Horror is hereditaryby Peter Howell
Movie Critic
Toronto Star, Saturday September 6, 2003
Section 'J', pages J1, J14-15Neither Dr. Spock nor Dr. Phil would have approved of the idea.
Having your son dress as a blood-splattered dwarf in a movie about murderous blood-splattered dwarves seems a sure-fire way of inducing permanent nightmares. Isn't there a Disney film the kid could play a role in?
But when your mother is Denise Cronenberg, sister of horrormeister David Cronenberg, and you have a chance to play a mutant monster in one of Uncle Dave's films, you don't turn down such a life experience.
This is how Aaron Woodley, now 32 and something of a budding horrormeister himself, almost got to play one of the gruesome ankle-biters in The Brood, Cronenberg's 1979 study in womb-symbol terror. Aaron was about seven years old when his mom took him to visit his uncle during the shooting of the picture, and the precocious child decided that he, too, wanted to be a killer dwarf.
"I really desperately wanted to be one of these Brood children and play in the film," Woodley recalls.
"So they dressed me up and tried to put a mask on me and I started crying. They couldn't actually put the mask on me, because it was too frightening. But I did end up appearing in the film in one scene where I'm playing dead, lying on my face. My uncle managed to get me in somehow and make me feel not so bad."
The experience undoubtedly scarred Woodley for life. Which, considering his chosen profession of making dark and disquieting films, probably wasn't such a bad thing after all.
He's nervously awaiting public reaction to his first feature film, Rhinoceros Eyes, which is generating much buzz at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it premieres tonight. It's a psychodrama (although Woodley swears it's really a comedy) about an orphaned teen named Chep, played with cool intrigue by Michael Pitt (Bully), who is adopted by the eccentric operators of a movie prop house.
Chep is reluctant to leave the comforting anarchy of the prop house, where he is surrounded by such B-movie arcana as a 50-pound cherry, fright masks and fake prosthetic limbs. The outside world beckons via the comely face and figure of Fran (Paige Turco), a perfectionist movie art director who is driven to acquire increasingly weirder props, including a pair of genuine rhinoceros eyes. The smitten Chep is determined to make Fran happy any way he can, even if it involves theft, or worse. As he falls deeper under Fran's spell, he starts to hear voices of caution — are his props starting to talk to him?
Woodley says he wrote the screenplay for Rhinoceros Eyes way back in 1996, partially basing it on his experiences shopping for props for Bed & Breakfast, one of two shorts he released in 2000 that made this very serious York University film studies grad a talent to watch. Bed & Breakfast is the exceedingly creepy story of a peeping Tom hotelier who uses hidden cameras to spy on his guests. Downpour, his other short from that year, pays tribute to NFB legend Norman McLaren's 1955 groundbreaker Neighbours in its fable of two desert farmers fighting over a seedling. (Many more filmmakers than just his Uncle Dave have influenced Woodley.)
Woodley's shorts and Rhinoceros Eyes showcase his knack for stop-motion and Claymation techniques, older forms of movie animation that have all but been forgotten in the current mania for computer-generated (CG) effects. They involve painstaking work, requiring many hours of labour and sweat to get right, but it's a labour of love for Woodley.
"I'm not a fan of CG," he says, fiddling with the name-brand drugs he's brought to the interview — Starbucks coffee, Du Maurier smokes and Excel gum.
"I really actually despise it. I just find the 'organic-ness' of stop-motion to be so much more appealing. I'm really getting tired of these CG films. I hope they're just a fad."
Woodley first started making animated films at age seven, around the time he visited The Brood set. His mom Denise, who has long made costumes for David Cronenberg's films, used to take him to the Art Gallery of Ontario, where he learned animating techniques from Eugene Fedorenko, the National Film Board co-director (with Rose Newlove) of Every Child, which won the 1979 Oscar for best animated short.
But Woodley had the urge to create from the time he was old enough to hold a crayon.
