Director Evan Kelly and screenwriter Josh MacDonald talk about Nova Scotian indie THE CORRIDOR
Interview by Ariel Esteban Cayer

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Canadian sleeper hit The Corridor took Montreal audiences by surprise when it cialis online us premiered at the Fantasia Film Festival a little over a month ago, winning their hearts to eventually take home the Gold Prize for Audience Award. With its ominous and gorgeous minimalist poster promising bloodshed and backwoods terrors, a premise shrouded in mystery, as well as rave word-of-mouth womans levitra following the first screening, The Corridor and its tale of male friendship pushed on the brink was quite hard to ignore. And rightfully so: this cohesive character-driven indie hybrid of horror and sci-fi is a refreshing take on the cabin-in-the-woods narrative, offering a genuinely endearing – and bloody! – look at male dynamics and preoccupations. Bound to turn some heads, Spectacular Optical had the opportunity to talk to director Evan Kelly and screenwriter Josh MacDonald about the project’s inception, its themes and production.

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AEC: Can you guys tell me story of where the project came from and how you came to work together?

EK: The project began as an original idea of Josh’s.  On the practical side, it emerged from a casual conversation with our producer – Mike Masters – who encouraged [Josh] to complete his first-in-progress draft. Mike saw a tonne of potential, optioned it, and order cialis online without prescription started the development process. Mike brought in our other producer – Craig Cameron – and eventually they asked me to come aboard. Mike, Craig, and I work together frequently in a variety of capacities while doing work for a commercial production company in Halifax, Nova Scotia. If anything, our long shared history is one of the things that enabled us to collaborate so smoothly. Our resources and our ambitions only had a passing acquaintance, so it took the viagra canada generic four of us to truly make them connect.

Shared history in our small city and our smaller film community is easy. We know each other’s strengths and can cover for each other’s deficiencies… but even still, I was frequently surprised by everyone’s determination to make it all work.

JM: I set out to write a horror movie that reached some pretty psychedelic or transcendental material, but I also really wanted—somehow, at the same time—to write a grounded character piece about male friendships at a certain age.

AEC: There’s something very relatable about friends turning on each other. Is The Corridor and its characters derived from personal experiences?

JM: Though the “cottage in the woods” setting is a pretty canonical one for horror movies, I was actually writing about my own cottage in Nova Scotia, and about the group of guys who’ve populated it throughout the years. All of the characters are fictions, certainly, but they’re also amalgams of my buddies and, primarily, myself; the script undoubtedly says more about me than anybody else. That being said, within the kernel of my initial idea—old friendships in crisis, tested by extraordinary trial—I quickly plugged some actual circumstances in there which sort of fit the bill, in a real-world way. I had a buddy of mine suffer a pretty serious mental crack-up at one point in our lives, and I was the one who had to commit him to care. The tumult of that and how our groups’ friendships persevered afterward—well, that’s somewhat in the movie. I also wanted to play very fair by mental illness: I didn’t want my friend’s proxy—our lead character, Tyler—to be vilified for his condition, but to ultimately rise up into being the movie’s hero. All five of our characters are burdened in some way, all of them are facing uncertain futures (mid-mid-life crisis), but it’s Tyler who most squarely confronts his burdens and then tries to overcome them: he’s the one with the hero’s journey.

And my real-world friend is doing great, by the way—I hope he sees this movie as some perverse tribute to a particular time in our lives. Even the name I picked out for this character—“Ty”—is an extraction from the letters in my friend’s actual name.

EK: When it comes to being relatable, that was something that drew me in as well. Almost everyone has a group of friends who share a dynamic that resonates with the characters in our film. I have always had groups of male friends – in high school, university – and I found it easy to find loose parallels between the groups I had been in, and these guys. I think everyone does or can.

AEC: The film, through its effortless performances, does feels very intimate. How was it like to get the actors into that dynamic? What was it like on set?

EK: On meagre resources like ours, it was a tough but completely right decision to put a block of those resources towards rehearsal. So we were able to spend time in a room explaining the script to the actors; making room for their interpretation and even working out some of the physical beats and blocking.

I have had the chance to direct actors – somewhat – in short films and commercials. But this was the real immersion experience. On the technical side, ensemble films like this ask a lot. Coverage is so much easier in a two-hander, than when you are trying to account for (frequently) five characters in the room or space. And the guys themselves were so diverse. There was a real range of experience, technique and approach. Each of them was an individual. Without naming names, a couple of them approached in intellectually – wanting to discuss the rational aspect to each direction. Others were more instinctive and felt comfortable with a looser foundation. Their approach to discussing character, maintaining motivation, and even rehearsal was wildly different. It took a couple of days to figure out how to communicate with each of them, but to their credit they were all completely committed to the task.

