Research Questions

Some of my research questions are:

1) How effective are the current standards of film training and education in developing viable filmmaking careers in Canada?

2) Is the current representation of science in traditional Hollywood narratives negative? How could I develop a science positive screenplay?

3) How is secularism presented in film narratives? What are the common themes which explore belief and faith which could be harmful to secular

Got all my faculties

I spent five years in an undergraduate program learning how to watch movies.  It's a strange experience to sit down in a lecture hall and listen to a professor say exotic things like 'hegemony' and 'post colonialism' at least half a dozen times before the lights dim and you spend the next few hours watching 'Star Wars' or 'Citizen Kane'. Friends and family thought I had it easy. Everyone watches movies, so surely I must have logged thousands of hours 'studying' film well before my program began- I'm ahead of the curb! Not so much.

The study of film is very different from the consumption of film. I'd spent my entire life, up until I began my university career, as a consumer of film media- this meant I had a set of unconsciously triggered expectations regarding pace, structure and story, built up over a long period of casual (thoughtless) movie consumption. Really, I don't think there's anything wrong with consuming entertainment casually- anything in moderation- but as a film student, you need to become suspicious of your expectations and begin scrupulously picking apart motivations, themes and cultural dialects. Sometimes analyzing a film can be an exhilarating experience full of 'aha' moments and discovery ('Whoa, I think I just found a connection between the production of 80s vampire flicks and the AIDS crisis!'). Other times it can be rather a lot like peaking into the kitchen of your favourite restaurant- and seeing the chef sneeze in the soup ('Ugh, you can totally read the 'Aliens' franchise as an allegory for rape').


There's one film I feel is in my blind spot when it comes to applying the rigorous set of analytical tools I developed in university- something in the back of my brain tells me it doesn't have a clean story; there are cheats, messy dialogue, awkward exposition- but none of that seems to matter. I owe where I am today to Robert Rodriguez's 1998 sci-fi thriller 'The Faculty.'

A mismatched band of six high school students discover their teachers have had their minds and bodies enslaved a la 'The Puppet Master' by aliens. Think 'The Breakfast Club' meets 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers'. The teens come together as an unlikely group of friends to destroy the alien threat and along the way discover important truths about themselves- they're not so different after all! It sounds like a pretty cut and dry romp which one would anticipate leaves little to chew on after you run out of popcorn, but 'The Faculty' has a few tricks up its sleeve.

The 1990s were peppered with post-modern meta films in which characters seemed to have some sense of the restrictions within their diegetic little world and attempted to game the system based on their reading of film tropes (think Wes Craven's 'Scream'). 'The Faculty' nods at old school sci-fi through the oracular vessel of the Stokely (Clea Duval); a science fiction buff who quickly sums up their situation as one similar to 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' and 'The Puppet Master'. The kids even spend a little time theorizing that aliens may have invaded Hollywood, and are responsible for inventing classic sci-fi so humans wouldn't take the signs of an alien invasion seriously. Cute right?

Unfortunately (and perhaps deservedly) the critics didn't seem to agree on whether this self awareness was slick or sloppy- in the end, the group doesn't glean much from their reading of sci-fi beyond working out that there's some kind of 'master alien' which they need to destroy in order to get the school back to normal. What I took away from this when I first watched the film, was that movies were so prevalent in our culture that our movies had to start talking about movies! You couldn't create a realistic story-world in western society in which the principal characters didn't have their experiences in the cinema pre-loaded in their head well before the actor stepped in to fill in the rest of their personal histories. This realization was very exciting to me and slapped on an extra layer to potentially zestless pictures I'd see at the Popcorndium.

When I first watched this film I think I was around thirteen years old. I was awkward and bookish, and at this point I think I wanted to be a lawyer/veterinarian/fashion designer who lived in Australia when I 'grew up'. What I got out of 'The Faculty' was two fold: one, I got invested in the syrupy, feel good story of a group of kids who learned to get along despite coming from diverse social groups. The characters weren't just one note archetypes despite their cookie cutter introductions as the jock, nerd, cheerleader, goth etc. The nerd was the hero, the stoner a scientist. The narrative of the film was as much about removing layers of pretensions and socially constructed expectations from each of the characters as about aliens taking over a high school in Ohio. To an awkward pre-teen the message of the film came through loud and clear: you're not that weird, and even if you are, loads of other people are just as weird as you. So relax!

Two, 'The Faculty' became the icon of 'good movie making' in my head. Despite it's problems, it was a structurally sound film with a compelling ensemble cast, a refreshing take on an old story and a lot of heart. When someone asked me what kind of movie I was interested in making, I said 'The Faculty', and after their eyebrows dropped away from their hairline I explained why.

I believe that the best way to inspire people is to tell them a story. Even better is to tell them a story about themselves at their best. 'The Faculty' is that it's an underdog story with big stakes and huge expectations thrown at it's characters. In the end, it's the smallest, lamest, least skilled character Casey (Elijah Wood) who manages to save the day- and that's what stuck with me.