Push and Pull: a talk with The Other Half filmmaker Joey Klein

by Andrew Parker

Canadian filmmaker Joey Klein has done plenty of press before as an actor, but during our interview last week to discuss his feature directorial debut, The Other Half (opening in Toronto on Friday, December 2nd), he admits that he finds himself somewhat out of his depth. After The Other Half made its world premiere earlier in the year at South by Southwest and its Canadian bow at Rendezvous with Madness last month, he had dipped his toe into the pool of doing press for something he wrote and directed, and he had been used to talking about filmmaking as an actor and as someone who had also made two short films previously. But today the exuberant and excited Klein finds it fascinating to be talking at such length about a film he put so much time and energy into.

“I’ve never done a full day of my own press before, and while that can be kinda intimidating, it’s become fascinating to hear so many different points of view on the film,” Klein gushes while seated in an office at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel. “It’s also so weird because we shot this almost a year and a half ago now and although I’ve moved onto working on other things, it just brings all the thoughts of this film right back to the front of my mind. It’s weird, but also remarkably cool.”

He has all the reason in the world to gush since the modestly budgeted The Other Half has been racking up quite a bit of acclaim since its premieres for the first time feature filmmaker. It also helps that he has the participation of two of the fastest rising talents (who also just happen to be a real life couple) in the world as his film’s stars and Executive Producers.

The Other Half is an unconventional love story that could have been a rather conventional one. Nickie, played by Tom Cullen, is a British ex-pat living a solitary life in Toronto. Prone to fits of rage, unable to keep a job very long, and particularly adept at freezing out everyone in his life (including his parents back home), Tom doesn’t make friends very easily. One day while hanging out with the few friends he does have, Tom finds a kindred spirit in Emily, played by Canada’s own Tatiana Maslany, a bipolar artist who seems to have more moments of clarity than he does despite her rapid-cycling mental illness. It’s more than a standardized film about finding love in seemingly hopeless situations, but about two people learning more about the world around them than they ever thought possible.

We chatted with Klein during his first full on junket as a filmmaker about what his stars brought to the project, staying respectful towards those suffering from mental illness, avoiding clichés, and how his own experiences as a performer helped create a safe place for the cast and crew to explore deeper emotions.

 

You have a wonderful cast with this, film, and some of the people you’ve worked with before in your capacities as an actor. After you’ve written this film and you start settling on the cast, did any of them bring out things in these characters that you might not have noticed when you were writing it, or did they take the story in any directions that you hadn’t anticipated as a writer-director?

Joey Klein: I wouldn’t say that any deep truths about any of these characters that weren’t there before were brought to my attention or became a part of the conversation. But, yeah, like you said I really had an embarrassing privilege of working with some of the best actors in the world right now on my first film. They bring things as far as they can go. Through years of looking at these characters on and off, I found what I wanted them to be like, but once two people like Tom and Tatiana come along and you get a D.P. like Bobby [Shore], then things come together in bigger ways that you would have expected.

I talk about this all the time and I feel like I’m repeating myself, but it has to be said, that it was a real dance between the four of us. Everyone’s work was influenced and supported by the others. It doesn’t always go that way on a film, but we all understood this as a team project, and the rest of the crew did, too.

In terms of maybe a single thing that I could remember, Tom had a very specific vision for what Nickie’s wardrobe should be. He was doing a television show the whole time we were in pre-production, and he came in on July 1st to do wardrobe, we did a read-through on the 2nd, and then we were shooting on the third, if that gives you an idea of how fast things had to come together on this film. It was a quick 16 day shoot, which isn’t unheard of or even that bad by some indie film shoots, but Tom was always sending me images for some of his ideas while he was in the UK for the television show he was filming before headed over here. His ideas were kind of like this 1950s greaser sort of thing, which I thought as interesting. I originally pictured Nickie with what I think now are these rather banal ideas where he was always dressed in old, gray, or monochromatic shirts that were all holy and beat up because he never cared what he wore and he wanted to disappear. I envisioned him with this almost vagabond outfit, but Tom had this idea of someone who dressed in kind of this “fuck you” sort of way. He wanted people to know he was on the outside. When I saw Tom send me this picture of the character wearing a bright yellow short, I said “I don’t know,” but I thought that he definitely had the right to choose since he was going to be inhabiting this character. I’m so proud of that detail now and for his idea because I think my idea was a bit too conventional, safe, and down the line, but Tom’s was really comprehensive, sexier, and shows a real understanding of who he thinks this character is.

Tom Cullen as Nickie in The Other Half

Tom Cullen as Nickie in The Other Half

I definitely thought that the look of Tom’s character was great. He’s clearly distancing himself from the world, but through the way he looks and how he carries himself, Nickie comes off as a man who’s practically daring people to talk to him. It’s like he’s always looking for a confrontation.

