David Frankovich interview with Steve Sanguedolce 03/24/06

DF: So lets start from the beginning. Talk about Sheridan: going to school there, the other guys that you went to school with that eventually became the Escarpment School.

SS: I went to Sheridan. It wasn’t my first choice to go to Sheridan. I applied to York and I applied to Ryerson and I was accepted at York in spite of not handing in all the requirements. When I went to the interview the guy wanted to talk more about my hockey because they didn’t have a good team and I came out of an OFSSAA Ontario finalist high school team. I was a goalie, so I think the guy, I can’t remember who it was of course, but he was more interested in my hockey skills than my super 8 skills.

            I went to Sheridan. I wanted to go to Ryerson. I didn’t get into Ryerson. They had done this one year pseudo-psychological testing where they’d give you all these shapes and weird things, and you’d have to invert them, and it was a matter of time, and it was the first and only year they ever implemented this, so that was kind of weird. I went to Sheridan and it was kind of far: Oakville. I was living in Toronto. Sheridan was cool because it was a real production based school. That’s the only reason I didn’t go to York. I wanted to go to a production-based school. I wanted to learn about tech stuff of making films. It was also at a kind of interesting part in its career and its development in that there were a lot of artists. It had more of a hippie sensibility in the 70s, so it was really supportive of like a more liberal curriculum, and the people who were there were fantastic. In fact, I’m still really close friends with Jeffrey Paull, who still teaches there. He’s my editor on my last film. And they were making personal films, which of course I had no idea what that was about, but I knew that I didn’t want to make films for the sake of making money. I knew that I wasn’t interested in the business. I knew that I wasn’t interested in the industry.

I just came out of high school not knowing what I wanted to do, but I liked making films in high school. We were one of the very few schools in the 70s who had a screen education course, where we made super 8 films, and I just fell in love with it. And I always had a camera since I was 13. I was given a camera by my uncle(s).

Sheridan was perfect. It was a different kind of work that I had no idea about. I remember seeing my first Brakhage film and saying, “What the hell is that?” It was kind of like listening to my first Dylan record where I thought, “Who the hell is that?” As much as it almost repulsed me, I just couldn’t stop listening or watching this work. There was something really attractive about it even though it was totally overwhelming. I liked Sheridan’s design in that you could make anything that you wanted to make. It wasn’t as specific as some other universities or colleges. You could design your own courses. They were big on independent study, which was fantastic. You could basically say, “Okay I’m interested in optical printing. I’m going to do optical printing.” There was a lot of tech support and they had great gear. They had the best stock of equipment. Out of OCAD, Ryerson, York, Sheridan was number 1. I still think to this day it may have the best tech stuff of all academic sources in the city. I liked Sheridan. It was a fantastic program for me.

Some of the people who went there: Phil was a couple of years ahead of me, so he was graduating. It was a 3 year program, no degree, because it was Sheridan college of applied arts and tech. The people who were in my class, none of them really went on to make experimental films. In Phil’s year I think it was Janice Cole and Holly Dale, who were two doc makers, Lorraine Segato, who was the singer for Parachute Club, she made films, I think, Richard Kerr was in Phil’s year, and he still makes work. There was another year between us, so Phil was 2 years ahead of me, and then my year. All the people who came out of Sheridan who continue to make experimental films were 2 years after me, not because they’re younger than me, but because they all went to some other school. They all went to university first. That was Mike Hoolboom, Carl Brown, Gary Popovich, Louise Lebeau. Those were all the people, but the Escarpment School, which you alluded to earlier, was really not just about Sheridan. It was all about the Niagara Escarpment, so it included other people: Marion McMahon, Phil, people from Sheridan, Mike Cartmell, Holly, Janice. Mostly it was Sheridan, but there also people from one of the other schools out on the escarpment.

Mike Hoolboom gets the credit for calling it that, but I think he says that Mike Cartmell coined the term. It was because a lot of us, most of us, were making personal films, and somehow these personal films dealt with memory and landscape, which is ultimately what a lot of personal films deal with. Just being Canadian and dealing with landscape, more kind of poetic interpretation of our landscape, not literal. It was almost along the lines of what the Group of seven were doing, except they didn’t have the memory contingent as obvious, but the landscape and dealing with interpreting our space. It’s ironic, though, a lot of us weren’t from there. I think Gary was from Niagara Falls, Mike’s from Burlington, Carl and I are from Toronto, Phil’s from Kitchener, Richard’s from Kitchener. It was just because our films were personal, which was a big proponent of Sheridan’s work, and because they dealt with memory, and they dealt with landscape. That term kind of stuck. It’s one of those innocuous terms and somehow it stuck, like a nickname, and it almost happens in spite of itself. I don’t think it was a conscious choice. A lot of those people obviously went on, and continue to make work.

Sheridan was also noted back then as being more of an art-based school. York was making more dramas, Ryerson was doing a lot more doc work, OCAD hadn’t really developed a film program yet. It kind of came later, and it was more multifaceted in terms of it would be visual arts and photography, painting, sculpture, installation, performance, so it was a little more esoteric, and I think they slowly came around to making more time based work. Sheridan was always making personal films. We were pushed to explore. Rick Hancox was one of the instructors there who’s made a lot of work, and he was big on personal film. We saw a lot of Brakhage, and we saw a lot of the experimental canon, so a lot of people were expected to make autobiographical pieces. From that came an interest in exploration in this language. It was really kind of opening up after the 60s and 70s. I was there in the late 70s, and so this language was pretty loose. It would have just started to have been defined by the avant-garde movement of the 60s, and so it was open for trial or experimentation, and so a lot of us would just try stuff. We knew that we wanted to make autobiographical or personal stories, but we didn’t know what shape they would take, so it was really a lot of playing around and trying to fumble through figuring stuff out. That was always exciting, because for the first time in my life, especially coming from a regimented high school, going to Sheridan was heaven. Teachers would expect you to call them by their first name. You could work on your projects day and night. You had unlimited access to all the equipment and facilities and the school would literally bend over backwards to give you even extra access overnight or equipment you could take over the holidays. It was a truly liberating place in terms of exploring something that 1) most of us knew nothing about before, and 2) just diving in full throttle, so it was a real thrill just trying all these different things out.