I have heard – after the fact – that there was a minor amount of tension and dynamic amongst the actors, which even they wouldn’t be able to sort out – whether it was just bleed over from their working characters. But our shooting approach was very isolating. We shot the film in a very rural environment. There was no escape – on set, or in the evening – so the guys got a crash course in being around each other. We all think that it would be a weaker film if each night they returned to their homes, or the wider distractions of the city.

AEC: Would you say communications, from Chris’ silent sign language to the corridor’s mind-melting abilities, is the main theme of the film?  It pervades every aspect of these characters lives and interactions – can you comment on that?

JM: That’s certainly what we were going for—the idea that miscommunication (crossed wires) between vital relationships can prove to be really destructive, or, conversely, that true communication might be beyond words. The five characters are trying to get back in touch with one another as a group, but– when the corridor entity also “reaches out and touches somebody”—this ‘coming together’ turns into a collision.

EK: I don’t know if this is the right approach to telling a story on film or not, but as a member of a film audience, I love subtext, metaphor, and theme. A great surface story with sharp characters and cool plotting is that much better when you can glimpse a second interpretation that lies within. If a film about a home invasion can be enjoyed as a reflection of cultural fears – or an escapist zombie fiction carries echoes of modern anxieties about pandemics – so much the better. So Josh and I did think about how our film could express a theme that we were interested in. In earlier drafts, there was an abundance of ideas – which (in my opinion) competed for attention. Many of those ideas are still present, but with less of a profile. We made a commitment to the singular idea of communication, and Josh adjusted and re-adjusted each moment to resonate with that idea.

JM: When Evan came aboard as director, we talked about nesting all of the movie’s thematic interests inside this big idea of “communication and miscommunication”. When I turned around a new draft– specifically tuned for Evan– I hid “easter egg” nods to this theme within the characters’ jobs: Bobcat is a simple cable repairman, the guy who brings the signal into your house; Huggs is his high-end opposite, having made good in the telecommunications field; Ev is a bartender, good with a glib quip and campfire-confident on a guitar; Chris used to play lead-line guitar alongside Ev, but this has been impaired by his violent hand-injury… the same hand injury which has destroyed Chris’ vocation as a sign language interpreter. Chris’s job was meant to illustrate that he’s the group’s “best communicator,’ their hub. Tyler has no job in the movie, but his assignment during the narrative is to “get on the same page with his friends again,” and to re-establish broken lines of communication with his former best friend, Chris. Finally, Tyler worries that his illness creates a “miscommunication” between his mind and body… and that he can no longer trust his own five senses.

Taking these naturalistic expressions of theme and then fusing them to our movie’s MacGuffin, we wanted the corridor entity to function like a ‘burning bush’, a ‘Tower of Babel”, or a “universe wide web” that floods these guys with information overload…. communication which they can’t ultimately handle – the future unmans our overgrown boys.

EK: Modern communication is a blessing and a curse… and so is the corridor.  As they revel in the elation of what is possible, they are wilfully ignorant of the price that is being exacted. So works our communications world. It is great that the Internet, cell phones, social networks, whatever can give us such insight and access to each other – but the boundaries are invasive, elastic, and at times destructive. Too much information is a dangerous thing, as is the cacophony of communication without the precision of taking the time to listen.

Yet none of that matters to the enjoyment or understanding of the film. It can be about 5 friends unwinding and unspooling in a cabin in the woods. It can be about a mysterious space that triggers some unexpected impulses. It can be about friends who start attacking each other. But as we tried to discover the story, we needed a foundation on which all that could rest and grow. It gave shape to our choices, whether or not it should ever be immediately apparent to the audience.

AEC: The Corridor walks the line between drama, horror and science-fiction, recalling at times work as varied as The Thing, Dreamcatcher, The Twilight Zone or Larry Fessenden’s wintery character-driven landscapes (Wendigo, The Last Winter). Can you discuss your influences as genre film enthusiasts and how they came into the making of this film?

