Lights, Camera, Jaymz
Short films and the reluctant actor
A shot from a short film - a super short cameo in 5 Course Meal!
I never meant to be an actor. I want to be clear about that. It just kept happening to me, the way certain things happen to people who say yes too often and mean it every time. I enjoyed theatre acting as a kid, but movies? Too much waiting around…
It started, as so many things do, with a friend doing you a favour. It was 2004. Susan Swan had written a book called What Casanova Told Me and she was making a short film to promote it. My pal Taffi Rosen, the award-winning photographer, suggested me for Casanova. I had one line.
We shot in the empty ballroom at the top of the King Edward Hotel. The young actress who had all the actual lines was experienced and fantastic and friendly. I was flirtatious with everyone on set, including the author, including the crew, including the furniture. That is method acting of a very specific kind. What was even more fun than the shoot itself was the book fair at Queen’s Park, where I was hired to walk around in character and drive traffic to the sales table. I ran into many old friends who did not recognize me. One of them was my high school teacher’s daughter, Eliza. She recognized me immediately and played along. That is the mark of a good sport and possibly a better actor than I was. Whitney Smith was suspicious.
Eliza and Whitney meeting Cassanova. Taffi Rosen (who got me the gig). Susan Swan (author) and me with the makeup just started, I look like a French almost-mime!
The bug was in me after that. This is the danger of giving people one line and a costume.
The other films from that era were, I will be honest, not uniformly distinguished. I had a cameo in a film and ended up on the cutting room floor. IMDB still lists me as being in it. I have watched it. I am not in it. There is something philosophically interesting about that and I have chosen not to pursue it. I played a thug at a bar in DOM in 2004. In another film HEATSCORE, I was shot and had to lie dead on the ice in genuinely freezing cold for what felt like an extended geological period.
Then there was Allan Moyle.
I was already a fan of Allan after Pump Up the Volume, which gave Christian Slater his first real starring role and gave the rest of us a very good film. I encountered Allan at TIFF, where he was pushing New Waterford Girl, which introduced the world to Liane Balaban. I had actually met Liane a few years earlier at a film event with Salah Bachir. I walked up to her and said “please tell me you are an actress because you look far too interesting to just be a model”. She laughed and told me she was a DJ and a student in Montreal. I said the next time there is a casting call, just go. You don’t need an acting lesson. The camera will love you. Her neighbour eventually told her mother about an audition. She went. She got the lead. Once in a while there is justice in the movie business.
Allan cast me in a cameo in a film shooting in Toronto and the night before the shoot we went out for drinks and closed the joint. The next morning at stupid o’clock I arrived at a mansion on the Bridle Path and went directly into makeup and sat down beside Nastassja Kinski, whom I had admired since “Cat People”. She spoke in a whisper, which my hangover appreciated enormously. When Alan showed up he said “what happened to your voice?” I explained that I always woke up with a deep voice and that it had never hurt my career hosting morning radio. He said he had imagined my character a bit swishy, that I owned a spa, that I was gay. I said Harvey Fierstein’s voice is way deeper than mine and he is not straight. I saw the film on late night television years later. My voice had been dubbed by a man who was very French and had a very feminine voice. I stand by my Harvey Fierstein argument. but...the director is still always right!
Me with Nastassja Kinski and Billy Baldwin, and director Allan Moyle, a guru director!
Susan Swan’s Casanova remains my favourite performance of that period. He was a ladies man, not a womanizer. People confuse him with the Marquis de Sade, which couldn’t be further from reality. The book makes this clear.
My first short film, Wild Music - won tons of awards at festivals around the world!
It wasn’t until I became a filmmaker myself that I was truly comfortable in front of a camera. When you wrote it and directed it, you know where to stand. My first short film, Wild Music, might always be my favourite. And then there was my cameo as Zeus in Magic Land, my first feature, which is still very much alive and may have a secret screening this September at Paradise Theatre. I am not confirming anything. I am just saying watch the sky.
I made these films the way I have made most things in my life. With friends, with conviction, and with very little sleep. It turns out that is enough. It might even be the formula. The making of MagicLand (me as Zeus) was the most fun ever!!!
MagicLand was just completed. J.J. Brown and I worked for two years on this film. Michele Silva-Neto (our Executive Producer) knows good things take time!