After it’s north American premier at the 2006 AFI’s, Matt Bissonnette’s first solo feature, Who Loves The Sun, has been quickly moving through the festival circuit. Featuring endearing performances and a gorgeous lake front location, the film will soon be released theatrically in Canada (hopefully the US too). We had the opportunity to speak with Matt about his adventurous past, how locations can help develop great performances and receiving great news—while in the middle of a lake—on a sinking boat.

You’ve had a pretty colorful background, how did it lead you to filmmaking?

I definitely wasn’t one of these people who were making Super 8 movies when they were nine. I see these kids and they’re like, “I did my first feature when I was twenty-four.” When I was twenty-four, I was sitting on a corner in Bangkok vomiting through my fingers. [laughs] I wasn’t really on that same kind of path.

Artistically, the biggest thing that happened for me, was getting into punk rock with my friends when I was a very young kid. We saw a lot of English bands, were really into the Clash and that kind of stuff. Then we went on to American hardcore and Black Flag, and then into the Replacements, Hüsker Dü, and then started our own bands, and it was that whole kind of 80’s to 90’s punk rock musical education.

That was the big awakening for me, and cinema was tied into it. I love a huge variety of films, but the stuff I first watched seriously was the American new wave of the 80’s: Gus Van Sant, Alex Cox, Hal Hartley, Spike Lee, that kind of stuff. At that time no one was buying independent movies. They came to the local rep cinema, if at all, and you were lucky if you could ever see them. They had the same sort of quality that I attributed to punk rock music, it was hard to find out about these films, and they had a kind of mystery and excitement to them, and that is what initially got me interested in movies.

Then I went to Concordia University in Montreal, in English Lit, because I was also very into the books, particularly the Beats, Kerouac, Burroughs, et al, but also Raymond Carver, Fitzgerald, Melville, Delillo, etc. Concordia has a good film program, and I also studied some film theory while I was there. After that I ended up going to Japan for two years, a lost weekend of sorts, hanging out in Asia, traveling, working in bars, trying to write a couple of novels, those kinds of things. Then I suppose a sense of responsibility crept in, and I came back and went to law school, which was odd. [laughs] After I graduated I got a job at this very big firm, but it soon became apparent that they were going to fire me. They wanted you to get up pretty early. [laughs] It just wasn’t part of my routine.

Around that time my good friend Steve Clarke, who I had studied with at Concordia, was working on a script, and he knew I had been doing some writing, and asked if I wanted to help out. We ended up writing the script together, and by the time we were done he said, “Well, why don't we direct it together?” And that’s basically how I got into directing movies. I really wasn’t familiar with film production—in fact, the first time I was on a movie set I was calling action, which goes to show you how serious Steve and I took the motion picture industry—I had a decent idea of how movies worked by studying theory but I didn’t come at it from a technical point, so Steve really helped me a lot with the actual production side of things.

How was your experience with your first film?

We learned a lot from each other in the process of making Looking For Leonard. It was fun, but also a difficult film to make, because we did it for a very, very little money. I don’t know if it’s a basic small film horror story, but we ran out of cash, were getting sued by our creditors, and it was a pretty bad scene. Luckily for us, we’re Canadians and have access to some public film financing. We had a rough cut of the film, which we sent to TeleFilm Canada, and they liked it and gave us the money to finish and pay off our debts. Making Leonard was definitely a case of us jumping into a half empty pool or off a cliff without a parachute, but the film got done, and played a bunch of festivals, people seemed to like it, and it made a bit of money in Canada, so I got to make another, which turned out to be Who Loves The Sun...

I hooked up with Corey Marr [producer], we met at a festival, got to talking, he liked the script, we got the money together – all of it up front this time! - and that was how the second film got done.

What sparked the idea for the story? Have you been involved in a love triangle before?

I’m sure I’ve been involved in a couple. [laughs] The actual idea for the movie was lifted from this Paul Auster book Leviathan. In that book someone is indiscreet with their friend’s wife, is discovered by that friend walking in, and then that character disappears; but in the book, if I remember correctly, he never comes back. So after finishing that novel, which I really liked, I started thinking, “What if this person returned? What would happen then?”

