Michael McGowan

0:03Oh hey Matt. Yes. It's Mike McGowan. Hey, how are you? I'm good. How are you doing? I'm doing good. I just watched one week like two hours ago. Oh, you poor soul. No, I liked it. I saw it while I saw it in theaters a while ago, but I haven't seen it since and I forgot how good the soundtrack was. Yeah, we liked our we like our music. That's why we like playing the music. It was like we like putting music and movies so much. Let's do a musical. Well, let's let's let's start there then. Let's do this because that's that's a very interesting you've upped it basically. You've turned it on its head and it made it a thousand times more musical. Exactly. No, it's it's fun. I mean, I from you know doing a hallelujah and Saint Ralph to the all the music music was a big character obviously in in one week. I really do. I'm a want to be rock and roll guy with no musical talent whatsoever. So it's kind of nice to play in that sandbox when I can. That was a bit of the impetus for a musical.

0:49Fair enough. And is that why you're trying to cast rock stars in your movie to try and act more like one? Well, the thing is like when Foxley say like he was writing some of the songs. Right. It just seemed like good karma to say come on. Let's let this just come and play and come up for a day and do this part. And he hadn't done it before and it was it was really fun to like bring something like hand or with Mark Jordan. Mark Jordan was just came in like something you recommended. I see Mark and he just was so unique that it was easy to cast Mark. Well, I haven't seen the new film yet, but I saw the trailer for it and he looks hilarious. Yeah, he is. He's got such a unique look and now is that him or did you dress him up a little bit? Oh, no, no, we dressed him up. I mean, he thinks he's told me he's got the part because he got the part because of his glosses.

1:39So those are his glasses. The glasses that make it though. It totally the glass. Well, to me, it was the glasses in the bow tie. Yes, of course. And but he he he was he was fantastic. But in the fact that he hadn't acted and his audition was so great, was amazing to me. When did you guys film this? When did you shoot it? We shot it from beginning of February to like start almost the end of January for five weeks the start five weeks are starting the end of January beginning of February. Great. How come it's coming out now beginning of hockey season or did it just happen serendipitous like that? No, we had our release date right from the we were hoping we'd get a really good festival release and obviously opening Toronto Health. But really we only finished it right a week before Toronto. So, you know, editing, special effects, music, the mix, everything else. It just got finished a week before Toronto and then we thought this coincided with the

2:34opening of the hockey season would be a good time. Yeah, fair enough. One week was a very Canadian film. I mean, you have the Tim Hortons thing even the even the tone of the narrator's voice sounds Canadian. I'm wondering about this film. Obviously the films about hockey, which will do it, of course, for Canadians. But does it have that same kind of feel? Are you trying to do something purposefully that is uniquely Canadian? 100%. I mean, it starts with O Canada and ends with the lyric we are proud Canadian talking to in our DNA. And it sprinkled everything from Canadian tire references to, you know, the hockey news to the score. I mean, I feel like if you can set a film in a particular time and place and if the story is working, the more unique that can be that I think the more interesting your story is.

3:22I mean, if you're pouring a gown and maple syrup over people that fill the ones, they just want to take a shower after because they're just so grossed out it doesn't work. But really what I'm trying to do is say, okay, we can use, we could use the Home Depot, of course, in Canada, but Canadian tire makes a better ring for it in a Canadian hockey film. If you're going to shoot it in Toronto, romanticize Toronto rather than shy away from it. That was the mandate of making it so Canadian. Why Toronto? Just because it's close to home? Yeah, I mean, I live about an hour outside the city. I know the city well. I feel it has not been romanticized in February for some stranger. And I really wanted to do that. I really wanted to make it a bit of a fairy tale.

4:10A lot of filmmakers, I feel, and I could be wrong with this. I mean, the Trotsky obviously did Montreal pretty good justice a couple of months ago. Yep. I'm not sure if you saw that or no. No, it did. But a lot of, I feel like a lot of Canadian filmmakers shy away from trying to be to Canadian because they're scared. It won't work in other markets. Yeah, I mean, that's fair enough. But I mean, really, the reality is our Canadian taxpayers are paying for our films. We're against the juggernaut of American product. And so, again, I don't think it needs to be Canadian just for the sake of being Canadian. But I do think that the Canadian, like, well, we should have shown it across the country in the last sort of four or five weeks. And invariably, somebody will stand up and say, thank you for showing Canada on screen and everybody else will cheer.

