Chris Landreth Talks The Spine
Chris Landreth follows up his Oscar-winning animated short, Ryan, with another bold, surreal, psychologically driven work, The Spine, collaborating once again with producers Steve Hoban (Copperheart Ent.), Mark Smith (Copperheart Ent.) and Marcy Page (National Film Board of Canada). However, in order to explore the breakdown of a marriage with a more ambitious, fluid look required a greater number of artists and resources, so Landreth utilized C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures along with Autodesk Canada and Seneca College School of Communication Arts. The Spine concerns Dan and Mary Rutherford, married 26 years, "trapped in a spiral of mutual destruction." They sit unhappily in a couples' group counseling session. Angela, another troubled participant in this group, wonders why their marriage has become so lopsided and twisted. But when Mary leaves Dan, he undergoes a surprising transformation in this meditation on evolving, adapting and breaking using a symbolic spine. The Spine premieres this week at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival (June 8-13), and will have its North American premiere at the World Wide Short Film Festival (June 16-21) in Toronto, Canada. In addition, Landreth will host a special presentation at SIGGRAPH 2009 in New Orleans (Aug. 6, 10:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m.) as part of the Computer Animation Festival: "Look Closer: Psychologically Driven Animation." Bill Desowitz: What inspired The Spine? Chris Landreth: What inspired me to do this was fear of getting a failing grade in a professional screenwriter's course I was taking at Ryerson Polytechnic University. I had to write a screenplay and I keep a journal of short essays and I put two or three of them together to make the story that [became] The Spine. I was working with a group of people in this workshop and this is what came out of it for me.
BD: How personal was this story? CL: There were a few parts of the story that were part of my experience. About 20 years ago, when I was still at University, I attended a group therapy session for couples much like the one you see in the film. And I got to see some of the dynamics that are part of strange or twisted or dysfunctional relationships. And it had always seemed to me that portraying a relationship such as one of those would be a really interesting story. This is a rather ordinary couple with a backstory that is extraordinary in the sense that when you bring it out and describe it, it becomes something that is big and has real drama in it. BD: How long was the screenwriting process? CL: It took two hours to put the basic outline together and developing the story took a year. But then there's so much going over the material in your own outlines and drafts of the script and then running it by other people whose judgment you trust. The workshop was very helpful in the first month figuring out what the story would be and getting a lot of feedback from this group of eight professionals. I still meet with this group once a month, actually. All of us do have our own screenwriting projects. These guys have seen the film developed from a very rough outline to its final form. And the production team that I worked with at the National Film Board and Copperheart Ent. are people that I really trusted to work on this story with me. So I would say that, for me, the process of doing this film has been to not work in a vacuum… BD: How was it different from Ryan? CL: On Ryan, I would say that we developed the story very much while we were in production. The actual editing was very fluid, largely because it was a documentary… and that process was still happening until the last stages of rendering. On this film, we were much more careful to have the story very much in place before we started production. If you look at the early animatics, some things did change, but not that much. We really concentrated the first year on nailing down the story.
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