Bruce McDonald on The Tracey Fragments

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Bruce McDonald is a unique talent, best known perhaps for directing Canadian classics such as “Highway 61” and “Hard Core Logo”. He is also known for his antics. For example, after Roadkill won the award for Most Outstanding Canadian Film at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1989, McDonald earned considerable notoriety by announcing that he would spend the $25000 prize on “a big chunk of hash”.

Not one to settle into conventional filmmaking, McDonald’s latest feature film outing, THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS, is the first feature film to use Mondrian multi-frame compositions for the entire length. Although it was filmed in just 14-days, it took over 8 months to edit.

The Tracey Fragments is a highly stylistic, fragmented and unique cinematic journey into the world of 15-year-old Tracey Berkowitz (Ellen Page), just a normal girl who hates herself and whom we first encounter riding at the back of a bus, wearing only a shower curtain, looking for her little brother Sonny, who thinks he’s a dog.  Her journey leads us into the dark, seedy underbelly of the city, into the emotional cesspool of her home, through the brutality of her high school, the clinical cat and mouse games with her shrink (Julian Richings) and her soaring fantasies of Billy Zero – her “boyfriend” and rock ‘n’ roll saviour. The film utilizes multi-frame editing and screens to represent Tracey’s internal life as she sees it.

McDonald spoke to First Weekend Club about the film and the unique process of making it.

KB: So how did you come to the project and why did the story of a 15-year-old girl interest you?

BM: A friend of mine passed the novel on to me. I think I just fell in love with this crazy voice of hers. She was funny and angry and opinionated – and she happened to be a 15-year-old girl. So I thought, well, that’s an interesting combination. I think it was the voice and the book that kind of captured my attention.

So it was the sort of unique storytelling of the book or…?

Yeah. I think it was the fact that she seemed very expressive, she seemed to have a lot to say. She wasn’t afraid to kind of go to a couple of dark places. So I think it was that kind of lonely, romantic, teenage kind of feeling…

Right. The book isn’t told in the same fragmented way as the film. What inspired this stylistic approach?

I think partly trying to channel teenage things, you know. It’s like, remember – sort of dumb stuff - like going to see Laser Floyd and liking sort of these audio-visual trips. I think that was sort of a weird unconscious inspiration – kind of trying to make this an audio-visual experience.
The movie is often a completely different project than the book. The book works very linearly even though it plays with time. It still is a very linear medium. So we were trying to channel this character as much as we could by creating a spinning non-linear – almost a nervous breakdown kind of feeling in the visuals. Kind of more like how your memory works.

I guess when you have a nervous breakdown you see everything in fragments and you hear a lot of voices (laughs) inside your head.

Well, even if you don’t have a nervous breakdown, I think a lot of people generally have many channels going at the same time. I think that maybe being a teenager stresses it even more so. Because everything is so first-time – everything is so switched on. So it’s just kind of trying to create this maximum experience in a very young, experimental, youthful way. We wanted the film to look as crazy as Tracey felt.

When you introduced the film at a screening, I recall you saying: ‘Please bear with me for five minutes and it’s going to make sense.’ Do you sit there on the edge of your seat and wonder how the audience will perceive it? It really is a new and different approach to film.

We sort of purposely made the first five minutes a bit like a random explosion. Sort of like fragments of a ‘Planet Tracey’ coming at you in pieces. And then very quickly you begin to order those into a kind of meaningful sequence. It’s fairly new in terms of showing audiences. So we’re still curious about people’s responses and we’re still curious ourselves about the experience of watching it – because it’s kind of a new way to read a film. Most people have been pretty great and some people have not been able to read it at all. So, it’s interesting.

It seemed like people really accepted it. They seem to go ‘Sure it’s a bit wacky and different, but it all comes together in a way that makes sense.’

Yeah, I know. It’s great. I think it’s a testament to Ellen Page. She really gives the emotional antenna. I think generally for audiences anything that is new and different and kind of really outside the box in a big way – you just want to let them know – ‘Hey, you know things are going to be cool’ (laughs).

Are you concerned that people are going to pay to much attention to the visuals – the new kind of style – rather than, you know, the content. Or do you think they’re just really married together?

Well, that was sort of our initial fear – concern. The opposite is sort of true in the sense that people are responding much more emotionally... I think from the screenings we’ve had thus far people have responded very well in the sense that the style seems to serve the content. ‘Of course this girl thinks like this. Of course her world looks like this. Of course it could only be this way.’ In this kind of fresh avante-garde, crazy sense…

How did you come to cast Ellen Page in the role?

