Recently we had the chance to talk with Tony Burgess about all things writing, including his newest project, the new movie Dreamland.
Horror Geek Life: Where did your interest in writing come from?
Tony: When I was younger, it was really painting that was my first interest. I studied it at university and developed as a visual painter, and secondary to that, I did a lot of writing tied to it, performance stuff, and art school punk, in Toronto around the late seventies, early eighties. Eventually, I discovered I enjoyed the more quiet pursuit of writing, which I had always done but was always secondary to visual art. I used to open for a band, too, doing performances. Not something you do anymore, the way I used to do it, anyway. I amassed a pile of writing and wasn’t even aware there was a thing called CanLit at this point, but I went back to university and had all this writing floating around and an editor for ECW Press, his girlfriend at the time was a friend of mine, asked if she could pass on the pile of writing that I had. He ended up liking it enough that they published my first book, but I really didn’t think at that point it was going to be a major focus, and that’s still partially the way I am. They liked enough they asked for a second book and that ended up being Pontypool. I never realized I was contributing to CanLit, or whatever Canadian literature was supposed to look like or sound like, I was just carving out a way to do things so I could keep doing them.
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HGL: While you were on this writing journey, when did it occur to you that you would like to write screenplays?
Tony: Well, there wasn’t anything I wasn’t generally trying, so it was a natural thing to do it and pretend I knew what I was doing. (Laughs) Bruce McDonald came to the launch of Pontypool which was at the El Mocambo in Toronto, around 1997 or 1998, and the manuscript, unpublished at that point, had been handed to him by the editor at ECW. Bruce liked it so much he came to the launch and he optioned it right there with, yes, a Kinder Egg. I’d never met him before and he said to me, I want to option your book, here’s a Kinder Egg for the option, and I said, sure, okay. He asked if I’d like to write the screenplay, I agreed and that was it. He took a great risk on somebody who hadn’t written a properly produced screenplay before, but it was actually ten years before we were able to get the film made.
I approached it the way I do most things, as in, I don’t know how other people do this, I’m only mildly interested in how they do this, but if I put in the work and research I’ll get something across the finish line that will work. One of the biggest hills to climb was figuring out how to do pitch and story meetings, and it took a long time to realize what you were up against as a writer. It was brutal, actually, but I learned and I’ve since written scores of screenplays. Some of the films work and some don’t, and I don’t know if it’s my first love now, but probably the thing I do the most.
HGL: When you are writing, do you have a specific routine you follow or does it change depending on the project?
Tony: It changes depending on the project, yeah. Those little grindhouse films I love writing for, you could be writing on-set, for instance, so your schedule is completely up to the demands of that. When I’m writing books, I try to keep a schedule and that schedule is all the time so, really, there is no schedule. (Laughs) There’s a lot of walking around and thinking. My schedule tends to be in the morning; I write better in the morning. I like how that feels, like that’s how I’m starting my day, instead of trying to sit down and write at say two in the afternoon after my head has been polluted with a dozen things.
HGL: Let’s talk about Dreamland. Where did the idea come from for this film?
Tony: That was an old, old idea, something that me, Stephen McHattie, and Bruce were kicking around almost immediately after Pontypool. It started with an idea from Stephen, stemming from a short film him made, and at the same time, we were battling with trying to get sequels off the ground like for Pontypool, but nobody wants to make sequels. Hell, nobody wants to make movies because it’s so expensive. In fact, Pontypool was a big influence on how I wrote Dreamland; came up with the idea.
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HGL: When I watched Dreamland and saw Stephen in both roles, he seemed so perfect, like this was written for him.
Tony: Oh, it was absolutely written for him. In fact, all of our story meetings were held with Lisa (Houle), Stephen, Bruce, and myself. They were sort of creative partners in how it evolved. Those were some very funny nights that we had, being in a dark place story wise and coming up with crazy ideas. I was actually shocked it got made, actually. We had challenges right out of the gate as Bruce and I didn’t have any arguments for it, so when the people from Luxembourg said this is genius, we were thrilled to have that kind of support.
HGL: The film is definitely not going to be an easy watch for some people. When you were working with director, Bruce McDonald, did you have any difficulties transcribing the written word into a visual idea?
Tony: Yes, but no more than usual. Once you kind of break the locks in terms of the way things are normally done, you have more choices and opportunities. You start to get excited about the what you are doing, how things looks, as it’s not what you’d consider the normal way of doing things. Our primary concern was the fact that there was simply so much story; we only used about ten percent of what we had, we could have just kept going, in any different direction. We believed if we were having fun, the actors and filmmakers were having fun, were excited, then that would show up.
It can be a risky thing to do because it can shut out your audience, it can seem indulgent, but that’s fine with me because some of my favorite things are hyper indulgent wank off sessions that make no sense. To me, you don’t score any points by just logging in a mediocre way a doing it in a way that’s supposed to be done. You might do it wrong, and do it shit, but you create something original and mystifying.
HGL: What other projects do you have coming up?
Tony: I have a bunch of stuff. Pontypool sequels are always going on; Bruce is working on two right now. The film was originally a radio play and commissioned by the CBC, the original Pontypool, it had nothing to do with the script I was writing at the time, so I’m right now writing a sequel to the radio play, I’m having fun with that. I’m adapting a couple of other novels of mine into features right now, writing a film right now, just generally writing all the time. I’m constantly poking around in fiction, tons of paintings in the garage, our band is finishing its fourth album and before the plague hit, we were doing shows all over the place.
I want to thank Tony for taking the time to talk with us.
Dreamland is now available in Canada from A71 Entertainment on Apple TV, Bell, Cineplex, Cogeco, Rogers, Shaw and Telus. Dreamland was released in the US on June 5th.
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