In his native Toronto Don McKellar is widely admired as a Rennaissance Man - a bright, versatile young talent who moves comfortably between movies, theatre and television, and between acting, writing and directing. He featured in three movies at the Dublin Film Festival last week, worked on the screenplays of two of them and directed one, and all three are opening here within six weeks of each other: David Cronenberg's eXistenZ, Francois Girard's The Red Violin, and McKellar's own Last Night, his first feature film as a director.
Last Night is set during the last six hours before the end of the world, but this is no special effects-driven, hi-octane apocalyptic epic with an Arnold Schwarzenegger or Bruce Willis to save the world in the last reel. In McKellar's imaginatively thought out scheme of things, there is an air of calm acceptance among the population as the end nears. "My film became about dealing with disaster on a very human scale," McKellar said when we met during his visit to Dublin for the film festival. "About little worlds collapsing in the wake of an outdated future. About protective environments and everyday rituals that cushion us all from the volatile world. In other words, about preserving, about continuing to live, and how that is sometimes heroic enough."
McKellar himself plays Patrick, the pivotal character who is trying to get out of spending his last hours with his parents and relatives who have organised a traditional Christmas dinner, to relive happy memories on their last night. Patrick is distracted when he comes into contact with a woman (Sandra Oh) whose car breaks down on her way home to fulfil a suicide pact with her husband (David Cronenberg, no less). Meanwhile, Patrick's best friend (Callum Keith Rennie) has an agenda of sexual acts to be experienced before time runs out.
"I had my own theories as to why the world was ending," McKellar says, "but I believe that raising those questions would have been a diversion that would just distract the audience. And I felt that at this point the characters wouldn't be talking about that anymore. There had to be some tangible evidence, so that's why there's a complete lack of night, why it never gets dark, so it was clear that something is wrong.
"When I would ask people what they would do under those circumstances, it raised a lot of practical questions. If you wanted to fly somewhere, could you really get a plane? If you stayed at home, how would you get a taxi? Why would a taxi driver work when there's only six hours to go?"
McKellar says that he entertained doubts about acting in this, his first feature film as a director. "I have to say that I was pretty nervous. In fact, I kept avoiding scenes with me in them. After the first week I still hadn't acted. Then my assistant director said I should get in there. And when I did it was easier than I thought. I had a lot of people around me whom I'd worked with before and trusted.
"No one believes this, but it's true. I didn't write the part for myself. And when I thought about acting in the film I thought I might play Craig, Patrick's friend. Then my French producer said this was the part for me and my Canadian producer said the same. It seemed such an audacious challenge that I felt I had to do it. "Because it was my first feature - and it wasn't one of those first films about your childhood or your old girlfriend - I decided this was a way to invest myself in the film. I had to take full responsibility for the movie, writing it, acting in it, directing it, and there was no way of avoiding this. And even though a lot of people in other countries have done all three things on the one film, it hardly ever happens in Canada. And that sort of appealed to me, too, because it was a very un-Canadian thing to do."
One of the distinctive features of Last Night for viewers familiar with the city is that Toronto plays Toronto for once. "That's true, Toronto never plays Toronto," McKellar says. "When I showed the film at the Toronto Film Festival there were actually gasps in the audience at the locations being identified for what they are. In Toronto we never have our own streets named as what they are. The city is a huge production centre and it plays every American city - Chicago in The Blues Brothers, Boston in Good Will Hunting and New York in so many films. "Toronto has very ambivalent feelings about home-made movies, and the response of the festival audience was so warm with this really, really long standing ovation, and I just felt Toronto was ready for a Toronto film. It was very moving for me."
Now 35, Don McKellar has been active in the city's thriving arts scene for most of his life. "It's the third biggest theatre city in the world after New York and London," he says. "I've been acting professionally even since I was in high school. I was doing magic shows to make money and I started my own children's theatre company when I was in high school. At university I spent most of my time in plays even though I was supposed to be doing a double major in fine arts and comparative literature."
Among those college productions was The Playboy of the Western World, in which Don McKellar played Christy Mahon. "I think I was pretty good," he says. "I think I can even say that over here in Ireland. I thought my accent was pretty good, too, but I won't do that for you! I avoided doing that kind of quaint leprechaun accent. I wanted it to be more subtle than that. It was good for me, too, because it was one of my first leading roles and I got offered a lot of theatre parts afterwards."
