>> The ultra-low-budget FUBAR is a tribute to a great Canadian prototype

by MATTHEW HAYS

In FUBAR, the ultra-low-budget feature that is currently opening across the country, actor/writers Dave Lawrence and Paul Spence bring the headbanger to life with incredible precision. And for anyone who attended a Canadian high school within the past 30-odd years, the type is instantly recognizable.

The two play rough, loud, drunken heavy metal fans, with little or no interest in gainful employment. Their existences are fairly simple: they get fall-down drunk as often as they can. They scream along to music. They bitch about their old ladies. And they appear to be in an arrested stage of development, not having progressed much further than, say, a 15 year old might.
But FUBAR (the acronym for Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition) isn’t just a comic skit played for nothing but laughs. Lawrence, Spence and director Michael Dowse throw a curveball into the proceedings by having Spence’s character deal with the news that he has testicular cancer in the film’s first third—something he and his buddy are forced to deal with for the remainder of the film. “We thought nut cancer would be appropriate,” says Dowse. The twist gives the film an edge, making it an odd comment on mortality as well as a biting comedy of ill manners. The film is receiving rave reviews for its blunt honesty and nutty characters. The praise is sweet for the three main players behind the film, after two years of hard work (and since Lawrence’s father took out a second mortgage on his house to help pay for the film’s $400,000 budget).

FUBAR grew out of a comedy sketch that Lawrence had created in the late ’90s, as part of his improv routine at Calgary’s Loose Moose Theatre. Lawrence and Spence had met up while working in the pipelines in Northern Canada, and both recognized the comic potential in the headbanger.

“I had been working the character for years,” recalls Lawrence. Then all three thought the headbanger deserved his own documentary. The original idea was to focus on the phenom in a non-fictional format, but Lawrence and Spence had their characters down so well they settled on a fusion of fiction and documentary. FUBAR’s bizarre hybrid began to take shape; the film would be about two ’banger friends, one of them dealing with his testicular cancer, and an artsy young filmmaker (also fictional) who is making a documentary about them. But using lightweight digital equipment, the filmmakers roved around the Calgary area (with Lawrence and Spence in character) and captured scenes of interaction with actual headbangers. The fiction-meets-reality technique explains some of the film’s strikingly realistic (and hilarious) scenes. The film is prefaced by an apology to all those who thought they were part of a documentary when, in fact, they weren’t.

Familiar faces

“The biggest compliment we’ve gotten is when people tell us they know the characters,” says Spence, a Concordia English-lit grad who fronts the Montreal-based band Daylight Lovers. Spence reports that audience members’ biggest surprise often comes when they realize he’s not the character he plays onscreen. “I can’t say I was an actual banger. I had long hair, but that was just a rebellion against my parents. I based the character pretty closely on a friend I had in junior high school. He had shocking red hair. He had written METALLICA himself on the back of his jean jacket in felt marker. The inside of his coat read, ‘I’m a fucking genius.’ He had failed a couple of times so he was a few years older than me. He smoked dope at recess. I never knew what became of him.” But the compliments about their headbanging alter-egos can also prove grating, Spence reports. “People will ask us to recite lines from the film. Then they’ll bust a gut when we do it. And they won’t stop laughing.”

While loving their onscreen personas, Spence and Lawrence also knew they wanted to avoid previous ’banger and pseudo-’banger movie anti-heroes. Coming up with decent headbanger material in a post-Wayne’s World, post-Bob-and-Doug universe was one of the filmmakers’ main anxieties. “We certainly wanted to avoid being repetitive,” says Dowse. “We didn’t want them to appear as caricatures, but rather as actual headbangers. Cartoon characters had already been done. We wanted to avoid Wayne-and-Garth territory. Every time we saw a Wayne’s World movie we’d think about our characters. But Wayne and Garth were cute. Real ’bangers aren’t cute.”

The real thing

For inspiration, Dowse says “we really looked towards Christopher Guest’s work. His stuff on Saturday Night Live. This is Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show.” FUBAR has also been getting compared to the landmark faux no-budget wonder Blair Witch Project, no doubt for its gritty realism, jerky camera work and doc-within-a-film plot structure.

The film even features an overnight camping sequence, which entails huge amounts of beer being consumed and culminates in bits of lawn furniture being dumped into the camp bonfire. “I’m not going to lie,” says Lawrence. “We were drinking beer. There were two nights of shooting where we got really ripped. When the bus shelter gets smashed, we were ripped then too. The booze helped us to get into character.” In another sequence, the film’s stars and crew found themselves hanging out with actual ’bangers. One tried to pick a fight with Dowse, who declined the offer. Still, the real-life ’banger persisted, and a fist fight did end up breaking out between him and another ’banger, all captured on film.
Spence says a big part of the film’s success came with painstaking preparation. He and Lawrence would don wigs (“expensive ones that looked real”) and head down to a fave rocker hangout, the St. Louis Hotel in Cowtown, to pick up on more character ticks. “We would go out on a Friday night and hang out at blue-collar bars. We really fit in. No one picked up on the wigs, so they must have been very effective.”

Though the film may sound over the top, Spence says a big part of his philosophy of the characters was to be restrained. “When you look at a film like Zoolander, I see a lot of missed opportunities. The fashion business is ripe for parody, but the characters are all cartoons. The idea today is that the only way to be funny is to be louder and more obnoxious than the last guy. Look at the work Peter Sellers used to do. He
wasn’t saying, ‘Hey, look at me.’ Rather, he was trying to focus on his part and what he was saying and doing. That subtlety has really been lost.”

Sundance success

Though the film has been getting raves in its native land, the film did not manage to land a U.S. distributor at Sundance in January, where it played to sold-out houses. “Canadians recognize this film immediately,” says Dowse. “And the film did really well at Sundance. The demand was so great they had to set up another alternate screening. But Americans don’t really know what to do with it. They’re not used to it. It seemed like young guys would come along and like it, but when they took it back to their older bosses, the older ones would scratch their heads and not know what to make of it.” Thus Canada’s largest distributor, Alliance-Atlantis, snapped up the film. But an American distributor didn’t bite. “I suppose they thought only Canadians will get this. And there were no major stars in it.”
Oddly enough, the trio did end up with a U.S. offer emanating from the film’s reception at the Utah-based festival. They were flown into L.A. where they met with some Fox suits, who offered them a TV show based on the characters—something the three saw fit to ultimately turn down (instead, they’re moving to Montreal this summer, where they’ll base their future productions). “The series would have meant no swearing or drinking,” says Spence. “We weren’t just in it for the money, which no doubt would have been good. But we weren’t interested in doing a flat, boring TV show. We would have had to do it right away, so it would have been rushed. So we closed the door on that.”

“There are 300 fucks in this film,” Lawrence says of the dialogue. “That’s about four per minute. You can’t get around it. They’re always breaking stuff. And then there’s the point where Spence’s character recounts how my character finger-fucked his cousin.
“We didn’t want to cut any of that. We wanted to remain true to our vision.” :

FUBAR opens Friday, May 24