DF: What is the reason that this specific group of filmmakers got this name?

SS: Sheridan, I think, opened its doors in 73, so it was relatively young. It was only about 5 years old when we got there. After that, Sheridan made a pretty serious move towards industry, because there was a lot of pressure on colleges and universities to get placement. If your students graduated and they didn’t have jobs it didn’t look good on the departments or the college, and so it was harder to get funding. So there was a big push, and I know in the late 80s Sheridan made a radical switch into industry based work. There was still some of the same faculty: Phil was still there, Richard Kerr was teaching there, I taught there for a bunch, and Jeffrey Paull was still there, but Sheridan made this switch where they wanted to be a little more accountable to the industry in terms of placement. It was simply a question of numbers. I think what happened was after a  lot of exploration and late 70s loose sensibility of art and practice, they had to kind of hammer down some numbers and say, “Hey, we need our students to graduate and get jobs.”

I don’t know why the term was coined then, but I think that the fact that we were at that place at that time might be the reason why some of us continue to make this kind of work. Before us, I think it was pretty open, and I guess Sheridan graduates were finding voice and exploring different ways of telling story basically, and after that I think it moved much more radically towards, I don’t want to say accountable, but more industry based, where they had to get placement, they had to get jobs. Now Sheridan’s a leading institution in industry. They teach high definition courses. They’ve done that for about 5 years. They’re mostly dealing with leading edge technologies.

Sheridan was interesting, too, in that you could specialize. It was a 3 year program: first year you did a little bit of television, little bit of photography, little bit of audio, little bit of film, and then when we were there you could branch out into anything you wanted. After my first year I totally took film courses. Now I think you have certain streams you can take. I’m not as familiar with the curriculum now. It was open to you creating your own curriculum, whereas I don’t think that’s the case much now. I think it allowed people to explore areas and focus. It was not so worried about if were you going to get a job when you graduated as a DP, or as a location recordist, or as a key grip. It was more about, “Do what you need to do to figure stuff out and hopefully we’ll turn out artists.” It was fantastic, and the people there were great. Hancox was a great guy, and Jeffrey was fantastic, and Phil, and Richard. They had some good key people that were all at least interested, if not working within this genre or style of filmmaking, so it was breeding itself to some extent. I know a lot of other people who came through there that continue to make work. It was always really positive in that it was very supportive of whatever you wanted to do. If you wanted to make some hybrid docu-drama, fine. If you wanted to make a straight drama, fine. If you wanted to do something really radical on the optical printer, there were not many questions. I think that tightened up in the 80s, and then definitely into the 90s, and shifted gears and became much more practical and industry based.

DF: Where did you go after you graduated?

SS: I tried to get work in the biz. I always say that the best thing for me was the fact that I didn’t get a job, and that allowed me to continue to develop my own films. It’s not like I knew exactly the kind of work I wanted to make. I was still fumbling through figuring out what film was and where I fit in it. We had Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, we were starting up a couple of co-ops, the Funnel had just formed and LIFT had just formed, so there was access to at least equipment and facilities. There was a group of us, the people from Sheridan: Gary, Mike, Phil, myself. We would pool equipment and share stuff amongst ourselves. And there were cheap rental houses before LIFT. I remember Janet Goode was running rental facilities. You could go rent a cockroach infested Steenbeck suite for a weekend for 50 bucks. It was really cheap. And there were arts councils.

When I graduated I did try to get work editing, and I guess I’m lucky I never did get any work, because I was just able to continue making films. I didn’t know what that meant. I had no idea what meant then to actually go and find funding or to figure out what a process oriented project might read like on a grant proposal, so I stumbled through that for a couple of attempts, and fortunately I did manage to get some grants after 2 or 3 tries, and then once I did that I was just able to continually make personal work. It was always work that was based on a need to figure stuff out, whether it’s identity, or coming of age, or relationships, or issues of desire. It’s not that far removed from the kind of work that I’m making now, which is really telling other peoples’ stories to some extent, albeit in a somewhat fictionalized context. Ultimately I think I’m making documentary films about people. They’re called experimental because formally they’re very different.

            So once I left Sheridan I always had other kinds of jobs. I hacked cab. I worked in factories. I was a carpenter. I did almost all the schlep work you can imagine to help pay rent and help support things, and I would say just thanks to being somewhat lucky with the Canada Council, it wasn’t like I was getting every grant but every 2 or 3 I would score some money and be able to finish a film, and that kind of snowballed, and I became addicted to the notion that I could actually make, not a living, but make a career out of making movies. It wasn’t financially that stable, but that’s why I always had these other jobs. Toronto was a good place to be at that point. Also, the NFB had just started their PAPFS program, which is now called FAP, Program to Assist Filmmakers in the Private Sector, now its Filmmaker Assistance Program. So we could get free processing, free access to equipment, free editing suites.  LIFT was just coming into being, there were some of those cheap rental houses and some arts councils: Ontario, Canada, I think Toronto started later on in the 90s. So there was always places and resources, and because we had so many people I had a camera, someone else had a Steenbeck, someone else had some rewinds, someone else had some lights, you might just have to borrow a Nagra or something and we could work on each others films, which we did. I collaborated with Carl Brown. I collaborated with Mike Hoolboom. I collaborated with Gary Popovich. Phil shot parts of films for Carl and I. We were always working together, kind of like our own little co-op. In fact, when LIFT was being formed, the group of people from Sheridan were really close to starting our own co-op, called the Metro Works or Loop Collective. We weren’t quite sure what name to give it, but seeing that LIFT kind of got off the ground, it felt kind of redundant that there should be two co-ops starting up in Toronto at the same time. Thanks to a lot of resources we were able to carry on and make these films. I don’t mean that we were squeezing out 5 films a year, but every 2 or 3 years I managed to finish something, and some of them were feature length pieces, and some of them were 2 minute conceptual pieces. It didn’t feel like we were moving from anywhere like, “I’m going to start with a short, and move into medium length, and then eventually end up in a feature world.” It was, “This time its going to be a full length orchestra or concerto, and next time its going to be a little quartet, and next time its going to be a short little piece.” We were always moving in different lengths and styles, depending on what the films were, so the films often dictated what was needed: what length, what form, what style, what kind of approach. Every piece was always unique in that way. In that context we came to define certain things that we did and certain stylistic tendencies that we would evolve towards.

