We should probably preface this whole thing by saying that we absolutely love Don McKellar. And not in a cute, innocent, forgivable way—in a nerdy, fawning, obsessive kind of way. And so while much of the following interview does relate directly to Reg Harkema’s new film Monkey Warfare (which Don is in, and which will be screening at SXSW), we also couldn’t resist occasionally veering way off topic, randomly blurting out years worth of pent-up questions, and unsuccessfully trying to convince Don to move to Austin. Please forgive us.

For those of you who don’t know, Don McKellar is one of Canada’s most well-respected director/writer/actors. The multi-talented McKellar has written, directed or acted in countless award-winning films including Last Night, Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould and The Red Violin. But he’s also found success outside the film world, hosting a radio show on Canada’s CBC Radio, co-writing the Tony Award winning musical The Drowsy Chaperone and starring in the cult TV series Twitch City (a brilliant anti-sitcom about an agoraphobic television addict named Curtis).

In Monkey Warfare (named after a term Abbie Hoffman used in Steal This Book), Don stars along with his real-life girlfriend Tracy Wright as a pair of ex-revolutionaries living an underground existence in Toronto’s Parkdale neighborhood. The pair—who survive by selling garage sale treasures on the internet—meet a feisty young radical named Susan whose own revolutionary tendencies begin to threaten their safety.

We recently had a chance to chat with Don about Monkey Warfare, Twitch City and the indestructibility of television.

So the film is about a group of revolutionaries…

It’s not so much a group as a couple—me and my girlfriend, who is played by Tracy Wright. It’s sort of unclear, but we were sort of radicals who are living off the grid now in Toronto. Radicals, activists who are sort of “on the lam”.

Is it ever made clear what sort of activists you are?

Kind of, yeah. But that’s why I’m being so coy. It’s sort of revealed later on. I don’t want to give away too much. But at the beginning, all that you know is that we’re sort of living a strange life, off the grid, making money selling things on eBay, without a phone and without any connections to the civilized world. Well, we have a house and everything, but you know.

I ask because it seems like there isn’t a lot of that sort of 60s and 70s-style guerrilla activism any more.

Well, definitely not. I guess there is, but it’s definitely not as apparent as it was when I was in university. People are shy about being organised now, that’s for sure. And I think that they’ve been cowed, you know, beaten down a fair bit. Activists, they don’t want to seem like Angelina Jolie or Bono or…

Right. But I mean, do the characters feel obsolete?

Yeah, I think at the beginning, they feel very jaded. They’re feeling extremely sceptical about what’s happening today. But then they meet up with a young girl, and she challenges them and sort of revivifies their lives, sexually and politically and in every way. But they’re definitely jaded—my character in particular is extremely jaded at the beginning.

Is the film intended as a comedy, or it more like a serious sort of…

It’s a sort of comedy, but it’s also a drama. It has a kind of melodrama of the Fasbinder school, but it’s also funny, I think. I don’t know…it’s a dramatic comedy or something like that. That sounds terrible, doesn’t it?

No, it…well, yeah, maybe it does.

I mean it’s serious, the characters are fully realised, it’s not tongue-in-cheek in any way. But it’s funny situationally. Funny things happen and there are funny lines and things.

It seems like a lot of the work you do deals with a certain kind of ambiguity. For example, with Curtis [who’s the main character in Twitch City]—on one hand, the show is very reverent of television, and on the other hand really critical of it.

I always thought it was about—you know, it was respectful of the intelligence of the viewers. And I always feel that people can watch television intelligently, whether or not it’s not good, whether or not it deserves that intelligence. I never buy the theory—that sort of “dumbed down” theory. People watch, and their minds are still engaged, even if they’re watching crap. And you know, it’s not un-valuable crap sometimes. Sometimes there are valuable thoughts that can be gleaned from watching bad television. But right now there is also some very good television.

So, people can watch bad television and still not be bad people.

Exactly. Now I know I took you way off topic there, I’ve interrupted your question.

No, I was sort of interested in what you’re watching on television right now.

Oh yeah? Someone just sent me up the complete Battlestar Galactica set.

The new Battlestar Galactica? I’ve heard that they’re good, but…

I’ll let you know soon. I saw some and I thought they were really good. Umm…you know, I watch a lot of television. But there’s not much I watch regularly. Right now I’m sort of watching Heroes, which is interesting to me although I don’t think it’s great writing. I also love watching…umm, I don’t know. I guess the sort of "Curtis thing" is watching all sorts of television, and watching with a sort of critical eye.

So if I were to just shout out a day and a time and a channel…

No, no, no, I’m not like that. But I probably do watch whatever you’d shout out.

Because I considered just randomly doing that during the course of our conversation.

