This article was originally published on beingtheremag.com, an independent music and film magazine that ran from 2004 to 2007. It is presented here as part of the Being There Magazine archive.
By Adam Anklewicz | Being There Magazine, January/February 2007
Reginald Harkema, Don McKellar and Nadia Litz sat down with Being There in a downtown Toronto bar/concert venue. Together, they crafted a unique film about drugs, political action, love and bicycles: Monkey Warfare.
Dan (McKellar) and Linda (Tracey Wright) have been alone together for too long, having had to abandon their lives in Vancouver and live under the radar, lost in Toronto. The pair has been able to scrape by with a respectful landlord and the ability to transform their garage sale finds to money on eBay. Through the downtown streets and alleyways, abandoned by their owners, in the garbage are treasures to others. Dan and Linda use this knowledge to scrape by.
After the disappearance of their dealer, Dan encounters Susan (Litz), a young, intelligent woman, willing to supply Don with quality B.C. bud. It’s not just his money that Susan’s after; soon she discovers Dan’s interest in urban guerrilla warfare and his vast library indulging this interest. Dan’s skilled in the art of bicycle repair, as well as bicycle theft, a talent that Susan is willing to exploit for her own means.
Don McKellar is a long time staple of Canadian film and television. McKellar wrote and starred in the recent DVD release, Twitch City, a CBC sitcom about life in front of a television. McKellar has also directed the features Last Night and Childstar and recently won a best book Tony Award for his musical The Drowsy Chaperone.
Through countless films, theatrical works and television appearances, McKellar is best known for co-writing The Red Violin and Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould with director François Girard.
Director Reginald Harkema’s résumé is also filled with some classic Canadian films. Harkema had cut Hard Core Logo and through the film’s director, Bruce McDonald, met McKellar. Later McKellar invited Harkema to edit his two films. Harkema made his directorial debut with A Girl Is A Girl in 1999 and in 2004 directed the documentary Better Off In Bed that followed The New Pornographers (who won’t allow the release of the film). As he had worked with them before, Harkema wanted to make a film starring Wright and McKellar, a real life couple.
While chatting with Harkema before the interview, he asked about Being There and I could see him light up when I mentioned music. Monkey Warfare features a soundtrack handpicked by the director, and it’s obvious that a lot of love went into its compilation. Featuring the likes of The Fugs, Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings and Leonard Cohen, the music will intrigue the audience and make it worth their while to watch the credits and jot down some names. Mostly from Dan’s collection of anti-establishment vinyl, the music is some of the best insight into the characters in the film. The songs and characters are intertwined to help establish this fictional world in our realm.
Harkema, Litz and McKellar discussed with me Monkey Warfare’s politics, the characters and the city it evolved from.
Being There: What drew you to examine the concept of urban guerrilla warfare in this film?
Reginald Harkema: I think it was just a fantasy. I grew up in a Christian household with a cop father and certain indoctrination with how the world worked; I went outside and there was a lot of injustice in the world. I have a very temperamental personality and get quite angry. I’ve kind of medicated that with marijuana use over the years. I just thought to myself, what it would be like to be someone who’s burned with such righteous anger, a righteous anger that I wish I could have burned with, if I had balls.
Don McKellar: So it’s wish fulfilment?
RH: It’s a revenge fantasy. Too many SUVs and HUMVs sideswiping me; wouldn’t it be great to smash one.
DM: I didn’t know that, but I guess that makes sense.
RH: It’s like N.W.A., man, “Straight Outta Compton”, crazy motherfucker.
BT: You’re a cyclist?
RH: 365 days a year, man!
DM: Reg will be riding through the pouring rain, through the snow…
Nadia Litz: Even in the dead of winter?
RH: Yeah, oh yeah. Some might think that by choosing a bicycle as a mode of transportation that you’re making a statement about wanting to save the world and all, but it just comes down to being too cheap and too mechanically disinclined to own a car.
BT: In Toronto there’s a pretty big cycling community.
DM: Yeah, it’s a good city for being a cyclist.
RH: It’s flat!
BT: Is that a movement you’re part of and is that –
RH: No, I’m kind of this weird lone wolf. It’s not an advocacy thing for me, it’s just –
DM: [Reg] being from Vancouver, he doesn’t have deep roots in the Toronto…
RH: and it’s only since making the film that I’ve met people involved in that cycle advocacy. Those people are way more committed than I am.
DM: Are they coming out to the film, Reg? In Vancouver did they come out?
RH: Here’s the fucking thing that I realised in making a movie about slacker cyclists, pot smokers who dig through garbage –
NL: They don’t wanna go to the fucking movies.
RH: They don’t want to pay $13 to go to a movie.
DM: Who does?
RH: I think it’s gonna have a healthy life on DVD.
DM: On bootleg DVDs.
BT: That’s a great way to make some money. You’ve got two sets of characters. There’s Dan and Linda who have distanced themselves from any kind of movement; in the end they’re very lackadaisical towards any type of movement until they’re confronted by it. Then there’s Susan who is a bit too committed, she’s willing to take anything with a little bit of knowledge and just push it. Where is the middle ground for that?
NL: I think that’s for the audience to decide.
DM: The audience is in the middle.
BT: Hopefully, yes the audience would be in the middle.
DM: Most audiences would be.
RH: It’s like, uh, you hold up these characters for an audience to say, “Do you wanna be slacker-ass, do nothing, let the world go by, or do you want to blow yourself up in an attempt to blowing up the inequities of the world?”
DM: I think Dan and Linda are certainly aware of the issues at hand and they’ve become so used to repressing their anger and their guilt that they’ve almost convinced themselves that they no longer care. They really care more than they’re willing to admit.
RH: That’s kind of reflective of me, don’t you think?
DM: Yeah, yeah.