DF: You mentioned the Loop Collective.

SS: There’s one now. I think it’s been around for a couple of years. I remember us sitting on the Lakeshore late one night thinking of names, and I know there was a debate between Loop and Metro Works. Of course these were informal collectives we created because we worked together. I know there’s a Loop Collective now, but that came out 5 years ago. Its not connected at all. We were still students. This was ’79, ’80, so this was 25 years ago, but those were some of the names. We went to initial LIFT meetings just before LIFT was born, to those conceptual meetings about creating a co-op, and we just felt it was hard to do because you had to incorporate a constitution, and a mandate. It was a lot of work, so we just left it all alone and thought, “Well, somebody else is doing this. We’ll just tag on the tails of that.” LIFT turned out to be great. I think one of the strongest reasons why people are able to make films in Toronto is because they have access to places like that.

I would argue that the reason the Funnel died is because it wasn’t very personable. If you were not one of the inner core members of the Funnel, you were treated like you were some stranger from some other galaxy. They weren’t very open. What LIFT did in those early years, I would like to think its still true although I’ve heard different stories, what LIFT managed to do was they managed to make people feel welcome, that the co-op was for everybody and we’re all in this thing together. That environment is just key when you’re coming out of school and you’re just figuring out, “What the hell am I going to do?” in this film world that is not really a business. It’s an art practice. LIFT was fantastic. When they were on Adelaide, people would spend nights there. Sleep over. Bruce Macdonald, I remember, many nights spent sleeping over there trying to finish his own stuff. It was this tiny little co-op, not like it is now, and it was just a great place to be and dialogue. The dialogue was just so significant, because without that, especially upon graduation if you lose touch with friends, you’re working in a vacuum. This kind of work needs some kind of community. It needs some kind of discourse. LIFT was fantastic for that. A bunch of us joined co-ops, and CFMDC, and LIFT, and other places, and other co-ops, and it was just important and instrumental in helping us feel like part of the community, and put back into the community. I’ve always been a strong advocate of LIFT. I think LIFT’s fantastic. The Funnel had their own problems. They folded and dissolved and kept all the equipment, and it was kind of a nasty ending to that place. They showed interesting work, but the important thing about co-ops is to allow new people to feel welcome. If not its just an old boys club, or something. I think access is paramount. Now LIFT is real sharp because they’re doing all these educational things. They’re teaching workshops on grant writing, on final cut pro, on tech, on aesthetics, on animation, and I think that’s fantastic because now you don’t have to go to school for 3 years or 4 years to get degrees to be able to make work, and its feasible, and its current, and its taught by your peers. I always liked that part of it. I’ve always been active in that part of it. I always feel it’s important to share. I’m a big advocate of workshops. I’ve done it all my life all over Canada. I always really liked the fact that we can share whatever expertise we might have with others. It’s always been a really positive activity in that its bringing a lot of different expertise together and allowing people to get instant access to a certain perspective or sensibility without committing 4 months, or 2 grand, or $30 000. I think it’s important that it becomes more grassroots. I’m a big advocate of grassroots art practice and the support that comes with that. The community’s paramount. It’s so easy when you make this kind of work to work in a vacuum, and I think that’s the worst thing you can do. I think you need people to look at work, to discuss work, to give you feedback, because we all know its so hard to see your work when you’ve been at it for 6 months. It just becomes like looking in a mirror: you don’t know what the hell you look like anymore. I think it’s important to have some kind of feedback to shape your work.

            I know from hanging out primarily with Gary and Mike. They’re people I’ve made most of my work with. They’ve been key in everything, so I think that’s real important. I’d like to think that anybody who belongs or becomes a member of LIFT or Charles Street has that kind of community access because that’s paramount in creating some kind of dialogue and allowing you not to work in the dark, so to speak.

DF: How do you begin with your process-oriented work?

SS: I’ve always made films out of some necessity to figure something out. I know that it’s going to take me a couple of years at least, if not 4 or 5 for the longer pieces, to finish a film. I’ve always thought that I’m going to make films about things that are important to me whether they’re about relationships, or whether they’re about personal desires, or fetish, or sports, or things that I’m trying to acknowledge or understand. For me it’s more about figuring out what’s important to me and writing about it.

Often I start by writing, not just proposals, but ideas, and issues, and stories, and insights into what’s important. It’s odd because where I start off in a film is rarely where I end up. I might start off moving in one direction. By the time the film’s done it might be a film that’s moved totally in an opposite direction. For me it’s always been important to allow the process to dictate. I’m not into executing films that are pre-produced in script. I’m more interested in starting and following something. I really believe that I have to listen to the work. I’m a big advocate of trying to follow a film and listen to the work. I think half my job is, of course, to impose where I want the piece to move, but the other half is to listen to it and allow it to grow into whatever shape it wants or needs to. Ultimately, I feel like my responsibility is allowing the film to surface. There’s stuff in there, and I think part of my job is trying to figure out how to let that come out.