JM: That’s funny, one of the first movies Evan and I got together and watched before making our movie was Fessenden’s Wendigo. I very much appreciate Fessenden’s character-forward approach to horror: it makes him stand in pretty bold counterpoint to a lot of the empty sensationalism that passes for horror movies these days. In terms of influences, I’m a movie omnivore: I try my best to consume a balanced diet of film genres. I do adore horror movies, though, and The Thing, Session 9, The Shining, Let’s Scare Jessica To Death, Deliverance, were certainly going into The Corridor’s DNA. Just as much, though, the 1st act of the movie was influenced by Barry Levinson’s Diner, John Sayle’s Return of the Secaucus Seven (which predates The Big Chill), Beautiful Girls, etc.. The second act of The Corridor is our “cabin in the woods” horror movie, but then the 3rd Act purposely pushes hard against the ‘unknowable’… using it both as a horrific thing, but also as an ecstatic, transcendental, almost religious experience… and that brought us more into the realm of sci-fi – though we’re definitely some “lo-fi sci-fi”. Movies that went into the hopper here, at least in an inspirational way, were Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Stalker, Vincenzo Natali’s Cube, and definitely Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. One of the basic premises behind The Corridor was “what would happen if the Monolith wasn’t discovered by geniuses from NASA, but by five garbage-men while they’re pounding back Mooseheads?” These guys who are trying to figure out their place in the universe, suddenly, one weekend, come to believe that they’re standing at the universe’s centre… but they don’t know how to solve the universe’s riddles.

EK: I have admitted to this in the past. I can’t rightly say that I am a genre enthusiast- certainly not in the same way that Josh and Mike Masters are genre enthusiasts. I certainly like a lot of great genre movies, because they are great movies. But I also know that there are delights to be had deeper along the genre shelf, that I have missed because I have wondered elsewhere in the video aisles.

I do have the groundwork. I was a Stephen King obsessive up to a certain point. And then I stopped, and moved onto other writers. I loved the Twilight Zone and have memories that I am uncertain as to whether they were old episodes or half remembered dreams. But the influences on this film, for me, were as likely to be small independent character dramas. I went to little character study movies like Old Joy and All the Real Girls to consider how friends grow and fall apart. Of course, Mike and Josh rightly prevented me from staying there. And they gave me lists of films to watch, like The Thing, Evil Dead and other shameful absences on my ‘have-seen’ lists of movies. And thankfully they did because we live somewhere in the middle.

JM: Producer Mike Masters—who really is so, so responsible for putting this whole movie together from the beginning–  selected Evan as director for a multiplicity of reasons, but one of them was this: Evan’s not a horror movie guy. Masters believed that Evan’s interest in the New American Realism and quieter types of cinematic storytelling might ultimately distinguish The Corridor from, say, Final Destination 3D. I think Evan’s done a terrific job on this movie, from start to finish.

Mitch Davis, Evan Kelly and Josh MacDonald at Fantasia 2011. Photo by Isabelle Stephen

AEC: From paper to screen, how did the titular corridor evolve?  Josh – can you talk a little bit about the thought process and evolution of this science-fiction concept? How the process of actually executing the idea, working with CGI and such?

JM: It really started as an image: a perfect geometrical “ghost,” exponentially building upon itself in the middle of nature. Having that force-field then be discovered by a “boy who’s afraid to cry wolf” was what came next. As written in the script, the corridor was defined by absence:  if it’s snowing, for instance, it’s snowing everywhere but in here… a place where the weather cannot penetrate. There was a spectral disquiet to this image I liked a lot, and, from there, it thematically developed. Our main characters are also defined by absence: each of these guys has something that they feel they lack. So having these hollow men then gravitate to an area in the woods, which—in painter’s terms—is a negative space was really interesting, because the guys’ experience quickly becomes, well, really negative. Finally, these men also feel they lack a “sense of direction”, so—as the corridor exponentially elongates itself and becomes a pathway to somewhere—you can see characters like Chris seize on a new, mad belief that, “Hey, here it is–! This is my sense of direction; this is my new path!” Through production and post-production, the look of the corridor took a side-step in order to become achievable: finished, it’s more of a rippling energy field than an absence, but I believe it still carries all the thematic weight it was meant to carry.  Of course this entire concept was waaaaaaaay easier to scribble down than it was for the rest of the team to dead-lift onto the screen— to describe all the ingenuity that went into realizing the corridor on our thrifty budget, I’ll defer to Evan!

EK: The Corridor was hard. We knew that it would be a stretch on our resources, so we attacked it as responsibly as we could. We used a bunch of techniques… in camera lighting and lensing, green screen and plate shots, and ultimately, the diligent work of a group of determined rotoscopers. But we never would have embarked on the project if we didn’t have one key collaborator. Jacob Owens was our Visual Effects Supervisor. He – virtually singlehandedly took on the 260+ effects shots in the movie. We worked together on commercials, and Jake had pulled off so much in the past. He was creative, lightning fast, and applied himself around the clock. The same challenges of production followed us into post. In the same way that our schedule and resources only allowed (often) for a single, or limited number of takes…in post, we really didn’t have time to reflect or experiment with our shots. When we finally got into adding the corridor – the timeline was so tight, that we would have a quick review and maybe a revision pass – but would have to move on. Hell of a learning lesson…

AEC: The ending is very bleak and uncompromising, and to quote a friend “feels like the wrong team wins” Can you discuss where that came from?