"It comes from the fact that I used to draw for endless hours a day. I used to draw comic strips and cartoons and comic books. It was sort of a natural progression to want to bring those to life and see them move around.
"I started off by making really short films, using Super-8. They were all pretty similar. They involved somebody coming home and being eaten by his toilet or his laundry machine or some other appliance in the house. It's sort of a recurring film I did over and over again."
There are elements of that machine dread in Rhinoceros Eyes. As the love-crazy Chep becomes increasingly delusional about his relationship with Fran, his props start arranging themselves into strange creatures, which harangue him to take bold action. Woodley credits character animator Veronica Verkley for the hundreds of hours it required to track down the many bits and pieces used to make the talking prop creatures.
"I wanted a pile of junk that moves," Woodley says.
"Veronica spent weeks going to garage sales and junkyards and trash heaps, collecting bins of throwaway items. She spent further weeks in her studio, piecing these things together, assembling them into something close to what we were looking for. It was quite a long process, but I'm very happy with the results. What you see is real. Essentially these puppets exist."
The largest of the puppets, a fearsome six-footer the cast and crew dubbed "Max," will remind many people of the giant rabbit in Donnie Darko, Richard Kelly's celebrated work from 2001 that also involved a disturbed youth going through a life change.
Woodley says he didn't see Donnie Darko until after he made Rhinoceros Eyes — he did write the screenplay in '96, after all — but he appreciates the comparisons.
He more readily sees the connection with other films in the fantasy vein, including David Lynch's Eraserhead, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's and Marc Caro's Delicatessen and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.
And, of course, there are the films of his Uncle Dave's, which he's followed avidly and with some personal involvement — he was an apprentice editor on Crash, Cronenberg's 1996 shocker about people who enjoy having sex inside wrecked automobiles.
Many people in the extended Cronenberg clan were involved in the making of Rhinoceros Eyes. Mom Denise made the costumes, Aaron's brother E.C. Woodley did the music (with an assist from Velvet Underground stringman John Cale) and Uncle Dave dropped by to offer advice during filming and to critique the final work.
"He loves it," Woodley says with a sigh of relief. "He really likes it a lot, so that was very gratifying. He's a very tough critic. He's never been `Weird Uncle Dave,' just Uncle Dave. He's not weird at all.
"He gave me a lot of practical advice during filming: wear comfortable shoes, make sure you take naps, try to eat lunch alone so you get some quiet. But his best encouragement was, `You know more than you think you do.' Those words of advice were really what gave me a lot of confidence. There are really no secrets there. You just get in there and work as hard as you can. You sort of make it up as you go."
Shooting took six weeks, on a slim $1-million budget put up mainly by Madstone Films, a start-up New York production house that had heard about Woodley through an admiring article in Filmmaker magazine. Before Madstone made the call, Woodley had been shopping his idea around to Canadian interests for years, to little avail. Woodley's previous experience as an acclaimed maker of short films and Gemini-nominated film editor didn't cut any ice in his home and native land.
So Rhinoceros Eyes is technically an American film, despite the fact it was written and directed by a Canadian, shot in Toronto with an all-Canadian crew and a cast that was 95 per cent Canuck. An all-too-typical story, sadly, about having to go elsewhere to have your talent recognized. But the ambitious Woodley sees even brighter days ahead, especially if Rhinoceros Eyes lands a distribution deal at the Toronto festival.
"I've written six feature scripts that I have sitting at home on my shelf. This was one of them. I'm hoping to get another one up (filming) soon.
"It's very hard. I started writing in 1995, and I sometimes wondered if it was all just a waste of time. You just have to do it and hope and pray and believe that one day it will all be worth it. It always takes longer than you think. But I think there are so many bright filmmakers out there who never saw the light of day because they just sort of gave up."
Rhinoceros Eyes screens tonight at 9:15 at the Cumberland 2, and Tuesday at 2:30 p.m. at the Uptown 3.