Toronto filmmaker Ed Gass-Donnelly, above, is a tease. He loves ambiguity and has no problem leaving his audience with a few blanks to fill in. Which is not to suggest that the writer/director’s latest film, Small Town Murder Songs, will leave you scratching your head — it won’t.
At a local eatery, not far from his home near Queen and Bathurst, Gass-Donnelly tells me, “I like things that have a sparseness to them. A less-is-more approach allows you to build tension because the audience is actively trying to figure out what’s happening.”
Set in small town Ontario – the film was shot in Mennonite country around the town of Listowel – the movie stars Swedish actor Peter Stormare with Martha Plimpton and Jill Hennessey. The story revolves around a middle-aged police officer named Walter who lives under a dark cloud of past misdeeds until a murder upsets the balance of his new life. The film, which opens Friday at the Royal, is a spare and brooding character study, punctuated by haunting shots of original music by Bruce Peninsula.
Gass-Donnelly grew up in the theatre; his dad, Ken Gass, founded the Factory Theatre in 1970 and after toying with acting for a few years, young Ed directed his first play at age 16. Although he loved theatre, Gass-Donnelly was also interested in film, “but it seemed like such a technical medium that I didn’t really know how to get into it.”
Then at age 22, a friend of his dad’s, Bernie Zukerman (Dieppe, This is Wonderland), got him a gig as a director’s assistant. “I was essentially a coffee boy,” remembers Gass-Donnelly, “but it demystified the process for me. It showed me that I didn’t have to know how to record the sound in order to make a film. Theatre is so grassroots that you end up knowing how to do everything to a certain degree but in film it’s not like that.”
Ironically, Gass Donnelly has ended up with a spoon in just about every pot on his films; he wrote, directed, edited and co-produced Small Town Murder Songs, roles he also took on with his first feature, 2007’s Genie-nominated, This Beautiful City.
Gass-Donnelly’s efforts have not gone unnoticed. Just last month Variety picked him as one of its “10 Directors to Watch,” an accolade that has given the down-to-earth Canadian “a pair of stilts that will give me a boost and help me stand out in the sea of people all clamouring for attention. It means that for the next year I’ve got a slightly easier chance of getting a script read.”
In fact, Gass-Donnelly recently signed with a U.S. manager and agent who have him booked for meetings in LA next week to discuss a $20-million project. It’s a huge jump from the $1.4 million budget the director had to make Small Town Murder Songs: “It’s a big step financially but the law of diminishing returns holds especially true in movie making; once you cross certain thresholds you have to start paying everybody more so the money doesn’t really go that much further.”
At age 33 Donnelly is now working with people who, in some cases, have decades more experience than he does, yet he insists he’s not intimidated by the challenge.
“I think I already went through that experience when I was directing Tom McCamus when I was just 18 or 19 years old. And I did a show with R.H. Thompson in the women’s bathroom at Buddies in Bad Times. So I’ve had people play that card, like you were in diapers when . . . That kind of comment just reeks of insecurity, I don’t have time to bother with that kind of thing.”
WHERE/WHEN: Small Town Murder Songs at the Royal Theatre (608 College St.) opens February 18; a Q&A with the director will follow the 7 pm screening on Friday.
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