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MRH:   I noticed in the interviews on the DVD that the cast and crew were very supportive and respectful because you were juggling a lot of responsibilities during production. In order for you to accomplish that balancing act, did you have, just for yourself, a written plan, in terms of how you were going to organize the production, the marketing plan, and any kind of distribution models?

MD:     The answer is no. No plan at all. It was totally like extreme sport, like bungy jumping; not knowing anything of how and what will happen. It was not a very good business decision; it was more something from the heart. I just needed to make a movie and went ahead, but I was flying completely blind.

 

MRH:   It’s quite a rush, and it’s also quite terrifying to make a full-length feature film.

MD:     For sure. You read or hear on the DVD commentaries how stressed usually every filmmaker is, but most of these filmmakers, except on rare occasions, don’t have the added stress that it’s their own money that’s going out the window, so it’s something that’s added to the mix. Even without that, you know it’s a very stressful job, so adding that makes it complete and utter dynamite, but you do what you can.

 

MRH:   Did you plan on making End of the Line a union production, or was that an option that you hoped would attract more people with standard pay scales?

MD:     The only reason, in my case, that I went union with the actors was to be able to get better actors, because that was one of the bigger problems of my previous films; the talent pool of non-union is so limited, because usually if they’re any good, they become union, so having faced that challenge before and knowing it’s almost an impossible thing to achieve, I decided to go union to help the film.

 

MRH:   For the subway sequences, you mentioned that it ended up being cheaper to shoot in Toronto than to get the cooperation of the Montreal subway system, which is kind of surprising.

MD:     It’s a perfect example of what I was saying before of how these cities become so greedy and blind because they’ve been spoiled by Hollywood, and if a smaller production comes along, they won’t give them the time of day.

When I was a teenager, I went and shot without permission in the Montreal Metro, and no one saw us; we didn’t hurt anyone, we didn’t stop anything, and only when were leaving someone came and said ‘What are you doing?’ but then said ‘Okay, Good bye’ and let us leave after we explained we were students making a film.

But times have changed. Now, just being there in a corner with a camera, they’ll say ‘Well, it’s $5,000 an hour, and we need three paid guardians here.’ That’s all Hollywood’s fault, when they come with millions of dollars, and they have no time to deal with anything to negotiate and they just go ‘whatever’ and throw money at the problem -  but it makes it a lot harder afterwards for the small guy.

 

MRH:   Among the locations in your film, you shot in what’s known as the Lower Bay subway station, the ‘ghost station,’ as it’s called.  It’s only in the last year or year and a half that the public has had two or three opportunities to go in there and visit it, but it’s been used many, many times by film studios.

I’d like to know what it was like shooting in the ghost station? And did you have a great deal of use of it?
  
MD:     Once again, for budgetary reasons, I found that Toronto is really cooperative (unlike Montreal); you’re still charged an amount which is completely okay in terms of for what it’s worth, but it’s still very expensive for someone paying out of their pocket.

Instead of being at night, I had to shoot during the day, and what happens is that trains are still running, so every few minutes there would be the trains that would ruin any dialogue takes, so we had to time our shots where the actors would be speaking in between trains.

Other people might say, ‘Well why didn’t you just loop the dialogue later on?’ For low budget films, you have to bring back the actors, etc., and these are expenses which are negligible in big films, but every dollar counts on a small film.

Secondly, we didn’t have access to any subway tunnels, just the platform, because everything else would be extra. Let’s say we wanted a train to come down. Well, you have to rent the actual train and the driver and this and that, and that would’ve been added to the expenses, so we just took the minimum, which was the access to the platform, and that’s it; everything else is complete movie fakery.

I do not like the looks of that guy...

Exploding Ketchup Bottle Syndrome

filming the main subway car

"Stay away from the steak tartar."

   
 
   
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