Gwen Madiba :
Welcome to uOttaKnow, [pause] a podcast that illuminates, inspires and entertains produced by the University of Ottawa.
Hello, I’m Gwen Madiba, host of uOttaKnow and a proud two-time graduate of the Faculty of Social Science. I am also the President of the Equal Chance Foundation.
uOttaKnow puts you in touch with uOttawa alumni and researchers around the globe at the cutting edge of their fields. Listen in for thought-provoking conversations on today’s trending topics.
Welcome to season III of uOttaKnow. This season we’ll be focusing on the entertainment industry with conversations on film, music, reality tv, tech trends and more. We’ll be talking to alumni at the heart of show bizz from Montreal to Toronto to California and beyond.
Our guest alumnus today, Philippe Falardeau, is one of Canada’s most beloved contemporary filmmakers. He’s a Quebec director who has earned national and international success. Our conversation explores all the different aspects of his ability to make films in both official languages and to create entertaining and thought-provoking works of art.
Philippe was born in Hull. He studied political science at the University of Ottawa and international relations at Université Laval in Quebec City. After graduating, he was part of the Course destination monde series, where he had to make 20 short films during a solo trip through 19 countries. He won the 92–93 edition, which propelled him into the world of cinema. He earned recognition as a director very early in his career. His first feature film, The Left-Hand Side of the Fridge, won the award for best Canadian first feature film at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2000.
He went on to win five Jutra awards, including best film for Congorama. The release of his fourth feature film, Monsieur Lazhar in 2012, brought him international recognition. The film was distributed in around 50 countries and won a slew of awards internationally, even earning an Oscar nomination for best foreign language film. Following this success, he made three major English-language films: The Good Lie, The Bleeder and, most recently, My Salinger Year in 2020, working with famous Hollywood actors like Reese Witherspoon, Liev Schreiber and Sigourney Weaver.
Philippe recently finished shooting Le temps des framboises, a French-language production and his first television series.
How are you, Philippe?
Philippe Falardeau:
Very well, thank you. And you?
Gwen Madiba:
I’m doing well. Philippe, thank you for joining us today from Montreal. I really appreciate you taking the time because I know you’re very busy with shooting. So, to begin today’s conversation, I have a somewhat philosophical question for you as a filmmaker. What does entertainment mean to you?
Philippe Falardeau:
It’s funny because I had a conversation with my brother recently about entertainment. We were discussing the relevance of the films we were watching and he said to me, “It isn’t complicated. When I see a film, I want to be entertained,” and for me, when I watch films, I’m looking for something that goes a little further than entertainment and, on the flip side, when I make a film, I try to offer something that goes beyond entertainment. Entertainment can be very broad.
It could include watching a football game on TV or reading a book. It isn’t necessarily a cultural thing, either. When we want to be entertained, if we want to do something or listen to a story that allows us to escape from our daily lives a bit, culture and cinema, literature, can do that. I think they also have the power to go much further than that and reflect the world we live in. To question things that are happening now, to question the past and explore the future. So, for me, entertainment is a very broad concept. But when it comes to culture, personally, I think there needs to be some sort of reflection, an examination of the world we live in.
Gwen Madiba:
Thank you for sharing that, Philippe. Growing up in Hull, on the Quebec-Ontario border, and attending a bilingual university like the University of Ottawa, you had to learn to navigate between French and English spaces from an early age. Can you tell us how you’ve managed to balance your projects in Hollywood and in Quebec? And is it important for you to continue to take on projects in English and French?
