Alien Nation

Brad McGinnis, Paul Popowich, Mary Crosbie, Rob Stefaniuk, Noam Rosen, Addison Bell and Graham Greene in Phil The Alien. Courtesy Lions Gate Entertainment.

Like many Canadians, Phil wears a Mac jacket and has a drinking problem. Less like us – and more like an alien from another planet who crash-lands his space ship in Northern Ontario – he makes an eardrum-bursting electronic barfing sound when stressed. Back to the “like many Canadians” thing: Phil is very funny.

The film, Phil the Alien, and the guy, Phil the Alien, are the creation of Rob Stefaniuk, a 33-year-old writer-director from Toronto who plays the eponymous extraterrestrial. The low-budget movie – about an alien with a talking beaver best friend (voiced by Joe Flaherty) who unknowingly thwarts a gang of fur-coat-wearing American secret service agents living in a lair under Niagara Falls – is one of the most absurd, joke-dense movies ever produced in this country (unofficially: no more than four minutes go by without a gag). It seems destined for cult status, soon to be acted out by the same people who “do” The Simpsons and Monty Python at the photocopier every Monday: “Remember when Phil runs through the forest and Rush is playing and [alien shriek goes here]?” Phil the Alien was the surprise hit of the Toronto International Film Festival last fall; it came in as an independent feature from a relative unknown and left with a distribution deal from Lion’s Gate Films.

In person, Stefaniuk has the same spiky, impaling hairdo as Phil, and a sleepy way of speaking, perhaps because he returned home late the night before from the Slamdance festival in Utah (Steve Buscemi told him he liked the film). When asked about Phil the Alien’s open-arms reception from critics and festivals around the continent, Stefaniuk gives a sarcastic reply: “Oh yeah, I saw this coming all along. An alcoholic alien movie – that’s going to sweep the Toronto Film Festival. Everyone’s been waiting for it.” He wrinkles his face with incredulity.

Thing is, he’s not wrong; Canadians are hungry for homegrown comedy. There’s a strange dissonance between the international reputation of Canadian film – earnest, Egoyan sparseness with painful themes like suicide and incest – and that of Canadian performers, who are mostly comedians.

“It’s absurd that we so rarely do Canadian comedy movies or sitcoms. Pick a generation and a Canadian will be the funniest guy of his time: John Candy, Jim Carrey. I know so many funny people and they’re this great untapped resource,” says Stefaniuk. “Then again, I did get funding, so maybe the tides are changing.”

While working as a line editor on the film Public Domain, made by his live-in girlfriend Kris Lefcoe, Stefaniuk learned about Telefilm’s low-budget feature film fund. With great savvy, he made his pitch: a non-urban comedy, and cheap, cheap, cheap.

“I needed to maximize the budget and my brother does special effects and runs a creature shop. He had a beaver and an alien, so I thought: Okay, talking beaver, drunk alien,” says Stefaniuk.

Graham Greene liked the script enough to sign on as Wolf, proprietor of the small-town watering hole. (“I couldn’t believe we got Greene,” says Stefaniuk. “I guess the guy likes to work.”) Phil himself remained un-cast until the last minute. “We auditioned the whole city and finally my producer said, 'Why don’t you just do it?'”

Stefaniuk looks at a giant Phil the Alien poster propped up behind him in the hotel suite for the benefit of TV crews who will interview him later. It features a gigantic Phil face set in his signature expression: rubbery, forlorn, with an invisible hiccup from his mouth. It’s the kind of larger-than-life character that an actor can’t easily escape. “I guess I could be known as the drunk alien guy for a long time. I do wonder about that…” mutters Stefaniuk.

Phil the Alien resonates on the same frequency as the film Fubar and the TV show Trailer Park Boys. This new brand of Canadian comedy is distinct from Kids in the Hall or The Newsroom, not only because the locations are outside Toronto, but because it goes for big belly laughs, as opposed to cerebral ones.

Rob Stefaniuk as Phil in Phil The Alien. Courtesy Lions Gate Entertainment.

“I want the audience laughing,” says Stefaniuk. “I even put in a couple of jokes that weren’t my sense of humour. Not to compare myself to Shakespeare, but he would throw a few jokes to the pit. I’ll throw in a highbrow joke, a lowbrow joke, a unibrow joke.”

But as with Fubar, where Albertan head-bangers guide each other through testicular cancer with surprising tenderness, it’s gentle raunchiness. Phil is a naïf, a welcome outsider so innocent that he’s an easy target for Jesus freaks (he gets converted) and seductive assassins (he gets seduced, almost). He is – as if there’s another kind in this post-E.T. world – a loveable alien.

“Because he’s drunk for half the movie and belligerent and smug, I had to make sure the audience would want to watch him, so I imagined him the way we all are when we come into the world – innocent and goofy,” says Stefaniuk. “Of course, normally we’re babies, so we're cute.”

Stefaniuk is the baby in a family of three creative brothers from north Toronto: one is currently directing The Lion King in Boston and the other – the creature builder – was a magician-comedian who let his younger brother watch from the wings as he performed at local comedy clubs. There was no familial precedent for such creative careers; Stefaniuk’s father worked at Honeywell and his mother was a legal secretary.

“But the house was a funny place. We would laugh at the kitchen table,” says Stefaniuk. “More recently my father had a massive stroke, so it’s sort of changed the dynamic…” He looks a little sheepish, like serious is not his natural state. “I guess that’s not very funny,” he says, changing the topic to how he attended a school for the arts, juggling music and acting. Stefaniuk sometimes worked as a street musician for coin, leading patios in sing-alongs of American Pie and other “really bad songs that drunk people like.”

In his 20s, he moved to Los Angeles. Bit parts and endless auditions followed, but never the big acting break.

“Asking permission to be in someone else’s piece of crap, and being told you’re not good enough to be in the crap, that's a tough pill to swallow at night,” says Stefaniuk. “I ended up swallowing quite a few pills.” But he also won the aspiring artist’s lottery: in 1996, a script he banged out in a few weeks, The Size of Watermelons, was actually made into a film starring Paul Rudd and Ione Skye.

“I remember we were on location, and Donal Logue, one of the actors, said, ‘See that cop? He’s sitting on that bike because of something you did on your laptop six months ago,’” says Stefaniuk. “That’s a cool way to look at it.”

Not exactly warmly received – “Bad script, bad comedy,” wrote Toronto’s Eye weekly – Watermelons did lead Stefaniuk to the useful conclusion that he is a control freak.

“Comedy is all about timing and unless you can affect the timing – in other words, the editing – unless you’re cutting it, you’re really not controlling it at all,” says Stefaniuk. “I wanted to do [Phil the Alien] myself. I enjoy editing, I enjoy directing, I enjoy acting. As long as they’ll let me get away with it, I’ll keep doing all of it.”

Phil the Alien opens on March 11 in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. It opens on March 18 in Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.