There’s something about Toronto filmmakers: they have a tendency to feel so local. Take, for example, Don McKellar, director, writer, actor. You might know him from Atom Egoyan’s Exotica, David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ or Crimes of the Future or his own films, like Last Night. You might also know him, simply, from the line at your neighbourhood coffee shop or sitting in the next seat over at a downtown movie theatre.
Still, he’s no stranger to Hollywood. Particularly with the April premiere of HBO’s big-budget drama The Sympathizer starring Roberty Downey Jr. and Sandra Oh, based on Viet Thanh Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2015 novel. The story, which is set toward the end of the Vietnam War, follows a spy who was embedded in the South Vietnam army and flees to the U.S., where he then begins spying to the Viet Cong on the refugee community he lives with.
Not only is the series a massive HBO production that took the cast and crew from California to Thailand, but McKellar co-created it with legendary Korean director Park Chan-wook (Decision to Leave, Oldboy). Despite all these high-wattage factors, McKellar wrote pretty much the whole show at home.
“This is a global project, but I wrote it in my backyard in Little Italy,” says the filmmaker. “Fortunately, we got the green light for writing the project from [production and distribution company] A24 right before the pandemic started, so I built an office in the back and did the entire writers’ room there. The show felt pretty strongly rooted in Toronto.”
The virtual room not only allowed McKellar to work from home, but it meant he was able to be joined by writers from all over the world. As for Park, the pair have been well-acquainted for some time, and wrote a screenplay together years ago, titled The Ax. Nguyen had hoped Park would adapt the project, and he then brought on McKellar as co-showrunner.
“We had a great time writing together,” says McKellar. “He came to Toronto, and we worked for a while; it was great. We trusted each other and have similar tastes, so working as a team on this project made sense. I think the idea of doing an entire series by himself and dealing with the network sounded like a lot of work, so he smartly thought, ‘Oh, I have to get someone else on this.’”
Cue a call to McKellar who, with experience in film, television and theatre, and his distinctive, quirky sensibility, actually makes for a perfect match for Park, who was especially a fan of McKellar’s divisive 2008 film Blindness.
Born and raised in North Toronto, McKellar’s a life-long theatre kid, having begun his career on stage at a young age. He co-founded Toronto touring company Child’s Play Theatre early on, and later studied English and theatre at the University of Toronto.
He was greatly influenced by local arts collectives, co-founding his own — The Augusta Company — in 1989. He made his first international splash with 1998’s Toronto-set Last Night when he won the Prix de la Jeunesse at the Cannes Film Festival. He then returned home, writing and starring in Twitch City, a CBC sitcom centred on four friends living in Kensington Market. His frequent collaborators include Cronenberg and Egoyan. It doesn’t get more Toronto than that.
Naturally, then, jumping onto a Hollywood production marked quite a shift. He says, “It takes a while just for you to realize, ‘OK, I can blow up helicopters, I can build giant sets.’ You have to overcome your independent film Canadian thriftiness, and it helps to surround yourself with writers who tell you to go for it.”
Another concern could very well be those fans of the book curious about how a Korean and Canadian are able to tell a very Vietnamese story. But, assures McKellar, there was a great number of Vietnamese people in the writers’ room, on the crew, and in the cast. And because the lead is biracial and the narrative is about straddling two cultures, McKellar and Park “thought of ourselves as a showrunner with two parallel faces presenting this global story.”
Working as a kind of mentor for new, inexperienced Vietnamese actors on set was star Sandra Oh, a fellow Ontarian who also provided McKellar a dose of home. The pair worked together not only on Last Night, but on 2017’s Meditation Park.
But McKellar wants to clear up one thing about their Sympathizer reunion: “She’s a really good friend of mine and I love her not only as a person, but as an actor, but it was actually Viet, the book’s author, [who] said, ‘My dream actor for Ms. Mori is Sandra,’” he says. “I thought, ‘Okay, I think maybe we can swing that!’ So, I texted her from the dinner table, and she was like, ‘Yes, this is amazing.’”
Their friendship meant the pair could be “completely honest” with each other when it came to his script or her performance, which can be rare but is essential on a large-scale project, explains McKellar.
Although he found the entire experience “inspirational,” it also had him itching to work on something on a smaller scale.
He shares, “I won’t deny the fact that I feel like I want to do something more controllable. I have an urge to do something in Canada… one way or another. After we finished, Chan-wook was like, ‘I’ve got to go home to Korea and make a little film, on my home turf, and in my language.’ I understand that impulse.”
For the record, he’s always open to acting, too, even if that means multi-tasking (while shooting Crimes of the Future in Athens, McKellar would be up late interviewing writers for The Sympathizer).
“I like the varied career,” he says. “Whatever that says about my personality, I’m not sure, but I guess I’m impatient in a way where I don’t like to feel stuck. Showrunning is a unique job because it encompasses directing and writing, and I use my performing skills a lot in dealing with actors and helping them in that way. But I’m eager now to act…I don’t have anything lined up, so please put the word out there!”
FAST FACTS
Name:
Don McKellar
Graduated:
Lawrence Park Collegiate Institute
Go-to restaurants:
Patois, Bar Vendetta, Hamers Coffee
Fave T.O. memory:
Sneaking into movies at the U of T cinema club
Fave local talent:
All my favourites are the ones I want to work with next, so I refuse to say!