There are too many channels now. Curtis would have a harder time now. That game would now require a savant kind of mind. Which Curtis had anyway, I suppose, slightly.

Definitely. Getting back to Monkey Warfare...is it harder to act in something you haven’t written? Because a lot of the films you’ve acted in, you’ve written.

No, I don’t think so. In a certain way, it’s more fun as an actor, because you have to figure it out using your actor muscles. And that’s sort of exciting. When you write it yourself, you can say “if this doesn’t make sense to me I’ll just change it.” But when you’re act in someone else’s stuff, you have to say “it doesn’t make sense to me. Why would my character say that? There must be a reason”. So it’s sort of fun that way. Although I have to say, working with Reg, Tracy and I—Tracy, who’s in it, is also my girlfriend in real life—we worked with Reg a fair bit on the script, so we did have our input.

And you’ve all actually worked together a lot in the past. Reg has edited some of your movies, no?

Yeah, Reg edited both of my feature films, Last Night and Childstar, and Tracy I’ve worked with forever, because we had a theatre company years ago. And the producer Jen Jonas, she and I worked together—she was my assistant director on 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould. I wasn’t the director, but I was the writer, and then she was my assistant director on Last Night. So anyway, yeah, it goes way back. But that’s how Reg was able to get a cast and crew together with no money.

Is it like a community of friends? Down here in Austin, the filmmaking community is really tight-knit, but I think that’s partly a function of the city being so [comparatively] small.

That’s probably the case here too. People often remark on that—people from out of town, or at least people from L.A., you know—say “wow, you guys have lunch together and you hang out, and you don’t hate each other and stab each other in the back!” Because the country is small, and I think that generally we realize (I’m sure that this is a bit idealistic) that other people’s success is good for us. So it’s pretty friendly, I think.

I know that you’ve said you would never move to L.A. but I was hoping we could convince you to move here to Austin.

Yeah, that would be allright. I actually go to L.A. a lot, like I guess everyone in movies does. But it’s just for work, and I sort of go in and out. I was there for a while last year because I co-wrote this musical, The Drowsy Chaperone, which played in L.A. and then it moved to New York and…anyway, so I was there in L.A. for months, which was very unusual for me. But hilariously it was for a musical; a theatrical musical, so nothing to do with the movies.

Living in Toronto, the city often plays as a major character in a lot of your work.

Yeah, for sure. It doesn’t play in a lot of people’s stuff, but for me I’ve always tried to do stuff where Toronto is identified as Toronto. Because as you know, a lot of people shoot up here for Boston or Chicago. Like Chicago for the film Chicago, things like that. So I always try and make it identifiably Toronto. Like, Twitch City was very much a neighbourhood show, and so is Monkey Warfare, which is very much about Parkdale and the Parkdale community.

There is a film festival here in the summertime called SXSW Click that’s centered around mobile devices and the web. You’ve dabbled in that medium, right?

Yeah, I did a couple of films—I actually shot about eight but I’ve only finished two. They’re called “Phone Call From Imaginary Girlfriend”, and I shot two in Turkey and finished them. But I also shot one in London, one in Madrid, one in Regina and L.A….so I’m going to try to put them together, finish them off. They’re kind of… I thought, “what would you like to see on your little mobile phone?” Not much, really, except for maybe a phone call from someone nice. So they’re sort of imaginary phone calls for lonely guys to watch. I’m going to try and make them available online, so people can download them to their phones.

Do you think that people are going to eventually want to see more substantial, full-length television shows and movies on their phones?

Well, I think it’s a very specific medium. There aren’t a lot of reasons why you would want to. If you were stuck somewhere and you were bored, you’d maybe watch something on your phone. If there was breaking news, you’d maybe watch it on your phone. If you were trying to watch some sporting event…there aren’t a lot of reasons. But I also thought, you know, in Japan there’s a lot of soft-core porn that they sell on cell phones and in Europe they have these little tiny serials, like little melodramas, so I tried to combine that and imagine what people…mine are not pornographic, but they share kind of emotional similarities. They’re more romantic versions of the same thing. You know, what I like about the phone is that it’s personal. Everyone has a very close relationship with their phone. I don’t particularly like phones myself, but it’s definitely becoming more and more part of people’s identity, and they’re very possessive of it, so I thought that that’s an interesting place to address people from.

This might border on sacrilege—but do you think mobile devices and the internet are replacing television as the dominant cultural force?

People have been saying that for a while. TV viewership, though, isn’t going down by any means. And it still seems to be one of the only ways to create large-scale community viewing experiences—that kind of massive, American Idol kind of thing. But it’s definitely going to start overlapping more and more. I watch television, and I also download some television, things like that. So it will definitely cross over pretty soon, I would say. I’m not sentimental about it. People will still want programs, I think; they’ll still want dramatic programs. There is definitely every sign that people want what television has provided: stories and characters and things like that.

