Matt and Mara is part of a new wave of Toronto cinema changing the game

Matt and Mara is the latest film from Toronto-based filmmaker, Kazik Radwanski. A kind of love story between two people who knew each other during undergrad and recently reunited, the film stars Deragh Campbell and Matt Johnson (who also directed last year’s Blackberry) as two writers in different stages of life. Mara is married with a child, and works as a creative writing teacher at TMU (Toronto Metropolitan University) and Matt is a perpetually single and vaguely controversial published author. Tensions underpin their interactions, until they explode during an ill-fated trip to a literary conference.

Kazik Radwanski spoke with us when he came to Montreal to present the film as part of the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma in October.

Justine Smith: The film has already had a release in NYC. How has that gone? 

Kazik Radwanski: It was great. It played for three weeks there and it was super positive and sweet. I don’t know why, but I always expect New York to call me out, or to get confronted at the Q&A, but it was very sentimental and very nice.

JS: What is the tone of the Q&As?

Kazik Radwanski: They’re different. In New York, it was great because Matt and Deragh were there. Some of the initial Q&As almost felt like another scene from the movie because they would disagree. It’s nice seeing that dynamic in real life, too. In some ways, they’re opposites, but there’s also a lot of creative trust or support. The Q&As are a nice place to talk through some of those nuances. 

JS: Can you talk a little bit about casting? Obviously Matt Johson is an actor even if we know him best as a director. He and Deragh have such different approaches to performance.

Kazik Radwanski: Matt has a few scenes in Anne at 13,000 Ft. and a very brief scene in How Heavy This Hammer, my second feature. In Anne, he’s got several and it was enough to be nominated for the CSAs for Best Supporting Actor. 

All the way back with my second feature, Hammer, Deragh and I were already talking about Anne at 13000 Ft. When we filmed Hammer, it was almost like a screen test. (Her character) was working in a daycare, so it was literally putting her in the context that she would be for the film. For me, it was really seeing what it would feel like. A lot of my early stuff was with non-actors and more documentary-like performances. 

When it came to Anne at 13000 Ft., Deragh and Matt knew each other, but we weren’t sure it was a good idea. We were both nervous, there was a bit of tension around whether their instincts would align or if it would be uncomfortable or strange, but it clicked right away. In 13,000 Ft., Matt was going to be in one or two scenes but then it grew into something a bit bigger. When I saw that, I was like, I’d like to see a whole movie like this. There was a lot to work with. I found it stimulating that I got to go to such interesting places with the two of them. Their process is quite different, and in this film, the dialogue is improvised. There was a structure and concept for the scenes and I’d revise that and give notes or write new ideas for scenes as we shot it. 

Matt’s instincts in those scenarios, his background is almost Second City, improv-like comedy — improv in the sense of supporting every idea and growing it bigger and bigger. Deragh is amazing at knowing when not to speak, which I feel is really important to improvising. She’s almost the perfect foil for Matt. She can really save scenes when he’s getting too big, she kind of grounds it again. It becomes really interesting to watch how she does that. In the subway scene, where he’s riffing about a short husband, it almost becomes too silly, but she’s able to keep it real and analyze him, like “Why do you say this? What’s behind it?” I honestly felt at times like I might not be able to direct Matt if it were not for Deragh but I also think that’s the nature of how we’re working. We’re collaborating with each other in different ways. There’s a sort of meta-level in this film where Matt’s persona as a writer is similar to his persona as a filmmaker. It’s more than that though. Like these conversations of them jesting about how they’re approaching a scene adds this extra texture of conversation that would come up a lot, like how Deragh interpreted for Mara and how Matt interpreted it for Matt. 

For Matt, it was much more literal, more overt, more plot-driven. Like, ‘my character is doing this’ and for Deragh, for Mara, it was much more honest in a weird way, like how she thinks about love or ideas she finds stimulating about love drive the character. It was much less literal and it would go into these weird places. I don’t think she ever saw Mara pursuing the relationship or that they would end up together. It’s fascinating to see them debate that or how they’re interpreting the scene and their concepts of what makes a good movie or what makes a good scene colliding. It becomes a fascinating collision of people who live their lives differently but connect so deeply on one level. It’s been fun even still doing these Q&As and talking through it, finding slightly different angles to talk or think about it. 

JS: In cinema and art, there’s always been this attraction to these kinds of “not-love” stories, where characters love each other, but cannot or do not end up together. Aside from Matt and Mara, I’m thinking of movies like Brief Encounter or more recently, Past Lives. What is it about these stories that you think appeals to audiences?

Kazik Radwanski: Interesting way to phrase it, “not-love stories.” That is what I tend to gravitate to. Even in my other films, characters almost have sex or show a connection that is quite moving or have a certain romance. Funny about Brief Encounter, it’s a sort of British old-fashioned version of that story. It’s a movie I love, and Matt loves it, too. Thinking in more contemporary terms, I don’t know if I can put it into words, but it is my preference. When I’m exploring this topic, I don’t have a good answer for it, I wish I did. There’s something that makes those films great and I’m after something similar. 

