For my first post at missmakeamovie, I thought I'd introduce myself through movies and how they've shaped who I am.
Writers often have intact infantile memories, and one of my earliest memories is crawling over my dad on the couch in the dark, the only light coming from the flickering black and white TV set. He would watch an old movie with his wakeful daughter, who grew up to be an unrepentant night owl.
After my sister was born, our family used to head out to the Royal Oak Drive-In, where the wait for sunset seemed unbearable, and the mini fair grounds below the screen helped us kids keep our sanity.
Photo by Keith Milford
Although I'm sure I saw quite a few movies before this one, Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the first theatrical release I can remember as an audience member.
I was completely freaked out by the evil queen, even before she turned into a witch. I can still recall the utter dread in my gut as I kept my eyes glued to the enormous screen, watching fearfully for the queen's reappearance. I'm certain that experience hardwired me to crave being as close to the screen as possible, my field of vision taken up only by the world of the movie.
I come from a family of film lovers, so in May 1977 it was not unusual for my parents, my aunt & uncle, my two cousins, my sister and me to be in the line-up outside the theatre waiting to get into a new sci-fi film called Star Wars. I had no idea that I was crossing the threshold to discover my creative center.
When the film started, and the rebel ship crossed the screen seemingly from behind the audience's heads, I felt that same thrill Snow White's queen gave me when I was small. Only this time the dread was replaced by disbelief as the space leviathan of an Imperial Star Destroyer chased after the rebel ship, obliterating our view of the planet below, and then of the very stars themselves.
When most 13-year-old girls were reading Tiger Beat and 16 Magazine, I started buying American Cinematographer and Starlog to find out how Star Wars was possible.
After gathering theatre experience in high school, both acting and directing, I moved from Halifax, Nova Scotia to Toronto, Ontario. In the mid-80's Halifax had limited film screenings, with mainstream Hollywood fare and the very occasional foreign film available. Toronto was like water to my film-deprived desert. I worked at the Runnymede Theatre in Bloor Street West, for Famous Players, which gave us weekly passes for one employee and a guest. My friend and future husband, who worked at the theatre, too, saw two films a week as one another's guest. We saw foreign films, indie films, cult films - everything we could plunk down a pass for.
When I met my husband, he was graduating from the acting program at The New School of Drama in Toronto. He was instrumental in making sure I attended Ryerson's film program several years later. While I took my film degree, I worked evenings as an usher at the O'Keefe Centre, later the Hummingbird Centre. (And now the Sony Centre, I guess...) Though it was live theatre, everything I saw onstage reinforced or expounded on what I'd just been learning earlier that day. It was an intensely creative, exhausting and deeply fulfilling time. Really, it was the best time of my life.
In fourth year I drove back to Halifax with four cast members who doubled and tripled as my crew, and shot some of my final film there. Only a lunatic would do that. Or an obsessed filmmaker.
Since then I put filmmaking on hold for novel writing. I needed to keep working on my stories while concentrating personally on caregiving for my grandmother. Over the years I've worked on occasional projects, including last weekend when I played the role of 'God's Hands' for a short film. Nothing beats the feeling I get when a group of people are all working towards telling a story. It's really a form of bliss for me.
