Q&A: Chandler Levack On Her Feature Debut, 'I Like Movies,' & Being A Canadian Filmmaker
While much of the film world has been preoccupied with the final days of award season, Chandler Levack has been busy rolling out her debut feature film, I Like Movies.
A vet of short films and music videos, Levack made the most of a $125,000 Talent to Watch grant from Telefilm Canada, crafting a coming-of-age comedy that is perplexingly universal for a film set in the Toronto suburbs in the early aughts — back when Swollen Members' Fuel Injected ruled the CanCon-constricted airwaves and Paul Thomas Anderson-obsessed film nerds dreamed of making it big stateside.
I Like Movies follows Lawrence, played wonderfully by gregarious newcomer Isaiah Lehtinen, as he attempts to engineer a path from high school in the GTA suburbs to NYU's prestigious film program. To finance his ludicrously expensive plans and his addiction to movie rentals, the misanthropic teen pesters the manager of a local Blockbuster-type store (Romina D'Ugo) for a job.
In almost any other movie, this is the part where the older woman might, er, initiate her young charge into adulthood — but as Levack is quick to point out, this isn't the sort of movie "where Lawrence loses his virginity to Alanna in the back of the video store." Instead, Lawrence is forced to confront to how much of a narcissistic dick he's been to the people who care about him — namely, his boss Alanna, best friend Matt (Percy Hynes White) and long-suffering mother (Krista Bridges).
(Lawrence is unimpeachably correct on one front: 2001's Shrek is complete and utter [REDACTED].)
I recently caught up with Levack to chat I Like Movies, the stigma of being pigeonholed as "a Canadian filmmaker" and what we lost when Blockbuster went the way of VHS tapes.
Andrew Joe Potter: Chandler! So excited to chat. Can you start by telling our readers where you got the idea for I Like Movies?
Chandler Levack: I was in my early 30s, and I felt this kind of like biological imperative, like I need to make a movie or I'm gonna die. It started making me think about the last year I worked at Blockbuster. I was a really passionate, super nerdy cinephile and I felt very estranged from everybody in my life. I was really freaking out about where I was gonna go to university. And it's this weird period of my life where everything was ending, but I didn't want to acknowledge that. I was also so stuck on my future — what it was going to be like — and it was a lonely time.
But I was also really obsessed with movies and working in a video store and hanging out with all these adults, you know? I felt like I just had never seen that kind of film before. And it was a story I was passionate about telling.
AP: In previous interviews, you’ve mentioned that Lawrence is a bit of a stand-in for a younger you. You also revealed that by gender-swapping the role, you're able to open up possibilities for the character that wouldn't necessarily exist if the character was female. What does that change unlock for you as a storyteller?
CL: I think if Lawrence was a girl, the Lady Bird comparisons would never end. This was a new spin on that. I also think female filmmakers often don't tell stories about young men. There's kind of a gap in representation where women can tell stories about male characters from a different angle than they can see themselves.
And I wanted to explore this sort of archetype of the "toxic film bro" at a very early and formative age of their development. I feel like a lot of the worst offenders — older Lawrences that I know — feel like maybe the core of their identity got formed in high school. They were watching Stanley Kubrick movies in the dark, alone in their basements. And maybe if they'd had a coming-of-age journey that was similar to Lawrence's, they would have changed into a slightly different version of themselves.
I think there's just something interesting about telling a story like this, where you actually hold the main character accountable for their actions. And I feel like I've seen this kind of movie many times, but it's always been made by men, and (the characters) don't learn anything. In fact, they're just kind of entirely validated.
AP: Isaiah Lehtinen is such a dynamic on-screen presence as Lawrence. What was the collaboration like in finding the midpoint between your script and what he was bringing to the table as an actor?
CL: Lawrence was such a difficult role to cast because he literally is the movie. He’s in almost every single shot of the film and he has entire pages of dialogue to perform. And it's a really insufferable character on the page, I think! You need to have somebody who's innately empathetic and charismatic — who's fun and in on the joke. A lot of young men who want to be actors, they kind of just play these sort of blank-slate characters. They don't have an edge to them. And they often won the genetic lottery. I wanted somebody who had a deep well of emotional intelligence and a lived experience that at least was kind of in line with Lawrence — someone who had the same obsessive relationship to movies and music and art the way that he did.
We did this casting search across Canada and over 300 people auditioned for the part. Isaiah was one of the last people to audition — and he didn't look or act or sound like anything I imagined Lawrence to be, but he was so much more compelling, and funny and specific and interesting! The more that we talked, the more I felt like we really got each other. I was like, "Oh, there's so many more possibilities than I even imagined by casting him. It's so much better than what I wrote." He really made that part his own.
I made Isaiah watch maybe 12 or 15 different movies and a lot of them he hadn't seen before. He watched Rushmore for the first time and Punch-Drunk Love and Francis Ha — and then he also sent me movies that he really connected with, too. We had this kind of mutual exchange together. We just spent hours and hours chatting, and he would just tell me about his life. And he talked about the script and the character. By the time I got to set, I felt like I had known him forever.
AP: Because the younger actors in the film are so great, I almost feel like Romina and Krista’s characters — Lawrence's boss Alanna and his mother — are a little overlooked. Those performances are so wonderful! As much as Lawrence is this partial manifestation of you as an up-and-coming creative, how are these older female characters taken from your own experiences?
CL: I feel connected to everybody in the movie. All the characters probably contain some element of me or people in my life or my family. And then there's also kind of like fictionalization — and sometimes when you fictionalize something it becomes more true in its own way. I think that's why it was really essential that Lawrence was a boy because I could actually be more vulnerable and more autobiographical because of the gender switch; people wouldn't be like, "Well, that's you." It's like, "Well, no, it's a boy."
