MRH: The look of the film surprised me because it’s really beautiful. I don’t know if you had a set decorator there, but the colour schemes in specific shots from scene to scene are well balanced. It’s not just you using the bare essentials of a bare location; you put a lot of time into making sure there were specific colours reflecting specific moods.

Later in the film there’s a scene where Wendell is with the new boyfriend in a high-rise apartment, and everything is very green and very cool, and that’s where he discovers the camera in her bag, and it was that scene that make it clear to me how well thought-out the film’s look is.

SR: Well you’re the first person to mention that, and thank you for noticing. We couldn’t afford to decorate, so what we did was we chose locations that would work for us. We actually had a number of places to choose from because we had friends who were willing to let us shoot in their places, so we could choose.

We were able to prep a week in advance – sometimes more – for a 2-day shoot, and then we would go onto the set and we’d work sometimes for 4 hours just figuring out how we’re going to shoot it; what would make it visually interesting.

It was trickier when the camera was moving because I had to operate it…We realized when he operated the camera and it was supposed to be Betty who was moving it, our cinematographer was a little too instinctively careful; his instincts were to frame better, and Wendell couldn’t handle the camera technically.

Luke, on the other hand, could. We spent four hours for the scene where he finds the camera in his bedroom, and worked it out. Then I left. There was nobody in there except him and his mother. He shot it. We couldn’t be there because there were too many mirrors, and he had to shoot it, otherwise, it was left to me.

I ended up being the operator quite often because I could figure out the way Betty would frame something, so we spent 4-5 hours sometimes rehearsing the shot – even if it was static – and then we only spent a couple of hours shooting it, and that would be our day.

MRH: How hard was it to assemble the film in editing?

SR: Well, because Chris Kern owned his own postproduction facility, I think basically he said, ‘Okay, for your postproduction, I’ll handle it in return for being the editor,’ which is a nice way for him to be generous. We had to deal with his schedule because he had a number of people working and only so many editing suites in that building; sometimes they were booked doing Buick commercials or whatever they were doing.

It wasn’t like a normal editing situation where you’ve got a good 8-9 hour day with your editor, 5 days a week, and you can get your first cut in a month or get it cut while you’re shooting. We couldn’t do it.

All we could do is give Chris material. It could be downloaded and safely secured, and that was about it. And then we took all this time. Our movie was 3 & 1/2 hours long. [When] I looked at that assembly, Chris was very nervous. At that point, we wanted Elinor to stay away so she could be a little more objective when we created our first cut; it’s too hard when you’re in the midst of it.

Chris and I were on the same page. I looked at that 3 & 1/2 hour cut and said, ‘Let’s get rid of 90% of the monologues into the camera, and let’s see where we are,’ and he just breathed this huge sigh of relief, realizing, ‘Okay, that’s what’s going to make [this film] move.’ I also said, ‘We’re going to have to use jump cuts as a technique. Some of this take is working, some of this take is not,’ and we’ve just got to move to the next part of the scene.’

Sometimes we’d let it run. Probably one of the longest scenes in the movie is where the guy is being accused of sexual harassment. It’s just such a great take, there was no reason to cut into it, but quite often we’d just jump cut and everybody gets into it.

MRH: Was it hard to market the film once it had been done?

SR: Oh my God, yeah. Jesus Christ, what a difficult thing that was to do. We got into Montreal and San Jose Cinequest and Seattle, Vancouver, Winnipeg and a couple of other places, and got some awards and good reviews, [but] Toronto and Sundance wouldn’t have us. I was kind of surprised, because I was part of the Toronto Film Festival for so long, and I just think they didn’t like it. I know that there are politics involved, but I honestly think they didn’t like the movie, which surprised me.

We had no cache; we had no stars, there was no distributor behind it… Maybe it was a little ahead of its time because it was 3 years ago that I submitted it there.

It took a while for this movie to catch on. We spent a year editing it, a year going to festivals before we could even find anybody who was willing to show it anywhere, and it was only by happenstance that I realized after the fact, ‘Wait a minute. We’re all Canadian.’

The reason that you’re talking to me, and that it actually has a DVD release, and it’ll be on cable and on TV in Canada… is because of that odd thing: we’re all Canadians, and it has some value to a distributor selling it in the marketplace in Canada.

William Alexander and David Partridge are a two-man operation for Critical Mass… Those guys took a chance. Not a huge one; they’re going to make a little bit of money; it wasn’t that hard to sell to cable TV, people liked the movie enough, and it’s not expensive. I don’t know if we’re going to be able to pay everybody back, [but] the actors will get paid, so obviously it was not done for money.

YouTube is the thing that convinced people that maybe this can be a viable thing. I mean, it was unusual to get a million hits on YouTube with absolutely no advertising whatsoever.

And I hid it. I was “Betty Munson,” and I pretended that the character put up a number of cut scenes, and I only ‘outed’ it before the DVD was released in the United States in November of 2008, and the website came up.