And I suppose there’s sort of a parallel in radio. They thought television would kill it off, but it’s still kickin’.

I think television will be around for a really long time, whether or not it looks and feels the same. Television may share the same screen with your computer, but television will still be there. And we’ll be digging through those old shows like Curtis was, just like people look through vinyl now.

Collecting VHS tapes, maybe?

Exactly. All those tapes we have piled in boxes will one day become valuable. People will appreciate the terrible image, maybe.

You’ve worked in pretty much every medium in various capacities—radio and film and television… what do you think you enjoy doing most?

Well, I really like changing it up. Partially I like surprising people who are following my career, but also I think I have a fairly low attention span and I like to surprise myself and scare myself by trying new mediums. I’ve just noticed a pattern that whenever I do something and it has some degree of success, I quickly do the opposite thing. So it’s kind of a lifestyle choice as much as anything else, and it would be very hard for me to say that I preferred doing one or the other, you know what I mean? I don’t like to limit myself. Because also doing something, like you said I did a radio show, and it just helped me think about other ideas – ideas for movies and ideas for TV and things like that.

I’m sorry. We’ve drifted a little far off topic. But there’s a scene that was supposedly cut from Monkey Warfare where a man explains how to make a Molotov cocktail. And I was wondering whether it’s going to be in the version we’ll be seeing at SXSW?

I’m not sure, actually. There was a scene that was cut by…well, the lawyers demanded it was cut for the release up here. But I know that Reg wants to show it, and certainly I would think for a festival it would be allowed. Reg said they wanted to show it down there, and certainly in Austin…well, everyone in Austin knows how to make a Molotov cocktail anyway, so it’s sort of pointless. But still, I think they would enjoy it. It’s got some good tips.

Does the fact that the film was done on such a tight budget work in your favour? Do you think it gave the finished film a sort of guerrilla feel?

Yeah, that’s right. When Reg approached me with the script, I thought it was smart and I thought it was a funny script I thought there were characters that I knew—and they’re certainly characters that Austin will know, by the way, the type of character—but I hadn’t seen represented on film very much. But I also thought it was smart because the subject matter matched the way he was going to be shooting.

You’re right, the idea of doing this as a little guerrilla unit makes sense when you see the film, and it would be sort of ridiculous if it was a big budget Hollywood film. Not that it ever would be, but you know what I mean. Often people approach me with low-budget ideas that you realise immediately will look crappy because they should be on…they’re not realised properly for the medium. This allowed us a certain kind of mobility, it allowed us to get some looser shooting. Just for instance, there’s a lot of bike riding; shooting out of the back of a van at someone riding on a bike, things like that. Instead of closing down the road, getting some sort of camera car and things like that…it made sense.

Was the film shot digitally?

Yep.

Do you have a feeling about that either way? Would you consider going all-digital in your own work?

I don’t think I’m sentimental about film. I think film can look better, certainly. But when it’s correct, when it’s used well, I think digital stuff can be good. And the difference is getting less and less pronounced. Which means, by the way, that it’s less cheap too because you have to light it like film increasingly, because it has more sensitivity, and setups take longer. I think that the small window that was open for—it seems I’ve said crappy a lot in this interview—for that kind of dirty-looking video thing is over. I don’t think audiences have the patience for that anymore. But still it’s a little cheaper, and there are definitely looks you can get with digital imagery that you can’t get in film, and if you can exploit it to your advantage it’s cool. And, I think, like with the TV thing, it’s going to change over. They’re just making the technology better, and able to emulate things you can do on film so that it won’t make that much difference. I don’t have that Roger Ebert purist kind of “it is made with light, it will never be replaced” attitude. I don’t know if you’ve heard that argument, but anyway I don’t really believe that.

Well, I’m excited about seeing Monkey Warfare.

Where is it screening, what cinema?

I believe it’s at the Alamo.

Oh yeah, well that’s good. That’s perfect. I was telling Reg about that theatre. That’s great.

Actually, someone at the Alamo was telling me that she had met you when you were here at SXSW with Childstar, and that you were a bit nervous about the format.

Well it’s definitely scary when you hear about it, yeah, because you imagine, like, his majesty’s feast, Medieval Times, people banging tankards of beer and cheering characters and things like that.

Well, maybe most people don’t imagine that.

Well, that’s what I was imagining. But it wasn’t like that at all, as you know. No, I thought it was really cool. It’s a great theatre. It really is the perfect place for it. And Reg will be there, and he’s very entertaining. So you should encourage people to go out

I definitely will.

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