Past curse, haunted history doesn’t scare off filmmakers

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/10/2024 (675 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

You can’t say Canadian filmmakers Stuart Stone and Adam Rodness are scared off by a curse.

The pair infamously shot the 2022 stoner comedy Vandits in Winnipeg in 2021, only to have hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of film equipment stolen from them on the day designated for the first day of shooting.

“After what we went through, people might think we did not fall in love with Winnipeg,” says Stone.

But the story of the theft proved to have promotional value for Vandits, Stone asserts.

“What a story that made!” he says alongside Rodness during a Zoom interview from Toronto.

“You have to learn in the independent film world how to make chicken salad out of chicken shit, as they say. So even with that misfortune, we love Winnipeg, so we took the opportunity to come back and pull the curtain back, in a meta kind of way, and show how to make a movie in Winnipeg.”

With Stone directing and Rodness co-writing and both starring, the pair returned to town about a year ago to make another film, this time examining some of Manitoba’s most haunted locations.

In the raw, unfiltered spirit of the movie, it’s titled Don’t F—k with Ghosts.

Hence, in a prelude featuring real life Farpoint Films producers Kyle Bornais and Trevor Suffield, we see Stone and Rodness pitching a different project — a search-for-Bigfoot doc.

Bornais counters with a proposal that what the world really wants to see is film evidence that ghosts are real. Stone and Rodness take up the challenge, but with a few exploitative measures thrown in for good measure.

While there are some fictional elements, the film utilizes real local haunted locations, such as Room 202 of the Fort Garry Hotel, Hamilton House and the Maritime Museum in Selkirk.

In the communal filmmaking spirit, the film also features crew members in supporting roles, including locations manager Karen Tusa and sound mixer Kevin Bacon (whose name may be duly exploited for promotional purposes).

“Winnipeg is a perfect backdrop for this misadventure that we go on, not only because of the great crew and the spirit of the filmmaking community there, but also the spirit of the city,” Stone says.

“There’s a lot of haunted places there. You’ve got a lot of crazy characters roaming the streets downtown. You have a lot of people, like the Winnipeg Ghost Society and the Winnipeg Magic Society.”

Along the way, they did encounter some inexplicable things during the shoot,” Rodness says.

“We’d been ghost hunting for two or three weeks and people were starting to feel a little eerie inside. There’s nosebleeds, there’s headaches. My radio is doing weird things with frequency,” Rodness says.

In one startling scene in the former convent in the L’Auberge Clemence Inn in Elie, Rodness says his throat really did close up and he started choking.

“That’s not an act. We’re not forcing any of the things happening in this movie. Stu and I set out to make a story and literally the things we came up with in our head actually came together in real life, on camera,” he says.

If the film occasionally treats the notion of ghost-hunting with tongue planted in cheek, the filmmakers assert they themselves are the main butt of the humour.

“The joke is not on them. The joke is on us, We’re not there to make fun of those ghost hunters at all, really,” Stone says.

“If I’m a skeptic, I’m going to be sceptical. I’ve gotta be me. I’m going to be real with them because I want them to be real with me. If something was floating around and we got it that would have been amazing. They thought we were nuts. And we thought maybe they were nuts, but if you throw a bunch of nuts in a bowl … you get mixed nuts.”

randall.king.arts@gmail.com