Vancouver Plays Itself

Good-natured slacker Ryan (Paulo Costanzo, left) and money launderer Bryce (JR Bourne) fight over Ming (Steph Song) in the Paul Fox film Everything's Gone Green. (Katie Yu/ThinkFilm)

Lately, nothing in Vancouver is as it seems. Aliens roam the suburbs of North Van (they’re actually extras from an American TV series); a surrealist golf course twists like an Escher drawing (no one really plays there — it’s a money-laundering venture for Japanese yakuza); and a dream girlfriend turns out to be the gold-digging star of a website called slutcam.com.

This is the Vancouver of Ryan (Paulo Constanzo), the slacker conscience of Everything’s Gone Green, the sophomore film by Paul Fox (The Dark Hours). Written by novelist and first-time screenwriter Douglas Coupland (Generation X, Eleanor Rigby), it is full of familiar Coupland obsessions: soulless corporations, loneliness, pop culture and kitschy Canadiana. It’s also a cinematic love letter to a city that often masquerades as somewhere else.

“People [in Vancouver] are always feeling like they’re the backlot of someone else’s movie,” Fox says over the phone from his home in Toronto, as he prepares for the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. “So it was really important to be specific in the location, to get those wide shots of the water and mountains.

"In film, there’s this pervasive sense of Vancouver either dressed up as a U.S. city, like Seattle or Los Angeles, or in gritty stories of the downtown eastside. I wanted to give a different picture of the city. I really wanted to show how people co-exist with all that nature in their daily lives.”

Fox was brought on board after producer Chris Nanos of Toronto’s Radke Films optioned the screenplay. (The other producer is Salt Spring Island’s True West Films, which was behind the highly praised 2005 feature It’s All Gone Pete Tong.) With its laid-back soundtrack, mid-century modern set design and references to real-estate dealings and grow-ops — plot devices that also show up in Coupland’s latest book, JPod — Everything’s Gone Green feels very much like a Coupland novel come to life. A few of the author’s detergent-bottle sculptures even appear in the film.

“Most of the collaboration happened in the early stage,” says Fox, who claims that the film gave him a better understanding of Coupland’s writing. “I wanted to capture Doug’s voice, which is very distinctive in his novels. His characters go off on tangents, or make some kind of social commentary. The trick was to convey that and make it work in a movie, which is a very different medium.”

Ryan contemplates his future in front of a photograph of his crush, Ming. (Katie Yu/ThinkFilm)

Adrift and almost 30, Ryan is caught in a premature mid-life crisis. In quick succession, he is dumped by his ambitious girlfriend (“You’re not motivated to awake the warrior within,” she tells him) and fired from his corporate drone job for writing bad poetry on company time. Finally, his fantasy of early retirement is dashed when his family’s winning lottery ticket turns out to be a dud. Ryan ends up taking a job at the provincial lottery office, photographing jackpot winners for the company’s magazine. All around him, people are getting rich in dubious ways. Ryan is seduced by the promise of fast money, despite his ongoing quest for authenticity, like capturing the heart of his new crush, Ming (Steph Song), or finding someone content with simply being middle-class (Ryan’s young niece tells him that when she grows up, she wants to be a “trophy wife”).

As a filmmaker, Fox can relate to Ryan’s quest to find meaningful work. “It is a constant struggle in this business,” Fox says. But the film is as much about Vancouver’s growing pains as it is about Ryan’s. In Everything’s Gone Green, the city seems both multicultural and oddly provincial. Like the luxurious, empty condominiums in Ryan’s building (their Chinese owners have decamped for Hong Kong), Coupland and Fox’s Vancouver is a city that hasn’t found its true character. Tweaking the west coast tree-hugger cliché, there’s even a scene involving a dying whale beached near the Burrard Street Bridge. Office workers toting briefcases pour down to the sand to touch the beast and pay tribute. In a city of highrises and freeways, it’s an authentic experience of the wild. The film is full of wry jokes like this.

“I wanted to get the visual details right,” says Fox. “Not only is Doug a visual artist but Ryan is, too, although Ryan doesn’t yet realize what a good photographer he is. So the film needed to live up to that. I spent a lot of time plotting the geography and thinking about where everyone would live, like Ming’s granny. I asked around and people said Strathcona, where there’s a lot of Vancouver Specials [a style of house]. I also wanted to be sure that when Ryan turns off the Burrard Street Bridge to see the whale, that he would be where he should be in the city.”

Fox even hired noted Vancouver photographer Lincoln Clarkes to take Ryan’s pictures of lottery winners. “Usually, you just send out a production assistant or somebody for that kind of thing, but I wanted Lincoln for a consistency of vision. He sees the world with a kind of humanity. That was important for the film.”

Everything’s Gone Green screens at TIFF Sept. 10 and 12.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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