We do things a bit differently here in Canada, eh.

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When I got back to Vancouver, I told Cameron that we were going to make our own movie, out in the boonies, with buds and buds of buds as our cast and crew. Cameron, having worked on a few big, fancy American productions, was hesitant about the idea of not paying anyone, and he didn’t agree with me when I suggested using liquor instead of currency. So we decided to pay everyone about a hundred bucks a day (which probably converts to something like four American dollars).

And people were surprisingly excited to join our team—even Cameron’s weird buds from his fancy sets. Eyes lit up when we told people we were going to spend two whole weeks in the mountains, filming every day, living on the set. “I should tell you now that you’ll have to chop all of your own wood and keep the fire in your cabin going so that you don’t freeze to death at night,” we would tell people, but that would only get them more pumped up. When people were hesitant, we told them, “There will be beer,” and that was usually all they needed to hear.

So we found our location in the mountains, gathered our crew, made a cast largely comprised of guys from the acting school (students and my fellow TAs), and then we fucked off into the woods for two weeks. We had a guy on our crew who we called a ‘production manager’; his job was to go for a rip every morning down to the lick to buy a case of beer or two for each cabin. We emptied the town of Lumby out of Hell’s Gate, so for the last few days we were stuck drinking the second shittiest beer in town.

Sure, there were a few hosers, eh. One of Cameron’s big fancy set buds got fed up with our shit by day two, so he fucked of back to the city, I think to work on that Godzilla movie that no one saw. Then there was the recovering alcoholic who decided to stop recovering on day five. He threw up all over the makeup artist’s bags, so we told him to fuck off back to town (though someone had to drive him the six hours because buddy didn’t have his own whip).

Then I think it was on day ten when another buddy stormed into my cabin—which was doubling as the production office and editing suite. “This isn’t how they do things on real sets,” he said while shaking his fist. Real sets—I’d heard that before. “If you don’t like it, you can go,” I said. So he went for a rip down to Revelstoke and cooled off and came back and we had a beer together and it was all fine.

But there was something magic about the Black Mountain Side set. We were having a blast.

We had one actor with a scene on day one and not another until day ten. He left on the morning of day two and then came back on day four because he missed our set so much, being surrounded by that amazing atmosphere. He didn’t ask for any pay and he even offered to help out the grips in exchange for a few meals each day.

People work better when they’re excited and happy and ambitious. It’s true that sometimes you get what you pay for—like in the case of our deer god puppet. When the amateur special effects guy told me that he could make the deer for just two grand, when we’d budgeted ten grand, I should have said ‘fuck no’ and found someone else… but you learn. (It was after the shoot that I found out buddy was under the impression that if he could make the deer for two grand, then he would get to keep the other eight for himself).

A producer’s job isn’t to figure out how to get the money to pay for the best people, it’s to inspire ambitious people to do their best possible work. The crew of Black Mountain Side was great—not because they were being paid to be great, but because they were inspired, maybe for the first time since leaving film school.

The show ended and we all went back to the real world. I got some work booming for Lifetime and SyFy. The pay was good and I was excited to see some familiar names on the call sheets. But it wasn’t the same, even when it came to shooting on top of a mountain for a Syfy Christmas movie that was literally called Christmas Icetastrophe. How could that not be the most fun shoot ever? It wasn’t—it was hell. People moaned and groaned every day. One guy tried to stage a crew walk off because he was convinced the production was secretly skimming money off his pay-cheques. I got a dagger stare from the director when I made a joke between takes. When filming was done for the day, everyone would fuck off back to their hotel rooms, only to resurface at the exact minute of their call time the next day.

Though there was one funny moment, eh, when one of the higher-ups looked at me and decided to tell me about how he liked watching girls pee. “I left my wife because she wouldn’t pee on me,” he said. I guess he assumed that I would relate, I don’t fuckin’ know.

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