Philippe Falardeau:
Yes, I grew up in the Outaouais, where by default you had to be bilingual to be able to interact, and also you had to be bilingual to get your first job at 16. I worked as an usher at the National Arts Centre for two years. Then on Parliament Hill, as a guide in the East Block. It was impossible to imagine getting a job if you weren’t bilingual. I wasn’t very good in English and my high school English teacher made me take enriched courses, and I wanted to stay in the normal English classes, or the quote-unquote “basic” English classes, but she said, “No, no, no, you’re going into advanced English.” She pushed me and I think that’s why I’m able to work in English today. Now, as far as filmmaking projects in English are concerned, it happened a bit by accident. I shot films in French in Quebec, in Montreal, and because Monsieur Lazhar had an impact internationally and was picked for the Oscars, I suddenly had people asking me to make films in the United States. And because I was able to speak English and direct actors and a crew in English, I said yes, especially since I was offered scripts that moved me. That, and I’m also very slow. It takes me a while to write my own films, especially in French. So this allowed me to make more films without having to wait two or three years, the time it normally takes me to write a film. So it isn’t something I had planned. Certainly not when I was living in the Outaouais, because I didn’t even know I was going to be a director at the time. I studied political science, then I went on to study international relations at Université Laval and it was a series of “happy accidents” that led me to the film world.
Gwen Madiba:
Earlier, you were talking about mirroring and reflecting the world, about making people think and going a bit further than entertainment. I want to talk about the first English-language film you made, in 2013, with a Hollywood star, Reese Witherspoon, called The Good Lie, which follows the lives of Sudanese refugees who have resettled in the United States. Because in many ways, since it stars real refugees from South Sudan, it’s not the kind of story that often comes out of Hollywood.
Refugee resettlement is also a very important topic for the University of Ottawa community. The University of Ottawa’s Refugee Hub, headed by law professor Jennifer Bond, continues to set an international example. It aims to alleviate the global resettlement crisis by extending Canada’s successful private sponsorship model to other countries. Can you tell us how making this film and sharing this important story about Sudanese refugees affected you?
Philippe Falardeau:
The story began almost 20 years ago, in the mid-1990s, when I was starting to do a little directing. I was also working at the National Film Board, and I had a colleague who asked me to go to Sudan, South Sudan, with her to help her make her documentary on the famine there. This was during the war between South Sudan and the north, and I accepted. And it was a trip that changed a lot of things in my life.
I saw war up close, and then famine up close. I saw people die, children die. I saw children of single Dinka mothers who had lost their parents walking in an attempt to escape to Ethiopia. And this was all part of a short film called Attendre, which is still available on the National Film Board website. Twenty years later, I was asked to read a script inspired by the journey of these children.
They ended up being called “The Lost Boys of Sudan,” which is a bit unfair because there were as many girls as boys, and it told the story of refugees who ended up in the United States, often under very difficult circumstances, who were uprooted. And it touched me because I had seen these children when they were small, when their families had been decimated by the war. And when we were shooting, we had to be evacuated because there was a rebel army, a bit out of control, heading our way.
We were never able to properly finish the project, or at least the shooting. And when I read this script, 19 years later, I said to myself: “Okay, here’s a way to conclude or finish the work we started,” but this time through fiction. And with fiction you’re often able to reach a larger audience, and because it was made in Los Angeles, financed in Hollywood, it needed a star. That’s how movies are financed in the United States. You need well-known actors. They don’t have a public financing system like in Canada. Films are financed through film sales, which are driven by the stars who act in them. And so we had the opportunity to get Reese Witherspoon interested in a small part that wasn’t the lead, which made it possible to make the film, even though Hollywood usually isn’t interested in these stories when they’re told from the point of view of refugees. They’re interested in these stories when they’re told from the perspective of white people but usually not when they’re told from the perspective of refugees or Africans. And that was the case in this film, at least that’s what I tried to do by beginning the film in Africa, following the children during the war and continuing to follow their journey in the United States.
Gwen Madiba:
That’s really fantastic. It’s so wonderful that you’re able to take this position and give a voice to people who are often voiceless.