EK: It is organic. Josh can dispute this, because – no doubt – the creation of it wasn’t easy. But the story started at the beginning and leads us to the end. The consequences for each of the characters are predicted and cemented with each choice they make. In the film, within the group, there is a central relationship. The film starts with a betrayal of sorts and it can only be reconciled with a sacrifice. That is old-school story telling. Our story had to earn its redemption. And once things turn dark in our film (which in a way is in about the 2nd minute), you just have to stay on that path. There was a point in editing the film when our editor, Thorben Bieger, turned to me and said, “Christ, this is bleak” when considering the unseen implications of all that could happen beyond the credit roll. However, I always tended to see the film as kind of positive and complete. For our key character, he has righted the wrongs around him as best as he can.

JM: The original ending was even bleaker, but there was a feeling within the team that then we’d be only presenting nihilism. Our story-editor, Evangelo Kioussis, felt that if we were exploring the idea that “miscommunication can destroy you,” then we should also demonstrate that statement’s opposite. Without getting too much into spoiler territory, we feel that our new ending shows Tyler going “beyond words”—mobilized and whole, with his deeds and his sacrifice exampling healthy, positive communication: somehow, Tyler gets through to “the corridor” and embraces it, for the sake of his remaining friends. Personally, I’m never bummed out when I get to the end of The Corridor… but I think that’s because—when I get to the final credits– I always feel a booster-shot of pride in the entire team: the cast, the crew, Evan, Mike and Craig have all done mighty work in bringing this all to life.

AEC: Do you guys have any upcoming projects? Josh, can discuss Faith, Fraud & Minimum Wage and the experience of working with Canuxploitation legend George Mihalka?

JM: My Bloody Valentine! Hobo With A Shotgun and The Corridor are continuing a tradition of Nova Scotian horror that begins with George! I have great fondness for George, and George absolutely let me stay with “my baby” all the way through production, pre to post. Like The Corridor, Faith, Fraud & Minimum Wage began as speculative writing, without a home: in this case, the script was based on my stage play Halo, and I just hoped that somebody would make it into a movie someday. That “someday” turned out to be in the same twelve months that we would make The Corridor, so it was a crazy period in my life. George fought like a lion for FFMW, and I learned a lot from him—both about the art and the politics of movie-making—but it was a tough shoot. Having these experiences back-to-back has been interesting for me: FFMW was a bigger budget (ha!) Canadian indie shot on 35mm, with—in my opinion—too many cooks. The Corridor—shot on the Red—was a “little” movie, with a little budget, and that was enough to keep the core creative team away from most of that extra static: The Corridor felt like an extended discovery process among friends. I’m glad to have had both experiences. To me, FFMW felt like a 20th century model of Canadian filmmaking, and The Corridor felt more like a 21st century model… and I’d like to keep moving toward the future. That being said, I remain proud of a lot of FFMW, and I am just as proud of that movie’s core cast as I am of The Corridor’s cast. Having George on-hand for The Corridor’s Fantasia screening was a big moment for me: I was so glad he was there that night.

Looking toward future projects, I have a number of stories—genre and non-genre—that I’m really excited about sharing. All of them are mid-process, and some of them are a closer to completion than others. I just have to remain one step ahead of the day-job in order to share them with you, but I hope that they’re coming soon…

AEC: Evan, this is your feature-length debut and an extremely strong one at that. Any projects beyond this one?

EK: I have spent some time trying to figure out what my next step could be. We live and work in the Canadian film model, so any next project isn’t going to be right around the corner. Out of necessity, I have returned to the day job of producing and directing commercials and video projects… which is just fine. I get to shoot all the time – and I work out ideas, techniques, challenges in and around the edges of all of those projects. But I am looking for the next thing. And I am pretty certain that I would want to stay genre, but keep it anchored in character and rooted in theme. I won’t necessarily rush to shoot something where the blood flows as freely, but the sci-fi, suspense aspects are right in my sights. Films like Primer, Moon, Another Earth are all pretty inspiring and might be a realistic place where I should head. And probably like any first time feature director… after this experience, I finally feel completely ready to direct my first feature. So crank up the time machine, let’s go back.

The Corridor will screen (with director Evan Kelly in attendance) as part of Austin’s Fantastic Fest, which runs from September 22nd to September 29th. Stay tuned for more details.

About the author:

Ariel Esteban Cayer

Ariel Esteban Cayer is a film student, programmer for the Fantasia International Film Festival, writer for Panorama-Cinema and an occasional contributor to Fangoria Magazine.