Black Sheep interviews Marc-André Grondin

NOBODY'S GOON
An interview with GOON star, Marc-André Grondin

Before Québécois actor, Marc-André Grondin started work on the Canadian hockey comedy, GOON, he was not what you would call a great skater. “I skated like shit,” is how he actually put it to me.

This meant Grondin would have to train to convincingly play Xavier Laflamme, a major league hockey player burnout, who has been demoted to the minor league, which he can still barely keep up with. “The players today are machines. They start at 12 in the gym. There are like five guys in all of the NHL who are my size,” he explains of his motivation to pick up his game, with only a hint of self-deprecation. “So I trained. I had to go on a big diet. It was two and a half months of hell.” But worth it, I’m sure.

Laflamme is a character Grondin knows well. In fact, the tweaked out, trashy Québécois hockey bum is a character we all know well, whether we’re hockey fans or not. Rather than allow the character to sink into cliche though, friend and GOON co-writer, Jay Baruchel, worked with Grondin to keep the character feeling real. “When Jay sent me the script, there were a couple of things we knew we had to work on, mainly to not make this French-Canadian character a joke. We didn’t want ‘Tabarnac’ to be the punch line.”

Their efforts were successful. Actually, Baruchel, along with co-writer, Evan Goldberg (SUPERBAD), and director, London, Ontario native, Michael Dowse (FUBAR), injected Goon with so much genuine heart that none of the main characters succumb to any of their potential trappings.

Grondin, with co-star Seann William Scott

“The heart comes from Jay. He’s just like that,” Grondin says of his longtime friend, and fellow Montrealer. “He can see a douchebag, a nerd, a gay guy, a Russian, stuck up parents or potheads, whatever. Even though he labels them, he doesn’t judge them. I think that’s what comes out in Goon.”

And did Baruchel write the part of Laflamme with Grondin in mind? “That’s what he told me,” Grondin says, somewhat suspiciously. When he realizes I’m not sure if he’s kidding or not, he continues, “Well, he told me so early on in the process that I have to believe him.”

My Ottawa Xpress GOON cover story

Ever since Grondin’s breakout in Jean-Marc Vallée’s C.R.A.Z.Y., he has been working consistently in Québec and France. When I ask why he never went after the English market or Hollywood, he gets a little reticent, as if nervous not to say the wrong thing. I learn why when he says, “I don’t really dream of a perfect career because my happiness doesn’t reside in movies,” he admits, candidly. “If you ask me what it would take for me to be happy, I would say a small farm and a family, maybe a few horses. If I work in the US or in France, it doesn’t matter, as long as I can bay my bills and work with interesting people.”

Before we move on, Grondin chimes in with one more thought on the subject. “Obviously I still see some English films and think, fuck, I wish I could have done that.”

Grondin will be seen later this year in the Victor Hugo adaptation, THE MAN WHO LAUGHS, alongside Gérard Depardieu. With GOON now behind him though, is he keeping up with his hockey? “When we finished shooting, I continued working out. I stopped the diet but I continued playing hockey.”

GOON, which also stars Seann William Scott, is now available on DVD and Blu-ray from Alliance Films.

Black Sheep interviews Jay Baruchel

THE ENFORCER
An interview with GOON star/writer, Jay Baruchel

For Canadians, it is considered borderline sacrilegious to not be a hockey fan. I know this because I am not actually a hockey fan. Despite this horrible aspect of my personality, I still managed to greatly enjoy GOON, a new hockey movie that practically does away with the sport itself and strips it down to what everyone secretly really wants to see - the moment the gloves come off and these massive guys on skates go to town on each others’ faces with their fists.

GOON co-stars and was co-written and co-produced by Ottawa born and Montreal homed, Jay Baruchel, who is a big, big hockey fan. “Hockey is my religion,” he tells me over the phone, with not a single hint of sarcasm. “The Habs play 82 games a year; I probably watch 76 of them. It’s how I organize my weeks.” And while that might sound extreme, just you wait. “Even as I sit here right now, I’m wearing a Habs jersey, sitting on a Habs pillow and playing with my Habs wallet.”

Yes, I’d say Baruchel is a very big hockey fan. It suits him well too.

Baruchel’s love (read, obsession) for the game served him well on GOON, which was directed by Michael Dowse, of FUBAR fame. The film shines for two main reasons, not the least of which is its authenticity and evident appreciation for the sport itself. “There’s no bullshit you can smell in this movie,” Baruchel jokes. “It is a passion project built by people that love this game and are fascinated by this way of life.”