Being lazy, and prone to lifting things, I just put that story into a location that I knew about. I chose a part of southern Ontario that I grew up near. It’s a kind of lonely, Canadian, watery, grey, rocky place. It has a nice visual feel to it and a concentrated isolation that was interesting. The characters are more or less like people that I have known. So I just transplanted that story into a place and people that I understood.

What was your experience like with the Film Independent Directors Lab and The IFP No Borders program?

They were both very good. My first film Looking for Leonard played at the LA film festival. Through that I got to know the people there and got involved in the IFP in Los Angeles. They’re really cool, Josh Welsh at the lab, and the programmers of the festival. Anyway, Josh suggested I send my next thing along, and I did, and they took it at the lab.

Rodrigo Garcia ran my lab, and it was nice to have the experience of working with a really gifted director. Rodrigo is very smart about film, and he has a tremendous capacity to work with actors, which I came to realize is really just an exercise in basic human communication. I think it was Nick Ray, when somebody asked him, “How do you talk to actors?” answered, “The same way you talk to people.” Rodrigo was instrumental in keying me into that insight, that there was no magic, rather you attempt to find out: How does this person work? What do they think about? You try to learn how to best communicate with them, and hopefully you can both understand the movie you are trying to make. So that was a really illuminating experience.

The No Borders in New York was more of a funding thing. That was good to meet some financing people, some distributors, and it gives a certain industry cred to the project. That side of it not as much fun, but money is an integral part of filmmaking, and you need to learn about it, because if you don’t …what do they say? If you don’t take care of business, business takes care of you.

Was it difficult to get such a great cast involved?

Not so much. I already had Molly, and was pretty sure about Wendy and RH. The tough thing was, given the dynamics of the story and the way it plays out, the two younger male characters needed to correspond to each other in a certain kind of way. It’s a little Rubik’s Cube kind of thing, and I’m not so great with the cube, and I was just sort of spinning it.

Then a friend of mine invited me to a press screening of the Gus Van Sant film Last Days, which is a film I really loved. I saw Lukas [Haas] in it, and thought to myself “Oh yeah, that seems just about right.” The next day, I was all excited, I called my casting director and she sent the script over to Luke and his people and they seemed to like it. Wendy [O’Brian, casting director] then suggested Adam [Scott] to me. Fortuitously Adam happened to be at the same management company, and so it all came together, or so I thought...

I went up to Winnipeg for pre-production, and for some reason the contracts took a while to get done. Then all of a sudden, it was Friday night, we were supposed to start on Monday and the only signed contract was with Molly, and we’re married. I was in a boat on a location scout, in the middle of this huge lake, and the boat breaks. The sun is going down, and we’re just drifting, and a it seemed a bit Titanic... then my phone rang, and it was Wendy O’Brian, and she’s like, “All the contracts are signed.” and I was like, ‘Oh cool.” I thought we casted up really well in the end, and in that way, Who Loves The Sun it was a very easy movie to direct.

You could really feel the tension between all the characters. What do you think helped contribute to their great performances?

The cast was really good about creating, how do I explain this, they created all the basic dynamics. We were shooting on location, so they had a lot of free time unto themselves but no friends there and no where to go; accordingly, they had to spend all their time together and I think that compression, the mashing of their lives together, created the situation where that when they’re on camera you do have the sense that there’s a history there. I thought they were very, very good about creating that dynamic, and we just turned the camera on and caught it.

Even off camera, for example, Lukas and Adam kept that routine going, constant retarded banter. Here’s a small story. We were really far north in very small towns and Molly’s pretty well known in Canada. So those three are off in this one small town at a 7-11 and the clerk recognized her and she was like, “Oh my god, Molly Parker! What are you doing here? Could you please sign this autograph for me?” and that type of thing. So Molly, who is just the most gracious, polite girl around, said Sure. As she’s signing it Lukas and Adam come up and with these absolutely filthy porno magazines, drop them down and say, “Can you get these for us?” [laughs] Later they hid them in Molly’s script bag, and the make-up woman’s daughter found them, and thought Molly was a terrible pervert. Those three created dynamics similar to how those characters would’ve acted in their real lives. That was really the key. R.H. and Wendy did the same sort of thing, and they all fell into their characters 24/7. It’s the benefit of shooting on location.

The location was beautiful and iconic. Was it difficult to find?

Finding it took a lot of driving around in trucks and boats, but that is fun, you see the sights. The idea was to make it iconic because I wanted to have this before the fall, prelapsarian kind of feel. One of the visual ideas is this really idyllic, pastoral location—not to press the point too far but a “Garden of Eden” type of thing—and then you have the introduction of desire, and then it all falls apart. So there’s that sort of idea trailing through the picture, very mildly I hope, but there is a suggestion. You know, born innocent more or less, grow up, and when you hit desire, things change. Whether it’s sex, drugs, whatever, people get pulled down different paths as they get older.

The other physical thing about the location is that the interiors were shot four hundreds miles away from the exteriors, for financing reasons. It was a co-production between the two provinces, and that required shooting ten days in one province and ten in another. Also, I felt it was important that we shoot the exteriors on an actual island, though that does make for some logistical nightmares. But we were very lucky, these really cool people called the Wilson’s let us come to their island and shoot for two weeks and they basically treated us like members of their family. These forty strangers hauling huge lights and cables and what not around their beautiful island home, and they were great about it.

Also, when you make lower budget films, like I do, you get a different cast of characters and the whole thing has a sort of carnival type of feel. A lot of people had their kids out there with us, so in between takes, the kids would be running around and jumping in the water. The grips would be playing guitars or they’d have drinks at the end of the day. Which I also thought was important because again, you want that feeling going on if that’s the type of movie you’re making.

What were the challenges in shooting at that location?

Shooting in water is impossible, which I didn’t realize that before we made the film. Also we shot this film in twenty days, and the script was a little long, over a hundred and something pages. That sort of works out to five, six, seven pages a day, which is a fair amount of ground to cover. I remember one day where there’s some shot and it's nothing, an eighth of a page, a cup of coffee, but because it was in water, it took us the whole morning to get it. And if I shoot an eighth of a page in the morning, that means I have to shoot six pages in the afternoon. At that point I was like, “Whatever, just give me some sand bags and I’ll hold on to them and jump off the edge of the boat, because we’re definitely not getting out of here alive.”

So were you actually setting up cameras in boats?

Not after that, through there’s one scene where, it’s a tracking shot as Lukas and Molly are rowing along, and we’re on a big rusty old barge, because none of the boats we had were steady enough. There’s a couple of shots where I put the camera in the boat just for some pov stuff, but generally what you do is you bring the boat to you. That's what I learned after that first day, because I did put a camera in a boat that morning, and what happens is the thing you’re trying to photograph is moving, the place you’re trying to photograph from is moving, and the light keeps moving... you might as well shoot yourself in the head. I quickly figured that you keep the camera on the ground, bring the boat near to you, and then just do it from there. So after that, a lot of things that through movie magic, appear to be far out in the middle of the lake, actually we’re sitting on a dock, someone’s holding the boat and we’re shooting just tight enough so you don’t see that. Then when we do the wide establishers, we throw the actors out in the middle of the lake and take the shot. There’s no other way really...

What format did you shoot the film?

Super 16.

Did you have any difficulties with this format?

No. I did my first film on Super 16 too, and I liked the way it looked. I’m not super technically versed, but my basic understanding, from talking to DP’s that I work with, is that the Super 16 stocks are really good now, and as long as you don’t push that stock—you know, sometimes you see these 16 movies that seem very grainy, that’s generally because they don’t have enough light for what they’re trying to do, or they want it to look gritty—it can look really great. The difficulty is when you want to shoot at night, or when you’re shooting inside, it requires a certain amount of lighting to make things look good.

I am still of the feeling that film is a visual medium and that it matters what the pictures look like. You know, Godard and Truffaut made beautiful movies, on film, for not a lot of money. I think there has been, in my opinion, a mistaken idea that video’s just the cheapest thing of all time, and it’s going to save everybody. When actually, at the end of the day, if you’re making a movie for a couple hundred thousand dollars, Super 16 is within your reach, and if you want to make the pictures look good, you can. In my opinion, digital is more an emotional choice. Digital has a different tonal quality, it has a different emotional quality, through reality TV and stuff like that. For the kinds of films I’m making, the tone that film brings is really important. I like digital and I’m interested in it, but film is a different thing, it’s a completely different thing.