Joey Klein: (laughs) What you just said is almost literally what he said, and that’s cool. (laughs) But truly, I love the team sport of filmmaking, and I think through my experiences as an actor, I like to think that I can tell when something’s right and when something’s not right. As a first time filmmaker, you have to know what you know, know what you don’t know, and accept that you don’t know what you don’t know. If you have amazing people to collaborate with, you always have that to lean back on. There’s something very exciting and addictive about that collaborative process and how filmmaking builds to moments like that. The writing process is always solitary and kind of isolating in the correct way, and on the other side of the project it kind of went back to that when I went to work with my really lovely editor. In the middle of all that, though, you have this controlled chaos with an organized focus. Anything can change what you’re doing, and in sixteen days it becomes a bit of a whirlwind that has its own specific energy.

But in terms of getting back to what we were talking about regarding the people I worked with, you can’t write on the page something as trite as “Emily has a meltdown,” and you don’t know what it’s going to look or sound like, and those are the opposite of scenes that are always going to be page and letter perfect. Some scenes are scenes where you have to try respectfully to convey the experiences of those who do suffer from these kinds of mental health issues, particularly with regard to bipolar people. You can’t write what a manic breakdown is like because everyone who goes through them goes through them differently, and you need to have someone like Tatiana who feels comfortable and who I would allow to go off the page if they needed to. Some of the most gorgeous moments for my taste are her elaborations and improvisations. In terms of them taking it further, we never always had the chance with so little time to have full on conversations about things like this, but the things that Tom and Tatiana are capable of doing in the moment in terms of playing these sometimes sick people just blows my mind. It breaks my heart to think about all we had to do. It’s batshit to think about all the work they put into this, and there are takes that you haven’t seen where you can watch them just nail these really emotional scenes over and over again.

I don’t believe at all in God, but I do believe to a certain extent in the “film Gods.” (laughs) You don’t get lightning in your movie if you don’t appease them somehow. But I think if you work long and hard enough, the things that are meant to happen will happen. I met Tatiana on an acting job, and then after I had met her, someone told me that I had to check out Grown Up Movie Star, and after I saw that I offered her this part, and that was four and a half or five years ago, so she was offered this from me as something to keep in mind way before Orphan Black came along. The two of them together are just extraordinarily committed and curious people. There’s this misconception that when people become celebrities and they get a huge break that they only want to do films like Iron Man, and that’s something that I’ve never really seen to be true. There are always people like Tom and Tatiana who would love to do small pieces if they came by their way and they responded to. Actors want to be scared and want to respond and be challenged into putting their hat into the ring to fight for what they believe in. We didn’t really know each other all that well before getting into this, but by the end we had become great friends. Their intentions are as full their actions. They give all they can as performers and human beings to a project like this. And they give a hoot. Everyone on this film happily sacrificed themselves to work on this. That was the greatest, most humbling thing about working about this.

Tatiana Maslany as Emily in The Other Half

Tatiana Maslany as Emily in The Other Half

It seems really easy to make a film about mental illness and just label a character as being bipolar and have them just act crazy and show all of the outbursts that sometimes arise from that sort of mental illness, but here it’s great to see that when Emily is at her most lucid, she’s always more grounded, emotionally available, and thoughtful than Nickie is, which is a nice sort of flipping of that dynamic. Even at her worse, Emily always seems better adjusted than Nickie is. People who live around a tragedy often tend to dwell there, which is what Nickie clearly does, while Emily is a well adjusted person that just has this biological predisposition that she has little control over. She’s always the more lucid than the two, even with her setbacks and manic episodes. Was there a conscious decision to make this the case on your part, and did you learn anything from other films about mental illness and bipolar disorder that made you want to stay away from a more clichéd, possibly easier to understand look at what both of these characters are going through?

Joey Klein: Thank you very much for saying that. A lot of love and thought really went into just that. Someone who is sick like Emily is isn’t sick like that all the time. It’s such a common misconception or Hollywood trope to handle anyone like that in such binary terms. I think the biggest fear I had was that I would somehow disrespect people with bipolar disorder, so I always thought long and hard about how this character would be portrayed. Both of these characters are in some ways based on me, but neither of them are particularly based on me in specific details. I would say that Nickie is probably more like me than Emily is, so I wasn’t as concerned with getting him right. Bipolar disorder is a diagnosable metal illness that’s both clear and complicated, so you have to make sure that you get that right.

That’s the rub to me, though, when it comes to Nickie. When you lose someone close to you, it’s always hard. If you lose a parent or a grandparent, that’s something that’s often sad and it definitely hits you in a certain way. But when a child goes missing in a violent way like what happened in Nickie’s life and it’s something that’s not meant to be, there’s no warning for, and they’re gone, that changes you completely. If you need to put a label on it, that’s Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which is more destructive in ways that are counter to what Emily experiences, and in a lot of ways a lot more punishing. We talked about this on set that these are sick people who need help, and although they have each other, they need help in different ways. To each other, they know each other and sniff each other out with this almost animal-like instinct. It’s what brings them together, but also what rips them apart whenever either of them slips into a dark place. They’re both not going to be healed by time. She’ll always be sick, but she’ll have some good days. He will always be sick, but he needs to learn how to have some good days.

