Drama draws on spirit of ‘patron saint of Montreal’

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This article was published 08/03/2021 (1657 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The career of filmmaker Matthew Bissonnette has two throughlines.

One is songwriter Leonard Cohen. Bissonnette was raised in the west end of Montreal and has always felt a strong connection to the urbane fellow Montrealer, to the extent that Bissonnette’s very first feature was titled Looking for Leonard, a comedy-drama crime caper about a couple of low-level brothers-in-crime. The girlfriend (and sometime confederate) of one of the brothers spends a lot of time reading Cohen’s novel Beautiful Losers. The 2002 film also intersperses clips from the 1965 NFB documentary Ladies and Gentlemen, Leonard Cohen, acknowledging Cohen as a kind of sublime spirit floating through the movie’s sordid events.

The other throughline is producer Corey Marr, a Winnipeg-raised talent now based in Toronto. (His Wikipedia page includes the tidbit that he used to be the “Minahel,” or program director, of Camp Massad, a Hebrew-immersion camp near Gimli.) Marr gravitated to Bissonnette when they met at a film festival Marr was attending with his own short film while Bissonnette was supporting Looking for Leonard.

“We really struck it off,” Marr recalls in a Zoom interview from Toronto. “After that festival, he told me, ‘I’m working on this thing. Would you take a read of it? I’m looking for a producer.’”

The thing turned out to their 2006 film Who Loves the Sun, shot in both Manitoba (Falcon Lake and Winnipeg Beach) and Ontario, starring Bissonnette’s then-wife Molly Parker, Adam Scott and Lukas Haas. After that, Bissonnette and Marr reteamed for the 2009 film Passenger Side, again starring Adam Scott, about a pair of brothers on a sad road trip in Los Angeles.

It presumably helps that both Bissonnette and Marr work in advertising, Bissonnette directing commercials and Marr producing them.

“Corey is certainly like a filmmaking partner,” Bissonnette says in a phone interview. “He’s there in the editing suite pretty much the whole time. We might have slightly different perspectives, but we work very well together.”

As with any good partnership, there’s a division of duties, Bissonnette says, adding that Marr is good at handling the business so he doesn’t have to worry about it. “Mostly we just have a lot of fun. We enjoy working together, we don’t fight all that much when we do it and we always make up.”

The partnership continues with their film Death of a Ladies’ Man, starring Gabriel Byrne as Samuel O’Shea, a professor who fears the end may be near when he experiences disturbing hallucinations. His waitress has the head of a tiger, he enjoys drunken camaraderie with Frankenstein’s monster, and he starts to have conversations with his long dead father (Brian Gleeson).

The title is taken from a Cohen song, and many tunes from his body of work pop up in the film.

“It’s not a musical, but I approached it that way… that the songs were a character within the film,” says Bissonnette, who refers to Cohen as “the patron saint of Montreal.”

When he wrote the script, Bissonnette was a young dad, so he found himself drawn to the dynamics between fathers and sons.

“I was interested in how those dynamics play out in certain kinds of trauma, across generations,” he says.

“My understanding of Leonard Cohen’s work is there’s quite a bit of in there about that — how the family creates you, how people live through a mistake. How do you go on? What do you do? How do you be better? That’s the kind of stuff that I’m interested in.”

The screenplay was in the works before Cohen died in 2016. As with Looking for Leonard and The Passenger Side (which includes Cohen’s song Suzanne on the soundtrack in a pivotal moment), Cohen had to sign off on the music.

“From my understanding, he thought it was funny that kind of stuff we were doing,” Bissonnette says. “Every time, I’d write him a letter and say, ‘We’re back again. Can we use this or that?’ He would always very generously say yes.”

“Every time we had to go to Leonard to get permission, in the olden days, he would send a fax back saying that it was OK,” Marr says, explaining that Death of a Ladies’ Man went well beyond looking to license a tune for a soundtrack. “This was lifting the title of a very famous record of his and using the songs as extensively as we do. We wrote a nice letter and sent it through to his people and Leonard came back to us and basically gave us his blessings. He was really interested in what we were doing and maybe a little intrigued as to why we were coming back to the well again.

“I remember meeting his manager after Leonard died,” Marr recalls. “He told us, ‘For whatever reason, Leonard had a fond affection for you guys.’”

Death of a Ladies’ Man will be available on VOD platforms Friday, March 12.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing