Maxwell McCabe-Lokos stars in Bruce McDonald’s The Husband
Tonight, Bruce McDonald’s The Husband will premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. It’s a dark film about an insecure single father coping with his wife’s infidelity: she’s serving time for statutorily raping her 14-year-old student. The film is dark, obviously, but also quite funny, and anchored with an excellent lead performance from Maxwell McCabe-Lokos.
McDonald is a veteran of TIFF, having won the Best Canadian Feature Film award way back in 1989 for Roadkill. So I talked to him about his history with the festival, what it means to be a Toronto filmmaker, and about his new film.
You’re a veteran of this festival. How do you feel to be back at TIFF this year?
Oh, it’s great. I like coming here because I feel like I’m sitting at the big kids’ table. Plus, when you’re at these things, you always get to see filmmakers and friends that you haven’t seen in a while. Plus, these festivals are really where these kinds of independent films find their audiences. They start here and then they go from festival to festival until they kind of find their fans.
You’ve been making these low budget independent films for 20 years now. What do you think has changed about the industry and your approach to it?
What’s changed? Well, for me, not much. It’s just become a little easier to make films. You used to have to worry about laboratory costs and film costs, and now you just need a machine about the size of that [points at my voice recorder] and you can do it all. I guess it’s changed in that there’s more people doing it. There’s more people coming out with films than before, but that’s because it’s easier to make them.
The Husband, like a lot of your films, is set in Toronto and you make a lot of use of Toronto landmarks, like the AGO and Honest Ed’s. Do you go out of your way to show off Toronto?
No, not really. Martin Scorsese makes movies about New York because he’s from New York, so I make movies about Toronto because I’m from Toronto. We shot at the AGO because I thought it had some cool architecture, with the staircase it kind of looks like a maze. And, amazingly, they said we could. I don’t really know if we went out of our way to show Toronto, but I figured we should give the film a sense of location and show people stuff they can recognize. People from Toronto are so used to it being seen as New York or Chicago that they’re always kind of surprised when they see places and things that they recognize.
Yeah, I saw my apartment in one shot. It was a little disconcerting.
That’s what I like about shooting Toronto for Toronto. People can look at it and be like “Oh, I recognize that building. Oh, there’s my house. Oh, there’s my girlfriend kissing another guy on the corner.”
The Husband premieres at 7:30pm tonight at the Scotiabank Theatre and also screens at 9:00pm on Wednesday at the Ryerson Theatre and again at 12:00pm on Saturday at the Scotiabank.
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Alan Jones writes about film for Toronto Standard. You can follow him on Twitter at @alanjonesxxxv.
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