We often wonder about the Canadian film industry and our struggle for identity. Hollywood dominates content. It’s hard to get movies that are set in Canada to the big screen. This is true for most of Canada but not really in Quebec. There are incredibly powerful and engaging movies made in Quebec that are often nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars. French films made in Quebec are thriving and worth watching. The rest of the country might be envious but perhaps we should be paying attention.
A new thought-provoking thriller that proves the point that if you make a great movie set in Canada, it’s worth watching is Red Rooms.
We spoke with director Pascal Plante and producer Dominique Dussault at the Vancouver International Film Festival (VIFF).
HNMAG: Are you both originally from Montreal?
Dominique Dussault: I’m from the West Island, actually. Pierrefonds and Kirkland.
Pascal Plante: I mostly grew up in Quebec City. I moved to Montreal when I was in Film Production at Concordia University. I was there from 2009 to 2011. I have been doing a short every year and moved on to my first feature in 2016. Red Rooms is my third feature and our second feature together.
HNMAG: Nadia; Butterfly was your other feature together. That was set in Montreal and she was an Olympic athlete, was there an influence from the 1976 Montreal Summer Olympic games?
Pascal Plante: Yeah, yeah. Nadia is a name that rings the Olympics, especially in Montreal. It’s a little nod to that. There was an actual boom back then of people being named Nadia.
Dominique Dussault: You know afterward how she was treated too.
Pascal Plante: Sometimes is a curse to achieve your dreams, especially too young.
HNMAG: Quebec has something that we are missing in the rest of Canada. In Quebec cinema, we’re not afraid to set a movie in Quebec or Montreal.
Pascal Plante: We used to film in Montreal to stand in for other places like New York or another lookalike city but I think in recent years there has been more of an embrace to acknowledge that. Being geographically specific is a recent trend. For us, it’s very Montreal.
Dominique Dussault: The trial takes place in Montreal. It’s important that we felt that city, specifically Griffintown.
Pascal Plante: The big condo tower is a very recent urban reality. In most movies, we never see the inside of them.
Dominique Plante: That’s the Canadian Towers in Griffintown, right near the Bell Centre.
HNMAG: That’s like gentrification?
Pascal Plante: It is. It’s 100% gentrification. It was built from the ground up super quickly.
Dominique Dussault: It looks like Toronto.
HNMAG: Could that embrace of our own country happen as well for the rest of Canada?
Pascal Plante: I just was in Calgary and I had no idea before I arrived what the downtown area looked like. I’ve seen a lot of Canadian cinema and I was wondering why I hadn’t seen that in movies. Do films shot in Calgary try to erase Calgary? That’s common with a lot of Canadian cities.
HNMAG: I get that. Vancouver is the prettiest city in the world but we’re constantly making it Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and New York….
Pascal Plante: There is something deeper there but for us, it was always clear from the get-go that it was going to be very Montreal-centric. You mentioned something about Quebecois cinema having a distinct DNA, so we don’t have that complex anymore.
HNMAG: You also have your own market.
Pascal Plante: There are no political incentives for Quebecois films to be put in theatres. If it works in Quebec, it’s because people want to see them. It’s an ecosystem that has been built.
HNMAG: Of course but in English Canada the market is controlled by Hollywood. Genevieve speaks in English, why is that?
Pascal Plante: The Internet is mostly in English and Kelly-Ann is a child of the Internet.
Dominique Dussault: There are more entries on the web in English.
Pascal Plante: If you want to train your AI, it’s going to be in English due to all the content in that language.
HNMAG: It’s more practical.
Pascal Plante: This character is all about practicality and efficiency.
HNMAG: Clementine is from Thetford Mines and there are no busses to even another small town like Victoriaville. It makes it almost impossible to get to Montreal without a car. Does that speak to her isolation?
Pascal Plante: Canada is frickin’ big! Yes of course. There are small towns everywhere, it’s a reality. The sense of being isolated and when they watch the news, they watch a lot of Montreal news. This is a character defined by her actions. It makes her pilgrimage more significant. If you are going to go through all those hardships just to get there.
Dominique Dussault: Attend the trial.
HNMAG: Is this another reason why Kelly Ann is determined to be at the trial?
Pascal Plante: It’s an impossible friendship in a sense because Kelly Ann is there because she knows it’s him. With Clementine, she’s in total denial. We wanted the characters to contrast as much as possible. The groupie phenomenon is what interested us the most.
HNMAG: Is the boom of advanced technology and the internet international connection being predominantly in English a threat to language in Quebec?
Pascal Plante: It’s only a minor threat. If there is not a strong cultural identity tied to language as well as popular culture such as movies, music…etc. We are proud to make films but within the Canadian context of making them in French. The threat is there but culture is the great counter that balances it out. This film attracts a lot of audiences in their late teens and early 20’s who might usually be more interested in Hollywood films. We are very pleased by that response.
Dominique Dussault: Quebec cinema is diverse. It’s not because it’s Canadian or Quebecois that brings audiences to the theatres. It’s the quality. It was important for us that we see that production value on screen.
HNMAG: It’s high quality but still not trying to be a Hollywood blockbuster.
Pascal Plante: There’s a balance. You can not beat Hollywood with 1/20th of the budget but we want the strong cinematography, performance, music, and language to appeal to someone who is used to watching Hollywood movies.
HNMAG: Kelly Ann is so practical, so it makes sense that she would be perfectly bilingual.
Dominque Dussault: From Montreal too. The city has a lot of bilingual people.
HNMAG: As far as I know, Red Rooms are an urban legend.
Pascal Plante: That being said, murders on the internet are very real, live be-headings…etc. The question is not whether they exist. The question is do they exist in the way the film portrays them. It’s in relation to the mythology of the dark web. The killer is a filmmaker but he taps into the psyche of the audience. Are we being too literal when we have the backdrop of his lair painted in red? Of course, it’s in red because that’s what is expected. You want to feed into that folklore. It’s now technologically possible. Nothing prevents someone from doing this but there has not been a singular case that has been exposed. At the beginning of the trial, the lawyer says “For a long time we thought this was an urban legend but now we have the first case…” It’s a plausible alternate reality.
Dominique Dussault: For the snuff aspect it was important for us not to show the violence. Even though some could brand Red Rooms as a horror. The content is definitely horrific. We would say it’s more of a psychological thriller.
HNMAG: What was the origins of this movie?
Pascal Plante: We came up with the core idea together since Dominique is a very creative producer. It was a co-creative endeavour. If we film something, we are going to film it right.
Dominique Dussault: We have to be on the same page.
HNMAG: Are you working on anything for your next project?
Dominique Dussault: Potentially a historic drama, we’ll see. We have a few projects coming along.
Red Rooms is a well-made and entertaining movie that audiences have really taken to at International Film Festivals as well as other pre-release screenings. We have been asking how can we have more movies set in Canada that play in movie theatre’s both at home and abroad. It seems like we should look no further than Quebec. The answer could be to stop trying to emulate Hollywood and make high-quality and engaging movies that you are not afraid to set where they belong.