INDEPTH: TORONTO FILM FESTIVAL
Not his uncle's nephew
CBC News Online | September 8, 2003
It's hard to avoid using the word "Cronenbergian" when having a conversation with Aaron Woodley. That's because the 32-year-old Toronto filmmaker is the nephew of David Cronenberg, the director revered and reviled for gory, disturbing motion pictures like Scanners and Crash. When it comes to the films they make, however, there's not much of a family resemblance between the two.
Aaron Woodley, seeking to outgrow the moniker "David Cronenberg's nephew."
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Woodley's new picture, his feature debut, is Rhinocerous Eyes, the tale of a young man living in a warehouse used to store movie props. The picture does have a dark tone but, contrary to what Cronenberg fans might expect, there's only a single severed body part in the entire 92 minutes.
At several points in Rhinocerous Eyes, the detritus around the central character – broken mannequin limbs, scuffed patio lanterns, discarded toys – spontaneously assembles itself into human form and starts talking. Filmed using stop-motion animation, these are the only scenes that seem overtly Cronenbergian. They recall the talking insect/typewriter from Naked Lunch, but otherwise Woodley doesn't appear to be consciously following in his uncle's footsteps.
In fact, the young director says his style is likened more frequently to that of Canada's other auteur. "I'm getting a lot more comparisons to Atom Egoyan, strangely enough," he says.
Woodley got the idea for the script about seven years ago, when he was working on one of his four short films. Searching for props in Toronto, he visited a warehouse known as The Prop Factory, and was enchanted. He began wondering: Who would inhabit such a place?
"They're kind of like pirates," he says of the people who run these "indoor junkyards." (Rhinocerous Eyes looks as if it were set entirely in J.F. Sebastian's apartment at the end of Blade Runner.)
Where Woodley differs from both his uncle and Egoyan is in his ability to provoke laughter. Despite the fact his movie is a meditation on what happens when people act on their obsessions, Woodley considers it a comedy. The young director is just as interested in making people guffaw as in making them gasp.
In one scene, for instance, a police officer visits the prop house where Chep (Michael Pitt) lives and works. The cop questions Chep's boss about the strange habits of his employee. The boss, played by Matt Servitto, explains that Chep never ventures outside because he's an idiot savant. "I only hire idiot savants," he deadpans.
Woodley says all the film's characters are facets of his own personality. He drew on his childhood years to flesh out Chep, who has a hard time separating real life from the figments of his imagination. As a boy, Woodley says, his main love was drawing. This led him to attend York University's film school. He worked as an animator after that, eventually branching out into writing and directing.
It's obvious the films he saw as a youth in the early ’80s made an impression on Woodley that lasts to this day. He says he fell in love with stop-motion animation because of motion pictures such as Clash of the Titans. He compares Dragonslayer favourably to Jurassic Park, and waxes rhapsodic about the low-tech methods used in The Empire Strikes Back: "The Millennium Falcon was great. And that was a model."
"I quite despise it," he says of the computer-generated imagery now in vogue in Hollywood. "I think it's an abomination."
These are definitely the words of a filmmaker who is determined to blaze a trail of his own. As for the inevitable comparisons to his uncle, Woodley says he’s going to let moviegoers be the final judge.
"I don't think that we make the same types of films at all," he says emphatically.
Dan Brown will be attending the Toronto International Film Festival for its entirety, from Sept. 4 to 13. Throughout the 9-day festival he will bring you reports on the latest Canadian films. Read his dispatches and follow his comments by clicking on the links.
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Dan Brown is the site's senior arts editor/reporter. Before joining us he was a lineup editor and senior writer for Newsworld International. Dan helped to launch the National Post's Arts & Life section, where he was a columnist and reporter. A former editorial writer, copy editor and journalism instructor, Dan has degrees from three universities.
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