Philippe Falardeau:
There was one particular aspect to the film, which you mentioned earlier, which is that the actors were not professionals, they were actual children or refugees from the Sudan crisis, and it did take a lot of work to convince the producers to accept that. As I explained, films are often financed based on distribution, on casting, but I told them that it wouldn’t have been credible to have African-Americans in the role of the South Sudanese. They don’t look at all alike. The South Sudanese are very, very, very tall and have a very particular physiology and way of speaking, and I think that it was also necessary to have real refugees with us to guide us in the production.
I needed their perspective, even if I was the one who ultimately made the directorial decisions. So I asked them about their lives and I used what they told me and put it in the film. For example, there’s a scene where they arrive in their new apartment in Kansas City. They’re used to sleeping under the stars, ever since they were kids, and now they’re suddenly in a small apartment with bunk beds, so they take the mattresses and put them on the living room floor to sleep together as though they were under the stars. And they fall asleep singing songs. That wasn’t in the script, but it was a story they told me and that I incorporated into the script because it was important for me to work with real refugees.
Gwen Madiba:
Yes, that’s fantastic. It reminds me of how even here, in Ottawa, there are refugees who are homeless, who are in temporary housing, and they come from Ethiopia and Sudan, and some from Chad too, and they do the same thing. They set up their bed in the living room and then the whole family is there. It’s beautiful to see that often, you go, you see that despite the circumstances, they still manage to recreate a little home.
Philippe Falardeau:
Exactly. The tragedy of the film is that in one way we saved their lives, perhaps, by welcoming them to North America, and in another way we killed what had allowed them to survive, which is that they were always together. And when they arrived in North America, they were told that they had to separate, that they had to go to school and work individually. And for them, it meant losing their bearings and losing the main tool that had kept them alive during the war.
Gwen Madiba:
Your most recent feature film, starring Margaret Qualley and Sigourney Weaver, opened the Berlinale in 2020, just before the pandemic began. How did that go, and do you think the last year and a half has changed the way the film industry will operate in the future?
Philippe Falardeau:
The first part of your question, yes, it’s a unique setting, except that when we went to Berlin, we had the sense that the pandemic was getting worse but we hadn’t yet crossed the threshold where suddenly everything was closed, flights were shut down. Strangely enough, two weeks before the world got shut down, I was shaking hands on the night of my premiere. I must have shaken 800 hands. There were 2,200 people in the theatre. It was kind of a surreal experience, from today’s perspective, and in a way I’m lucky to have had it, but it also kind of killed the launch of the film afterwards, because it came out somewhat anonymously. During the pandemic nearly a year later, people mostly watched it through video on demand. But at the same time, I figured that if our films can allow people who are in lockdown to continue to have a window on the world, so much the better.
So in terms of the distribution model and the delivery model, I don’t think the pandemic caused that, I think the pandemic accelerated something we were already seeing. The advent of digital platforms came long before the pandemic and the fragmentation of the audience, so I think that different ways of watching movies are always going to coexist. I think there will always be an audience that prefers to go to the theatre and for some films, like Denis Villeneuve’s next film, Dune, I don’t want to see that on my computer screen, I want to see it on the big screen. While there are other movies you’re more likely to want to watch in the comfort of your own home. I think all formats will be able to coexist in the future. But that means that some small films will no longer be released in theatres, because it entails distribution and advertising costs that will no longer be possible for some productions.
Gwen Madiba:
So today we have a question for you from Papa Orleans-Minnow, who holds a bachelor’s in psychology from the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Arts and is a Toronto-based writer and producer. He’s also the host of the popular podcast Pops Culture, a weekly show focusing on music, sports and entertainment news.
Hi, Papa, how are you?
Papa Orleans-Minnow:
I’m well. Thanks for including me.
Philippe Falardeau:
Hi, Papa.
Papa Orleans-Minnow:
Hi, Philippe. Television tells us that directors say “Action,” but what’s the director’s role in the day-to-day filmmaking process, and how do you make sure that your vision for the film comes to life?
