Rhinoceros Eyes - Interview with Director Aaron Woodley and Puppet Creator Veronica Verkley

In many ways director Aaron Woodley has woven as rich and evocative tapestry as his uncle (Canadian auteur David Cronenberg) ever has and Rhinoceros Eyes is his only his first feature. There was a screening of the film last week (Twitch Review) in Toronto to generate some word of mouth for the tiny little film which will be opeing across Canadian cities over the next few months before going to DVD in June. I was lucky enough to sit down with Aaron Woodley and the designer of the stop-motion puppets used in the film, Veronica Verkley, at a bar across the street for a short yet meandering (admittedly my fault -- blame Hemmingway's freezing cold rooftop patio and a couple of pints of Heineken!) conversation. Answers are from Aaron Woodley unless otherwise indicated, also I should give a warning that there is a *mild spoiler* in there or two:

Rhinoceros Eyes first played the TIFF 2003, and then opened in NY in 2004. Now March 2006. It took a long time to open in Canada.

It took a very long time. The thing is, it has had a very difficult struggle, an epic kind of tale for this film, it has been through a lot. In 2003 it had a lot of hype and build. It won the discovery award (at the TIFF), people were buzzing about it. Then a lot of strange things happened. I would probably take an hour to tell it, but the gist of it is: The Company that funded the movie, Madstone films had a different way of doing things and they prided themselves on this. They wanted to in a sense re-invent the traditional route of promoting and getting the film out there. One of their techniques was rather than to festival the film any further, especially in foreign markets, was to send all of the footage to film students, editing film students, to kind of spread word of mouth, and what that kind of resulted in was a lot of different and strange mutations of the movie. Very soon after that Madstone went bankrupt and the film found itself locked up in someone’s wine cellar and inaccessible to me and a lot of people. And honestly I really never thought it would get a second chance to see the light of day. And this all happened a year and a half after the fact and it was a scout for Capri who found me at my day job as an animator at Cuppacoffee, and he said what ever happened to that film? And I said ‘I can’t get to it, it’s gone, I’ve put it behind me. It had this wave kinda built, but the surfer crashed just as the wave was cresting. It’s lost in limbo.’ After the dust had settled, Capri luckily gave it its chance on the screen and on the DVD. Not for lack of interest, I’ve had hundreds of people on my website say ‘Where can I get this movie?’ And I’ve had to say, ‘I’m sorry’. It has been really tough that way. At a certain point I said, “I have a very expensive Directors reel on my hands. It’s a wonderful film I’m proud of, but isn’t going to get out there.” But these guys said lets do this and here it is, and I’m excited. I never thought this would happen.

Your uncle is a director [David Cronenberg] and your mother is a costume designer [Denise Cronenberg]. Chep is lives in the prop house and lives vicariously through movies. Is it safe to say there is an autobiographical element to the film?

The film is very autobiographical, it is a very personal film, and is expressing a lot of stuff that I felt very deeply about when I wrote it in 1995, which is a long time ago. It’s been a labour of love. More than not, I was really trying to express a state of mind about a guy who is having difficulty with joining so-called reality. Which he feels very much not a part of. That was the genesis. It was important to me for this character who is lost in his imaginary self built state of mind.

A movie state of mind?

Yea, and that was autobiographical. The whole movie element came in when I was trying to find a place to set the film. A world to place this character. And it wasn’t until I walked into that actual prop house, and I felt somebody has to shoot a movie in this place, it is the perfect location for a story to play out. And therefore film filtered in, and the idea that film is an extension of this place that Chep wanted to stay within. Your fantasy worlds becoming real and film is very much just that, art in general.

Many of the props in the house are looking to be looking at Chep. Chep is looking at his own fantasies on screen.

Yea, and also a very kind of a thin line between these realities. He is trying to define them now, and cut ties between them and find out what is and isn’t real. That is the struggle he was after. The prop house was a character in itself and to him, these in animate objects are as real as any human being that he had ever dealt with and certainly he was more comfortable dealing with these and a little anecdote. I think that a lot of people find this. When I was a kid, we had this family car for the first 10 years of my life and it had become like part of the family to me, like a dog or a cat, and when we got rid of this car I cried terribly, It was a hunk of metal, for gods sake and lets understand the difference between the two, but often that is a fine line, especially for kids, children having less experience in this reality, have to fill in the blanks to some degree and write their own rules, and eventually you have to conform to the rules that are set by what we have around us, and reality becomes more external rather than internal. That balance shifts. Chep just took a bit longer to shift.

Chep is naive character, he is all stilted and stuttering and can’t relate to things, but in light of the some of the crazy supporting players he is almost like the most normal guy in the film.

That was very conscious. Every single character, down to the very small ones has issues with reality. This whole idea of masks the kind of people we want to be, and the kind we actually are, and how much of that is true and isn’t. It’s an interesting question. Chep becomes this other, different person, in order to deal with this other reality. The hooker is he a man or a woman. Sweets, is he a pirate, does he speak, does he not speak. The detective wants to be something, but is in fact something else. He is trying to manipulate or control reality in a sense. Paige Turco’s character is massively that. She plays in her sets. Her doll house is Chep’s prop house, her world, her extensions of her childhood fantasies. She is trying to build them just so much as how people are. Everyone does to a certain degree. Also the real world in this film at least is much more frightening than anything he can imagine, that old cliché like as when you tell a weird story about something that actually happened, and people say, ‘Oh my god, you couldn’t actually write that.’ Truth is stranger in fiction, and it is all very true. To weird to be fake, you know.

