We Can't Go Home Again: In Conversation with Zachary Lacosse on IMPERIAL GREEN
We sat down with the writer/director/editor of IMPERIAL GREEN to talk about his ambitious experimental drama.
After a trio of American indies we’ve recently hosted the Toronto premiere of, it’s nice for Bleeding Edge to return to its roots and showcase local talent. This is the case with Zachary Lacosse’s IMPERIAL GREEN, a compact yet ambitious experimental drama that bridges Ontario and British Columbia. With the film, the director both bravely dramatizes elements of his own life onscreen (even including family members) and pushes the boundaries of cinema, shooting in 60 frames per second, a format usually reserved for a handful of blockbuster directors like Ang Lee and James Cameron. We were lucky to sit down with Lacosse and discuss the important context going into the film as well as his thoughts on cinema in general.
BLEEDING EDGE: I always ask everyone this, but what was the genesis of the project?
Zachary Lacosse: The genesis of the project came from the last couple of years of my life living in Vancouver with my long-term partner Katie and some feelings I had about the area in Burnaby, BC called Metro Town, which for a long time was a site of great interest to me as a young Jehovah's Witness boy.
Anytime I'd go and visit my dad over the weekends, he'd usually take me there and just drop me off or walk me around. I'd go to West 49 and beg him to get me those two for $15 t-shirts and dream of being a cool skater that wasn't a Jehovah's Witness. Yeah, so the genesis of the project just came from those memories of wanting to be part of the world and coming to Vancouver and thinking about how I had changed over the years, how Metro Town had changed and how my relationship was starting to fracture in a way that I felt was similar to the way of my parents.
There's a lot of ways to contextualize the film, we’ve been trying to do it by sharing the music video, which was kind of a predecessor, and we’ll be showing the short you made, Rockglenn, SK, beforehand to provide even more. Do you see this film as a culmination of your work in some way?
That was always the goal. I always wanted to have a ledger, to weave some great tapestry, even though that seems a little, I don't want to say ambitious, why would somebody care really, but I always just wanted to be able to look back and be able to chart everything together and make the whole entire catalog amount to something. If that something is some mosaic of who I am as a person, then maybe I've succeeded.
When you were starting to get the impulse to be a filmmaker, I don't know what age that would have been, was autobiography always your intention?
No, when I first started making movies, I just fucking loved Lego, you know. I think if there was any link to how I started making films when I was 10, it was just the patience that's involved with doing like stop-motion, that's pretty much it. There was the painstaking process of animating, taking each frame, and adjusting things. I think that level of patience has stuck with me for a long time. But no, I never really wanted to chart my life like that through my art, but that's something that came around in high school because I had a lot of issues with how to present myself as I was about to leave the Jehovah's Witnesses, because I had been in it since birth.
There’s that intense period in your late teens where you have to decide who you are, which was exacerbated by the fact that I was purposely letting go of my belief system, and at the time, I was very worried about losing my whole family as well. I remember very distinctly there was a moment where I was called in front of some Jehovah's Witness elders and my mom and they laid their charges before me and this sounds like a silly movie moment, but I felt that the only way I could explain myself and the sins that they had revealed to me was that I did have some sort of belief. I didn't want to just be a worldly person, as they would say, I wanted to believe in two things. I wanted to believe in expressing myself and using art as a way to have faith and just faith in love. So I think that decision and that argument that I made to them, well, that rationale has become the guiding force for everything that I've done.
It's such an interesting prism through which to view the world, including art. I remember when I saw Donnie Darko with you and you talked to me about how personal that film felt to you as a young man because of the faith you were raised in.
Oh yeah. I think I told you this before, when the apocalypse is on your back, when it’s just on the horizon, it’s easy to feel like you’re important or something.
Can you talk a bit about actually incorporating your family members into the film? I mean, your dad plays the mentor role in Imperial Green. Did you know it always had to be him from the very beginning?
Yeah. I've always wanted to make a movie with my dad in it, or just like my dad as a character, because I always thought he was the most interesting character I’ve ever met. He has his frustrations, he has his compensations, but he nonetheless has always remained such an interesting figure in my life. They used to think he was like Carmen Sandiego, like I could never know where in the world he was. And I used to have dreams about him on the lam or something. But when the time came for me to actually put him in something, I had this short that I was working on in 2017, and I thought, well, I could cast him, I guess, but maybe that's too much, like I was too scared to do it.
So I went around auditioning people, and everyone I auditioned for the most part was not mixed First Nations. In Vancouver, there were a lot of Italian men. Then it dawned on me that it doesn’t really make sense, as it was gonna be very difficult for me to find a person who is just like my dad, and that also does not provoke who he actually is and what his history is. So it became important to me that whatever I made with him, I could use his love for the spotlight and the truth of his complicated ethnicity, and what that means to me. So it made sense to just always have him in there, because who else is gonna play my dad just as well? I mean, he loves to do it!