4:58And I think there's this very few opportunities to embrace our Canadians. And my Canada and my representation of Canada on film isn't supposed to be anybody else's. Right. If it sort of touches some strand of patriotism in the view or a viewer, then it's working on that level. But again, I go back to the whole thing. And if it's not, like, even with one week, there's a real, the humor and the sort of that undercut with the humor allowed the heart, the patriotism, the sentimentality to work so much better. If you don't have the humor, it's also aggressively Canadian or aggressively, you know, in that case, about dying. And it sort of just becomes this, why am I watching this film?

5:44This film, I feel, will be more funny, obviously. Yeah, I mean, when you, for sure, he doesn't have, you know, the hockey team does no term of cancer. Yes. Yeah, it's pretty broad in places. I mean, once you go into the musical world, once you enter that, you're already broad. But what I try to do is surprise. Like, I don't think you can predict where it's going to go in five minutes or let alone the end of the film. And, yeah, we have a lot of, you know, we're light and farts on fire to, you know, to people falling off at treadmills. And sort of the broad flopstick, you stuff to more, word play and, you know, more subtle humor. So, yes, I'm trying to get a laugh pretty much all the way along.

6:31How does the musical aspect get into it? Do these people just break out in the song randomly? Not randomly, hopefully. I don't want to feel like it's randomly. I know we, what I wanted to do with this one was not have the songs stop the action. So it's not like, okay, they're just breaking into song and now it's song time and nothing else is happening. And, okay, it's sort of good, but where's the plot? The song advanced the story. So I really try to blur the line. I mean, obviously when they're singing, they're singing. You can't, you know, I'm not trying to mask that. We really, like, you know, big musical numbers to really small ones and everything in between. But I wanted it to feel all organic so that a song happens and we find out information.

7:17It advances the plot. Okay. So it's sort of doing two things. You know, like, when we first meet, like it's about this 17 year old who goes from no one to number one. And his best friend is Eve, who's living next door and she's got a crush on him. And, you know, the first, you know, Eve and I have known each other since we were two. And then she comes back, our parents met at a fundraiser for Desmond 2-2. Like, it's kind of idiotic. It's kind of, but it tells you some information as well. Like, their parents are sort of lefties or intellectuals, et cetera, et cetera. So I'm trying to layer the songs with information as well. Are all the songs related to hockey? No, we have the love songs. We have, no, they're not. I mean, there's some of them obviously are. But, you know, we have this one line hockey without fighting his like craft and earth that cheese.

8:03It's still passed a pallet at one, please. Who wrote that, you? I wrote those there at T.S. and I'm kind of eternally proud of them. A lot of filmmakers, you know, it took Woody Allen, what, 40 years to do his musical? Did it? Well, he did it in the 90s, so that's got to be about 40 years. Yeah, probably, yeah. It's very early on in your film career to do a musical. It just seemed like the time was right. I mean, I've been looking around to do a musical for a number of years. And when I came across this idea and thought, oh, surely to God, we've done a hockey musical in Canada. And it hadn't been done. I was like, OK, I'm going to do this right away. It was sort of like, OK, do not tell anybody right to the script, get the financing and announce it to the world. So it just, it felt like an idea that probably should have been done earlier. And I was, I'm eternally grateful that it hadn't been. What's next for you, then? I don't know.

8:48Well, I'm working on something I hate even to jinx it now. It's sort of too early. I remember doing the press for one week. I, by about halfway through, I got far enough along in hockey, the musical that I was able to say. I'm doing a hockey musical and then people would last on sort of say, are you serious? But I'm not quite there. I'm not quite there. The premise of it does sound a little ridiculous, but I mean, looking to preview, it looks like it's going to be a good film. Oh, it'll be a ton of fun. I mean, we've just found that audience is just laughing and enjoying themselves. Cool. Well, I see you don't want to say what's next. And that's cool. Keep it as a surprise. I just hate to jinx it. No, I understand. Yeah. I totally understand. So we do a thing on the show called Five Questions. Five quick questions, one more answers. All right. Hockey or music? Music. Landon or McCartney?

9:33Landon. What's more important in directing an actor? Facial expressions or dialogue? Dialogue. Film you're most proud of. Score hockey musical. In one word, Michael McGowan. Canadian.