Made-in-Manitoba hockey film is a bruising comedy with a big heart

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 23/02/2012 (5210 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The hockey comedy Goon started to form about five years ago when an L.A.-based producer named David Gross got hold of a book about a hockey enforcer.

Gross took the book to screenwriter Evan Goldberg, who, partnered with his friend Seth Rogen, had years earlier scripted the raunchy semi-biographical teen comedy Superbad. Reasoning that Goldberg was a Canadian, Gross figured he would easily be able to handle a story about hockey.

He was wrong. Goldberg didn’t know much about the sport. But he had a friend, Montreal actor Jay Baruchel, who lived and breathed hockey and was happy to collaborate.

And so, a few years and many script drafts later, the movie Goon was shooting in Manitoba in late 2010 on a quick 35-day shooting schedule with stars Seann William Scott as a good-hearted bouncer drafted to be a hockey enforcer, and Liev Schreiber as his nemesis, Ross Rhea, a longtime goon at the end of his career with nothing to lose.

As the film opens across Canada tomorrow, here’s a few more things you should know about Goon:

• The movie was inspired by the book Goon: The True Story of an Unlikely Journey Into a Minor Hockey League, about an amateur boxer named Doug Smith who didn’t start playing hockey until age 19.
• Producer Gross, Baruchel and Dowse all make no bones about their ambition to finally make a Canadian hockey movie on a par with the acknowledged greatest hockey movie of all time, George Roy Hill’s 1977 classic Slap Shot.

“It’s the Holy Grail of hockey movies, for sure,” says director Michael Dowse. “You’re always conscious of it.

“We would make conscious choices to go in the opposite direction just because we never wanted to be accused of ripping it off in any way. I think it’s definitely an inspiration in terms of the tone of the humour, but we definitely wanted to make the jokes our own and not rip anything from them, even down to the choice of the colours of the team uniforms. We didn’t want anything even remotely close.”

• Baruchel offers up another movie that provided him with inspiration for Goon’s more dramatic moments.

“You’ll definitely laugh when you watch this, but all of that is irrelevant if there’s nothing to care about, and so our kind of template, our way of articulating the kind of tone we want to create, is Raging Bull with jokes, if that makes any sense,” Baruchel says.

“It’s brutal and exciting and sad and heartfelt and all these different things, and with some jokes on the way.”

• Dowse was hired on the basis of his improvised comedy Fubar, which demonstrated a flair for off-centre characters and violent comedy.

But different participants had different reasons for loving Dowse. For Baruchel, it was the fact that Dowse, like himself, has a maple leaf tattooed on his chest. For Scott, the proof of Dowse’s skill lay in his 2004 film, It’s All Gone Pete Tong, about a deaf DJ.

“I’d heard about (Pete Tong) when it was on the festival circuit and when I finally saw it, I got so anxious to work with him,” Scott says. “The movie was so awesome, I just assumed big movie stars were going to snatch him up for their films, so I was really excited when he was attached to this.”

• Alison Pill has worked with the likes of Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris) and Gus Van Sant (Milk) but jumped at the chance to play her first romantic lead in Goon. Later it emerged that Pill became the real-life romantic lead for Baruchel, and the two actors have become engaged since falling in love on the Goon set.

“It was midnight in Portage la Prairie,” said Pill on a recent edition of George Stroumboulopoulos by way of explanation.

Baruchel elaborates: “She was supposed to work in the crowd scenes and she didn’t. They had her there for three days in a row, paid, but she just ended up sitting around. So I was like: When else will I have her for three 12-hour days when she’s paid to be here and she has no choice but to listen to me?”

• Baruchel once thought the film might be shot in his native Montreal, but he was won over on the decision to shoot in Manitoba. “All our (arenas) in Quebec are old and decrepit and falling apart and (here), there’s brand new beautiful buildings all over the place.

“And everyone here has been so kind and so welcoming to us and this has been such a positive experience, one of the happiest filmmaking experiences I’ve ever had.”

• Goon enjoyed many of the same local resources exploited by the shooting of the TV miniseries Keep Your Head Up Kid: The Don Cherry Story a year earlier.

“A lot of our crew had worked on the Don Cherry movie and they just knew what it took to shoot a hockey film and just how slow it is with 52 extras on the ice,” says director Dowse. “That was invaluable.

“The problem was the Don Cherry movie prevented us from shooting in a couple of choice arenas because they had burned some bridges… so it was good and bad.”

 

Goon opens in Winnipeg on Friday.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca