Young People Filming | Director Martin Gero, getting Conservatives angry on the set of Young People Fucking
By this time next year, if the Canadian film industry isn’t a smouldering hole in the ground where once stood a reasonably healthy economic driver, we may owe a debt of gratitude to an independent film called Young People Fucking.
The low-budget romantic comedy has been cited by members of Canada’s ruling party and various conservative social groups as an example of the kind of filth that would be excluded from the federal tax credits designed to support Canadian film production under a proposed piece of legislation known as Bill C-10.
So what’s so shocking about Young People Fucking, aside from its provocative title? Its detractors most certainly couldn’t tell you, because none of them have seen it.
“I’ve seen clips of it,” Charles McVety, head of the Canadian Family Action Coalition and a vocal proponent of C-10, told CBC’s George Stromboulopoulos, “and that’s all I need to see.... It’s about the sexual escapades of four [sic] couples, including orgies—it should not be funded by the Canadian government.”
Until McVety and others jumped on a soapbox to denounce movies like Young People Fucking as a waste of taxpayers’ money, not many people knew about the existence of C-10, much less its ramifications. But the omnibus bill, which includes a long list of technical changes to the Income Tax Bill, has been around since 2003, when Liberal Heritage Minister Sheila Copps and Deputy Prime Minister John Manley proposed in Section 120 that the provision of tax credits to film and video production would hinge on whether “public financial support would not be contrary to public policy.”
Copps has said subsequently that the Liberal government at the time was attempting to distance itself from the controversy around the funding of Karla, the controversial film based on the Paul Bernardo-Karla Homolka case. (Karla, starring Laura Prepon and Misha Collins as Homolka and Bernardo, was released to little commercial or critical success, in 2006.)
Now, in 2008, the House of Commons passed Bill C-10 with that language intact and the bill now sits before the Senate. In the meantime, discussions have arisen about how “public policy” should be defined in relation to creative content, and how government guidelines for compliance might be set and implemented. Canadian artists like David Cronenberg, Gordon Pinsent, and Sandra Oh have come out in opposition to the bill, saying that such vaguely worded legislation would force Canadian artists to self-censor, or worse, go elsewhere to realize their creative visions.
But Steve Hoban, the producer of Young People Fucking as well as the Ginger Snaps series of made-in-Canada horror movies and Chris Landreth’s Oscar-winning documentary Ryan, says the censorship issue, while important, is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the harm that Bill C-10 could do to the Canadian film and television industry and, ultimately, the Canadian economy.
“It could destroy the Canadian film industry completely,” Hoban says from his Toronto office, where he’s currently involved in post-production on Splice, a big-budget science fiction thriller starring Adrien Brody and Sarah Polley. “Not just domestic production, which it would have a massive impact on. I’ve been saying from the beginning this isn’t a debate about censorship—and I understand those concerns. This is an economic debate. That tax credit exists for one reason and one reason only: it’s to improve the economy of the country. That’s it. It’s not a cultural thing.”
Presently, the film industry contributes $5 billion annually to the Canadian economy and employs around 127,000 people. So while C-10 has the potential to restrict the kind of movies and television made in Canada based on content, what it will do is remove the certainty Canadian filmmakers have that their films will receive tax credits after production is finished.
Hoban uses Splice as an example. Most of the film’s $26 million budget comes from overseas investors, but he used the $1.3 million federal tax credit from Telefilm Canada—basically a small refund on the millions his company will spend producing their film here—to complete the financing of the movie. If there’s a possibility that the federal government will withhold or retroactively strip the film of tax credits based on possible objectionable content, the financing will fall through and the film will not be made.
Luckily for those producers, however, many countries and American states have followed in the footsteps of the tax incentive scheme Canada pioneered, and such productions could easily find hospitable environs elsewhere. “I could go to the U.K. or the U.S. and bank a deal,” Hoban says, “but I couldn’t do it in Canada, which means I couldn’t shoot in Canada. Ironically, even though most of the federal tax credit for film is paid to non-Canadian productions, they won’t be affected by this. So an American film producer could bring a movie called Young People Fucking to Canada, shoot it here and get the federal tax credit.”
Martin Gero, director and co-writer of Young People Fucking, says the federal Conservatives, in pandering to their social conservative base with Bill C-10, are hamstringing the domestic film industry at exactly the worst possible moment.
“It’s so crazy because they’re making it sound like ‘Don’t worry, we’re going to stop these pornographers!’—which is so nuts because we can go make a movie somewhere else.” Gero says. “We’re talking about our next project and it’s looking like it would be cheaper to shoot this project in Phoenix. It’s insane that a Canadian production would go somewhere else because it would be cheaper. That used to be our game—it was cheap to shoot in Canada. And it doesn’t punish the writers and directors and stars; it punishes the grips and the boom operators and the people that have opened post-production facilities and invested in the infrastructure that the Conservative government would like to do away with.”
In attempt to clear the smoke of controversy around Young People Fucking, the filmmakers have hosted two exclusive screenings in Ottawa, one for the Senate Banking Committee and one for MPs and senators who wish to judge the film on its actual content rather than just the naughty gerund in its title. The latter attracted a number of politicians, but none of the Conservative MPs or senators who were invited.
“It seems like public sentiment is in support of our film and against C-10, but I don’t think these politicians knew that,” Hoban says. “They just knew from a political point of view they were against [the film]. The whole thing from beginning to end has felt not-Canadian.”
One thing the controversy has done is provide tons of word-of-mouth publicity, which has supplemented its paltry marketing budget and helped with the American release of the film. “Our movie is getting probably the widest release that any Canadian movie has had in the last five or 10 years,” Gero says. “I’m the envy of all my fellow filmmakers, they can’t believe the kind of release we’re getting, and it’s because there’s such an awareness of the film because of the C-10 thing.”
Kristin Booth, who stars in Young People Fucking as one-half of a committed couple stuck in the bedroom blahs, says it might be the controversy that puts bums in seats, but she’s convinced the movie will win over audiences on its own merits, none of which have anything to do with gratuitous titillation.
“The film is incredibly funny,” she says. “It’s very smart and very clever. Yes it’s about young people fucking, but it’s also about young people connecting and it has a lot of heart and you get to know the characters and care about them. We rarely see in romantic comedies characters in these situations where things don’t go splendidly well in the bedroom, and I think it’s a refreshing thing for people to see because sex doesn’t always go well and there are usually strings attached.”
Booth admits, however, that the movie is not for everyone—least of all her parents, who will not be seeing their daughter’s latest big-screen turn anytime soon. “Your parents should never see your orgasm face,” she explains.
Josh Dean, formerly a fixture on Edmonton’s theatre/improv scene, plays Booth’s onscreen partner, the straitlaced Andrew, who submits to her unconventional solution to their flagging passion for one another. He said he’s coming back to Edmonton from his home in L.A. especially to see Young People Fucking with his loved ones—though not without some misgivings.
“I’m pretty excited to see it in a theatre where I used to see movies,” Dean says. “I’ve got three sisters and my parents and then my parents-in-law and their whole families coming. We had quite a discussion about whether we should have people come to see it—my wife hasn’t even seen it yet. I’m going to be sitting in a different row than everybody, ideally in a different theatre in a different town. But failing that, I’m just going to keep my head down.”
Hoban says he’s pleased that the movie will find a bigger audience than it might have without all the foofaraw, especially because he believes Gero and Abrams are major talents with bright creative futures. But he hopes that doesn’t obscure the serious implications of the new tax legislation being pushed by the federal Conservatives.
“They might have helped the film and the whole Canadian film industry,” he said, “but the victory will be short-lived if Bill C-10 gets passed.”