Philippe Falardeau:
That’s a good question. Especially since I personally never say “Action.” The assistant director says “Action” to start the scene, and I say “Cut” because it’s more important to know when to stop the scene or let it continue than to say “Action.” Action always starts at the same place, everybody, that’s easy. “Cut,” sometimes you have to know, to have the instinct to understand that the actors are in an emotional moment, or that even if they’ve finished their lines there’s still something happening emotionally, so really it’s up to the director to say “cut.” But beyond that, to sum things up, I would say that when you watch a film, everything that’s in the shot, everything that’s not in the shot, all the colours, the way people’s hair is done, the way they move, their tone, the speed they speak at, everything that happens on screen is the director’s responsibility, so that it’s consistent, so that it doesn’t look like a vinyl record that’s skipping because suddenly you’re slipping from one world into another that’s not consistent with the rest. The director is the person who has to have the finished film in their mind.
When you make a film, you do it out of order. You don’t shoot a film in order, you shoot it according to the availability of locations, the actors’ schedules and so on. So it’s like making pieces of a puzzle independently. You have to know what the final puzzle picture is. It’s the director who always has to have that in mind. For example, if I’m shooting a restaurant scene between two protagonists, and in the scene just before one of the characters got some bad news, they can’t both be laughing in the restaurant. I have to remind one of the actors, “Remember that in the scene just before this, you’re going to experience something very emotional, so you’re going to be in such and such a state.” So it’s the director’s responsibility to make sure that the dramatic arc of the film is maintained even though you make the film out of order and shoot very small parts at a time. So, the same script directed by two different people would result in two completely different films.
And finally, I’ll give you an example. Sometimes it feels like the films are shot on location spontaneously, but if I shoot a scene of someone eating at a restaurant, the other people in the restaurant are part of the staging, the pictures on the walls are chosen to fit an aesthetic, the sounds you hear from outside are added in editing to create an atmosphere. Everything is always constructed, so ultimately, everything you see inside the rectangle of your TV or your computer or your phone, or the movie theatre, has been decided by the director.
Gwen Madiba:
Philippe, thank you so much for taking the time to answer Papa’s question. Now I’d like to end today’s conversation with something we’ll be asking all our guests this season. What is entertaining for you right now?
Philippe Falardeau:
That’s a big question. I just finished a 69-day shoot for a TV series in Quebec, and it was a marathon, 14 hours a day, and right now what’s entertaining for me is sitting under a tree reading books. I’m reading a great book called Barbarian Days by William Finnegan, which is the memoir of an American who’s been a surfer all his life and who’s now 70 years old and started surfing in the 70s. And what’s great about the book is that you don’t even have to be interested in surfing, or the ocean or the waves, it’s the way he tells the story of his life and his journey around the world, looking for the best waves in the world. It’s almost philosophical. It’s a Pulitzer Prize-winning book. It’s extremely entertaining because it takes me out of my reality, it gives me the chance to experience a whole life that I haven’t lived, that I’ll never live. I’m too old to learn surfing now, unfortunately. So that’s what’s the most entertaining for me right now: Barbarian Days by William Finnegan.
Gwen Madiba:
So you recommend this book?
Philippe Falardeau:
Absolutely. To everyone!
Gwen Madiba:
Thank you very much for that recommendation. Thank you so much, Philippe, for joining us on uOttaKnow. It’s really been a pleasure to talk with you today and learn about your filmmaking journey.
Philippe Falardeau:
Thank you for having for me!
Gwen Madiba:
uOttaKnow is brought to you by the University of Ottawa's Alumni Relations team. It is produced by Rhea Laube with theme music by alumnus Idris Lawal. This episode was recorded with the support of Pop Up Podcasting in Ottawa, Ontario. We pay respect to the Algonquin people who are the traditional guardians of this land. We acknowledge their long-standing relationship with this territory, which remains unceded. For a transcript of this episode in English and French or to find out more about uOttaKnow please refer to the description of this episode.