And then of course there is a whole dialogue between the spirit of the film camera, which is something I was focusing on very strongly in the film.
As a producer, I think one of the most important decisions you make is not necessarily the material you are working on but the production apparatus that you choose to develop the project with, and that determines what funding you go to, it determines many factors.
Because of the formal considerations in Family Viewing, I had no desire to make it into a higher budget picture.
I automatically thought that you had to marginalize yourself and that there wouldn't be an audience as a result.
I have always felt that this story is universal. When I began to understand the details of the history, I felt that the most compelling aspect was not what happened, but what continues to happen and how it is denied.
I make my living doing freelance directing for North American television shot in Toronto, series like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Twilight Zone, and so forth.
I mean, if you are directing actors to do one thing and then directing them to do something else entirely because the one thing you wanted them to do may not work, then you are just shattering their confidence in the project.
I suppose I had these concerns but I really felt that I had to keep my scope very, very concentrated.
I suppose it's important to keep conflict in mind when you are planning the film.
I think if you look at the themes that are presented in the film, some are inherently social, and I think that any film which deals with the family is dealing with the smallest social unit in our society - and in a sense it is a question of scope.
I think it is a great starting point because you are able to deal with the central archetypes in our society. They can be reduced to Father Figure, Mother Figure, Figure of the Child, the Figure of one generation against another generation.
I think that's one of the real joys of working with a small budget - that you have to determine exactly what it is that you need and want to say.
I think the actual appearance of the mother is in some ways secondary to what is happening, the fusion of the two different types of imagery, which is a much more exciting thing for me. That is the true resolution of the film.
I think the situation in Toronto is such that there are funding organizations which make it easy for a film to raise more money than it needs and very often that works against a film.
I think ultimately if you have a very high expectation of your audience and you know exactly what it is you're trying to express through the medium of film, there will always be an audience for you.
I think what has happened at that point is that he has been pushed to look towards this 'shrine' as an object of revelation because there are certain things that he has already begun to glean in terms of his own identity, his own past.
I think what has happened at that point is that the film first of all very accurately reflects my own ambiguity towards the role of certain types of media in our lives - that here you have this medium which is able either to trivialize or to enhance our feelings towards things.
I wanted to make sure that the environment of the shooting itself was not that controlled, and the way to go about that course was to work with as small a crew as possible.
I was trying to use in Family Viewing, you know, different generations of video image, film stock, and so on. So, at a certain point, it all came together and it was quite intuitive; you plot to a certain extent but at a point it finds its own momentum and you just lose yourself in the process.
I was very interested in that whole aspect of the film, the myth that we can simplify our lives, and that technology allows us to trivialize ourselves, if we choose to use it that way.
I've just been very, very lucky with the film having been introduced in the right way.
In an 8mm movie you paid, what was it, $20 for two and a half minutes of time, and were forced to be selective.
Ironically, I now have another body of work which conforms to their idea of what film is about. So as I said, in my case it's very schizophrenic.
It becomes very obvious that it wasn't a lean production, that the focus did not have to be precisely honed because of budgetary limitations.
It is about this very abstract sense of displacement that he feels the moment he turns off the television.
It is not as though the process of production holds any mystery for me, I know exactly what it involves and I know the predominant concern in shooting one of those things is production values - or as they would say, seeing it all up there on screen.
It sets up a very weird world, and what it's asking you to do is trust that I know what I'm trying to say - and that's audacious, because no one's heard of me!
It was very important that it be done in such a way that it be executed with complete conviction. If I had done it both ways, if I was trying to cover myself in case it didn't work, then it would have been to no purpose.
It's a very important moment because of what happens right after, because he looks away and realizes that the woman beside his grandmother has died. It an important sequence.
It's not as though I'm working in some sort of vacuum, I do know exactly what my options are and it is a creative choice to go one way or the other.
My exposure to mainstream forms of production has taught me what I am up against and actually clarified for me where I'd like to go.
My parents taught me to believe that through the creative act, we're able to transcend and give a response to desecration.
Once we were in the studio, we realized we were getting certain effects through the shooting of the dramatic scenes on video, shooting off a screen and then getting wave patterns and stuff like that.