I’ve always approached it, as a process-oriented filmmaker, by writing and then shooting stuff. I’ve always collected images. It’s more like journal entries in a diary. I never know where they’re going to end up, but I know there’s certain things I’m attracted to, and I know there’s certain things I keep referencing or keep going back to and keep revisiting. For instance, I might always go back to children. Before I was a dad, or ever wanted to be a dad, I would always be attracted to the innocence of youth, and I’ve always shot a lot of kids. Now, in fact, ironically, since I’ve had kids, maybe I do shoot them as much, but it doesn’t feel like I do anymore or maybe it feels like a little less.

So I collect these journal style images that I’ve got libraries of, and I’ve always been writing, and I’ve always had an idea about what this particular project’s about just by writing about it, what my interests are, whether they’re travelogue pieces or relationship pieces, and then I would just start cutting and pasting. Here’s some images I’ve collected: what do they mean? It’s about figuring the film out. I have this, some would argue, really ass-backwards approach where I shoot first and ask questions later. I would start by shooting images and then I’d go, “Okay, what does this mean? What’s this image about?” Often I would find the shape of the film in what I shot. It’s not that I would impose that, but just by what I’m shooting and what I’m gathering that I would have, lets say, all these images of travelogue footage, or that I would have all these images of sports things, or whatever, music elements, and then I would find the shape of the film in the footage. For me its more like assembling a jigsaw puzzle that hasn’t been made yet. I don’t have all the pieces and I’m trying to build these pieces, and the pieces come out of some interest, or desire, or willingness to explore these particular areas.

Some people would say they never want to make a film like that. It’s like I never have a clear idea what I’m doing until I’m half way through it, and I really don’t know what my films are about until they’re pretty well half done, because they’re just collections of stories or images. It’s probably not the smoothest way to proceed, but I always like the explorative element of that. I always like the discovery element of it, because I feel like I’m not predisposed to writing an idea that I think I can work with throughout. I think I might start writing about red and end up with green, or I might start writing about wood and end up with steel. I’ve always tried to follow that. I’ve always tried to follow certain things that are important and through that I’ve tried to decipher some kind of code.

Over the years I’ve developed some kind of visual style, perhaps, and I’ve moved into other areas like hand colouring, hand developing footage, dreams, memories. Those kinds of themes are consistent in most of my work, and they just came out of this willingness to point the camera at anything that I was attracted to whether it was devastation, or destruction, or anything. I always feel like the camera is a way of exploring other parts of myself, like musicians might try to find certain sounds or certain techniques, or like vocalists might find certain vocal techniques. I think that the camera’s a way of finding voice, ultimately, for me, and that voice is not a singular consistent element. It could be anything from tone, to texture, to shape, to figuring out why I like this shade of white over this shade of grey, and so its always about exploring perhaps formal elements of cinema: light, movement, colour, rhythm. Those things have always predominated my work and then tying that in to intellectual interests, what my ideas might be about, and that just comes through the writing.

It’s really, probably, not the wisest way to proceed. I couldn’t imagine a student making work like this when you have to execute it in 4 months, or a 24-hour film festival. For me, because I know it’s a long process I just start shooting, and then eventually I come to some kind of shape and figure out what the content is, and then try and tie that in.

DF: It sounds almost like an unconscious process.

SS: Yeah, I think that’s right. Once I sit in front of an editing bench or a monitor, then I’m able to figure out, “Okay, this is about this.” My last two films that I’ve made, and the one I’m working on now starts with the words. I interview people who tell me stories. In some ways I have no idea what they’re going to be about. I know the people I’m interviewing and I know parts of their lives. That’s why I’ve chosen to interview them, although some of them call me and ask to be interviewed. It really is about assembling. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle. The unconscious way of approaching makes perfect sense to me. Until I sit down and actually hammer out some kind of either formal or contextual strategy or structure, I have a really limited idea of what the film’s about. I know I’m moving in this vein or this direction, and I’ll pursue things that are within that context, but I don’t have much more beyond that. Why am I shooting slaughters? Why am I shooting children playing? Why am I shooting sex? What is it about these activities that are bringing me back? The films come out of what it is that either my body or my eye is attracted to and ultimately what my brain is moving towards.

They are really loose like that, and that could be as much a curse as it is a blessing. Some would argue, “Oh my God. I could never start a film without knowing what it is about.” Others would argue, “Well that’s real easy. You don’t have to really ever know until you’re half way through it.” I’ve heard both arguments, and I can see both arguments. I guess I stopped fighting the process. At first I thought, “This is terrible. I should try and hammer down an idea, and get it down.” Now I feel I’m happy to pursue this process. I feel a little more comfortable in it. I don’t feel like I have to know what it’s about.

It’s really a level of discovery that I’m not used to in other parts of my life. I always find filmmaking balances everything else I do. I’m real big on playing the banjo, and I’m real big on playing hockey. I feel that film is hermetic, it’s cerebral, it’s expensive, it takes a long time, and music and sport are physical, they’re public, they’re cheap, they’re immediate, they’re the total opposite of each other, they’re the antithesis of each other. I always find that’s really important to me, and yet I think the act of editing, playing goaltending, and playing the banjo are very similar activities, where you have to be ultimately super-relaxed, and be able to execute with such speed or clarity. That only comes with real relaxation. I always find these parallels in the things that I do in my life. I’m getting a little clearer about what they might be and why I might be attracted to them.

At first it was tough because it’s not the typical way to proceed. In fact, it;s probably advised not to proceed in this manner because its so hard figuring stuff out. You end up shooting way more than you need, but I’ve managed to reuse everything I’ve shot anyway. I’ve just built this large library that I keep culling into my newest films. Now I’ve got 50 hours of film footage from all my years of collecting 16mm footage. It seems like my library’s just growing, and it’s like the library of my brain or of my unconscious. It’s kind of nice that way now that I trust the process a little more

DF: Is this process similar for other members of the Escarpment School?

