LAFF Interview: Matt and Joel Bissonnette – Passenger Side

Joel Bissonnette in Passenger Side

Passenger Side, the latest film from Canadian brothers Matthew and Joel Bissonnette made its world premiere at LAFF on Friday night and you can read the LiC review here. This is writer/director Matthew’s third feature and the second time he’s worked with his actor brother Joel. I sat down to talk with the pair on Sunday afternoon.

I suppose I’ll start with the most obvious question: Passenger Side is the story of two brothers and you guys are two brothers. Was this autobiographical in any way?

Matthew: Not really, no. Other than it has brothers.

Joel: I would say yeah, but not in such a delineated way. Just more in the quality of who they are and the way they talk. There’s a real familiarity to me in the characters and to he and I, but the story and the events and the particulars of it not so much.

M: Let me put it this way. I think it’s much easier to make up stories than characters and I think you borrow more from people you know in terms of their tone and personality and stuff like that. The narrative you can sort of make up anything. I think it’s difficult to conceive of a person I’ve never met before but it’s quite easy to think of a sequence of events that could happen to a human being.

(to Joel) You probably approach it a little bit differently as an actor. You’re looking for different things than he is as a writer and a director…

J: I think so, but it’s sort of chicken and egg in terms of how story relates to character. Do the actions of a particular character define his character or does it start with “can this particular character actually take those courses of action?” so it’s a similar approach for me.

Did you guys work on Passenger Side together throughout the whole process or…?

M: I usually write the thing and then I send them…[co-star] Adam Scott I’d worked with on a film and know him very well and obviously I know Joel very well also…so we like send them early drafts and say “do you guys want to do this?” and then we kind of move forward from there.

They usually wait until right before we’re gonna shoot to say like “Oh I don’t like this line” so they would not do that sort of six months in…

J: (laughs) You can’t give too much advanced warning. You’ve gotta spring it. It’s your only hope.

M: Yeah, they like to keep it fresh in that kind of way.

They wait until you’re ready to pull the trigger.

J: Exactly.

M: Keep you on your toes.

J: At the end of the day it’s a dictatorial approach. It’s collaborative, but there’s one final say so in order to get what you want you can’t give too much leeway.

Did you have Joel and Adam in mind as you were writing?

M: Oh yeah. I was going to do another movie, but it didn’t come together so I went home and wrote this script and I always knew Joel would be in it and it was something I thought we could do easily in Los Angeles. Then the other movie came together and it was the last movie I did [Who Loves the Sun] and Adam was actually in it so that’s when I met him. I said well obviously he’ll be the other character and then when I refined it, I kind of refined it with his voice a little bit.

So this was intended as something relatively easy and low budget you could do while the other film wasn’t working out?

M: Exactly. It’s something I knew I could do and I wanted to do it in Los Angeles because I was living there. That’s the first part of easy. And I’m interested in road movies so…

Did time and budgetary constraints lead you to a two-character story told in a confined space, or were you intentionally going for sort of a Hitchcockian Lifeboat challege?

M: On both sides. If you don’t understand how the movie is going to get made, there’s not much point in writing a script. Having done a film or two, that’s just my view on it and my view on the lay of the land. I’m not saying you need to craft your…you know “I’m going to make a movie in a phone booth” or whatever to minimize your costs, but if you’re not aware of the financial constraints of filmmaking, it’s difficult to make them.

And I think there was a challenge. It was not so much Hitchcock, but I thought of it more as My Dinner with Andre and the challenge is the other way. How do I open that up? I enjoy writing dialogue and it’s something I like in other films, but how do we open the film up visually? So that’s the challenge.

There’s something about a road movie that’s mostly contained within the city of Los Angeles that really says something about this city, isn’t there?

M: Oh yeah. Totally. One thing is that I enjoy defeating expectations or having something different happen in the film than you think is going to happen so that’s one thing, but then also, yeah, as an outsider to Los Angeles…When I came to LA I didn’t drive. When we grew up we didn’t have cars when we were kids. I was like: there are two kinds of people, bus people and car people and we were bus people. And when I came here I needed to learn how to drive and so it’s the only city I actually know in that kind of context. It is so weird the amount of time spent in a car here.

J: Yeah, and when you first arrive…one strip mall can look like another strip mall and you get this sort of generalized impression, but if you look at the film from Joshua Tree to Long Beach, just the shot out the window, I mean there really is this…I’m embarrassed to say it…this sort of subtle beauty to this city that is diverse that maybe you underappreciate until you see it on a large screen and it surprises you.

M: There are more things to photograph than people traditionally photograph. I remember when I first came here I’d like drive down Sunset Boulevard with an X tape playing and it was so like iconic and I think I lost that a little bit. One part of doing the film was going back and going “oh yeah” to try and connect with that kind of iconic Los Angeles strangeness.

Do you guys work well together?

J: Yeah. I think so. There’s not a lot of friction. It goes pretty smoothly. When you spend a lifetime with somebody, you know what they’re saying and they need minimal amount of words to say it.

How would you compare Matt to other directors you’ve worked with?

M: (laughs)

J: A large part of a director actor relationship is communication and we sort of have that in shorthand.

M: Or trust in the sense that you know what they’re going to do. Like an actor I think their biggest fear is “You’re gonna make me look stupid. You’re not going to do this properly.”

J: Yeah to a certain degree you’re subverting your own…you’re not telling the story so in terms of tone and in terms of choices at the end of the day you have to deliver what the director wants. So I guess, yeah, there needs to be a level of trust there that when you jump off these many little cliffs that you’re going to be supported. There’s always a part of you that’s trying to see it from the director’s point of view, but you’re inside the story so you have to trust there’s someone outside…

M: That they’re going to put the pictures together right and then put the right type of music, or not music, and cut it in a way that functions. There’s nothing more unpleasant I’m sure than going to see a film that you’ve acted in that you don’t like. There’s all your work and effort and your own face. From the director’s perspective you’re trusting this person is going to deliver what you need them to in this time frame.

J: (laughs) Yeah, this time frame of 14 days…

M: Working with Adam and Joel, the trust is already there. I don’t have to worry about whether they’re insane and they don’t have to worry they’ll find out in mid-shoot the director is some maniacal cokehead.

J: Yeah or just full of shit.

The film has a great soundtrack including Camper Van Beethoven, Wilco, Leonard Cohen and a bunch of others. It’s surprising for a small budgeted film. Was it difficult getting the rights together?

J: Yeah, it was the longest process.

M: It took a while. I mean I thought it was important to have that kind of music in to get the film to certain kind of, again, iconic level. The Silver Jews were in the last film I did so we worked with Drag City a bit and they’re a very easy label to work with because they’re independently owned. Same with Merge. Mac McCaughan who runs Merge scored my first two films so we’re kind of pals and he was the music consultant so Mac can phone Dinosaur Jr. up and say we’re doing this small film, the money is terrible but it’s going to be a fun thing to do. Are you interested? Generally if you approach people in that kind of manner…like the guys from Camper Van Beethoven, I was a huge fan but we didn’t know them, so we just called them up and said “these bands are doing it, here is the pittance money” and they actually though it was a joke. They thought we were joking around and then they were like “Really? People are doing this?” and they said “Ok man, sure.”

J: That’s all you need is a few people on board.

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Passenger Side is playing in LAFF’s narrative competition.

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Tags: Joel Bissonnette, LAFF, Los Angeles Film Festival, Matthew Bissonnette, Passenger Side