When I go to film festivals like the Toronto International Film Festival, I get the big stars but I also want to discover some of the new filmmakers launching there. I wanted to talk to Aaron Wilson, whose first narrative feature Canopy premiered at TIFF. The Australian film stars Khan Chittenden as Jim, a downed WWII pilot surviving for a night in the jungle of Singapore. He encounters a Chinese resistance fighter Seng (Tzu-Yi Mo), and they must cooperate despite a language barrier. Even though Wilson and I were both in Toronto, we spoke by phone because the only way our schedules coordinated, we couldn’t be in the same physical location. That’s TIFF, baby!
CraveOnline: There is so little dialogue in Canopy, how many pages was the actual script?
Aaron Wilson: That’s an interesting question. It sort of was always in a state of flux. I’d say around 40 pages, 40-50 pages? 40 pages maybe. So there’s a lot of descriptive text and I use a lot of poetry to, I guess, put down how I felt, how I wanted a scene to feel rather than specific camera angles or specific movements. That sort of evolved over a period of a few years.
Canopy is a lean 80 minutes, 84 with credits. Did you play with different cuts that were ever longer?
We did and because the film gets quite claustrophobic after a period of time, we felt that to protract the film much longer would be a bit too long to keep people in that space. We definitely wanted shots to feel languid and like we were sort of opening up the audience to this forest and all the little details that we could see in the shot and that we could hear. This length felt like a good length for us to get our story across.
This is an aspect of World War II that I’m not familiar with at all, but is the film even about that?
Ultimately no. It’s a setting and a situation that drove me to tell the story in the first place, but ultimately when you pare it back, it’s the story of an individual that is out of his depths in a situation that he’s never been in before, in a world that he’s never been in and that’s totally foreign and intimidating. So it’s really about not just even a soldier in any given war going through this situation but really about the vulnerability of a single man or a single person. That, for me, was something universal. People who’ve never been to war can hopefully glean what it’s like for an individual to experience the intensity of this sort of situation, will appreciate that it would be ridiculously overwhelming and would be an experience that would stay with you forever more. You would walk out of this space forever changed.
I felt like the film looked three dimensional even though it wasn’t shot in 3D. Did you do something with the cinematography and lenses to achieve that look?
Yes, that’s interesting you say that. In post, we manipulated some of the shots that were static, or that had slight movement to give them a sense that they were pulsating or distorting. It gives the forest a sense of character in addition to our sound design, but also to make it, as night progressed, make it feel like things aren’t literal anymore. Time is slipping and Jim’s losing grasp of what’s real and what’s not. That’s when sleep deprivation kicks in. So it’s interesting that you noticed that, and also we did some different angles and some bizarre overhead angles that open up the space in ways that we thought were quite different.
That’s interesting about later in the film how it’s manipulated, but I even thought the opening shots of the jungle looked 3D.
We did that on a few of the opening shots but very subtly at the start, especially in the shots before we see Jim, but we did it more often as the film progressed.
