INTERVIEW for Last Night

with Doug McKellar

by Joanne Yamaguchi and Gus Calabrese

at the Oxford Hotel, hosted by Landmark City Manager David Kimball

Clicking on some of the photos and text will run video clips

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C1--Director Doug McKellar speaks of actress Sandra Oh selected to play the pivotal role in LAST NIGHT. Sandra had gained prominence primarily in comedy in Canada. McKellar saw in her the ability to express the dramatic struggle of LAST NIGHT. With Sandra Oh and legendary Canadian director David Cronenberg as her husband, the head of the utilities company stoically reporting to citizens the status of service, until the very end, McKellar creates a unique work of self-reflecivity and courage. play1

C2,C3--Everybody already knows the world is coming to the end (McKellar's brilliant interpretation of the instruction to make a 'millenium' film. Why not go for the the jugular, rather than a mere Y2K frivolity?) No scientific explanation is provided for WHY the end is coming. The focus is on how people handle the big end of the world. They do so rather as they handle life's little ends of the world. Here McKellar has created a stunning cinematic theme that compares with the French writer Georges Bataille who describes sex as a 'little death'.
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C4--McKellar favors the unpredictable in film structure. He admires Atom Egoyan's works for their mixtures of dramatic coherence along with fragments. McKellar used this approach in his earlier work THIRTY-TWO SHORT FILMS ABOUT GLENN GOULD. Doug McKellar omitted an explanation in LAST NIGHT of the world's end (which would have been very Hollywood) so viewers could focus on what is actually happening.
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C5--Did you really push that car over in the street scene? McKellar grins, recalling the event, says yes. LAST NIGHT is a low budget film, except for a few strong images to sell the film.

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Cronenberg makes a call play

One Last Nighter makes up a list of sexual acts that he wants to perforn before the end. play

Another wants to shoot down strangers he has never met.

Then there is the strange man/woman who runs the streets announcing the remaining time..... play


head to the bedroom ?

And then there is the last romantic moment.......punctuated by guns......lights out

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last second

 

It's over !