Interview Leon Marr

The mid-’80s are like the Dark Ages of English-language Canadian cinema. Coming out of the modestly lucrative tax shelter era (roughly 1975 to 1982), which allowed investors in Canadian films to write off 100 percent of their investment in Canadian films from their taxable income, and led to a boom in both inventive genre pictures with American stars (The Changeling, The Silent Partner) and a whole lot of crap, Anglo cinema in Canada seemed lost.

Denys Arcand’s 1986 film, The Decline Of The American Empire, would further expand the profile of Quebecois cinema, both domestically and abroad. But in English-speaking quarters, the “new generation” of the ’90s (Atom Egoyan, Don McKellar, Bruce McDonald) was still honing its craft, on stage and in film school. In Winnipeg, a house painter named Guy Maddin was still getting drunk and watching old movies on weekends, while tinkering around with shorts. Sure, David Cronenberg would be making some of his best, most inventive work (Videodrome, The Fly), but his reputation was already more or less sealed.

It was into this confused, unfriendly climate that Leon Marr’s Dancing In The Dark was released in 1986. Not to be confused with Trier’s Dancer In The Dark (or the Springsteen song), Marr’s film was based on the acclaimed novel by Joan Barfoot, about a bored housewife (Martha Henry) whose sense of displacement and deep-rooted domestic dissatisfaction closer her off from her already aloof husband (Neil Munro) and the rest of the world around her.

It’s a bit chatty, leaning heavily on Henry’s voice over, but sparsely shot and grippingly tense, Dancing In The Dark is a legit lost classic of Canadian cinema. TIFF is screening the film tomorrow night as part of its ongoing Canadian Open Vault series, which provides the perfect occasion to catch up with this ambitious, under-exposed film. The A.V. Club spoke to Marr about the making of the film, the climate of Canadian cinema in the ’80s, and how it helps to have a distributor who gets your picture.

The A.V. Club: What was the filmmaking climate in Canada like at the time you were making Dancing In The Dark? Was it during the tax shelter?

Leon Marr: No, no, it was not. It was after that. That was more in the late ’70s and early ’80s, when they made all those horrible movies with American stars. This was after that.

AVC: Coming out of the tax shelter, was there a move toward films like Dancing In The Dark, which had bit more of a personal vision?

LM: Um… I can’t honestly say. All I can tell you is that we got no support from the funding agencies. Telefilm gave us no money.

AVC: Why was that?

LM: They didn’t like it. They thought the script was horrible. They didn’t understand it. The budget at the time was reasonable, around $800,000. But Telefilm decided not to fund it. It was Film House, and the CBC, who came on board to fund it. Nobody really understood it, quite frankly. At the funding agencies, anyway.

AVC: That seems odd. Wasn’t the book it was based on fairly popular at the time?

LM: Yeah, and that’s what first brought it to my attention. I read a good review of it in the Star. You know, “a harrowing story of a housewife’s descent into madness!” It got very good reviews, but basically people didn’t get the script. It was a director’s vision, as you say, and the agencies weren’t geared towards that kind of stuff.

AVC: What attracted you to the material, other than that review in the Star?

LM: The two things were, well, when I read the book I got lots of images, visuals. There are certain images that just popped in my head. Secondly, Edna is the kind of woman I would have no interest in, yet, I got inside her mind, and that fascinated me.

AVC: Edna seems like a throwback to the very domesticated 1950s housewife. Did her character feel contemporary to you, at the time? Was this something that you saw going into the 1980s, women staying at home and concerned exclusively with maintaining the household and tending to their husbands?

LM: I wouldn’t say I gave it that much thought. I was just fascinated by her story, and her mindset. The thing that I did notice was that after screenings, people would come up to me and tell me they knew an Edna. Everyone knew an Edna. A lot of women came up to me and told me it really hit the nail on the head. A lot of people think the ’60s ended all of that, but that’s not true. It still exists!

AVC: That’s one of the great things about the film—it’s not even so much her husband’s transgression but how cliché it is, and how it just makes her life seem totally banal.

LM: Exactly. Well that’s what she says in the film, right? That you never think it can happen to you and that it always happens to the nextdoor neighbour.

AVC: The film could have been so sensational. It’s easy to imagine it as being a full-on, horror film—

LM: Unfortunately the trailers for it showed it like that, with a booming voice and everything, and that kept the right people away.

AVC: Even that seems a throwback to the tax shelters, and all the cheesy horror films.

LM: Oh yeah. But the look of the film was very deliberate. The cinematographer, Vic Sarin, he’s got a list of credits as long as your arm, and he said it was the first time he’d read a script that was so visual. In the flashbacks, the film covers six different time periods, and each one has a different look. It was a very coordinated film in terms of the art direction and the look. That was crucial.

AVC: How did you find Martha Henry for the role of Edna?

LM: We sent her the book. She was at Stratford. I actually went to see her and played the music that she danced to at the end. She said that if it ever happened, she’d be happy to do it, but she never thought it would, actually. She thought it was too good to happen! [Laughs.]

AVC: It’s great that the film is screening as part of the Canadian Open Vault program, but even the TIFF press notes refer to it as a “buried treasure.” Why do you think the film never really stayed in the public memory over the past quarter century?

LM: Distribution. We had the wrong distributor. Quite frankly, they didn’t know how to handle it. As I said, the trailer was all wrong. It just wasn’t handled well, and you have no control over that. When I saw the trailer, I nearly died!

AVC: It was that bad?

LM: It was horrid.

AVC: And you couldn’t say, “This misrepresents my film, kindly re-cut it?”

LM: No, no. If somebody like Sony Pictures Classics—I don’t even know if they were around then—but if somebody like that was around they would have known how to market it. It was an art film, you know? It went around to about 20 festivals and won different awards, but the distributor didn’t know how to handle it.

AVC: It’d be great if it got a DVD release, if only so it could get back into the narrative of Canadian national cinema. It’s easy to see this film as a precedent to the films of Atom Egoyan, who would come to define personal filmmaking in the post-tax shelter climate. Your film anticipates the chilly emotional temperament that a lot of his films have.

LM: A lot of that would be part of a larger European sensibility. My sensibilities seem to be more European. I’m interested more in internal drama than external drama. We had a screening in London, England, and after the screening a critic came up and said, “I wasn’t expecting this. This doesn’t look like any Canadian film I’ve ever seen.” It had a very, very different look.

AVC: Were there any filmmakers you were thinking about in particular while making Dancing In The Dark, that tie into this European sensibility?

LM: One of them in particular was [Bergman’s] Persona, which is one of my favourites. We originally had a credit dedicating it to Orson Welles and Francois Truffaut, who had just died at the time, but Doug Smith at Film House said that Orson still owed him money. Seriously. So they took those credits off.