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Last Night A DJ Fought Some Zombies | Stephen McHattie Rules the airwaves in Pontypool...but is anyone still alive to hear him?

Bruce McDonald’s quasi-zombie Thriller breaks new ground technically, financially, and artistically
PONTYPOOL
Directed by Bruce McDonald. Starring Stephen McHattie, Lisa Houle, Georgina Reilly. City Centre 9 (Eaton Centre). Fri, Sept 26 (7pm).

Inside the fishbowl of a radio station in Pontypool, Ont., a gruff former shock-jock, his producer, and his technical assistant are trapped by a mysterious plague that seems to have driven the local populace insane. Eyewitness accounts delivered over the phone are all they have to help them comprehend the apocalypse befalling the world outside the station walls as demented mobs spouting gibberish attack people and buildings, tearing everything in their sight to pieces. Worse yet, they’re closing in on the radio station.

But despite how it sounds, filmmaker Bruce McDonald insists his new shoestring masterpiece Pontypool is not a zombie film.

“I see it as more of a screwball comedy where you have the mismatched couple that are thrown together in this situation and they spar a little bit, and they’re both have their dignity to protect, but then things start to heat up and they have to join forces and save the world,” he says from his Toronto office, where he’s recovering from the film’s breakneck production schedule. “I see it as more of a dark romance with a small dash of zombie.”

Though McDonald — the man behind Canuck cult favourites like Roadkill and Hard Core Logo — has been working on an adaptation of the 1998 novel Pontypool Changes Everything with author Tony Burgess since the book was published, the director says the present film, which just wrapped shooting in the summer, might have set a land-speed record for how fast the production came together. McDonald and Burgess were actually in the process of writing a script for a radio play for CBC when fate intervened.

“Last February I was at the Horseshoe Tavern on Queen St. shooting this doc,” McDonald says, “and I stepped out on to the street for a smoke and a beer and I ran into this guy I know who’s in the music biz. So I start telling him about this crazy little thing that we’re writing and he asked me if I thought it could be a movie and I said, ‘Yeah I suppose it could — why, do you have any money?’ And he said, ‘No, but I think I could get some for you.’ And from that little meeting to shooting was very quick. Somehow he and his gang raised some money privately and we were shooting within two months. It’s the fastest zero-to-60 I’ve ever hit in making any

production.”

Working without government funding (the sine qua non of most Canadian film and television productions) called for a few austerity measures. Pontypool was shot over 15 days in one location with a starring cast of four (plus some scary extras bursting through the windows in the final act), and the film is the first to be shot with the Red One Camera, a new high-definition digital video camera that takes 35mm lenses and costs a fraction of most professional digital cameras.

McDonald says already having a specific cast in mind made the tight production schedule that much easier to manage. “As we were writing it, the first person I thought of was Stephen McHattie — actually, all four of them came up quite quickly. We didn’t have casting sessions, we didn’t have auditions, I said ‘I’ve worked with all these people before,’ and we cast them in an afternoon. There was no casting call. That was a treat, when you’ve worked with certain people and you have an instinct about them. For example, Steve McHattie [recently seen in 300 and A History of Violence] is one of the best actors in the country, and very seldom is he a leading man. So it was very fun to have Steve play the leading role.”

So far, the film has only screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, but McDonald says the response has been overwhelmingly positive — “If it’s good enough for Sarah Polley, it’s good enough for me,” he quips — and if Pontypool wins over a big enough audience, he and Burgess have plans to continue the non-zombie saga.

“This one that we’ll present in Edmonton is, in a way, the first of a trilogy of films, and the most intimate. The question of the first film is ‘What is happening?’ The answer to that is in the second movie — ‘This is happening.’ And the third one is about the aftermath. It’s a pretty rich book with a lot of juicy stuff in it, so it’s taken some time to figure out the idea of a trilogy.”

The director admits that, weird as his movie is, it just skims the surface of the weirdness to be found in Burgess’ book, which the author

has characterized as “autobiography.”

“Tony’s completely nuts,” McDonald says. “If you’ve ever read the book, the movie’s got nothing on the book. Some of it is unfilmable, but that’s always an attractive country to go to, because nobody’s seen that before. That’s part of our mission as independent filmmakers — there’s no shortage of heartwarming tales and action movies and superhero movies, that’s all well taken care of, so we’re the people who are going to take you to a different country.”