It took more than a dozen emails – and several last-minute date changes due to filming commitments – but finally we are seated around a large wooden table in a sunlit Kitsilano café.
On one side is Gabrielle Rose, a striking actress with piercing bright eyes who has appeared in countless movies and virtually every single television series filmed in Vancouver over the last couple of decades (an exaggeration, but only just).
Sitting beside Rose is screenwriter Roslyn Muir – fittingly wearing a bird pendant – and across from her is another familiar face from the local film and TV biz: actress Camille Sullivan (Ally Was Screaming). Reel People and director Siobhan Devine round out the tea-swilling quintet.
We're all present and accounted for, and suddenly it's clear (to Reel People, at least) that the flurry of emails and extra effort have been well worth it. The roundtable is a rare opportunity to delve deep into a feature film – in this case, The Birdwatcher, which will have its world premiere at the 2015 Whistler Film Festival – with the cast and crew who brought it to cinematic life.
The Birdwatcher tells the story of Saffron (Sullivan), a social worker and single mom who discovers she is dying of cancer – and Birdy (Rose), the titular birdwatcher who gave Saffron up for adoption immediately following her birth.
Saffron has no other family. Birdy has no interest in being a mother. But Saffron needs someone to look after her kids when she dies, and her time is running out.
The Birdwatcher has its origins in loss. Muir was inspired to tell this story after the death of her sister. She was also fascinated by the larger cultural expectations that swirl around motherhood.
“There’s a societal norm that you have to have children, but you don’t,” says Muir. “At the same time, I had a couple of friends who had found their birth mothers, and [the mothers] didn’t want to talk to them. They didn’t want to meet with them.”
That impulse became one of the building blocks of The Birdwatcher.
As the biological daughter, Sullivan explores a multitude of emotional states: yearning, grief, fury, and acceptance.
“When I first read it, there was a lot of sobbing,” laughs Sullivan. “It was a very wet script.”
There was something about the complexity of the role that appealed to Sullivan, as well as the fact that Saffron has a clear goal in mind.
“I like characters who are really driven to something,” says Sullivan. “They might take long paths, but they’re really on a road fighting for something, and she has that fight.”
What Saffron wants is someone sympathetic to look after her kids when she dies. In Rose, Devine and Muir found their Birdy, Saffron’s bio-mom who’d rather document her feathered friends than be anyone’s maternal figure.
It was a rewarding role for Rose. Birdy is a complicated person – arguably not a very nice one – and sometimes the characters with whom an actor identifies the least are the most rewarding to play, she says.
“She’s a very complex character who is living in denial, so I was attracted to her because I thought she didn’t follow a standard format of how we imagine people should behave,” says Rose.
“It’s interesting to me to look at these people who are imperfect, who are without a lot of sympathy, and to find the route through them and find the justification for their behaviour.”
The Birdwatcher filmed over 14 days in 2013. Indie shoots are usually riddled with challenges, and The Birdwatcher was no exception.
It was cold and damp in the woods. Rose used her husband’s “slightly moldy old van” as a dressing room.
It was pilot season, and there were no drivers available, so one of the producers regularly drove an enormous equipment truck on boards through the mud, says Devine.
One day, the cast and crew got rained out of their exterior location, and had to switch to interiors (and the only place they had a permit for that day was Devine’s house, so filming moved there for a short spell).
“A shoestring doesn’t even describe it,” recalls Devine. “We really knew that everyone just loved the script, because otherwise they would have said no.”
The Birdwatcher is a female-driven feature in a year when the film industry has been under scrutiny for the multitude of ways that women are underrepresented, under paid, and even intentionally shut out of the biz.
Whistler Film Festival seems to be rejecting the industry trends. The Birdwatcher is one of eight films directed by women screening at this year’s festival.
“I think we’re coming into a new era, and women are stepping up and saying, ‘No, we have stories,’” says Rose. “And we’re flawed, too. We’re not painting these perfect mothers and perfect daughters who behave perfectly and all they want to do is be married. This is a different story, and I think it’s really important to tell.”
The Birdwatcher also features Garwin Finch, Jakob Davies, Matreya Fedor, Nneka Croal, and Nicholas Carella.
It’s heavy material (no spoilers, but you might want to bring Kleenex), but it’s not without hope, says Sullivan.
“There are things you can’t change, and that’s hard to accept sometimes, especially if it’s really dire,” she says, her voice breaking.
“But it’s also something that’s true, and I think once you accept it, you can figure out a way to make it better.”
The Birdwatcher screens this week at the 2015 Whistler Film Festival. Tickets and screening information at WhistlerFilmFestival.com. Check out the trailer here.
MORE FROM THE CAST & CREW OF THE BIRDWATCHER
Gabrielle Rose on her love of birds: “I obsessed over eagles for about four years until I couldn’t take the brutality of the way they have to live, so now I feed the hummingbirds because they’re a little easier, although if hummingbirds were the size of an eagle, we’d all be frightened. Nature is brutal, and that’s a great simile in the film: that nature is brutal.”
Camille Sullivan on working with Gabrielle Rose: “I was really excited to work with Gabrielle. Obviously I was familiar with her work. I was also nervous. In the first couple of days, I was like, ‘Oh, boy. Gabrielle Rose. I better bring my A-game.’ As soon as you start working with her though, she dispels the nervousness immediately because she’s so generous and so present.”
Siobhan Devine on why The Birdwatcher has a higher percentage of female cast and crew than other films: “The reason that most projects are full of men is because people hire themselves, and I remember someone saying to me, ‘Well, you’re never going to find a female composer,’ and I’m like, ‘But I’ve already found one; she composed the music for my last film’ [referring to Jennifer Roworth]. I gravitate towards people like myself, and largely, they’re women. It didn’t dawn on me to look further afield than the people I have gathered around me, and they are women, I think, in large part, because I’m a woman.”
Roslyn Muir on the earliest beginnings of The Birdwatcher: “I was inspired by my sister who had passed away from cancer, and I wanted to write a story about that, but when I’d been going through some of my journals, I found a journal entry that I had written, and it was as the character of Birdy. That’s where this all started. I had written a whole stream of consciousness from this point of view. It was originally all about Birdy, the whole story. When I started to explore it, the daughter came in, and things changed.”
Roslyn Muir on watching the characters she’d written come to life: “It was magical. You have people in your head and you have words on the page, but it’s only 50 per cent of the story until the actors take over. I was once an actor in my 20s, but I could never get that deep into the emotions in the way that Gabrielle and Camille do, and it amazes me how they continually bring new ideas and moments and internal story to the whole script. I was really blown away. I almost feel like I almost didn’t know them as well as they do and did.”
