Interview: Trailer Park Boys' Mike Clattenburg
Alliance, Odeon Films Produce Countdown to Liquor Day
Sep 26, 2009
How do you end your series with a bang? If you're Mike Clattenburg – the creator and director of the 7-year sensation Trailer Park Boys – you end off with a 2nd film about the stooges of Sunnyvale trailer park. That film, subtitled Countdown to Liquor Day, asks the burning questions: can the Boys finally get it together and stay out of jail, and can Jim Lahey finally lay off the booze?
In Part #2 of our interview, Clattenburg talked about getting Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson to appear in the film, and tailoring his script to his actors' strengths. Here, he discusses the Trailer Park Boys' influences, and the shows he's obsessed with.
S101: Canadian filmmakers are known for documentaries, and we’re also known for comedy. Where did you get the idea to combine the two?
Mike Clattenburg: “Necessity was the mother of invention. I was fascinated with documentaries, and one of the first films that I admired when I was studying documentary camerawork was Salesmen by the Maysles Brothers. It influenced an episode of Trailer Park Boys: ‘The Bible Pimp’ from Season 2.
“But Salesmen is fantastic: they’re shooting these Bible salesmen and I couldn’t get over how people didn’t notice the camera, they weren’t self-conscious. I don’t know how it happened. Have you seen it?”
S101: Yeah.
“Okay. So then I would watch Cops, and that show is true cinema verité. Someone crashes into a room, and the person in there would glance at the camera right when it came in because it was invading their home. And then they would forget about it when they talked to the police.
“I was also trying to figure out ways to make video look like film, and it was trying to do an oil painting with watercolour: forget it! Just make video look like video!
“And I’d seen Spinal Tap: it was the best mockumentary ever done, I think. I’d seen another one about spaghetti growing on trees in Italy (BBC’s 1957 spoof The Spaghetti Story), which was so f•••••g well done! You watch it, you’re mystified and then – BABING! – you get it and it’s so funny!
“So a film can be cheap by design. So our angle for Trailer Park Boys was ‘an amateur film crew firing up a TV camera and following this crazy stuff.’ The form and the content kind of merged and it felt right.”
(Also look for an interview with actor Jonathan Torrens [aka J-Roc], coming soon to Suite 101)
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