SS: It’s funny because Mike and I’ve had these discussions, and he said maybe 10 years ago that he never wanted to make a film without knowing what it was about anymore, because he always made this kind of work. Gary used to make this kind of work. There’s a trend or shift by some folk to be a little more specific. “I’m making this film, and its going to have these shots, and its going to move in this direction.” Some people would swear against it, “No way. I’m not fucking going to shoot this stuff. Shoot first ask questions later, are you crazy? That’s way too painful. I’m going to have a very clear idea and then I’m going to go and execute it.”

I’m relieved to know I’m not the only one who’s stuck in this format of kind of collecting stuff and then trying to figure it out, because I know Phil has, and I know there’s a bunch of other people who continue to, but others would just say, “No way. I’m not going to do this anymore. I need a specific idea. I don’t want to be carving away at a huge boulder to get at some little shape in there. I need to go right for what it is that I need and then I’ll modify, of course.” There’s different schools on that just like there’s as many different approaches to documentary or drama. There’s as many different approaches to making this kind of work too.

DF: Was this something that at first, at Sheridan, you were encouraged to do?

SS: I don’t think it was encouraged. Go and shoot stuff, collect it, make journals. I think it was more of a process of figuring out personal sense, personal shape, personal style. Some people made very articulated scripted films, experimental films, great films. Other people made really loose process pieces .I don’t know if any particular process was supported or not. I think different people find different ways. Some people are clear up front, and they can articulate stuff, and write it down, and say, “This is what my film’s about.” Other people say, “I’m only going to figure this out when I actually get out there and start collecting images.” I would say it went both ways, and some people have shifted their process. “I do not want to do this process thing. I’ll save my process for the editing, or I’ll do that in a different way, but mostly I need to know what my work is about because this is too hard.”

The problem with this process is you can shoot 55 different things and only end up using 5 or 10, and then you’re trying to find the shape of the piece all the time. That’s not that easy all the time. As I’ve done it more, I’ve become more experienced at it. I’ve become more focussed on what it is I could use. I’m not shooting as broadly, so I’m able to be a little more focussed and still maintain that process-oriented practice, but its not as wide a net, perhaps, that I’m casting.

DF: So then really, aside from most of you having attended Sheridan during that decade, and this common theme of memory and landscape, that’s how the Escarpment School is defined.

SS: Sure, yeah, I would say that’s it. I like how the term has kind of taken a life of its own. Somehow when you classify something it becomes this bona fide entity. It’s not like we were in school going, “Hey, this is the Escarpment School.” We were all just making work. I don’t think we were making anything that was that unusual. We were all just making personal films in whatever way. That gamut of work ranged from abstract formalist stuff to real straighter dramatic pieces, and still all under the rubric of experimental. Obviously, hindsight is a little more efficient. When you look at it in context later on, you go, “Yeah a lot of this film was personal. It had landscape. It dealt with memory. Oh, yeah, there’s consistent themes.” The movement was defined after the fact, if it was a movement.

Maybe it was just the fact that there were two main film teachers there: Jeffrey Paull and Rick Hancox. With those two, in the 70s, they were keen on personal work. If I was teaching all the students at York there might be a certain brand of film coming out, or if it was Laurence Green, or John Greyson, or Antonin. It would be a certain kind of mark and emphasis, perhaps. I think that’s what happened there. Then, of course, Phil and Richard went back and taught a few years after their graduation, so that extended a few years.

DF: What other films or filmmakers at the time were a precedent for that style of filmmaking?

SS: Obviously Brakhage was shown a lot, and some of the American avant-garde stuff, just because it was so poetic, and so dream like, and wonderful. We were watching things like the European art masters, and Godard, and Fellini for different reasons. That’s not the kind of work we were making, although some people, Gary, I know, tried to make some dramatic work, and was really influenced by that stuff. Mostly, I think it was more personal, painterly films from that expressionist school of the American avant-garde. It was all the American avant-garde makers, not so much Warhol, who was more conceptual with his long-winded pieces, but like Brakhage, Bruce Bailey, Kenneth Anger, and all those people. It was really the American cannon. The old white boys who made these art-based films that were less content based and more expressionistic, perhaps. So that was the kind of work we were seeing a lot of and of course some Snow.

DF: Brakhage, Anger, or Snow: their stuff is really different.

SS: Other than Snow, they were still portrait films. They were still personal films. They were non-dramatic pieces. They weren’t typical documentaries. They were hybrid forms. They were slightly different, perhaps.

DF: But they weren’t really diaristic in the same sort of way.

SS: Some were. You could argue a lot of Brakhage’s work was diaristic. Not in such an overt, literal manner. Maybe that’s the difference with what was happening. We were more or less pointing the camera at ourselves for the most part. We would be in our films, Our films would involve our figures in our lives, whereas those films may have been portraits of places or sentiment. As much as they were still personal pieces, they were not as self-referential, perhaps. It’s always tough because I consider the notion of making films to some extent making portraits about people or places, whatever that might entail. Ours may have been specifically more personal. They would be about our own lives. They were either elaborate home movies, or modified documentaries, or personalized documentaries, abstract or formalist documentaries, perhaps. I don’t see a lot of difference because you look at Anger’s work, look at Brakhage’s work, at Bruce Bailey’s work, and I think they’re making films about things around them, and people around them, and they were still kind of formalist. Maybe not as directly autobiographical. Maybe that’s a good distinction. That might be it.

DF: Why do you think there is that distinction of being more directly autobiographical?