JS: In the last shot of the film, you have an Éric Rohmer book on the bookshelf. In a lot of ways, Matt and Mara makes me think about his Moral Tales and the question of what it means to live a moral life in the contemporary world. It seems to be something Mara, in particular, is grappling with. Can you talk a little bit about the influence of Rohmer in the film?

Kazik Radwanski: There’s a couple of references to Rohmer. The bookshelf. The scene with Mara and the sweater is a nod to Chloe in the Afternoon. It was a huge inspiration initially, just that feeling of the afternoon, this pocket of time you have downtown by yourself. You can just hang out with someone or exist in a way you haven’t been existing; it breaks the pattern, to realize that something is missing at home. That was the real inspiration. That leads to an interesting headspace, staying in that little pocket. The idea of an emotional affair and doing it in a more contemporary way. With Rohmer in general, I am attracted to the morality of it. I grew up as an atheist and that scene at the funeral is very much based on my dad. At the same time, there’s a lot of ministers, vicars and religious relatives in my family. So, I feel like I’m secretly religious, even though I’m totally an atheist. Some people have called me a Catholic because the characters are punishing themselves, but I don’t know where that weight comes from. Religious films without being religious.

JS: What I find interesting about this film is that, compared with an American film where characters are making big decisions and taking big actions, the characters are more passive. In a way, they’re not making decisions or taking action. It’s almost as if they’re waiting for something to happen to them. It feels very Canadian to me.

Kazik Radwanski: I think Mara is very Canadian and Matt is maybe a little American. Matt gets that a lot. I remember when The Dirties came out, people were like, how is this a Canadian film and not an American film? There’s a brashness or directnes to Matt that’s uncommon. Mara, in a lot of ways, is passive but there’s a quiet confidence to her, too. Almost like she’s exploring her indecision through her work.

JS: As a teacher, too, she’s very analytical and spends all day, as we see in many scenes, with students, discussing their work. There’s this kind of undercurrent, especially in the first few meetings with Matt, where he doesn’t ask her questions, like at the coffee shop, he doesn’t ask her about her work, because it would be rude. That moment in particular is so illuminating.

Kazik Radwanski: We did a lot of work on those office-hours meetings, almost as character development, just for her to get a feel for being a professor. We’d have actors or students bring in work, like a story of a poem that they wrote, and Deragh would literally give feedback on it. On some level, it was important for her to feel that intimacy or that connection. For me, too, it’s just important to get the faces of young students and the feel; the realness or vulnerability, the lack of being jaded. 

There’s a gap in time — they knew each other when they were in undergrad, they had ideals and were more open, so everything was more loaded. Then going to that café scene and they’re talking about each other’s writing, it’s that kind of connection, like 10 years ago. As you get older, you become jaded, or you die a bit, you get into a rhythm of life, but they knew each other before that happened, which I always found exciting. They knew each other when they had ideals about writing. Now, 5 to 10 years later, there’s sexual tension but it’s also a creative connection, which took me a while to figure out.

That’s very true of Deragh and Matt in real life: they both have a lot of integrity, but it manifests in slightly different ways. They have morals about what a good scene is or what feels real or feels good. They’re a bit unusual in that they care about that. In different ways, they’re very honest people. I think I’m like that, too. We all share that. We’re all interested in documentaries. We all make fiction like documentaries, like documentary texture.

It’s a very Canadian thing, the legacy of documentaries. We have a very long history of documentary and have formed a national identity around documentary and then it informs our filmmakers. I feel like that’s something in the current movement of younger English Canadian filmmakers, picking up threads from the ’60s and ’70s that were abandoned in the ’80s and ’90s.

JS: It really does seem, right now, that there’s a new wave of filmmakers coming out of Toronto. What is it like in Toronto?

Kazik Radwanski: Contrasting it from when I made my first feature to now, it’s amazing. There are so many filmmakers and collaborators working on multiple films. Like Nikolay (Michaylov), who shot my film, also shot Measures for a Funeral [which also played at this year’s Festival du Nouveau Cinéma] and a number of other great films. Editors are cutting different films. People are going to test screenings and watching each other’s edits. Just seeing these films travel and play at festivals and hearing people in other countries make these connections as well, is a good thing. To see someone like Ashley McKenzie, Graham Foy or Isiah Medina travel and be known… I’ve always been influenced by that. It gives you more confidence to try something. Making something small or interesting or personal, there will be an audience — that was the fear with this film.

If I’m being totally honest, when we were making it, we were like, no one outside of Toronto will like it. Like who really cares about who Matt is or TMU, all those sorts of details. But again, when I watch films from other countries, I appreciate that specificity — it can be the suburbs of New Jersey or Romania. Specificity resonates. I’m unsure if it’s a lack of self-confidence but my long, rambling answer is that, I think seeing Canadian filmmakers do that is really inspiring. ■

Matt and Mara is now playing in Montreal theatres.

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