FFWD Weekly
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Cover Story by FFWD Staff When you’re wandering around the labyrinth of downtown Calgary this winter, rarely descending to street level as you pass comfortably through the heated, recycled air of the Plus 15 system, chances are you won’t be thinking about all the possible negative effects that the enclosed elevated walkway system has created for this city over the years. These, however, are exactly the kind of consequences local filmmaker Gary Burns ponders on a daily basis. He hates the Plus 15s, and with the release of his latest film, waydowntown, a comedy inspired by his vitriol about one of this city’s most highly used but little regarded architectural anomalies, he’s set to tell us why. "The big thing for me was that I’ve always had a gripe with the Plus 15 system and how I think it’s to the detriment of downtown Calgary," explains Burns. "It used to be that if you’d go downtown on a Sunday in Calgary, there was nothing there at all. A big part of that, I think, is because of the Plus 15s.... All the stores and disposable restaurants are sucked up into the middle of the second floor somewhere. There’s no reason to go downtown except for a couple little strips. It’s really drained the city of any kind of after-work life." Coupling this argument about the vitality of Calgary’s street life with a curiousity about the workers who populate our own little downtown ant farm, Burns set about working on his third feature film. This follow-up to the Suburbanators and Kitchen Party is about four young, competitive corporate ladder-climbers engaged in a bet to see who can stay inside for the longest period of time. In a city where the car is king, and it’s possible to imagine a daily routine that begins in an attached garage in the suburbs followed by a commute through rush-hour traffic to another heated parkade and an elevator to the highrise above, the plausibility of a life without fresh air is not too much of a stretch. In a very sly, subtle way, this might be Burns’s most political film yet. "I never worked in that office culture, but I worked in construction," says Burns. "You know, I worked on Banker’s Hall, that first tower, and you just sort of know what they’re like. I was in them when they were just doing the final touches so I was always sort of familiar with the concept of pumping in the air, pumping it out." This added environmental stress placed on the characters in Burns’s new film provides the underpinnings of a narrative that amplifies some of the worst horrors of office life in our time. Dilbert this isn’t. Drug abuse, executive suicides, workplace infidelity, and the general dog-eat-dog mentality of the corporate culture are all fodder for Burns’s poison pen, and that of his screenwriting collaborator James Martin. The absurd comedy that Burns became known for in his first two films has been measured out with an equal portion of urban ennui – the tragic self-awareness of the romantic idealist caught up in the angst of a work-a-day world. "My closest tie to office culture is that I’ve had friends that went to law school," says Burns. "I know about the idea of hiring 10 people when you only need two and letting them all basically kill each other. Plus, (the employers) benefit from the fight because everyone is working extra hard to prove that they’re worthy of the one position. "So you get all these people working all these insane hours. The corporate culture just says, ‘Take advantage of your work staff, man, because they’re willing to do anything to climb up the ladder.’" waydowntown begins in the morning of an average work day and then jumps forward to chronicle the events of a single lunch hour in the downtown malls of Calgary. Although the narrative is structured around the contest between four co-workers who have each wagered one month’s salary on the outcome, the movie’s point of view is most strongly aligned with narrator Fab Filippo’s character, Tom. In a bold move for Burns, he and cinematographer Patrick McLaughlin developed some surrealistic visual techniques to align Tom as the focus of the film in the minds of his audience. There are shots of Filippo swimming at eye-level through crowds of people while his voice-over narration delivers his unique bird’s-eye perspective on the sad lives of his co-workers, from whom he actually differs very little. While these sequences seem almost out of place in a film by Burns, whose strongest suit has always been deadpan dialogue, it’s good to see the director branching out with respect to visual style. The film looks great, and throwing continuity considerations right out the window, Burns even includes some odd deviations in the colours of costumes from one scene to the next, a subtle device that some viewers don’t notice at all. "It’s funny, eh?" laughs Burns. "That just kills me. Some people notice it right away, but I was pretty surprised that it wasn’t as obvious as I thought it would be. There’s that one scene where you see one of the characters change her top in five different colours in five quick cuts. I was definitely just trying to illustrate their states of mind in some manner without, like, leaving the character. The colour is very hyper-saturated so it doesn’t look natural anyway. Especially with Tom, sometimes it’s changing but it’s really subtle. It goes from blue to purple, then back to dark red. I think the one that’s really obvious is when he’s running through the parkade and it’s yellow. If you don’t get that one.… Man, he goes from blue to bright yellow in two seconds." Audiences and critics both seem to be responding favourably to Burns’s new direction, and last Sunday he became the first Calgary filmmaker to receive the coveted City-TV award for the Best Canadian Feature at the Toronto International Film Festival. It will be interesting to see how local audiences respond to Burns’s latest film when it opens the inaugural Calgary International Film Festival on Tuesday. "If you show waydowntown to Joe Blow Calgary office worker, are they going to say, ‘Oh yeah, that’s so true,’ or are they going to say, ‘Hey, hey, that guy’s telling me to question my life, I don’t want to go there?" quips Burns. Hopefully Calgarians have enough sense of humour to handle this witty comic perception of their beloved city and their small, wretched lives. Burns isn’t so sure, just yet, but he’s happy to have the limelight, if only to beak off about the Plus 15s and to get people talking. One thing’s for sure: Calgary rarely eats its own. "People in Calgary don’t complain," says a cantankerous Burns. "They’re just happy to be living in ‘the greatest city in the world.’ There’s just no bitching. It drives me crazy that people aren’t critical enough in Calgary." Be careful what you wish for Mr. Burns, be careful what you wish for.

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