SS: I know that Rick Hancox was really big on personal films. I remember one of the very first articles I got in his class: one of his teachers on the East Coast said, “Before you can point the camera at anybody, you have to be able to point the camera at yourself.” Back then, I thought, “This is absurd. This is crazy. What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Maybe a lot of our sensibility was born to some extent in that little seed, saying, “Okay, before we have the right or ability to be able to make portraits of others, we have to be able to look at ourselves.” I think a lot of it came out of not just that article, or that thrust, but more out of that sensibility of figuring ourselves out. I remember the hardest thing for me to do when I first started making films was to point cameras at people I didn’t know. I thought that was just like an act of rape. I know a lot of people go downtown and shoot folks. I could barely point cameras at people I knew really well. I just found it a really intimate, invasive, almost violent act. I would never do that. I found it really tough. I don’t know if that’s because of the work I saw or my own personal bent, but it was really hard for me to do that. So I realized that before I could have the right to do that, then I better put myself out there. That’s what may have informed my choices.

I cant speak for others, obviously, but I think a lot of it was about accountability, and the power of the camera, and how much you want to be conscious and careful with it, because ultimately we were middle class white boys making movies. I think there was a consciousness around that of trying to be responsible and trying to be able to put ourselves out there as vulnerable as some of the subjects we used.

I always hated the bullshit of journalism: shooting somebody dying. That’s bullshit. I could never do that. You’re here to capture the war: big fucking deal. That’s a human being. So I always had real problems with that.

I always felt like I had to put myself out on the line before I could slam, or point, or judge, or frame. Frame, maybe, is a good way of putting it: frame other people. I felt like I needed to be out there. I realize that now as I’ve made my last couple of films, especially, I’ve always aligned myself with people who I think are misrepresented or underrepresented. It’s just so easy to stereotype people. I think that there are articulate people everywhere: people who are struggling, people who are privileged, people who aren’t privileged, people who are so called intellectual or not intellectual. I always try to find some kind of dignity in folks, regardless of what they’ve been through. I don’t like that about mainstream television or broadcast documentaries. There tends to be a simple reduction of people. I think there’s as much difference in all human beings that makes it easy enough to find the bad things, and I think it’s also equally incumbent on us to try to find redeeming features in all of us. I think its too easy not to do that.

My job, I feel, is to try to give voice, not just to myself, but to people that I care about, or people that I align myself with. I’ve always been attracted to underdogs to some extent. Perhaps because I’ve always felt like one for one reason or another. I think it’s too simple to stereotype and reduce people to certain things. I think there’s way more depth and complexity to everybody. My films are always trying to figure that out. I think it’s really easy to make uni-dimensional or two-dimensional people. I think it’s way harder to make a complex character emerge. I think that’s our job as makers. That’s why I’ve always been attracted to that. It seems like that’s where my desire, my heart is: to try to find those voices. We watch television and its kind of reductionist. I always hated that reductionism. I think people have great depth, and I think our job is to try to find that depth, not to reduce it to some commonality, which is bullshit.

DF: Where do you find those people?

SS: Those people started out as being my family and my lovers. Maybe they weren’t literal interviews, but those were the people I made portraits of: lovers, family, friends. Lately with Smack and Dead Time, the last two films, and the one I’m working on now, I’m interested in finding people that have great depth and who to some extent are misunderstood. Smack is about 3 brothers who experience drugs. One comes through with religion. The other two, its debatable whether they made it or not, but they survived. Dead Time is about incest, abuse, heroine abuse, and a lot of crime. For me a lot of these people are friends that I went to school with. One person was someone who phoned me and said, “I’d like you to interview me for your next film. I have some good stories.” He’d seen my last film. Otherwise, I mostly know everybody I interview.

Once again it’s about stories of underrepresented or the underdog person or personality. It’s really about trying to find real people in there. The way I’ve come to them: a lot of them are my friends, my brother’s been in once, people I went to high school were in twice.  There was only really one or two people I never knew that were in my films.  We were connected through friends. It’s almost like this studio down here has turned into this pseudo-confessional. “Come down and tell me your life stories, and I hope you trust me enough that I’m not going to do anything nasty with them.” People put in a lot of trust and faith in what I’m going to do. I feel like I have a great responsibility to not misrepresent them and to try to give them some kind of depth and complexity. I don’t buy the argument that people are either good or bad. I think we have both in all of us. There are elements of darkness in each of us, and there’s a lot of goodness and good will in people. I’m always trying to work towards the humane element and trying to figure that out, because I think its too easy to disregard people and to dismiss them.

Now I’m considering who to interview. I’m thinking of interviewing my father. I’m thinking of interviewing the people I play hockey with, one was in the gulf war as an air pilot, one worked for Children’s Aid taking in orphaned kids or kids from abusive families. It’s about trying to find 1) stories that intrigue me, because I have to work with these stories for a long time, and 2) stories that I think are always represented in one particular light. I think the army’s a fascinating place, for me. It’s like religion. My brother’s a Jehovah’s Witness, and I would love to interview him. I don’t think he’s going to do that, but I’ll ask him. It’s about finding stories that I’m fascinated with but I have no access to. This is the next best thing. I don’t want to pretend or write about it. I’d rather people speak to me about it.

It’s like inviting my biggest desires, fantasies and fears in here and having people tell me about them. They can tell me way more than I would know about what the life of a junkie might be like, or what the life of a prostitute might be like, or someone who did a lot of time in jail. Those are nightmares and weird things for me. I couldn’t imagine that stuff. It’s like accessing by virtuality: virtually, vicariously living these lives by getting these stories. I do live them because I’ll cut these stories for a year. I spent more time, in fact, on my last two films cutting the sound than I did doing the picture. That’s kind of an unusual approach for a lot of film.