Baruchel celebrating co-star, Scott

The second reason, is the film’s star, Seann William Scott. Famous for comedic parts in the AMERICAN PIE series and the classic, DUDE, WHERE'S MY CAR?, Scott would not be my first choice for the sensitive role of Doug Glatt, a guy going nowhere and getting up there in years, who discovers his calling working as an enforcer for a minor league hockey team in Halifax, Nova Scotia. For Baruchel, there was no other choice.

“We were very lucky that he was able to do it and I can say this now that the movie is made and about to come out, but we didn’t have a backup!” Aside from being glad it all worked out, Baruchel also has nothing but kind things to say about Scott. “Anybody who has ever met Seann for 30 seconds knows that he has a massive heart and is the most humble, disarming guy you’ll ever meet. He puts most Canadians to shame.”

With co-star and fiancee, Toronto native, Alison Pill

While Baruchel has been making waves in both Canada and the USA with acting turns in GOOD NEIGHBOURS and as the voice of the hero in HOW TO TRAIN YOUR DRAGON, GOON marks the first time he has written a feature screenplay. “It’s the first time anything I’ve written has ever been made,” he corrects me. For Baruchel, the rewards of writing carried certain expectations but he was still unprepared for the reality of how it all played out. “When you see these people connect to these characters that you created so much so that they start to know the character better than you, that was what was most exciting. These are people I wrote but the actors took ownership of them.”

Baruchel, looking smooth.

Unbeknownst to Baruchel, his own appreciative nature during our conversation was also quite disarming for me. While Baruchel is riotously vulgar as Doug’s best friend in GOON, it is clearly his role as writer that left him feeling smashed against the boards, y’know, in a good way. “It was a difficult movie to make but even at its hardest point, it was still this thing that came from my heart and my head that was now becoming real. I was just on a high the entire time we were filming.”

Black Sheep interviews Jacob Tierney

How Well Do You Know your Neighbours?

An interview with Jacob Tierney

If you’ve ever lived in an apartment building, you know how it feels. It’s basically you and dozens of other people stacked one on top of the other and you might actually know a handful of them by name, if that. You pass them in the halls or see them in the elevator but you don’t really know them and you certainly have no idea what happens in the little boxes they call home.

“I’ve lived next to some weird people in my life,” filmmaker, Jacob Tierney tells me when we speak about his new film, GOOD NEIGHBOURS. Who hasn’t? Still, I would choose most of the freaks I’ve lived in buildings with over the characters in his third feature and I’m not alone in that. Tierney continues, “I hope I never end up living next to any of the people in this movie.”

GOOD NEIGHBOURS is a black comedy with film noire elements that is based on the Chrystine Brouillet novel, “Chere voisine”. Tierney first read it when he was still in high school (the Montreal native is now 31) and has been itching to adapt it ever since. “As soon as I read it, I wanted to turn it into a movie,” he says. “It was actually the first script I ever tried to write.”

It would not be the first movie he would ever direct though. Instead he chose the challenge of adapting the Charles Dickens classic, “Oliver Twist” into a queer retelling entitled, TWIST, in 2003. It would be six years before he would release his second film, THE TROTSKY, in 2009, after a couple of potential projects simply fell apart. “Yeah, those six years, I drank a lot,” Tierney quips. Luck and timing would provide him the opportunity to shoot his two latest projects back to back, which Tierney calls “a strain on my very small brain.”

Tierney wrote all the principal parts in GOOD NEIGHBOURS with specific actors in mind. Fellow Montrealers and Tierney film regulars, Jay Baruchel, Emily Hampshire and Anne-Marie Cadieux, play three of the four neighbours, with Scott Speedman filling the last slot. “My father accuses me of casting the way other people have dinner parties,” Tierney admits. “If I like you and I want to hang out with you, I will ask you to be in my movie.” Tierney’s logic behind this is pretty sound. “I don’t work with people I don’t like. We work really long hours and we’re not curing cancer so you might as well enjoy yourself.”

To watch GOOD NIGHBOURS, it is clear that Tierney is definitely enjoying himself. It is a twisted affair but it is also undeniably playful, just as any black comedy should be. This is a balance Tierney is very happy to have finally struck. “I’ll never make another movie as depressing as TWIST and I’ll never make another movie as optimistic as THE TROTSKY. GOOD NEIGHBOURS is more to my taste than anything else I’ve done before.”

In that case, I can safely say that Jacob Tierney has some very good taste.

Tierney is currently adapting Doris Lessing’s book, “The Good Terrorist” into a screenplay and will appear as an actor in this summer’s FRENCH IMMERSION, his father, producer, Kevin Tierney’s directorial debut. GOOD NEIGHBOURS is in Canadian theatres on June 3 and American screens on July 29.