River 2007
River is an evocation of those life-changing friendships of youth – passionate, all consuming and sometimes, as brief as summer.
River is my first feature film. It’s original title was Plan B, because it was a film I made because I couldn’t get another film financed.
Starting around 2002, I spent a few years trying to get a feature made. I had a screenplay that had gone through multiple drafts and through sessions with story editors. I had some excellent actors and a wonderful DOP lined up. I had a producer. We came close-ish a couple times to getting it financed, but even though we were in the under $300,000 range, we couldn’t get the money in place. I put that screenplay in a drawer (a version of it finally got made as Resting Potential in 2022), and I starting thinking about creating something new with a small cast and crew, something that could be made for very little money. Plan B.
I’d loved the films of the English director Mike Leigh, and read about his process of working with actors for months on improvised scenes, and only then writing a script, which they shot. I read a biography of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, and was fascinated by his deep and nurturing friendship with the poet/singer Patti Smith. I’d seen filmmakers like Michael Winterbottom working with very small crews, taking advantage of the new digital cameras that had come on the market.
All of these led me to a new story and a new way of working. Instead of writing a screenplay I developed outlines of two characters Roz and Stan. I knew they would meet, and their friendship would have an important impact on their lives. I knew I would work with the actors for a couple months before shooting. I knew we would build the story together. I knew we would work around available locations, and with a small crew.
At the end of the audition process, I cast two first-time actors, Maya Batten-Young as Roz, and Adam Budd as Stan. In spite of their lack of experience, I felt they both really understood the characters they were playing, and could improvise from the character’s perspective. I worked with Maya and Adam for a couple months. We’d try out ideas for scenes, e.g. their first conversation, a day in the country, and if the scene showed potential we’d write a couple sentences describing it, then move on. We’d go to Value Village to look for wardrobe and props, we looked around town for a place that Stan and Roz could move into as housemates. At end of the rehearsal period, we had a 16-page script, which had action descriptions for 90 scenes. All the dialogue would be improvised.
Through Regina filmmaker Robin Schlaht, I got in touch with the Calgary cinematographer Patrick McLaughlin, and Patrick agreed to come to Regina to shoot this. He brought along his friend Derek Waite, who would record sound, and act as gaffer and key grip. Robin very generously put up Patrick and Derek for the month or so they spent in Regina.
I hired three students from the Film program at the University of Regina to help Patrick and Derek. Ryan Good served as a kind of production manager, dealing with the logistical aspects, and Trixi Moersch and Davin Robbins were assistant camera, grips, and lamp operators combined.
All our cast and crew and all our gear could comfortably fit in two vehicles. We could all go to a restaurant for meal breaks and sit around the same table. We’d hang out after wrap most evenings and have a beer and talk about what we might shoot the next day. We often came up with scenes over lunch, to take advantage of some nice light or an event happening in the city. We shot for 20 days, 19 of them were sunny and warm.
Picture editing was probably the hardest thing about making River. We shot with a single camera and improvised dialogue, so my editor (and spouse) Wanda Schmöckel had to work really hard to pull things together to make conversations sound consistent and coherent. Wanda also did some magical stuff playing with the notion of sync sound – that would never have occurred to me – and the elliptical, poetic results made the film begin to sing. We used some music from friends Michelle McAdorey and Eric Chenaux.
We shot three different endings for the film, and screened a cut for a group of filmmaking friends to get a sense of how things were working. Legendary Canadian filmmaker Allan King was spending a few months in Regina and I invited him to the screening. When the screening ended, Wanda and I asked for people’s responses about what was working and what needed work. Allan started the discussion off by something along the lines of “It’s a wonderful film! I’ve never seen anything like it.” That was really encouraging to hear. Later, after a festival screening, another legendary Canadian director Don Owen stopped to tell me how much he enjoyed the film and said it made him think of Satyajit Ray, which just about made me cry.
River had its festival debut at the 2007 Montreal World Film Festival. I arrived in Montreal to find a glowing review in the Montreal Gazette, and the Gazette followed up with a story on the film. The film had a nice runs at festivals, and both Maya and Adam received two acting awards at different festivals, and the “screenplay” of the film won an award at another festival.
River received support from the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and we got a pre-license broadcast fee from SCN. We had a cash budget of around $70,000 to make the film. Despite repeated requests, the Canada Council and Telefilm Canada declined to offer support. After its festival run, we entered into a pointless distribution agreement and sold the film to Superchannel, who declared some form of bankruptcy protection during the course of our agreement; payments were distributed amongst the key creative cast and crew and we got about half of what they’d committed to paying.
In spite of the disappointing financial aspects, River remains among my very favourite filmmaking experiences. I spent a summer working with talented, kind people, and together we made a film I was proud of.
During the rehearsal period, I shot a lot of the prep work I did with Maya and Adam, and the three of us also did direct to camera reports about our progress. During production Ryan Good shot a lot of behind the scenes footage. After we finished River, I used this other material to create a “making of” short Unless We Take A Chance: Making River, which was included on the DVD release.
Thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, you can still find the film’s website created by Ryan Hill: https://web.archive.org/web/20130621064345/http://riverthemovie.com/