I heard about this amazing young actress. A number of people, including my producer Sarah Timmins, said, “Wow, you’ve got to see this girl. She is amazing.” So we got a script to her pretty quickly to see if she would be interested. My first meeting with her was before I’d seen or her work, just based on people’s raves. Often when you hear things – or when people tell you things you kind of follow up on it.

Especially since they came from your producer (laughs)…

Well, that’s always good. Yeah. She was very, “You’ve got to meet her. You’ve got to...” We’d seen about 50 people so Sarah was really, really thrilled when we kind of hit it off and it looked like it was going to work.

Tracey is a very imaginative girl. Why do you think she is so drawn to the world that is inside her head?

Probably because the world around her is just shit (laughs).

Is that just her perception of it, or is it really that bad?

I think it’s that sort of teenage alienation. Suburbia isn’t the most exotic sort of place to be. I think smart girls get the sense that there has got to be a better place than that and the frustration of being so young and not being able to really throw the switch quite yet – in terms of whatever it is – living on your own or leaving home or following your heart’s desire. It’s that sort of frustration of being a few steps ahead in terms of your ambitions and intelligence – the unfortunate situation of being stuck in a place where you have to wait – put in a bit of time before you can act out your heart’s desire.

As a filmmaker, I guess there is a parallel in the sense that you also kind of create a world. Not really inside your head, but you create them in your films. Is that also something that also spoke to you as a story?

I guess that’s sort of an interesting way of thinking about that. Films are very much constructive planets and other worlds that you create in sort of ideal situations – or idealized situations – idealized characters. So, yes, perhaps there is that connection to her – that kinship to Tracey. It’s like – yeah – I do that all the time (laughs). I just happen to construct in the world and she sort of constructs it in her head. It’s not that much difference really.

The film took 14 days to shoot and I think 8 months to edit…?

It took 8 months for picture and few months for the sound and music…

That’s obviously an unusual process…

We knew going into it that our capturing material would pretty much be a low-fi approach. And the real design and sort of production value of the film would be done in post-production – which is a very radical kind of approach. But it is actually pretty practical because if you put your production value in your shooting you often need physical things, which tend to cost a fortune.

We used the time it took for three guys and their laptops to play with the film material.

In one sense it is a very practical decision, and in the other sense we knew it would kind of give the film a certain status in terms of it being completely different from other films. The process was following a few guides that we had studied – like these old movies from the 60s, and comic books, and some painters – without a map or a particular guide. We needed that time to be able to experiment. It was very much like a laboratory approach where you need the time to build and destroy, build and destroy, build and destroy until your start to see a slightly coherent sort of stylistic rule that we ended up embracing. It was a lot of trial and error.

How do you know when it’s done?

(laughs) Well, you don’t really know when it’s done. There are two approaches you can take.  One would be to sort of impose a style upon it and the other is to try to have the material lead you to that style. I think the editors were very conscious of trying to listen to the actors and their performances and try to channel what was going on – try to magnify, as best they could, the intent or the emotions rather than try to comment upon it too much. It’s a very intuitive, instinctual kind of thing.

Most of the score is composed by and features the rock band, Broken-Social-Scene. Why did you choose them to specifically tell the story musically?

They have this really spacey, sonic, dreamy sound to them. There’s a kind of beauty and a kind of lightness in their music – which I thought would be a nice counterpoint to some of the darker, snowy, cold spaces of Tracey. It helped to kind of elevate it a little bit. They are also one of my favorite bands in the world so it was kind of a chance to use them…

Who do you think is going to come out and see this film? Who’s your audience?

Maybe college girls and their moms? (laughs)
It’s the people who are young at heart and the brave at heart. Obviously I just thought – maybe not 15-year-olds – because people in the midst of the loneliness of teenage-hood generally prefer to see comedies and fun teenage movies. Whereas, once you get through it, it’s a little more fun to revisit. You are safely past the danger zones…

Well, she does go through a lot. Worst than most teenagers probably, so…

…That’s true. They could go, “Thank God, it’s her going through all that and not me.”

Exactly.

I would be curious. I would love to find a whole pack of 15-year-olds to check it out…
I think you do forget how lonely it is. There is like a desperation of wanting to connect with the world and not quite knowing how to do it yet, you know?

When is the film opening?

It’s going to open the 2nd of November. It will open in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal to start. And if people come then we’ll open more and more. It will probably be springtime for the US and UK release.

After this, what are some of your upcoming projects? I hear that HARD CORE LOGO 2 is in the works…

We’re stirring the pot… We’re cooking that up. We’ll see - if things go well we will be hunkering down inside a Scottish castle just outside of Glasgow in February.

THE TRACEY FRAGMENTS open across Canada on November 2nd. For more information or to view trailer visit The Tracey Fragments page or the official web site at www.thetraceyfragments.com