Shining a spotlight on London

Header image for Interrobang article CREDIT: DANNY DUNLOP
Brennan Julius and Dominique Kamras take the roles of Mitchell and Emily, a couple who met online that is experiencing dating troubles due to scheduling conflicts.

Darryl Callcott first had the idea to make a film about a day in the life of twenty-something-year olds years ago – “probably a good decade,” he said.

Money was one issue why it took so long to make the film. But the bigger problem was getting the story right.

“I started the story when I was in my early 20’s,” Callcott said. “By the time I was in my late 20’s, I had a different perspective of that whole decade.”

“Things that I thought were problems in my early 20’s didn’t seem so overwhelming in my late 20’s.”

The Strathroy native is now 30, wears thick black-rimmed glasses and sports a full beard and short, somewhat curly hair.

His first feature film, Liminality – the film he’s been working on for 10 years – will première September 25 at the Hyland Cinema on Wharncliffe Road. Shot in London, the movie tells the coming-of-age story of nine 25-year olds.

Callcott first wanted to make films after he watched Back to the Future when he was five years old.

“At the time, I just liked the magic of movies,” he said. “As I got older, I started seeing more dramatic, epic storytelling in the movies I was watching and thought, ‘there’s a lot of options for how you can make a movie and what kind of style of movie you can make,’ and I just wanted to play with that.”

He got his first video camera when he was 14 and started shooting short films while in high school.

He didn’t go to film school afterwards, though. Instead, he bought about 1,000 DVDs and watched every director’s commentary.

“Over the last 20 years, I just immersed myself in enough study of film itself to compensate for [not] going to film school,” Callcott said.

He first started making films professionally about 10 years ago when he co-founded his own production company, Sunny Day Jazz Productions. A few years later, he started the London Short Film Showcase with Sunny Day Jazz Productions co-founder, Jason Clarke. The purpose of the festival was for filmmakers to have a place to showcase their work.

But the duo parted ways in 2012. While Clarke went on to found Two Hounds Productions, specializing in producing commercials and promotional videos, Callcott founded 9:25 Productions, focusing on scriptwriting and filmmaking.

It wasn’t a nasty separation, though, says Callcott. It was a split of names to differentiate who was doing the more commercial work and who was doing the more creative work. In fact, the two still work together – Clarke was the executive producer and an editor on Liminality.

The London Short Film Showcase festival ceased to exist, too.

“We felt that it had run its course,” Callcott said. “It achieved everything that we wanted it to achieve.”

That’s when he started focusing on making Liminality happen.

“I sat down and started coming up with the characters and some of the stories I wanted to tell,” he said.

He says it’s the story of the random things that can happen to the characters in the span of a day.

“It’s how they’re connected, who they know,” he said.

Callcott applied for grants to make Liminality, but getting money to make films in Canada is incredibly hard, he says.

That’s when he turned to Indiegogo, a crowdfunding service that grants perks in return for donations, asking for $5,000. Some of the perks included walk-on roles, limited edition DVDs and invites to the première’s afterparty.

The campaign raised a little over $5,000.

He said he wasn’t too worried about hitting the goal – they had campaigned for the movie beforehand, shooting a teaser trailer and doing promotional stuff.

“It was not as nerve racking as it could’ve been,” he said.

As for the decision to shoot in London, he says it’s because he’s been living here for a while and he finds it easier to shoot here tthan in larger cities.

He says London has as many filming options as any big city but without as many restraints. Whereas he can’t even set up on a street corner in Toronto without a filming permit, he says, nobody bothers him here.

“London itself is an incredibly beautiful town,” said actor Jake Raymond, who plays Sam, a general manager at a Toronto nightclub who’s in a long-distance relationship with a master’s student in London. “Some of the locations we were at, you’d get there, and you just wanted to take a minute to take in the beauty of it before we started filming.”

Londoner Adrienne Masseo, who plays Laurel, a heartbroken grocery store cashier who reveals her affection for her coworker, also thought filming here was exciting.

“I’m really excited to see the whole thing come together and to be able to see London on the big screen,” she said.

And while the movie might’ve been shot in London with a $5,000 budget as opposed to, say, Hollywood with a $500 million budget, Callcott said it looks as good as any other film.

“It looks like a million-dollar movie.”