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SPENCER MAYBEE INTERVIEW WITH FILMPEEK
May 30th 2008 18:00
"I grew up playing guns with my brother in High Park, shaking a plastic Uzi at imaginary bad guys, making ch-ch-ch-ch-ch noises and diving behind bushes to dodge return fire, coming up with 'wounds' (A.K.A. poison oak)", Spencer Maybee remembers in his interview with us. "S:TAoT wasn't that much different. The guns were real -- that was cool -- and half-load blanks make a way more realistic sound than I could ever make spitting fricatives, but the bad guys were imaginary, just like when I was a kid."
On making films in contrast to theatre he says: "It's a funny thing about acting for film -- it was a year ago that I worked on Stargate: The Ark of Truth, but it only came out a couple of months ago. It's such a contrast to working on stage, which I haven't done a lot in my career, but which I did most recently, working on a stage adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window called High Rise. In theatre, the curtain goes up, you show/tell your story start to finish and then the audience laughs, cries, boos, and/or hisses and you hear it. You know right away if you've connected with your audience."
It's popular with actors taking on different roles in the filmmaking process lately, and Spencer Maybee has credits as a director, producer and writer as well. "At the root, my passion isn't for one role in particular, but rather for storytelling", he tells us on that matter. "I used to have a hard time trying to figure out which role was really my preference so I could focus on that and be more efficient about building a career, but I'm addicted to learning and my learning and development in each role is exponentially increased by my experiences in the other roles. I get on set more than if I only did one job. I also see the whole shooting match from a different perspective. One thing I love about acting is being IN it. You're IN the moment with the other character, you're dealing with the drama, you're fighting the fights, loving the loves, dying the deaths. It's pretty amazing. I'm not a very dramatic person in my personal life -- I like to keep the drama to a minimum. So it's fun to jump in and let the instincts run wild. All three roles for me are inextricably linked. I love the back and forth. I think if I were to do just one for too long, I might either go crazy or, worse, go stale."
And we can believe that's his aim, since he'll be soon do the Director's Lab at the Canadian Film Centre from July to December this year and therefore be full-time focusing on directing. "It's a great opportunity for me to develop and hone my craft as a filmmaker and it will mean a hiatus from acting."
Maybe it's a preparation for some of his own exciting projects that he is looking forward to execute when the circumstances are right. "I'm writing a feature that's at the outline stage that I want to make, another low-budget feature that I might want to act in, a two-part epic that I want to direct and which will probably have to sit until I've got enough biz cred to do it, another project that could go feature or TV movie that's got lots of violence and a Canadian history connection, a bio-pic of a con man, and a bunch of other projects, and those are just the feature length ones. There is one project that I want to direct that looks like it has wheels, only they aren't my wheels. Ever since I read The Collected Works of Billy the Kid: Left-handed Poems by Michael Ondaatje I've had really strong ideas of how it should be done as a film with a fierce loyalty to the imagery in Ondaatje's exquisite poetry, and an even more savage and mechanical loyalty to its themes of machinery, technology, the animal kingdom, and the human place in relation to those things. It's about Billy the Kid, so a lot of Americans will want to see it just by that virtue. Essentially, it uses certain details and moments of Billy the Kid's life and story as the lense through which to explore these themes. I heard that Bruce McDonald and Don McKellar optioned the book to make a movie out of it. So my mission now is to convince them that I'm the person who should direct it. The other thing I love about the project is that it's a cowboy movie. It's always been a dream of mine to play a cowboy."
In any case, he is slowly but steadily becoming a recognizable face by participating in a variety of different movies, some of them being cinematic big productions. Not least in the up-coming The X-Files: I Want to Believe, a movie highly anticipated by a great amount of fans from the series and sci-fi lovers. "I'm really excited for the worldwide theatrical release of X-Files: I Want to Believe on July 25th, mostly because I want to see the movie, but also because it's an opportunity for me to reach a broader audience compared to TV. My head is bigger. Seriously, in theatres it's WAY bigger than on TV. I'm just kidding. In the movie I play a very different character from Eric Lenihan (the supporting lead in the movie "Ice Blues") and any of the other characters I've played on TV. One of the joys of working on feature films is that the directors are usually deeply invested in the material and tend to put just a little bit more into cultivating the kinds of performance they want than you often get with TV. In TV, the directors are hired by the producers and they've got a job to do and if they do it well, they just might get hired back. No working director is going to put up a fight for a creative idea on a TV show. She'll save it for her feature. Fewer risks are taken in TV, in my experience, than on feature films. There's a kind of magic that you only get when you try new things and that's what I love about feature films and why I want to work in more of them."
Even if it's still a supporting role as Blair Finch, Spencer isn't bothered by that fact. "There are some leading roles that I would love to play. One thing you get with traditional storylines, though, is sometimes the lead characters can be cookie-cutter heroes. This is the character that people are supposed to like, so you don't have as much room to play and try new things as you do with a supporting role, for instance. Look at Fenster in The Usual Suspects. Benicio Del Toro probably wouldn't have had the chance to play Fenster like that if Fenster was the lead. Too weird. But for a supporting role? Sure. Then you get some great roles where you have room to play and you're expected to, like the Joker. I would love to play the Joker. Bad guys have more fun. In movies."
Getting to the end of the interview, Spencer Maybee shares with us a list of directors he actually dreams and probably hopes to work with. "Terrence Malick, Terry Gilliam, pretty much any director named Terry, the Coen Brothers, Haneke, Gondry, Mamet, Lars Von Trier, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Sean Penn, Miranda July, Fernando Meirelles, Pedro Almodóvar, Sam Shepard, Soderbergh, George Clooney, Iñárritu, Cuarón, Sarah Polley... Each of them would direct one scene. It would be a long dream and the movie would be released to mixed reviews, but someone -- at least one person -- would be profoundly moved. It might even save a life."
Sounds like an amazing idea to me - I could easily be the person profoundly moved by it, that's for sure. But even if it's probably severe wish-thinking, we hope and believe in a great continued carrier for Spencer Maybee and thank him for his time in giving us inspirational answers and insight into a rising actor's mind!
Words by: peeker, filmpeek ©
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