The two stars of this film, Joseph Logelin and Kate Boutilier, are from your music video mentioned earlier. What are the qualities about them that you like as performers?
They're just really sweet, wonderful people. Kate has been a good friend for a long time, and I think, at least in this film and in all my experiences with her, there's a certain meekness to her that I find in her style of performance, which was just what I was looking for. It was something I could just as easily associate with my own partner. As far as Joseph's concerned, he’s just one of the funniest guys I know. I think he's an exceptionally talented actor. I remember when I went and talked to him about the movie. I went back to Vancouver, or it was right before I was moving to Toronto, I got dinner with him, and we talked about the film. I talked about why I wanted him to be in it, and suddenly I was struck by something Tsai Ming-liang said about Lee Kang-shen. I think it was from early when he first met him when they were working on that TV movie that he made about Taiwanese youth. Well he said that he had to learn Lee Kang-sheng's rhythm, that he was so frustrated by the fact that he took things slowly and he didn't move his head in the speed that he wanted and that he had learned that sometimes people and their rhythms are the things that can actually challenge you and you can learn a way to listen to someone's performance as a director versus shaping it. I'd say Joseph had that quality during our first meeting, especially because I was finally actually recording his voice this time, you know, instead of a music video. Something I love about the film and his role in it is that he has this gait. I said, just watch a bit of a Takeshi Kitano movie and see his lumbering gait, and just think about that. Honestly, I didn’t really guide them that much, I just liked who they were as people.
Obviously, I mean one of the big things about this film is that it's shot in the high frame rate of 60 per second, as opposed to 24. Can you talk about what drew you to the format?
I think I've just always been at different times, at least formally, interested in falsity and how much you can actually believe in something. I think that's just been a problem that's followed me my entire life. I think I've always been in a state of constant doubt whether that was as a Jehovah's Witness or as a worldly person, or as a filmmaker. I think it's just something that's flagged me for a long time and personally, as much as I would like to not just be an image maker I find my suspicions with the image have been at the forefront of my mind for a very long time, almost as much as my suspicions, which I think are intertwined, but my suspicions
for example of how to be a good Jehovah's Witness or how to hide that I am one. So I think for me at this juncture, or at the time that I was making the film and developing it, I was thinking a lot about how I wanted to use a texture that was sort of perverse. You know, when you hear people complain about the soap opera effect on your parents' Smart TVs or whatever, like when people stick their nose up at The Hobbit or Gemini Man or Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, what have you. The revulsion that people feel towards that and the physiological sort of reaction because it’s highlighting the artifice of the movie-making process just felt like, well, I'm interested in auto fiction, I'm interested in quote-unquote blurring the lines as they say. But it seemed like, while I was doing that textually, why wouldn't I use something like a high frame rate that instantly does that for you? The hyper reality is sort of the joy of it. It makes you question what I'm telling you and even the process of making it. When I'm trying to make my shitty tripod move and I point the camera in a different way, you'll feel that normally with 24 frames, but in 60, I feel like you can really sense that I'm there.
The other night, when I was over at your place we were watching a bunch of Ang Lee interviews he had done for Billy Lynn and I think he was talking about in one of them how with the high frame rate, you had to rethink every element of cinema, be it where you place the camera, what makeup actors wear, the sets, etc. A part of me is like, why wouldn’t more filmmakers want to do that? Why don’t more filmmakers want to rethink the entire concept of cinema, especially when so many people think it’s dying?
I’m not really sure, I don’t have a manifesto to go along with what I’m doing. I'm suspicious of progress, I’m suspicious of nostalgia, I’m suspicious of conservatism, and it seems like it's very simple to just change the way something as simple as the speed at which you consume something, shooting at a higher frame rate, while it may seem like a sort of a gimmick I think it it does significantly change your relationship to what you're watching. Maybe I was just being reactionary in using it, but I had my reasons. I feel like just from my experiences back in Vancouver, you know, god bless Vancouver, but I found that there was a surprising lack of interest in alternative forms especially in as far as formats are considered and I do truly appreciate beauty but you know, there are other ways to go about getting that instead of harkening back to the past and propping up celluloid. I think this is a larger problem. I think that there's just generally less immediacy in cinema.
How are you feeling about showing so personal a film in front of a crowd at a 200-plus seat movie theater?
It feels fucking awesome [laughs]. I’m very happy and excited, of course. I mean, it’s my dream.
IMPERIAL GREEN has its world premiere on Wednesday, May 21st at The Paradise on Bloor. Tickets are on sale.