Director Paul Fox Talks Douglas Coupland's Everything's Gone Green

While in Montreal for Fantasia this past weekend I had the chance to sit down with Canadian director Paul Fox about his horror flick The Dark Hours, which has been turning heads since picking up the Audience Award at Dead By Dawn and is slated to hit Canuck screens in November. Though the bulk of our time was spent talking Dark Hours - and I have to hold on to that part of the conversation until closer to the release date - we also talked a bit about his current project, Everything's Gone Green, which is based on an original screenplay by famed Generation X / Microserfs / Life After God author Douglas Coupland.

Read on for his thoughts ...

PF: It’s very dialogue driven, very funny. It’s been interesting to watch it develop because it doesn’t have as strong a narrative engine as your standard movie does. He’s definitely not really a plot guy. There is one in there. It’ll be interesting in the editing process.

TB: You’re done shooting it now?

PF: Yeah, we are. We finished not long ago, about two weeks now. We’re in the second week of editing now, in Toronto. We shot it in Vancouver … it’s sort of an Ontario-B.C. co-production, so we shot it there and are editing in Toronto and we’ll do the sound mix back in Vancouver in November or December and hopefully have it ready to submit to Sundance and see if they go for it. I think it’s going to work out well. I’m very happy with how the rough cut looks.

TB: Was Douglas around the set at all?

PF: He’d come by. He was very good about that, about putting it into our hands. He’d come by and I think he was very happy with what we were doing. We were very consciously trying to make it feel like his world. Our production designer and I went out to dinner at Douglas’ and we co-opted some of Douglas’ home and sculptural ideas into the character [Brian]’s life. So Douglas came to the set when we were in Brian’s apartment and he said it was sort of odd, as if he had stepped into his own brain. We tried to do that with every set, to make it feel like Douglas.

TB: You looked at his photography style?

PF: Yes, exactly, very much so. The main character’s a photographer so there’s quite a bit of photography going on in the movie. It was very gratifying when he came by. He wouldn’t stay long, but he’d just sort of come by and smile and say, “Well, it looks like it just popped right out of my head,” and then he’d go away, so it was perfect.

TB: How did you get involved with it? That’s got to be a godsend, particularly for a Canadian film maker. It’s so hard to get any attention here.

PF: Yeah, this is a weird banner year. I’m actually going to have two pictures within a year. Dark Hours is in November and then this one. For a beginning film maker it’s pretty unprecedented. I’m glad that they’re two totally different genres. If I had another horror movie right on the tail of the Dark Hours I think I’d have put myself in a bit of a box. I always wanted to be more of a Howard Hawks sort of director where you can do a comedy one year and a gangster picture the next.