There is a new director in Canada. He is quiet, unassuming, and young. He graduated from York University and his name is Ryan Redford. (No, he is not related to Robert.) He just made his first film, Oliver Sherman, starring Canadian thespians Garrett Dillahunt and Molly Parker, along with Donal Logue, who I am told is semi-American, but he “had been born in Ottawa and lived there for a couple weeks, but that counts,” says Redford, referring to the requirement of a Canadian film to have Canadian cast in order to get Canadian money.
The film itself is a meditative look at the life of a couple of war veterans seven years after their service is finished. Why would a young, unassuming Canadian director want to make a movie about the experience of North American war veterans? “I don’t see it as a political movie. I can’t help if people are going to see that within it,” says Redford. “Throughout the making of it there was some call from various people to make it a definitive Canadian Coming Home movie, because I guess there hasn’t really been one, but that didn’t really interest me.” (Redford is referring to the classic Hal Ashby movie, starring Jane Fonda and Jon Voight, about returning Vietnam veterans). “I think it would be really arrogant and irresponsible of me, who doesn’t have any experience with that, to attempt to make some definitive statement about it.”
In Oliver Sherman, the title character (Dillahunt), suffering from PSTD, makes an unexpected visit to the house of a fellow former soldier, Franklin (Logan). Where Sherman is obsessed with war and cannot seem to get over it, Franklin has gotten married, raised children, and lives a functional life. In keeping with Redford’s goal of not making a political film, it keeps many things vague or unsaid. We never learn when or where it’s set; specific signifiers like license plates were altered give the film universal generalized feeling. “In order to keep it universal and in order for it to have this weird lyrical quality to it, I felt we had to strip that away.” Redford adapted the screenplay from the short story “Veterans” by Rachel Ingalls, which displays a similar quality. “The short story is actually set after the Korean War, but otherwise, her stuff, and even that story, aside from the Korean element… in a good way there’s this generic timeless quality to it.”
This style is a hallmark of Redford’s days as a student filmmaker at York and a director of short films in the years that followed. When talking about these films, he claims “they all had a very rural and other worldly lyrical quality to them. Between those five or six movies, they had maybe fifteen lines of dialogue,” but his first feature film isn’t quite so sparse: “I guess the leap was dialogue; it has more dialogue. That said, the dialogue is pretty stylized; it’s not realistic dialogue, it’s pretty austere literary dialogue.” This austerity extends to the manner in which the themes of the film unfold. Redford wanted to question the “validity of violence as a way of life.” The film deals with men who are capable of great violence and the potential for violence within the characters seems always to be lurking behind the performances, but Redford made a conscious decision not to depict any violence on screen. “There are two ways you can go about creating tension. You can be very graphic about something and you can underline it. You can have a score that’s telegraphing it and telling you to feel intensely… or you can do the opposite, which is what I did, which is to constantly withhold and to exercise restraint and to take away. It was a decision from the get-go to never show anything happening on screen.”
Considering the grimness of the story, I couldn’t help but wonder what it must have been like on set. I remembered seeing a set photo of Mel Gibson filming The Passion of the Christ with a red clown nose on. “If it’s grim on set, it’s not grim because of the subject matter,” he assures me, “it’s the money that’s going out the window, the weather’s horrible and you need to get your scenes… Because of the subject matter was it grim on set? No.” Well, that’s good news, I suppose.
