Cinema Canada (Apr-May 1974)

developing features. A great conservative pressure was put on young filmmakers to make a short, show it to a distributor and perhaps get a feature going on that basis. That impetus was conservative because it held them down to making something very glossy — and for $7,000 you can do a feature! If you’re working with friends and editing yourself you can do something tremendously experimental and exciting. All this was cut off on those grants. I’m quite sure they’re relieved that the Canada Council is taking over film grants. It gets them off that awful hook of having to nurture young ambitious talent while still being a bank.” “I think the Canada Council will be more open to that kind of approach to filmmaking. What is really necessary is for young directors to think in terms of $20,000 and $30,000 films. Canada Council leaves things more open — I can go out and make something brilliant or fall flat on my arse — it’s my own thing to do. I can grow that way. I’ve been hammering at this since I came out here two years ago with Coups and Proxyhawks.. .” An example of what was wrong with the old system — Darcus pointed to Sylvia Spring, whose CFDC short for Madeleine Is was beautiful. But then she was immediately pushed to making a $100,000 feature under heavy pressure and, he feels, she wasn’t ready for that. “What they should have done is given her $20,000 to do another film. To buy time. She was done a bit of a disservice. She had far greater potential than she was allowed to grow into.” Wouldn’t more low-budget features emphasize the great dichotomy between ‘art? and ‘commercial’ filmmaking? Darcus doesn’t think so. ‘‘My ideal is to make a film that all kinds of people will like. I have to feel that I’m growing from subject to subject. That’s pure self-indulgence. That’s my reason for staying in it. Offer me a year of directing CBC dramas and I’ll say no. On the other hand, I realize I’m learning my craft. I have to learn to be entertaining while I do my act. That’s where there’s a meeting point between commercial directors and myself. Otherwise, we’d break into two camps — the purists on one side vs. the vicious capitalists on the other. More analysis has to be done to show that there is a hell of a meeting point between the two.” What compromise wouldn’t he make? “I don’t wish to produce pure pablum, placebos designed to relieve people of their frustrations, get them back on the job the next day and not enrich their world one bit. You can make a work that’s intelligent and also entertaining. That’s the apprenticeship I’m serving.” Lawrence Brown 44 Cinema Canada With this approach in mind, Darcus made his third feature for $100,000 — Wolf Pen Principle. In many ways, it has far more commercial appeal than either of his first two films. For one thing, he was working with Vladimir Valenta, internationally acclaimed actor from Closely Watched Trains. Months after shooting, that experience still gets Darcus ebulliently animated. “Vladimir is incredible. He does things like — for continuity — if he blinks in the middle of a speech, he’ll do it the same way for every take. He never misses. An editor’s delight — you can cut any place you want! He could always find his light and work with it. He’s an old pro film actor, and he was trained as a film actor.” Lawrence Brown, the other lead in Wolf Pen Principle, came from the complete opposite pool of talent. He’s a high-school student from Nanaimo who has acted in only one play before, but his audition floored everyone and he was hired immediately. ‘“‘Vladimir would take Lawrence aside between takes. He was always showing him things. It was a beautiful teaching process. Lawrence did work for Daryl Duke after that, but what he needs is to go to drama school after graduation and get some bloody craft. He’s already on the level of a lot of the other young actors out there, but I hope he does it. He’s certainly got the stuff.” Wolf Pen Principle deals with a middle-aged theatre manager and a young Indian who both have a fascination for the arctic wolves in the zoo. For very different personal reasons, they conspire to free the wolves, and the film follows their conspiracy and its aftermaths. Darcus came by the story while he was working for Stanley Park Zoo treating injured birds of prey (the subject matter, in part, of Proxyhawks). He hates zoos. He seems them as concentration camps. “I used to go down to the zoo and get really angry at seeing the 6 arctic wolves. In the back of my mind, I was searching for a subject, and all of a sudden it just came to me. The fundamental thing about those wolves is that they’ve become inept. If you let them out, they’d die. They desperately need their cage. If I could, I’d take those wolves and put them ina halfway house in the Yukon and let them adapt back-to nature — they have a halfway house for orangutans in Borneo. Of course the wolves in the zoo were just a nice metaphor for a lot of people. I was getting mad out of self-pity. I was bemoaning their loss of potential, but it was bullshit.” That theme was part of what Darcus was dealing with. His other major concern was over the clash between two cultures — those of the white man and the Indians. “Indian artists are still working according to their traditions but they’ve lost their connection to what they’re doing. When they carve a wolfmask, it means no more to them than the radio does. It’s an object. There’s a whole confrontation between cultures that has been lost.’? Without overly romanticising the lost culture of the Indian people, Darcus does feel it’s a terrible loss. ‘The government has invested around $8 million building great shrines for that art out there. And it just sits there mute. I'm glad they’re doing it, but nobody has tackled that yet. What is it? Where do the two cultures part ways? In Wolf Pen I hint at it without presuming to be intelligent. I would never pretend to be over on the other side. For me to imagine living in a world where totem poles are an everyday fact of life is almost impossible. All I can do is write in a rather ignorant, white way. Essentially, I’m a comic character and that will probably be my contribution in my next film when I try to tackle this problem.” What sparked off the basic thread of Wolf Pen was meeting an anthropologist who had worked with Indians in northern B.C. for two years and had witnessed an occurrence where an old woman from the Wolf Clan died and the wolves came around the village and howled all night. As Darcus says, “It’s a charming idea and it also doesn’t disturb our reality when we walk down the street. We’re still connected to our AngloSaxon or North European-based world. It’s that connection which should be shaken a little bit more. As I say, there’s a body of subject matter there that is just immense.”’