The Great White North’s Great White Hope

Canadian indie film star Don McKellar goes global.

If Americans know Don McKellar at all — and it’s far from certain that they do — it’s for his midsize roles in such films as Exotica and When Night is Falling. But in his native Canada, McKellar is nothing short of a celebrity, a well-known face from his roles in films by Atom Egoyan, David Cronenberg, Patricia Rozema, Bruce McDonald and François Girard (with whom McKellar co-wrote The Red Violin and 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould). That’s not counting his role in the popular TV series Twitch City (co-starring The Kids in the Hall’s Bruce McCulloch) or his Genie (the Canadian Oscar-equivalent) award and nominations.

There’s no one reason why McKellar is hardly known in the States and so celebrated in the Great White North, but at least part of it has to do with the incredibly supportive nature of the Canadian film scene. Located mostly in and around Toronto, the tight-knit group includes most of the directors named above (except Girard, a fringe member who makes his home in Quebec) and actors like Callum Keith Rennie, Sandra Oh, Geneviève Bujold, Elias Koteas and Sarah Polley. From a distance, it may seem easy to mythologize the extent to which these Toronto filmmakers form a close group, but for the most part, McKellar says, it’s accurate.

"The fact is it really is a very supportive community," he says, reclining on a couch in Manhattan’s Hyatt Regency. "I didn’t realize how rare that was until people started coming in from other countries. [Adopts a French accent] ‘In Switzerland, we would never have drinks together.’" While they don’t exactly live in a Melrose Place-style enclave, McKellar points that Rozema (whose Mansfield Park opens next week) lives a block away from him and filmmakers and actors often socialize when they’re not working together.

Dressed in knit polyester shirt and slacks, McKellar spews words with blinding speed, often jumping to the next thought before he’s half completed the current one (a daunting task for your humble transcriber). It’s not hard to see how he could take on acting, writing and directing chores for Last Night, his first feature as a director, which won the prize for Best First Canadian Feature at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival (and made its U.S. debut at the Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema in May). In the best Canadian spirit, it’s an ensemble piece starring McKellar, Rennie, Oh, Polley, Bujold and even Cronenberg himself (a wickedly sly turn). The setting is Toronto, and the time is six hours before the end of the world.

More a rumination on mortality than a cataclysmic hand wringer, Last Night is unexpectedly subdued considering its subject matter. It’s perhaps the ultimate not-with-a-bang-but-with-a-whimper scenario. (In fact, McKellar says Whimper was one of his earliest choices for the film’s title, although he confesses "almost no one liked it.") While there are people running wild in the streets, the film’s central characters greet their oncoming doom with a kind of quiet dignity, simply trying to find the best way to spend their last few hours. What it resembles most is a New Year’s Party in the minutes before midnight, as people ferociously pair off in the hopes of creating a single perfect moment. That parallel, McKellar admits, is entirely intentional. "A lot of the subtext comes out of my reaction to New Year’s Eve, which is usually ‘Oh God, I don’t want to have to go,’ until someone drags me out."

In Last Night, McKellar’s character is a sullen loner who spends the film’s opening moments explaining to his mother (obviously not for the first time) why he’s chosen to greet the end of the world alone. "What was interesting to me," he says, "was that practical dilemma that comes up at times like Christmas and New Year’s, when you want everyone to be satisfied but you can’t. It’s about getting beyond obligations, and ultimately it’s about being honest to yourself." In the harsh light of imminent destruction, the characters in Last Night find themselves reevaluating the personal bonds they’ve always taken for granted, assessing who and what they want to be closest to when their time comes. "Everyone ultimately has to break through these structures that they’re used to relying on. They may have planned some ritual that was going to keep them going until the end, but ultimately all the characters have to deviate and are better for it. The film is about realizing you’re never going to find that perfect New Year’s Eve party where everyone you love is in the same room, so enjoy where you are."

Much of Last Night’s structure involves a cagey cat-and-mouse game where information is doled out to the audience in bits and pieces; a major link between two characters is not made clear until the film’s final minutes, and McKellar never reveals the nature of the pending cataclysm. Again, this is entirely on purpose: "I wanted to make it clear that whatever is causing the world to end is something outside of human control. Maybe there are people who can do something about it — presumably Bruce Willis is out there trying his best — but that seems less dramatic to me than a person coming to terms with their own fate. If you’re the President of the United States and you have a nuclear arsenal at your disposal and some top scientist telling you ‘Aim the missiles here,’ there doesn’t seem to be a lot of conflict there — unless you’re an extremely indecisive president."

Having worked with most of Canada’s great directors, McKellar found himself with no shortage of role models when it came to stepping behind the camera. Rather than emulating any one, he found himself seeking his own happy medium: "Atom is precise, of course. He has the shot, the lighting and the performances exactly in his mind. Bruce McDonald, on the other hand, is the exact opposite; his great strength is allowing people’s contributions to come forward and making them feel that the set is a big party. Both are really valuable skills if you can use them, but both are also dangerous, I think, if you allow them to get out of control." While Last Night has little of Egoyan’s placid visual mastery, it has its own modest visual style as well as McKellar’s razor-sharp writing skills to propel it along. In one scene, two characters desperate to make a connection find themselves trading tidbits of information about their lives in an effort to find something that will make the other instantly love them. It’s absurd, of course, and funny, but terribly poignant and even tragic. It’s all of them at once, which is certainly Last Night’s specialty.

Growing up in Canada, McKellar says he never wanted to be a filmmaker. "It seemed pretty inconceivable at the time," he recalls. "It wasn’t even an option. We all loved movies and thought movies, but even when we started making them we didn’t think of ourselves as filmmakers." The subsequent community of filmmakers "sort of came out of nowhere. When I started working, it was with people — Bruce McDonald was Atom’s editor, Patricia had done one film — it wasn’t very intimidating. Everyone seemed to be developing at the same time and really needed support, because there wasn’t any support system."

While other cities’ film cultures have often been geared toward exalting the individual at the expense of the group, McKellar says the Toronto enclave "realized early on that each other’s success was valuable for us. We would see Atom win an award in Cannes, and suddenly it would be easier for us to get money. So why fight it?"

In fact, the only trouble McKellar has ever run into in the Toronto film scene was when it came time to film his first short in 1992. In an admittedly audacious move, McKellar cast David Cronenberg in the lead, a novice director taking on the most established voice in Canadian cinema. "It was dangerous," he admits, "because I know if he had come on the set and looked askance at some camera placement there would have been a mutiny. It’s my first short film and he’s the godfather of Canadian independent cinema — my crew would have lost all allegiance. But he was very gracious. He took the acting very seriously. I remember he took me aside and said, ‘Do you mind if I say something? Because I acted before I didn’t think I said enough.’ I thought, ‘Oh boy, here we go,’ and then he said something like, ‘Do you think I should be eating a muffin in this scene?’" McKellar exhales, reliving the memory. "It was just actorly stuff, you know?"

Last Night opens Thanksgiving weekend.