During the dinner scene when Daniel and Will are arguing. Does Will make a Stones reference (“But if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need.”) before we walks off?

Yeah, it’s a total Stones reference. Growing up when I grew up, I sort of associate Rolling Stones songs with some sort of mythic teenage thing. Also, I think it’s in the sarcastic vernacular or cultural vernacular that the characters would have. That they would make off hand allusions to stuff like that, but what I think is also important is that you don’t explain it. You assume people are going to get it and if they don’t, it doesn’t matter. I’m not really doing it for the audience, I’m doing it because that’s actually how the people would talk to each other.

Molly did this TV show called Deadwood with David Milch [writer]. One time I had lunch with David, he’s a real generous guy and he was talking to me about the craft. You know he got a certain amount of flack for the language on the show. People were like, “Oh that’s not really how people speak,” and he was like, “Fuck that. This is how these characters spoke. People get confused, they think I’m trying to be provocative with them by using dirty words, that’s the least of my intentions. My intention is to honestly convey, to the best of my ability, how I think these characters spoke to each other.” In my own little way, I try to do the same thing. I try and write dialogue in a way that I actually hear and think these people would speak, and the character flows from that. So I’m not dropping a rock music refference to be cool, or try to shock with a dirty word, I’m doing it because it is true for the character.

Also, I think it gets back to why I first got interested in movies and music. I was pulled into the mystery of the whole thing. When I’m doing things I’m trying to increase the mystery of the characters and of the piece. I don’t want it to be too obvious. A story isn’t there to explain anything, and certainly not itself. It is there to unfold, to hopefully be interesting, to have a spark. A characters’ job is not to explain themselves, it’s to act in the way they would in the world, trying to achieve their objectives. People don’t walk around explaining themselves, unless they’re trying to con you, they more just sort of operate.

What’s next for the film? How are things on the distribution front?

It comes out theatrically in Canada on April 6th I believe, and we’re really hoping for a US theatrical. We’ve got sales agents and right now they're pounding the doors and talking to people. The response seems good, so we’ll see how it pans out. People are interested, so hopefully someone will get really interested. [laughs]

What are some of your influences as a filmmaker?

A big one for sure is that crop of 80’s filmmakers [Gus Van Sant, Alex Cox, Hal Hartley], then also Linklater who came a little bit later, Spike Lee, Penelope Spheeris, her film Suburbia I really liked a lot when I was younger, also The Decline of Western Civilization was a big thing for me.

Then like a lot of people I was into French new wave stuff. Truffaut I like a lot, and I like Godard. I’m a big, big Eric Rohmer fan and watched all of his films many times.

From experiencing Japan, I got quite into Japanese cinema... [Yasujiro] Ozu, Seijun Suzuki, obviously, but also Takeshi Kitano, who did a movie called Fireworks that’s well known, but then also Sonatine, Kikijiro and some earlier ones like Violent Cop and Boiling Point. When I was living in Japan, he was a really popular television comedian, kind of like Johnny Carson, and then he turned out to be this major Japanese auteur filmmaker. He makes these real beautiful, very violent but gorgeous art movies. He's also novelist, essayist, an actor, he’s a really fascinating character. And he, particularly visually, is someone that I’m really interested in. There’s also a guy called Sabu who’s making some really good films.

I’ve always liked Alan Clarke. He made a movie called Scum that I watched when I was young, that was a big influence on me. And the Kaurismäki brothers, Aki Kaurismäki and Mika Kaurismäki, are up there for sure, along with Jim Jarmusch.

That 80’s deadpan kind of stuff, that’s in my DNA. But when I was real young it was Bill Murray movies and horror films. What we wanted every night was to have Friday the 13th followed by Caddyshack.

What advice would you give to new filmmakers?

Read more books. The more you read, the smarter you get and smart people make smart movies. There are a lot of dumb movies out there, both on the independent and the Hollywood side, and I think they’ve got that area pretty much covered. So that would be it... read more, and live a little.