Next Up: Edmonton filmmaker Trevor Anderson hits a high notes with his recent work
The creator of the film High Level Bridge finds accolades at Sundance and elsewhere
by Lauren Den Hartog
Several years ago, en route from the Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival, the award-winning film DINX by Trevor Anderson was stopped by the Canadian Border Services Agency and held for over a month.
High Times: Trevor Anderson’s film about Edmonton’s High Level Bridge has taken him to the Toronto International Film Festival and Sundance
Photograph by 3ten
The incident gained significant media attention and roused debate about censorship in art, but independent filmmaker Anderson, 38, was far from outraged by the ordeal. “There was a certain pleasure in feeling, ‘Oh, I’ve really made it – they’re stopping my work at the border of my own country,’” he says, laughing. “It was someone’s job to sit there and watch that film, and I’m glad of it because whatever kind of gay erotica they might have thought it was, what they got was local rock stars Lyle Bell and Allan Hildebrandt in sparkly short shorts on the poles.”
Locally, the Edmonton-based artist is known for his work with his band The Wet Secrets, his activity on the city’s theatre scene and his latest project, The High Level Bridge, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2010. The film was inspired when Anderson attended a master class at the 2009 TIFF, where participants were told to make a short film about water. The iconic overpass that separates Edmonton’s north and south sides seemed to him like a fitting subject – not least of all because two of his friends had recently jumped from the bridge.
“You don’t live in Edmonton and brainstorm about water for long without thinking about the river valley,” he says, sitting in a noisy bar in downtown Edmonton, not far from where he lives. In the film’s closing shot, Anderson throws his camera off the bridge in memory of those who have jumped. “Right then, the river valley for me meant the High Level Bridge and the recent deaths of a couple of my friends, so I just kept thinking down that road,” he says.
Anderson’s work, released through his one-man production company, Dirt City Films, has been screened at hundreds of film festivals across North America and Europe. The High Level Bridge was chosen from among those of hundreds of other applicants and screened at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin this year and earned an honourable mention last fall in the Best Live Action Short Film category at the American Film Institute’s AFI Fest in Los Angeles.
And then there’s Sundance, long considered the definitive launching pad for American and international independent film. The High Level Bridge was selected to participate in the 2011 festival’s short film program. But perhaps even more memorable than the screening was an experience that Anderson had during a directors’ brunch hosted by festival founder Robert Redford. Anderson was making a cup of coffee when he felt someone standing beside him. He turned to see cinematic legend Isabella Rossellini. The two exchanged pleasantries and Rossellini asked Anderson if he was a director. “She held up her lanyard and said, ‘I’m a director, too,’” Anderson recalls. “[It was] the most surreal cup of coffee I’ve ever had.”
Anderson landed in Edmonton in 1992 after transferring from Red Deer College to study drama at the University of Alberta. In the years that followed, he wrote, produced and directed independent theatre through the Edmonton International Fringe Theatre Festival and spent five years directing Die-Nasty, the city’s (in)famous improvised soap opera. Stints touring with The Vertical Struts and drumming for The Wet Secrets followed, and it was during that musical interlude that Anderson had an epiphany. “In the middle of that period, I decided I wanted to start making films,” he says. “I knew I had certain skills from my theatre training – storytelling, working with actors, dramatic structure – and I wanted to learn the differences between theatre and film, the different language of communication.”
Working for the Edmonton Comedy Arts Festival and the Edmonton Street Performers Festival had equipped Anderson with another crucial skill: grant writing. “I’m shocked that it’s not taught in more schools,” he says.
After securing funding for 2005’s Rugburn, his first film project, Anderson hired an experienced crew and gave it to them straight. “I explained to them, ‘I’m hiring you to do two jobs: please help me make this film and please help me to understand how to be a film director,’ so that I could learn,” he says. “I think people appreciated the opportunity to get in on the ground floor and tell a director on day one what bad habits to avoid. People were happy to help.”
Farren Timoteo, who played the lead in Rugburn and DINX, says as a director, Anderson can lend an ear while also providing crucial leadership to his crew. “There’s a very easy, friendly way about him. You might leave a good, casual chat with him on set, and after a moment, realize you’ve just received a valuable bit of guidance. Was that intentional or accidental? In my opinion, intentional, always. That’s his way.”
Anderson says filmmaking allows him to sift through whatever is on his mind at the time. “I find it a very useful way to engage with the world and to think about what’s going on in my own head.” The medium, he says, is also a way for him to tackle more serious issues like suicide, homophobia and AIDS. His sixth film, The Island, imagines a tropical utopia populated by gay men. Anderson got the idea from an email he received from someone in the United States in which the author called gay men “a disgrace to society.”
“You should all be put on an island so you can give each other AIDS,” the letter said. So Anderson took the idea and ran with it, creating a five-minute animated short. “By picking heavier topics and treating them lightly but still respectfully, I’m trying to entertain audiences and give them that sense of relief and release that comes from having a laugh with a friend,” he says. “I love that feeling from real life and I think that there are ways to get at it.”
Not all of his films delve into dark subject matter. Figs in Motion, commissioned by the Art Gallery of Alberta for its grand re opening, features male ballerinas who become horses in a nod to painter Edgar Degas and photographer Eadweard Muybridge.
Anderson’s next film, which has the working title A High Note, tells the story of his late uncle Jimmy in six consecutive songs he wrote with former Edmontonian Bryce Kulak. Jimmy grew up in Alberta’s Rosebud Valley before moving to New York, where he became a Broadway dancer. Eventually, succumbing to addiction, Jimmy ended up in rehab, where he became friends with Judy Garland. “Talk about failing up,” says Anderson.
With a studio orchestra and crew members likely to be numbered in the dozens, A High Note will be Anderson’s biggest project so far. He says it has taken him several years to secure funding for film. “We can’t get away with giving everyone five bucks and a bag of licorice,” he notes, adding, “A bottle of bourbon and a credit in a movie has gotten me some very fine actors.”
A High Note will be filmed later this year in Edmonton, the city that has played a prominent role in most of Anderson’s films. “You can still pioneer here,” he says of the city. “The attitude of barn-raising is useful for independent, low-budget filmmaking.” But while the city has been kind to him, Anderson isn’t sure if he’ll continue to call Edmonton home. “Every year, I say I’m going to go somewhere this year and I’ve been saying that for 19 years now, so I never know,” he says. “Next year, I could be a Buddhist monk living in the Maritimes.”
Next Up is a series of profiles of emerging leaders in Alberta’s business community and public life.
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