In film McKellar has worked with all three of Toronto's finest film-makers, Patricia Rozema, Atom Egoyan and David Cronenberg. He played the owner of an avant-garde circus in Rozema's lesbian drama When Night Is Falling and he eagerly awaits her treatment of Jane Austen's Mans- field Park, having read her "really interesting" screenplay for the film.
In Egoyan's eerily powerful Exotica McKellar played the enigmatic gay pet shop boy. "I adore that film and it's got one of the greatest soundtracks," he says. "Atom is a bit like David Cronenberg. He's really dry-humoured, which confuses some people. And he is very controlled. He was certainly a big influence on me when I started to direct. He's got such a strong, clear vision, and as an actor you really know what he wants. His films are always about heavily laden subtext, which is comforting for an actor."
McKellar first worked with David Cronenberg on the short film, Blue, which McKellar directed. "Blue is slightly dirty, so it didn't get a lot of TV play," he explains. "David plays a porno addict who works in a carpet factory, and a day in his life is intercut with this porno film I shot. He's a really great, charming person and his persona is an important character type to me, this real Toronto persona - soft-spoken, articulate, always in control. I thought it was important to cast him in Last Night because his character is so ambiguous. He may be the most sane or most insane character in the film. He may be in denial or he may be resolved."
The roles are reversed in Cronenberg's latest film as a director, the characteristically strange and intriguing eXistenZ, a very witty futuristic thriller which blurs the line between reality and illusion as it follows its characters through an elaborate, state-of-the-art virtual reality game. McKellar lays on a heavy Eastern European accent to play Yevgeny Nourish, a subversive double agent whose nefarious achievements include raising mutant amphibians and cooking in a Chinese restaurant.
McKellar is amused when I tell him that three women walked out of the film's press screening in Dublin, shortly after the principal characters order the special in the Chinese restaurant. "I had real fun on that film because it's about acting," he says. "You're not sure when you see it because the dialogue is so strangely stilted. What appealed to me was that it seems improvised because the main character is learning how to play the game as he goes along."
Mckellar's other recent film, The Red Violin, is his second writing collaboration with director Francois Girard after their inventively devised 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, which dealt with the accomplished and eccentric Canadian pianist who died at the age of 50 in 1982. "I listened to Glenn Gould the way my peers listened to Pink Floyd - in the basement, with the lights off and smoking up," says McKellar. "I wasn't hugely knowledgeable about classical music at the time, but Glenn Gould had this crossover appeal at the time. There was even an article about him in Rolling Stone. He was my introduction to classical music. I even took a course on him at university, an aesthetics of music course.
"The film did pretty well and it and sold so many soundtracks for Sony that they said they would pay us to do another film with a musical subject matter. Francois came up with this idea of a biography of an instrument over the course of 300 years." That film, The Red Violin, which features Samuel L. Jackson, Greta Scacchi and McKellar begins with the manufacture of a violin by a master craftsman in 17th century Italy and follows it through its various owners, as revealed in a series of flashbacks intercut through the present-day sequence when the instrument is up for auction.
Don McKellar recently directed another short film in Elimination Dance, an adaptation by Michael Ondaatje, Bruce McDonald and himself of a poem by Ondaatje. "It's fun," he says. "It's a dance and there's this caller who eliminates him for implausible embarrassments. I get to dance in it!" And McKellar has finished shooting the second series of his TV show, Twitch City, directed by his friend, Bruce McDonald. McKellar plays the central character, Curtis, an agoraphobic who never goes outside his Toronto apartment. "He's a television addict who's very passive-aggressive," says McKellar. "After his roommate goes to jail he makes a play for his roommate's girlfriend. Curtis always gets what he wants. And there's always a weird new roommate who comes into it. It's very quirky. I hope you get to see it here because I think Irish people would enjoy it. It would fit into the mentality here. That kind of slightly loveable, disreputable, roguish character."
eXiztenZ opened yesterday at the Virgin and UCI complexes in Dublin. Last Night opens at the IFC in Dublin next Friday. The Red Violin is set for release on June 11th.