Daniel MacIvor flying high on first feature
Wrote, directed and stars in Past Perfect Confesses long interest in relationship stories
February 21, 2003
SUSAN WALKER ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER
When Daniel MacIvor was first approached to write a screenplay in which 25 per cent of the action had to take place on a plane, his first impulse was to refuse. But then the idea started to work for him, and he accepted.
"It's a metaphor for what happens to the world when we fall in love," he says of the airplane scenes that came to make up 50 per cent of his film, Past Perfect. Cecil (MacIvor) and Charlotte (Rebecca Jenkins) meet on a flight between Halifax and Vancouver. The film runs on two tracks, the hours in which they fall in love alternating with a Saturday two years later when their relationship seems doomed.
In the first stages of love, says MacIvor, "the world kind of disappears and we're floating and we're neither here nor there ... We're in a limbo of love.
"And then," his tone drops to a register denoting a harsh but familiar reality, "... we land."
Past Perfect is MacIvor's first feature-length film. His next two features are already in the works, under the aegis of da da kamera, the creative partnership he and producer Sherrie Johnson established in 1986.
It's a unique artistic marriage, an all-purpose dramatic company that allows MacIvor to write, act and direct in both theatre and film.
While he's at Halifax's Dalhousie University next month, directing the graduate theatre students in his most recent play, You are Here, he'll be working on a film adaptation of it. Come summer, he'll be back in Nova Scotia, to shoot Wilby Wonderful, another feature film that he describes as dark comedy about "a day in the life of a small town" with five main characters, two of them performed by Past Perfect cast members Jenkins and Maury Chaykin. In between, in May, his next one-man show, Cul de sac, directed like his previous one-handers by Daniel Brooks, opens in Toronto.
Given this output, Past Perfect is already past history for MacIvor, who won the Best Actor award in the Atlantic Film Festival for his performance in it, and the best screenplay prize for Marion Bridge, directed by Wiebke von Carolsfeld. The latter film, based on a play by MacIvor, won the Citytv Award for best Canadian first feature at last year's Toronto International Film Festival. it's theatrical release is scheduled for April 18.
There's a way in which Past Perfect resembles nearly everything that MacIvor, 40, has written since starting out in theatre in the '80s. It's about loss. Not just the loss the couple has experienced after a miscarriage, but a loss of the fantasy of a perfect romance.
"My impulse was to try make something that was a love story, but not an easy love story with the typical twists and turns of the love stories that we've been fed," says MacIvor, just back from attending a Quaker convention in Santa Fe, N.M. (We'll have to await the film version of You Are Here to know where that fits in.)
"Just because millions of people go to see Maid In Manhattan doesn't mean that we should be showing it to them," he notes, with a touch of self-parody. "Ice cream is tasty, but a steady diet of it it's not going to be good for you. There are a lot of people unhappy in love and Hollywood is responsible for that unhappiness. In my little corner of the world, I'm trying to do something about it."
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Wrote, directed and stars in Past Perfect Confesses long interest in relationship stories
February 21, 2003
SUSAN WALKER ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER
When Daniel MacIvor was first approached to write a screenplay in which 25 per cent of the action had to take place on a plane, his first impulse was to refuse. But then the idea started to work for him, and he accepted.
"It's a metaphor for what happens to the world when we fall in love," he says of the airplane scenes that came to make up 50 per cent of his film, Past Perfect. Cecil (MacIvor) and Charlotte (Rebecca Jenkins) meet on a flight between Halifax and Vancouver. The film runs on two tracks, the hours in which they fall in love alternating with a Saturday two years later when their relationship seems doomed.
In the first stages of love, says MacIvor, "the world kind of disappears and we're floating and we're neither here nor there ... We're in a limbo of love.
"And then," his tone drops to a register denoting a harsh but familiar reality, "... we land."
Past Perfect is MacIvor's first feature-length film. His next two features are already in the works, under the aegis of da da kamera, the creative partnership he and producer Sherrie Johnson established in 1986.
It's a unique artistic marriage, an all-purpose dramatic company that allows MacIvor to write, act and direct in both theatre and film.
While he's at Halifax's Dalhousie University next month, directing the graduate theatre students in his most recent play, You are Here, he'll be working on a film adaptation of it. Come summer, he'll be back in Nova Scotia, to shoot Wilby Wonderful, another feature film that he describes as dark comedy about "a day in the life of a small town" with five main characters, two of them performed by Past Perfect cast members Jenkins and Maury Chaykin. In between, in May, his next one-man show, Cul de sac, directed like his previous one-handers by Daniel Brooks, opens in Toronto.
Given this output, Past Perfect is already past history for MacIvor, who won the Best Actor award in the Atlantic Film Festival for his performance in it, and the best screenplay prize for Marion Bridge, directed by Wiebke von Carolsfeld. The latter film, based on a play by MacIvor, won the Citytv Award for best Canadian first feature at last year's Toronto International Film Festival. it's theatrical release is scheduled for April 18.
There's a way in which Past Perfect resembles nearly everything that MacIvor, 40, has written since starting out in theatre in the '80s. It's about loss. Not just the loss the couple has experienced after a miscarriage, but a loss of the fantasy of a perfect romance.
"My impulse was to try make something that was a love story, but not an easy love story with the typical twists and turns of the love stories that we've been fed," says MacIvor, just back from attending a Quaker convention in Santa Fe, N.M. (We'll have to await the film version of You Are Here to know where that fits in.)
"Just because millions of people go to see Maid In Manhattan doesn't mean that we should be showing it to them," he notes, with a touch of self-parody. "Ice cream is tasty, but a steady diet of it it's not going to be good for you. There are a lot of people unhappy in love and Hollywood is responsible for that unhappiness. In my little corner of the world, I'm trying to do something about it."
Back to articles