Canada's original auteur: Don Owen. Courtesy Toronto International Film Festival Group.
The critical reaction that met Don Owen’s first feature is the stuff of Canadian film legend. It was 1964, and Owen, then working for the National Film Board of Canada, had turned what was supposed to be a half-hour TV show about parole officers and juvenile delinquency into Nobody Waved Good-bye, a gritty feature about alienated youth. The film’s anti-hero, Peter (Peter Kastner), rebels against his parents, moves out, tries to find work and ultimately turns to petty crime.
What was striking about the film’s conclusion was that it was determined not to conclude anything at all. Having stolen a car and fought with his pregnant girlfriend, Peter drives off, in the rain, alone, with tears streaming down his face. The film set the standard for the existential grief that permeated so much of English-Canadian cinema in the ’60s and ’70s.
When it opened in Toronto and Montreal, the film was dissed and dismissed by critics and distributors alike. But a funny thing happened on the road to cinematic obscurity. When Nobody Waved Good-bye screened in New York, critics from the New York Times and Vogue saw it as stylistically fresh and unusual. Convinced that Owen had tapped into a burgeoning strain of youth angst, the U.S. press immediately championed it. The film went on to international success and returned triumphant to Canada, where it received a series of glowing on-second-thought reviews. The extremely negative response that Nobody Waved Good-bye initially got is now seen as a reflection of Canadians’ self-deprecating nature.
Owen went on to make a series of other low-budget feature films: The Ernie Game (1967), Cowboy and Indian (1972), Partners (1976) and a sequel to Nobody Waved Good-bye called Unfinished Business (1984). This past September, the Toronto International Film Festival Group published Don Owen: Notes on a Filmmaker and His Culture, written by Steve Gravestock. On Feb. 7, Gravestock will host an evening in conversation with Owen, who will discuss his cinematic oeuvre. Owen spoke to CBC Arts Online from his Toronto home.
A: It was meant to be a half-hour film. I had previously done some work with actors in Toronto, improvising scenes. Al Waxman had been to the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, and had learned from Stella Adler about the art of improvisation. We had brought together a few people here, including Gordon Pinsent, and worked out various improvisation techniques. When I came to work on the film, I didn’t have any dialogue written, I just had a very brief two-page outline. I was able to improvise the scenes and the whole thing expanded. It was one of those weird situations where many of the people who were in charge at the NFB were away on summer break. I just kept ordering more film. I told the story to myself as we went along — I was even improvising that. We kept on adding things, and one improvisation would lead to another. Something that began as a sentence grew into entire scenes.
A scene from Nobody Waved Good-bye. Courtesy Toronto International Film Festival Group.
Q: What was the NFB’s first impression of the film?
A: Everyone agreed that it was quite interesting and fresh. Most of the dramatic films before that were formal, Hollywood-style, glossy attempts to make something more mainstream. Ours was quite rough, the camera was moving, the improvisations gave us something we didn’t expect. That’s why it remains fresh today, I think. These so-called reality shows of today aren’t really real, but they do have elements of improvisation in them. And that’s what makes them almost bearable.
A: You know, people go to the movies to see magic. When a film opens with very little commercial value, practically no publicity, no stars and a style that was then considered messy, it doesn’t have a great chance. Now, people try to make films that look that way — they shake the camera to give it that hand-held look, to make it look real. There was a distributor at the time who called the film “amateur night in Hicksville.” It played in competition at the Montreal Film Festival, but they screened it in the afternoon and I felt that they purposefully scuttled the film. But then someone from the New York Film Festival saw it, and it played there. It was a huge hit there. And there, it got great reviews and picked up a distributor. It ended up playing for 22 weeks in New York.
A: I was relieved and delighted. I was convinced it was a good film. Its models were largely European and not Hollywood and I think it was made in a documentary fashion, so it looked jittery and on edge. But thankfully, when the film got to New York, people saw it as a virtue rather than something to apologize about. I think that has something to do with the Canadian thing about feeling inferior. Then it went back to Toronto and played for weeks and weeks.
A: The thing about Cassavetes is that he was an actor, and I think there was often a fair amount of ego in those improvisations. They were very showy. I mean, they were very good, but what I was interested in was less being showy than telling the story, in this case about middle-class life. I improvised each scene in three parts, with a clear beginning, a middle and an end. I admire Cassavetes and his work, but his improv was much more Actor’s Studio, and all over the place.
Another scene from Nobody Waved Good-bye. Courtesy Toronto International Film Festival Group.
Q: Themes of alienation seemed to be taking root in cinema around the world at the time: the nouvelle vague in France, people like Michelangelo Antonioni in Italy, the kitchen-sink dramas of Britain and Cassavetes in the U.S.
A: In my opinion, it was the values of the ’60s rejecting the values of the ’50s. The ’50s were about being complacent, materialistic and self-satisfied. I think the ’60s were a strong reaction to that. Peter, the lead character in Nobody Waved Good-bye, was doing what Bob Dylan was doing at the time.
A: I do. In fact, I’ve just been re-reading my favourite book, The Outsider, by [Albert] Camus. I’ve always felt like an outsider, but as an artist, I guess we all feel that way. It’s basically like being an insider and outsider at the same time. Somehow, to be inside enough to understand the experiences of people, but outside enough to be critical of it and show what it is.
A: I’m very committed to the idea of examining what a Canadian identity might be, what it is. Improvisation is very useful, because rather than projecting our concept of what it might be, it allows us to get to the raw material, rather than imposing our preconceptions of things. But I’d say the improvisation comes from my longstanding interest in Buddhism and Eastern religions, where the idea of improvisations, accidents and openness is very crucial to things. You accept things as they come up, and try not to be too judgmental about them.
A: I’ve been quite surprised and pleased at how well they’ve held up. I watched The Ernie Game recently at the [University of Toronto] with an audience, and they really liked it. I also watched Partners.
A: It takes forever to make movies in this country. I was never a real businessman — and you need to be, as well as being a filmmaker. I think Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg have great business smarts as well as strong filmmaking skills. My problems began after I left the NFB. There was a means to create work there if you had a script. Outside of the NFB, it was very hard to do. After a time, I just couldn’t make films. But I painted a lot, brought up two children as a single parent and went on a spiritual journey. Other people can go to Cannes and make deals. When I went to Cannes, all I wanted to do was go to the market and buy fresh vegetables and make food. During the day at Cannes, all this pornography is showing there, and then at night everyone puts their dinner jackets on and goes and sees art films. I mean, it was nice in that it was celebratory, but I also found it weird. It wasn’t my scene.
Don Owen appears Feb. 7 at the Gladstone Hotel Ballroom in Toronto.
Matthew Hays is a Montreal writer.
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