RH: In my declarations of cynicism and no home.
DM: I think that’s true, absolutely true. I think all these things… I think in the end, all these things come up and their convictions are real and they’ve taken it very seriously. I think through the course of the film, there’s some sense of them being forced to deal with it in a more concrete way. They’re forced to the middle a little bit; they’re drawn out of their complacency to some degree. They’re forced to be responsible to some degree, and there is a certain hint for audiences for how to come to terms with it.
BT: Susan, being the youth, she can’t really learn from the previous generation even when she’s assaulted with all the facts. It’s something that she cannot even learn from and move forward with. What can be learned from the past, why wasn’t she able to?
NL: No longer could this facade that they were all keeping up continue. I really feel like Susan is playing a role when she’s putting on the beets and when she’s interacting with Dan and to some extent Dan and Linda are playing a role as well. She feels like a poser up until that point, she hasn’t committed herself enough.
BT: She’s also confronted by the books, the music and all those elements are there and educating the audience, it’s not a subject that’s as well known as it should be. What can today’s disaffected youth learn from that history, what to do, what not to do?
RH: What fascinates me about these, their political beliefs, there’s a lot of worth to them. When you read Ann Hansen’s memoirs of being part of Direct Action/Vancouver Five, she goes at length in there about her political beliefs, what she sees the way the world should be, corporate corruption…
DM: A lot of that is now mainstream –
RH: Those political beliefs certainly have some value to be investigated. A lot of these political beliefs have been marginalized simply because they were attached to these radical movements.
DM: Demonized.
RH: That’s what I’m saying. The rock stars of left wing politics, only the rock stars, go underneath and read about what their actual beliefs were. If you don’t let people storm the barricades, they’ll only do worse things.
BT: It seems as if that’s something that’s happening in Canada, the political movements are moving a bit more left.
DM: [Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian] Mulroney on the news this morning was cheering for the conservative party to go green. I think Mulroney was saying that across Canada the environment, along with health care, are the big concerns.
RH: I thought it was environment and Canadian films.
DM: I think it’s a widely held concern.
BT: A guiding force in the film is pot. You had said already that it’s a part of your life; an important one, I’d guess as much based on the film. It’s also a guiding force in the three characters’ lives. For Dan it’s a debilitating addiction, life cannot go on until he finds a dealer. Is this an image of pot that you’re trying to purvey?
DM: It’s indifferent about pot, like it is about politics.
RH: Considering it’s pot, there’s probably a little bit of floating going on. I did want to look at the use of marijuana, less in the standard portrayal, Cheech and Chong, and more as a connection to how my characters are socialized. My designer, when he was initially designing Dan’s room, he was putting up Ethiopian flags, and it looked like a fucking Bob Marley album cover. I said to him, “No, no, no, this is not a celebration, they’re using it to anesthetise pain.” I freely admit that I spark one up, but that wasn’t part of it for these characters.
BT: How much was pot involved in the creative process?
RH: Oh I write on it, for sure. I don’t think that these guys are potheads at all.
NL: Not at all, I had to learn how to roll a joint.
DM: Once you learn, you never forget, it’s like riding a bicycle.
RH: The irony is, I had to make the actors, because I can’t roll either, my hands are too big and fumbly and mechanically disinclined. So I was making my actors learn how to roll joints and work on bicycles, two things I know nothing about.
DM: Sometimes at the same time too.
RH: I’ve toyed with making you a hotshot motorcycle mechanic for the next film.
DM: Let’s go for it.
BT: When Dan was going through and collecting the garbage around the streets, and all I could think about was too many of my friends who have made a career out of that… That’s a very urban lifestyle, and as I watched it, I thought that it was very Toronto-centric. Now you’ve told me you’re from Vancouver, so maybe I was wrong in that.
RH: No, no, you’re completely right in that, because you can’t do that in Vancouver
DM: People don’t do that in Vancouver?
RH: No, it’s a bylaw. My girlfriend saves things from the garbage, like she’s saving lost kittens so that vintage items don’t go to a landfill in Michigan.
BT: Do you fear that the film is too Toronto-centric? Visually, as it’s filmed here, and even the story reflects Toronto culture.
DM: I love that it’s a Toronto film, it’s one of the things that really appeals to me. It takes a guy from outside to do that. I believe that you set a film in specifically one location and it gives it a universal feel.
RH: To me it’s less Toronto and more Toronto re-imagined as Amsterdam. I like to think that I was creating a Toronto culture. There’s a certain Toronto culture that I don’t think the film was really all about, east of GO tunnel, north of Queen, faux-dale, Drake Hotel culture, not part of this movie. (ed. Drake Hotel is a downtown refuge for the suburbanites)
DM: Well it is an issue in the movie.
RH: Yeah, cause they’re coming in, the marching gentrifying army.
BT: In comes the Starbucks.
DM: That’s the way the gentrification happens.
BT: How far away are we from having armies from destroying SUVs?
DM: Armies? Armies of rebels, not the army itself hired? That would be a weird turn of events.
RH: We’ll just have to see how much of a cult film the movie becomes. A Vancouver cyclist wrote a review and he basically said that it’s a silly premise because his cycle-friends weren’t anything like that at all. I eventually met the guy, was talking to him, confronting the critics again; we started talking about a prisoner in Portland, Oregon named Jeff “Free” Luers. He’s not free any more, but that was his nickname. He was sentenced to 20 years for setting an SUV lot on fire. Then there’s the Earth Liberation Front. If it starts to happen, just make sure you know how to do it without harming yourself. We’ll all be in jail for making this movie.
Monkey Warfare paints a snapshot of what a city is, and even the people who make it have to question themselves. The film is a catalyst for those questions. It leaves the audience thinking and does more than most movies can claim. It is unique among a film world so bland and boring.