>>PREVIEW
FIDO
STARRING Carrie-Anne Moss and Billy Connolly
DIRECTED BY Andrew Currie
Opens Friday, March 16
Check listings
The Italians have Zombie Flesh Eaters, Spain has Tombs of the Blind Dead and the Brits have been blessed with Shaun of the Dead (we all know America’s foremost contribution), but what of Canada?
Enter Victoria-born filmmaker Andrew Currie who goes to bat for Canada this week with Fido, his $10.7 million offering to the zombie gods.
"It’s western Canada’s biggest budget indie film," says Currie of his boy-and-his-zombie-themed take on the genre, which was produced by his own Vancouver-based production company, Anagram Pictures. With nearly a third of the budget being financed by TeleFilm’s new national funding program, Fido is one more example of how the government-funded operation is helping Canadian filmmakers succeed on a larger scale – a point Currie is quick to endorse.
"It means larger budgets for Canadian films, which means that it helps give Canadian filmmakers the tools to really show what they’re capable of," explains Currie.
That would certainly appear to be the case for Currie given the ambitious nature of Fido’s script. Co-written by Currie and his two partners (Robert Chomiak and Dennis Heaton) and in development for the better part of a decade, it envisions an alternative reality (akin to 1950s suburbia) where the dead have long been returning, forcing citizens to live under the heavy gaze of ZomCom – a security conglomerate profiteering off people’s fears. The "living" reside in picturesque gated communities where menial labour is tended to by zombies pacified by special ZomCom bracelets and, for those who can afford it, there is also the luxury of personal zombie servants.
The story focuses its gaze on young Timmy, a lonely boy whose life suddenly changes for the better when his insecure and sexually unfulfilled mother (Carrie-Anne Moss) purchases a zombie servant (Billy Connolly), against the wishes of his father (Dylan Baker) who is struggling to save for their highly expensive (and entirely optional) funerals.
The great thing about zombies is they’re a magnet for social commentary.
"Fido’s central theme is that ‘love not fear makes us more alive’ – It’s about this small town that appears to be perfectly sweet but is actually rotting on the inside. It’s about xenophobia, fear of the foreign, and the desire of so many countries to keep their population homogenous," relates Currie, whose film was heavily influenced by the Technicolor melodramas of the ’50s, a fact that made a larger budget a prerequisite for his own production. "I really wanted to make this big, bold colourful film and that kind of style needs money. You just can’t do that with a low budget."
One only need see a few moments of Fido to realize that Currie and his team succeeded triumphantly in achieving their vision. The pristine retro set designs are captured in clear, crisp saturated colours with a spherical widescreen lens that glides along on dollies and cranes in sweepingly calculated movements. It bleeds a blind idealism into every frame of the picture, which is then made a farce of by the conflicting presence of walking corpses.
But still, it begs the question – can a big-budget Canadian indie zombie flick, one that’s not a horror movie but spans multiple genres while blending a myriad of tones (from dark comedy to melodrama), actually turn a profit in the name of Canadian cinema? Well, considering that Lions Gate has picked up its distribution for some 40 countries across the globe, it’s not too soon to hope for a renaissance.
Regardless, Currie’s efforts are validated by a story he enthusiastically recounts near the end of our conversation.
"I was at the Sitges festival in Spain and ran into this filmmaker and he was like ‘dude, I just ran into Terry Gilliam who just saw Fido and he was raving about it!’"
I’d take that over an Oscar any day. |
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