Plays, trains & neuropsychiatric disorders

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This article was published 12/08/2011 (5548 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The dramatic feature Son of the Sunshine is about a young man who suffers from Tourette’s syndrome, and when he isn’t getting into trouble due to his penchant for explosive profanity, he endures life with his drug-addict mom and his angry sister.

It is, in short, tough stuff. And befitting that quality, the film’s star/co-writer/director Ryan Ward had a tough time getting the project off the ground.

Ward, 33, was born in Portage La Prairie but was raised in one of the rougher neighbourhoods in Elmwood in Winnipeg. The former Miles MacDonnell Collegiate student began his acting career here, studying at the Manitoba Theatre for Young People and furthering his studies at the University of Manitoba.

During those years, Ward encountered award-winning filmmakers. He took a film class with Guy Maddin at U of M and got some screen time (albeit wearing a mask) in Deco Dawson’s award-winning short Film(dzama).

Yet Ward ultimately bypassed the creative hothouse of Winnipeg filmmaking to create his first feature in Toronto. By the time his producer (whom he discovered on mandy.com, a website specializing in filmmaker resources) accumulated the $100,000 he needed for his film, he wound up working with a crew, none of whom he had met before.

“If I had done it in Winnipeg, what I would have to have done is find people I know that are into film,” Ward says on the phone from his home in Toronto. “But here, there’s a bit of a bigger pool.”

And how did Ward end up in Toronto with the wherewithal to make a feature film? Blame big-time movie director Sam Raimi (Spider-Man films).

Go back. Ward found his love of theatre reinvigorated while toiling in U of M’s Black Hole Theatre.

“It was: Oh man, I love this! I forgot all about this! So it took off for me from there,” he says. “I decided to study more and I auditioned for what I thought were the top five schools in the country.”

He ended up at Ryerson University.

“I felt (Toronto) was the best place for me to be in terms of trying to get acting work.”

It was indeed. In 2003, Ward got in on the ground floor of a fledgling theatre production based on Raimi’s cult hit The Evil Dead. Ward found himself in the lead role of Ash, the shotgun-toting demon fighter in Evil Dead: The Musical. (Glimpses of Ward’s work in the production can be seen on YouTube, including the riotously funny tune What the F*** Was That?)

The play opened on the night of a huge power blackout across the entire eastern seaboard, and audiences still lined up to see it, even if it was illuminated by car headlights.

“When it finally opened properly with electricity, there was a huge lineup around the block and we went: ‘Oh, man what is this?’ he says. “It was really popular.”

“Then we took it to the Just for Laughs Festival, were it was picked up by a producer to go off-Broadway. I was lucky enough to be the one Canadian cast member who got to go and do it off-Broadway and then it ran for two years in Toronto after that.”

But even as Ward was singing, dancing and slaughtering in Evil Dead, he was nurturing his own serious film project, inspired not by Raimi, but other filmmakers of the ’70s and ’80s whom Ward revered, such as Sidney Lumet and Terrence Malick.

“I had been writing (Son of the Sunshine) since I was in school,” he says. “When I was doing Evil Dead for the last run that we did, I got some of the money to start making it, so I just started rolling the ball.

“I worked out an arrangement with the producer of Evil Dead that I could film four days a week and perform two days a week, so I was acting in that show while filming. I calculated that I didn’t have a day off for 42 days. I was just sleepwalking through it by the end.”

Ward had a breakthrough on the script while riding the Toronto subway system (which, not coincidentally, is where the film starts).

“I saw this man, who is kind of famous in Toronto,” he says. “He’s blind and he’s an older guy with a moustache and you’ll see him around town screaming and then going: ‘Sorry.’

“I was fascinated and I didn’t know what it was at the time and I went home and researched it and I figured out it was Tourette’s syndrome and the penny dropped for me there. It was at a time when I was feeling not so great about my chosen profession. I was working dead-end jobs and it wasn’t really working for me and I was writing a story about myself and I couldn’t figure out where it was going.”

The encounter crystallized the film’s protagonist for him.

“I thought: ‘Wow, what a perfect metaphor for an angry young man trying to find where he fits and belongs in the world,'” says Ward. “For me, it made perfect sense and from there, the story kind of took shape.”

Utilizing a cast of non-union actors, Ward got the film completed and found himself being lauded by a few Canadian critics.

“From the get-go, we had great critical reception and festivals were always very friendly to us,” he says. “In terms of critical reception and festivals, the film seems to never stop playing. But in terms of getting big crowds out to see it, it’s a tough row, because it’s Canadian, and Canadian product is often not trusted by its own people.

“For me, I think that’s just a product of a lot of not-so-great films coming out of the Telefilm camp, so they keep doing that and it makes people lose faith. It’s tough.”

Ward and Winnipeg actors Sarah Constible, Ernesto Griffith and Stephen Eric McIntyre will sit down to discuss the world of the independent actor following the Friday evening screening of Son of the Sunshine.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

 

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