Spotlight

Bruce Mcdonald uses violent language

Bruce McDonald swears there’s nothing specific he and writer Tony Burgess were getting at with Pontypool, their movie in which a virus travels through the English language infecting its victims in weird and violent ways.

“It’s not French, it’s not Armenian, so the people who speak French have a slight advantage over the people who can only speak English,” explains McDonald, director of such films as Hard Core Logo and The Tracey Fragments. He’s in a café across the street from his home in Toronto’s Little Italy. “What I’ve always loved about the idea of it is that it is quite ripe for interpretations. There’s a lot of decoding to be done.”

But don’t call the infected people zombies. For one thing, they’re not undead. “We ended up calling them conversationalists,” says McDonald. “This language virus effects their behaviour in really strange ways. They basically end up trying to chew their way through the mouth of another person to escape their condition. And the early stages are quite odd, where they repeat things and then they get confused and mixed up, and they can’t express themselves.”

Based on Burgess’ novel Pontypool Changes Everything, the movie takes place in a talk-radio station in the real town of Pontypool, Ont. But since the whole movie happens inside, it was shot in Toronto.

“It’s all interior,” says McDonald. “That was the big challenge because people get really nervous about being in one place for too long. But it’s been done many times before. We were inspired by the success of Das Boot and 12 Angry Men and My Dinner with Andre.”

Shot for just over $1-million (100 percent privately funded), filming ended in June, and by July Pontypool had earned a spot at this month’s Toronto International Film Festival. “Yeah, we were very thrilled. We’re working like maniacs,” McDonald says of post-production. “It’s tight, but it’s nice to have a finish line to go for.”

– Marni Weisz