About the animation in the film, The work of the Quay Brothers immediately comes to mind…

And Svankmajer.

The Tor Johnson mask worn by Michael Pitt a lot in the film does feel akin to a Svankmajer image.

That is a happy accident, but it’s a great match. I thought it was going to be hard to get an actor, as for more than half the film he would have to wear this mask. But Michael really took advantage of it. He even came up with a system, he considered himself a puppeteer actually. Emoting and almost scientific kind of, forward would be one thing, this angle backward would be that this angle would be one thing. Happy and Sad. He would play with the shadows and light and he was very conscious of that too. To kind of keep things happing. It is a great Mask.

The movie is very much a fable.

Yes, fable was the best way to tell this story. It is a dark fairy tale. Gilliam is a huge influence. I heard him talking and how much I relate to his work and how maybe possibly we are similar and that Gilliam described himself originally as a cartoonist. He was originally a cartoonist. That is how I started, by doing caricatures and animation. You can see that in Tim Burton also.

The film itself has loads of film references, all the genres which are brought in, Horror, Noir, Melodrama (The film within the film: The Sweltering Squaddie). Obviously you are a lover of genre.

Genre soup is how I look at it. That is definitely a jab at The English Patient and The Sheltering Sky. Films that are overdramatic and take themselves so seriously. People have come up to me with these references and I’m like yea that is probably where it came from. But I heard this great quote from a writer, I forget his name. When he was asked if you can only write what you know. And he said yes absolutely, but often you don’t know what it is that you know until after you write it. Right, so, it is that kind of thing where writing in itself is the discovery of what you actually know, and not the other way around.

For a first film, it is almost appropriate. The loss of innocence. Chep emerging from the prop house like creating your first feature.

Yes I felt very naked up there on the screen.

Yet you cast yourself has a porno-director of the film within in the film.

That was actually our whole crew. David Green our camera man, the sound guy was our sound guy. I definitely wanted our film crew making that film. That another way to cross reality once again.

You started as an animator of short films. How much of the stop-motion animation did you do in the film?

No, Veronica built the puppets. I’m a good animator, but I needed a great animator so we got Neil Burns to do that, because it was very challenging animation. These puppets were not traditional puppets. One was 6 feet tall, you just don’t do that, you build them one or two feet at the most. They started out small and grow over the course of the film. Chep has to grow up real quick so it is charting his evolution and maturation.

Yet his puppet-self gives him really bad advice.

(Laughs) It is a part of him, he is trying to figure it out and work it through.

Would you consider doing an animated feature?

Oh sure, yea maybe one day, but certainly I’m not a huge fan of CGI, I think it is one tool in a box in a box of many, one tool that is highly over-used, mainly because when it first came out it was a new toy, and films went a little to far. Especially studios and executives thought that there is no way we are going to get the kids out unless it is all CG. Things like the original Yoda or Jabba the Hut. We’ve got to turn them all CG now, because that is the old and this is the new. And I think that now people are starting to rediscover that. In fact there was something to that and it doesn’t all have to be all that. And I think Peter Jackson is very good at that because he will use sculptures and build models again, and use it where necessary, not just everything being a CG bath where things are just boring and fake. This is a bad example, but in Top Gun, I remember being astounded by the plane photography. These are real planes flying around doing incredible stunts and now you see something like Stealth and there is no risk or anything, no reality to it, so it becomes a yawn.

Yet you chose to shoot with similar to HD technology as the Star Wars prequels.

[Veronica Anwers] The same lenses actually but the stop motion photography was done with still cameras, usually it is done with video cameras, but we pioneered this method of using a still camera because you get really high rez shots, even higher resolution than HD, which was then pushed down for the film

At one point, you were a working on a project called Blueberries?

Yes, it is a script that I’ve written. I don’t know when I’ll make it; it will probably be a while. It is even stranger than Rhinoceros Eyes. I’ve got a couple of other projects coming up that I want to do first. I want to try some other genres first. I don’t want to get pigeon holed as the director who does you know kind of quirky, kind of freaky movies and only does those. I have a straight ahead drama coming out starring Mariah Carrey.

Not my first thought after watching Rhinoceros Eyes. I never found myself thinking this guy is going to off and work with Lee Daniels and Mariah Carey next.

So that is what is I’m doing, and nobody is going to stop me! (Laughs). It’s a road movie, it’s a drama, it’s a personal story. Not a script I’ve written, but I’m going to try something different. Glitter is not the best example of what she is capable of. I’m convinced she has talent, and we are going to shoot that in the spring [in New Mexico].

Rhinoceros Eyes was also made with American money but shot in Canada, correct?

Yes the movie theatre in the film is The Royal on College and the streaker in that shot, by the way was the editor, Robert Crossman. Which is kind of a funny story. In one of Rob’s early films, Dead Peoples Bums, I was the dead person who had to show his bum. And I said, 'Rob, I’ll do this if you streak through one of my films.' This was an old deal, and the option came up. Twice actually. So it was perfect. But the film is a Canadian film in every other way, and the money doesn’t define it as an American film.

Does the Prop House Still Exist?

[Veronica Anwers] I think that the Owners are actually trying to sell everything off.

Life imitating Art.

[Rhinoceros Eyes is playing across Canada over the next few weeks and will be out on DVD in June 2006.]