticipated followup to 32 Short Films; he acted in Peter Lynch's The Herd; he adapted Michael Ondaatje's poem into the script for the short film Elimination Dance; and he wrote, directed and acted in Last Night--for which he picked up the Best Directorial Debut award. Last Night, clearly the most ambitious project of the lot, grew out of an offer from French producer Caroline Benjo. Benjo and her film company Haut et Court were asking several filmmakers from around the world (including Hal Hartley) to make films about the end of the millennium. McKellar was immediately struck with the idea of making an end-of-the-world movie. "I just thought it would be provocative," he says. Due in large part to its ensemble cast, Last Night evokes the memory of On the Beach, Stanley Kramer's 1959 social-issue melodrama, which focused on the lives of a group of people in Australia who awaited the deadly radioactive fallout after a massive nuclear conflict had destroyed the rest of the world. "I was very conscious of that film," reports McKellar, "but I wasn't directly referencing it. Certainly, I thought of The Omega Man and Fail-Safe. But the characters I wanted to deal with are the characters that aren't normally dealt with, the characters usually offscreen. The people who would have no way of stopping this, who wouldn't be in the military. "I was told during the script stage that Last Night was too bleak, but not since then. If it isn't somewhat dark, then something's wrong. But I see an optimism to it. Not to sound corny, but I see it as a film about living against the worst possible odds--about being alive, continuing to go on. I find the closing images optimistic." McKellar's cast is duly noteworthy; joining the aforementioned luminaries are Geneviève Bujold, Jackie Burroughs, Sarah Polley and François Girard and Bruce McDonald in cameo appearances. "They had to be really great actors for this film. Especially in the face of what could have been too ironic or too flip. They really didn't require a lot of work for me as director, because when you present people with this premise, they have clear ideas about it." McKellar can be credited with making what is being declared Canada's first all-star-cast feature, in a country everyone thought was devoid of a star system. "Things have really changed for the Canadian film industry," reports McKellar. "It's now actually a selling point with some films. They're being advertised as Canadian films. That's a big change." Last Night will have its Montreal premiere as part of the 27th annual New Film Festival, which runs October 1530, and begins its regular theatrical run on Friday, October 23
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Don McKellar's feature-film debut poses a simple, if daunting question: if you knew the world was going to end in a few months, what would you do? A nasty, existential predicament, and one the actor-director-writer places upon the heads of his cast.