And I wish Tom and Tatiana were here to talk about what they did, but if were to liken them to boxers, they both left everything they had in the ring to make sure that they did right by these forms of illness. When you go out and do something like this – as an actor, writer, or director – it has to cost you something, and if it ain’t costing you something, you ain’t doing your job. I think Tatiana had so many highs and lows and flourishes, and she gave so much. The first of Emily’s manic episodes was something that Tatiana did eight times, and every single take was so full that although I had the luxury of putting something together with bits from every take, I could have just played any of them in full and it would have been great. The same with Tom, but here was a guy who has to spend all of his time as an actor in such a low place. With Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, he hasn’t allowed himself to cry for five years. He has massive survivor’s guilt. He always feels helpless. He feels like less of a brother and less of a human being, and the only thing he won’t do to lash out to the world around him is take his own life because he still has parents and part of that guilt he feels is that he doesn’t want to make things worse for them. He’s a walking dead man because everything is so buried, and Tatiana also has to play someone so kind and giving that she can bring out these things in him. They’re so giving as artists, and they’re so hard on themselves to make sure that they’re going as deep as they can go. I was never in a position as a filmmaker to make sure they were getting their performances just right because they cared about these characters as much as I did and they brought everything they had every day to make sure we got it all right. Constantly they were always starting in this wonderful place and always striving to go that one bit deeper. That’s just who they are as performers, and I have to think of a better word to describe it than privilege, but it was definitely a luxury. It was the most creatively fulfilling thing I’ve ever done.

Joey Klein on the set of The Other Half

Joey Klein on the set of The Other Half

Do you think your background as an actor made you a filmmaker who was able to create a safe space for these performance to take shape organically?

Joey Klein: I think so. When you’re on set as an actor, I don’t think that everyone ever means anyone any harm, but a lot of energy is being expanded by other people that’s running counter to what you’re trying to do, that just takes so much out of you and the job becomes harder. In a film like this, we needed a lot of quiet moments for everyone to get centred and tap into each other, and we could do that because of the great cast and crew we had. On another set, you might always have a First Assistant Director who’s pulling focus for whatever reason or people freaking about the lights and audio. It’s a real testament more to Bobby and his team than to me that we were able to create spaces for the actors to really work and get inside the characters. I really think that if I am lucky enough in the future to make another film as a filmmaker that it would have to be like this experience. Bobby is such a talented artist in his own right that we were always able to keep the actors the primary focus and everyone else on set was always on the same page and bringing the same amount of energy.

One of the last things I wanted to talk to you about today was the role that the parents of these characters play in the film, and how they inform them as people. Emily might clash with her father and step-mother, but they’re still loving and supportive because her dad knows exactly what Emily is going through after having lived with her mother. Meanwhile, you have Nickie who has a supportive family back in the UK, but he has distanced himself really far away from them and he can’t see the support of his mother, or that he’s slowly starting to deal with things exactly like his father deals with them. Was it always a careful consideration to portray the characters in this way and show how their environments impact them as human beings?

Joey Klein: I really like and appreciate how you put that, and there’s a lot of truth to that. I don’t think I ever thought about the role of the parents in any kind of structural terms. I always thought of them on an emotional level. When it comes to Emily, her illness is something that manifested capriciously when she was fifteen, so for all she has to deal with, guilt isn’t the primary thing for her, and she has a strong, supportive father and stepmother who want to help her through that, and she knows they want to help her even when she can’t realize it herself. But when you’re the brother of a family who lost a young child that goes missing, everyone’s mind goes off in such dark directions because none of them know what’s happening. That throws support all off, and the guilt really is what pushes Nickie away. Her side is a genetic predisposition, and sadly bipolar disorder is something that can be inherited, and they can all accept that and sort of try to move forward the best they can. Nickie kind of has that with his mother, but the sad thing about how men process grief, and he’s clearly reacting in a fashion similar to his father and both of them act really distant towards one another. They’re stuck in something they can’t control, and there’s this pathological need to feel guilty that they couldn’t have done something about it. In terms of the parental structure, it just seemed instinctual and correct to me rather than a narrative necessity. This is just kind of true to the things that I’ve witnessed and experienced throughout my own life, and I didn’t try to force it.

Join our list

Subscribe to our mailing list and get weekly updates on our latest contests, interviews, and reviews.

Thank you for subscribing.

Something went wrong.

You may also like

Comments are closed.

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. Accept Read More