Also, with that question of Lawrence's unlikability, I think people are less harsh on male characters. They can be kind of brasher and more like anti-heroes. But then, as soon as you attribute the same kind of characteristics to a woman, suddenly, people are like, "This is too much; she's just unbearable and I can't watch this." They’re way more lenient with male characters. And with Alanna especially, I just haven’t seen this kind of movie. [Usually], that character is just an empty vessel, or a muse, or that kind of person that's just there to be like, "You're so great, and you're gonna do it, I believe in you." And they have no complexity at all, and they're just instantly sexualized.
You know, there's a version of this movie that's written by a [real-life] Lawrence, where Lawrence loses his virginity to Alanna in the back of the video store, and she takes him to the prom. I didn't want to play into any of those things. And I think Romina is such a fantastic actor that she really made that part of her own. She's got her whole other movie going on that we didn't even realize because we were only thinking about this one boy. I liked giving her that space to tell her own story and just have him listen.
AP: There's such a relatable story at the heart of I Like Movies — but it's also this incredible buffet of references to ‘80s and ‘90s cinema. The film reels off a lot of the modern classics — overwhelmingly those directed by men. How has your relationship with these modern masters like Paul Thomas Anderson, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese changed over the course of your own life?
CL: All the movies that Lawrence reveres were the exact same movies as I was going on and on about when I was a teenager. Seeing Punch-Drunk Love for the first time in high school, I was like, "This is cinema and I'm a different person now that I've seen this." Also, when you grow up in the suburbs, and you don't necessarily feel like your friends or people around you are interested in the same thing that you are, it makes you even more intensely attached to those cultural objects, because they feel like an ambassador of who you could become. You're like, "Well, Punch-Drunk Love is now the whole core of my identity."
I wanted to pick all the movies that I felt that way about in high school. And then I went into film school and got taught this canon of cinema. I took a whole class on the films of Jean-Luc Godard and a Kubrick class and wrote long papers about all of these movies. There was something about the academic discourse, the way that cinema was being taught and presented to me, that actually kind of made me turn off from it. "This is so dry, and I don't see my own sensibility reflected in this. And I don't care about Béla Tarr’s movies." I may never care about them. But there was this expectation that if you were a real cinephile, this is what you had to like.
I wasn't learning about Elaine May or Agnes Varda films, or a lot of female directors that really shaped my sensibility later. I had to uncover them through the cracks of film history. Even in the last 10 or 15 years since I've been writing about cinema and studying it, I'm really grateful that the discourse has really shifted a lot and it does feel like there's more visibility and appreciation for films by women, queer directors, non-binary directors and people of colour. Hopefully, over time, we're gonna see a huge shift; there's more to cinema than just like these same 10 movies that we've been citing for the last 50 years.
AP: Right. We have movies like Shrek now.
CL: Exactly!
AP: Lawrence loudly proclaims early in I Like Movies that he never wants to be viewed as "a Canadian filmmaker." Was that fear of being pigeonholed something you’ve battled in your career?
CL: I guess it's sort of a tongue-in-cheek joke. But it's the relationship all Canadians feel about the work that we create, right? That it's not good until it's validated somewhere else. Oftentimes, Canadians are under-appreciated in their home country, so then they have to go somewhere else. Then when you have success somewhere else, Canada wants you more.
I think Lawrence feels more ambitious than Canada, that he has bigger sights than just being from Canada or being from Burlington can provide. There's something about this idea that Canadians don't like to tell our own stories. What I wanted to do with this film was really lean in as hardcore as I could into the real specificity of my suburban, coming-of-age experience in Burlington, Ontario, in the early 2000s. I made everything as Canadian as it could be, you know? A Swollen Members song on the soundtrack and Cows (Creamery) t-shirts, and Oliver the Cashman. I had never seen the Ontario suburbs be immortalized like that.
So why not just lean into that as much as I could? What was so cool about that is though I've screened the movie in Norway, Taiwan and California, everywhere, people are really relating and connecting with it. It’s exciting to know that I can be as specific as possible and [it’s still] universal.
AP: You were interviewed a few weeks ago by two middle-school-aged kids, and you also told them that the idea for I Like Movies was partially inspired from your time at Blockbuster. My first thought was: Is there any chance these kids have a clue what Blockbuster was? They’re like 13! In our streaming-centric world, what do you think movie-lovers have lost with the death of the movie rental store?
CL: There’s something about the emotional relationship you have when film is a tactile object that you can own and hold in your hand. When you rent a movie, you have to pay $5 and you have to return it on Friday; there's something about that that's so much deeper than everything on Netflix, where everything's entirely disposable. Now, you watch 10 minutes of a movie, and then you go on your phone for an hour and a half. And then you're like, "Oh, what was I watching? The Graduate?"
AP: Oh my god. Jeez.
CL: Yeah, it does depress me. I read somewhere that the average Blockbuster had like 10,000 titles at any given store and on Netflix, there are actually only 3,000 titles at any point. And also, movies on Netflix are constantly being deleted and titles are bouncing around different streaming services or disappearing entirely.
The chance of just stumbling around and picking up a DVD because you like the cover of it, and there's something intriguing about it to you and then you rent it and then you're like, "Oh shit, this is my favourite movie now!" You'll never have that when it's just this aimless scroll.
AP: What movies from the past few years would be in your personal Staff Picks sections?
CL: Okay, I'm gonna go Ladybird by Greta Gerwig, The Twentieth Century by Matthew Rankin, and a recent pick — I'll pick Geographies of Solitude by Jacquelyn Mills, this incredible documentary that came out this year. That's the most beautiful, visionary thing I've ever seen.
I Like Movies is now playing in select theatres across Canada. This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