People see a different type of language being employed and they often think it is a result of economic circumstances, in other words, the filmmaker didn't really have a choice. That has been very frustrating for me, because of the way we used video in that film, it was an aesthetic.
Right now my career is totally schizophrenic, because when an American production like Hitchcock Presents asks to see my work I would never dream of showing them my independent films.
That is where the irony of the film comes off, in terms of the language it employs - where he tries desperately to be a 'TV Dad,' to give advice and it's so pat it becomes ridiculous.
That scene in the Women's Shelter was one track, a camera moving through space, identifying where we were, moving up to this video surveillance camera perched on top of a booth, and then the video surveillance camera moved to reveal the scene of reunion, which the film camera identified.
That's a very complicated moment, it's a moment when there is a video surveillance image of the lead going to the hotel room with a stranger, and then what happens is that the Canadian flag comes out and broadcast day is over, and then he turns off the television.
That's a very odd notion because it involves seeing money up there on the screen - if something cost $5 million to make, they want to see that $5 million up there.
The biggest problem with the independent film sector in Toronto is that they find themselves having to make that budget show on screen.
The father's greatest folly is that he believes he can be a much more simple person than he is; he is not really able to deal with his own complexity as a human being.
The film camera's ability to physically move through space, not zoom through space - every time we have a video camera the movement is through zoom; every time we have a film camera it is a physical movement.
The programme has ended, something has finished, and he has a sense of something having finished its course, and then all of a sudden he turns away and this other thing has just finished its course, this other person.
The whole attitude with a lot of American organizations is that you delay the process of filming until the last possible moment. In the case of a film like Family Viewing it is all about the opposite, about taking certain types of risks and seeing whether or not you can succeed.
The whole film is about people being convinced that they can reduce themselves to their archetypes.
There is a certain moment in the film when the son is in the nursing home and he goes to the television and turns it off because he sees himself in the image.
These are very subtle things, of course, and I don't expect everyone to pick them up consciously, but I think that there is something there that you must be able to feel, there is an energy at work that I must trust my audience will be able to pick up at some level.
These sorts of things can happen, identities can be switched, the emotional implications are something that he has not been trained to feel. His whole life has been about separating himself from these sorts of actions.
This film has taught me that in fact people want to be challenged, right? But still, films like mine have to be placed in a certain context - they have to be introduced in the right way, because people are not about to embark on a normal kind of film journey, you know?
This is not a film that tries to satisfy you and keep you seduced on a moment-to-moment basis. For the first 20 minutes you don't know what's going on!
This married so well with the dolly we had of the film camera going up to the video camera that everything we had presented to you visually in the film was not being aesthetically and formally resolved as well.
Though I am still very vulnerable to audiences - and it happens all the time - where for some reason the energy doesn't connect and, since the film is very personal, obviously I am made to feel very vulnerable by that.
We improvised a lot during rehearsals and there are certain key moments in the film which were improvised, but they were improvised not in terms of the actors but in terms of the design of the film, the choreography of the various shots.
We shot his scene and, in the rough cut of the film, it became clear that this was not working - there was someting that was really falling flat.
When I finished my first feature, Next Of Kin, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation had a series called For The Record - which was a series of shows on social issues in the form of one-hour dramas.
When I was planning Family Viewing, the Ontario Film Development Corporation came into existence.
When we first shot it, something very, very weird happened, and it's a good example of how things work intuitively or are improvised.
When you make a film like this, you must have the highest expectations of your audience. Having worked in situations where we have the lowest expectations of our audience.
When you're working with a smaller budget I suppose one of the things that has to be in your mind when you are writing is that you have to keep the characters down to a minimum.
With Family Viewing, I think the film is about control; it's about how other people exercise control over others.
Working on the themes I was interested in, through the context of a particular family, was a very economical way of dealing with a lot of the issues I was concerned with.
You are traveling and see these people shooting the entire experience of going through a city, and maybe in the back of their minds they sustain the illusion that they will edit it all, but I don't think that's it.
You can talk about Holocaust denial, but it's really marginal for the most part. What is compelling about the Armenian genocide, is how it has been forgotten.
You have to be able to deploy the themes that you want to address with a minimum of means, otherwise you aren't going to be able to get it made.
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