I feel like I’m trying to find a certain kind of person that has that complexity and depth that people misunderstand. That’s what Les Blank did. He always interviewed what he would call subversive types: musicians, underground folk, the poor people that didn’t have access to mainstream media. I loved his films. I thought his films were fantastic. They were honest. They were real. They were raw. Great portraits. I liked his work a lot. It’s funny I’m just thinking about it now, because I saw a bunch of his stuff that really kind of moved me. They weren’t totally flattering. They weren’t dismissive. They had real depth and a resonance to them that I always liked. I’m kind of curious how to do that. I think its too easy to make somebody look good or bad or to make them uni-dimensional. I think the real job is finding that humanity, or that great scope in our potential, and in our darkness, because those are my biggest fears: fucking up and being saintly. How can you do either of those? Both of them are frightening. It’s accessing those subconscious fears to some extent. It’s perhaps, a safe way for me to go to these regions without really putting myself at risk or danger.

DF: What is it that attracts you to these themes?

SS: Like I said I think it’s my biggest fears to some extent. What would it be like to spend time in jail? What would it be like to have lost the battle to drugs and become a junkie? What would it have been like to be an incest survivor? It’s like reliving some wild nightmare and yet it’s almost safe. I met an Iranian man who’s making a film about his escape from Iran. His story sounded harrowing, and I said, “Wow, you’d be fantastic in a movie.” He goes, “Yeah, I’m making one.” Shit. This would be a great film. I’m really curious to see it. I never lived through some of that stuff, and I don’t care to, but I’m really fascinated with that. It’s like going into my dreams. I can access all these really dark parts without putting myself in harm’s way. I also try to do it to try to give voice. The last two films, people were really concerned how they were represented. One guy was a junkie and when he saw the film he said the nicest thing I think he could have said. He said, “Now I feel like if I die tomorrow that I’ve done one good thing, and hopefully that’ll stop somebody from taking heroin.” It’s not like I have these noble causes or anything. The desire is this interest in darkness. What I want to do is try to give some kind of shape to fear, pain, or anguish, so I can understand it better. Maybe they could understand it better, or that we could all understand it better, somehow. To allow people to get glimpses of different lives that they may not have access to.

DF: How do you approach memory through telling other people’s stories?

SS: Anytime that we remember something there’s always a filtering that happens. We can recount what happened tonight, and we might have totally different accounts. I think there’s always some kind of fictionalizing, whether it’s embellishment or downplaying. I don’t know if other people are telling me the so-called entire truth, but I believe that what they’re telling me they believe. The notion of memory is always tainted. There’s no real recall that is one hundred percent genuine. It’s all real, whether it’s partly paranoiac or partly embellished. I’m always curious how things are ordered, and how things are recalled, and where our emphasis is placed. It’s like when you have those dreams where certain parts are recalled and other parts are totally forgotten. Memory is like that. It picks snippets or glimpses and those will resonate forever. There are certain images that will never leave my internal eyes. There are certain ideas that I will never forget. It’s very selective. I know that when I’m cutting someone else’s voice I do it very differently from how anybody else would, including the speaker themselves. They would always choose different things to say from me. I don’t expect to be the reorderer of someone’s history. Somehow I can recreate a history. My history is now a fiction. These stories I recall: the names get changed and I turn it into a total fiction. I believe any time you recount any story there’s some kind of embellishment or some kind of fictionalizing that happens. It’s like owning these two genres. I like the idea because it starts with the truth and I turn it into a story. It also makes it a little safer. I can make these two people brothers, husband and wife, sisters, so I have some liberties there while still maintaining the actual shape of the memory. I can change its context. It gives me some freedom. It’s like a writer doing research. You can take that and do whatever you want with it. Still, some part of it is authentic and the other part is totally fabricated: the context or the characters. Many have never met and in my films they’re married or they’re brother and sister. I like that flexibility and I like the liberation that I garner from being able to join people in any context that I think is important for my narrative. I turn it into a narrative, ultimately, although it is a doc. It’s mixing two worlds. In some ways I feel that’s more honest. Documentary films are fictional films. You decide where you’re pointing the camera, when you turn it on, when you turn it off, the questions you ask, what you’re cutting in and in what context. That’s a fiction. I don’t care if the person is not scripted or performing, it’s still fictional. I think fictional films have a lot of elements of documentary. All you’ve got to do is look at Herzog’s work with Claus Kinski and you go, “Yeah, that looks part documentary to me.” I like that those two things can co-habitate. It seems more honest to some extent, because then neither of them exist. It’s like taking the elements that are real and turning them into a narrative, which is what we do when we recall things. You take elements that really happened and now you’re presenting them in some kind of context that you think is the order or the narrative. Whether or not that’s what happened is a different issue, but definitely we all have that restructuring that happens with past events. I like how they claim each other. I think it should have been claimed a long time ago. Films like The Thin Blue Line started a lot of this: claiming what documentaries are supposed to be in terms of narrative scope.

DF: What happens when you take someone else’s story and fictionalize it? Is it their story? Is it your story? Is it neither?

SS: I think it is their story. What I’m doing is changing the context. If they say, “I went to the store, I bought a pack of gum and I came home.” that’s still their story. I don’t change their words. All I change is where they live or whom they’re married to. In some ways I do change the story, but for the most part the events remain the same, or the way they recalled them to me. I don’t ask them to change their words at all. All I ask them to change is names, for a couple of reasons: one is I don’t really want to be dropping a lot of drug dealer names, and where they live, for obvious safety reasons, but also it gives me more flexibility. I can look at these 300 pages of transcribed voices and say, “This part of this story from person A could easily align with this story from person D,” and now I can make them husband and wife, or brother and sister, or whatever. It’s just looking at the documentary stories themselves as narrative fodder in some ways. I can now bring them into any context that I want. It’s safer in some ways because now the people aren’t real. They don’t become real people anymore. Their identity is hidden to some extent and the context is hidden. I don’t drop names of their kids, or their drug dealers, or the people they’ve stolen from, or whatever else. I’m able to just use the stories in a dramatic vein, which allows me to just deal with the narrative trajectory and not worry about incriminating facts. It’s like being able to deal with all the facts without incriminating anybody. I just jumble it up into a kind of fiction. The stories don’t change. Really all that changes is that context: who’s connected to whom. I usually try to find that interconnectedness by similarities, threads, consistent similar experiences. In Dead Time the Mark and Wendy characters never met, yet in my film I married them off, because by the time they were 20 years old they were both addicts, they both had a 4 year old daughter, and they were both divorced. These two people could easily have come from the same husband and wife team, so I married them off. In the film, that’s the fiction, but what they talk about is not invented. Only the fact that they’re married to each other is invented. They were both married to other people. Partly I’m creating a fiction and partly not. I’m just embellishing the narrative elements to make a story. Does that make sense? It’s always been so hard to explain.

