National Post Interview

Welcome back to the Canadian Short Screenplay Competitions official blog. If you’ve been following our posts up to this point, you may have discovered very useful tools and information about writing and producing short films. But, in checking the statistics of the website, I tend to notice out of all the people who read the article, only half or so continue through with clicking the link. (If you’re one of them, go back and check them out!) So since today’s off-site article is an interview by the National Post, I figured I’d block quote it for your convenience.

Jeffrey P. Nesker is a friend of ours and a terrific film director. Nightclub Story, his debut short, about a guy and girl whose lips and philosophies collide head-on outside a disco, is screening Thursday and Friday in Toronto as part of the Reel Heart International Film Festival. We caught up with Nesker to hear about his process, and why he believes tomorrow’s director of the next Transformers is currently making short films.

Where did you get the idea for your film?

Second year of film school I wrote a script about a guy meeting a girl on a subway. I liked it, but it read a little too much like a bratty second year student at a film school. Was this really a good story or just my fantasy as a single guy? Anyway, I sat on it for about a year, and then started seeing it as a battle of wills between two people. And if the subway was too much of a gimmick, the line of a nightclub could be unique and also plausible….I think.

Have you ever met a woman in the line of a night club?

That’s actually dramatic license doing its work, but back in my old days of raving, waiting in line for someone to figure out how to actually open the door, I met lots of interesting people in line.

Tell us a little about your story.

He’s 26 and sour on the whole dating enterprise and she’s 21, still young and naive. She’s very much trying to get her swerve on. For him, the fantasy of going out and meeting your soul mate and buying an island together just seems further and further away. I wanted to examine that, how things change: what if you’re giving up on the fantasy at exactly the same time that it’s coming true?

Was it difficult shooting amongst the club kids Toronto?

We shot at the abandoned police station on King Street and at Mink night club, which is actually tucked away from the entertainment district on Simcoe Street. Basically, it’s not hard to shoot at 8 p.m., but it gets infinitely louder as the night drags on. There was always more noise when we left than when we went in.

Storytelling wise, how different is it to make a short film as opposed to a feature?

A short is a one-trick pony. The reason shorts will always be a stepping stone to features is that they’re features in miniature, they mirror each other: if you can’t tell a story with two characters in a bedroom, you can’t tell a story, period.

We just had the Worldwide Short Film Festival in Toronto. Are film shorts becoming a more established way for a filmmaker to get his work seen?

They’re enjoying a renaissance thanks to online delivery. Cellphones and YouTube, there’s a hell of a lot of short film-only incubators today. We have Movieola in Canada and there’s one in France, while short film-only distribution centres spread out all over Europe. It also doesn’t hurt with that the Oscars now release collections of Oscar-nominated shorts on iTunes and on DVDs.

Short films are huge!

It’s en vogue now, they’ve even become profitable in the last couple years. We’re seeing a lot of interesting stories and bigger budgets. Short film festivals have better stories than the multiplex.

It’s interesting to dig through the minds of people involved in the Short film industry, and perhaps it will one day be you who is interviewed for your participation in the Canadian Short Screenplay Competition.