DF: You talk about film as a way of finding voice. Is it your voice? Is it their voice?

SS: Both. The way I shoot and the way I cut is definitely my voice. Am I finding their voice? I think I’m giving voice to them. I don’t know if I’m finding their voice. I think I might be trying to decipher some people’s lives or experience of their lives in a way that might make sense of it, to some extent, to put it in context. I don’t know if I’m finding their voice. I think I’m giving voice. My own voice is just in the presentation: the hybrid form of documentary and drama, the shooting style, the hand colouring, the editing, the kind of staccato verité. That’s a pretty unusual or much more unique presentation of either documentary or drama. I think I’m giving voice rather than finding their voice because they’re not really part of the process once they tell me their stories.

DF: What’s the landscape of your films?

SS: A lot of the so-called Escarpment School films would really deal with landscape. They’d be shot in fields. There’d be fires. There’d be waterfalls. They’d be shot in the physicality of our environment. That’s a very late poet romantic, poetic notion. It takes the group of seven and turns them into time based artists. Take this landscape and make it expressionistic. It’s not just about personal story. It’s not just about memory. Now it’s about how that ties into the physicality of our environment, Canada being so vast. The whole landscape as metaphor motif: that’s really what that’s all about. That’s about understanding space and how space might impact our sense of self. A lot of artists have always done that: cojoined memory and landscape, or at least landscape with a more expressionistic presentation. It’s hard to talk about the Escarpment. What are we talking about, maybe 10 or 20 people who made work that is similar? It’s like looking at York’s work that comes out this year, and lets say 20 people make films about the horror genre or about memory. That’s what happens. I always like the landscape part because landscape is not just about a physicality, but it’s more internal. It’s always been used as a metaphor. I guess a lot of us did it, so now it becomes part of the dogma or something.

DF: Do you think that’s part of your work?

SS: I do, because I keep revisiting certain places and certain things. Like I said, I don’t really like pointing cameras at people. I always find that really uncomfortable, unless they’re actors and they know I’m there. For me, it’s about trying to take a sense of space, how this space might translate psychologically, or how this space might impact on us psychologically. I think that’s a big part of it. I’ve shot waterfalls, Niagara Falls, fires, forest fires, a lot of landscape. Rhythms of the Heart is a whole landscape-based piece. It’s not just external, but internal landscape: tight close-ups of living rooms, bedrooms, and that kind of confined space, keeping the camera always inside. I’ve always liked that part of it and I do think it’s a big part of a lot of our work: trying to include the landscape beyond its literal context into more of a metaphorical, poetic context.

DF: How similar is your process to other experimental filmmakers and other members of the Escarpment School?

SS: Phil runs the Film Farm, where he does a lot of hand-toning and hand-developing. I don’t know how much he’s used in his films. He’s used some of it for sure. Carl Brown is the only other person I know who tones as well. He makes these long non-verbal films with abstract experimental music that are toned. Mike is all video. Gary’s all video. There’s only a couple of us still working with celluloid. Gary used to work with toners, but he worked in reversal and I did not want to work in reversal. I wanted to work in neg so I could get that extra saturation and extra contrast when I made a workprint or final print. There’s a large community thanks to LIFT and Phil’s Farm that still do a lot of hand toning stuff. We’re pretty big here in Canada, at least, Toronto, for sure, that are working with toning stuff. Internationally, I don’t know. I haven’t seen a lot of it. Most people are working in video, just because of the ease of access. There’s not a lot of purists. LIFT is great and Phil’s fantastic at pushing this, but I don’t know how long its going to last.

DF: How do you know when you’re done?

SS: Once I had a dream that my film was done. I had a dream and Jeffrey Paull was in my dream. I was working on Woodbridge. This was my first film out of school. It was really hard. I didn’t know what I was doing. And I said, “Jeff, how do you know when you’re done? I’ve been cutting this film for months and I don’t see it anymore. How do I know when I’m done?” He goes, “Oh, you’ll know.” I said, “How?” He goes, “You’ll know.” So that’s as vague as it gets, and you do know.

            A couple of times, showing all my peers, I’d show Gary Popovich and Jeff Paull. I’d go, “Hey, I’ve finished this film. I’d like you guys to see it. It’s finally done.” They’d seen a billion versions of it. “Yeah, it’s finally done. This is the lock. It’s done. I’m ready to go to the neg cutter and get it done.” They’d watch the film. “Steve, your film’s not finished.” I’d be heartbroken. I’d go, “Oh, shit. I got this finished,” and I would say, “Come on, are you sure? I think it’s done.” “No, no, this isn’t clear. This doesn’t work. This isn’t done,” and it would devastate me. Inevitably they were right, except for once. When I made Sweetblood, I showed them, Jeff and Gary, both of them said, “This one’s not finished.” I said, “This time I think you’re wrong,” because the other 3 times they’d been right. They go, “This isn’t finished.” I go, “No, this time I think you’re wrong. This ones’ finished.” They go, “No, I don’t think so.” So I said, “Okay, fine.” I thought it was finished. I felt it was finished. I finished it. I had a screening. They were there. Jeff came up to me. He goes, “You’re right. This one’s done. You finished it.”