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Interview Dave Foley and his sleeping puppy Oliver

by Clayton Windatt

 

Clayton:                 What do you think about North Bay?

 

Foley:                     I quite like North Bay, I wasn’t anticipating liking North Bay because I used to live in Simcoe County, so I wasn’t sure what North Bay was going to be like. Was going to be like shooting in Collingwood where I used to go to high school? I didn’t know if we would wind-up being hated by the town or whether they would welcome a group like us with our history. But it’s actually been fun and the people that live here have all been really great to us.

 

Clayton:                 How do you rate North Bay’s cultural environment?

 

Foley:                     Well, there’s a lot more going on culturally up here than I would have anticipated in that there’s an art scene up here and a theatre scene as well. We went out and saw some local punk rock bands and that was fun. There’s a lot going on here. I think that small towns aren’t as isolated as they were when I was a kid. Cable TV and satellite TV has changed what it is to be in a small town.

 

Clayton:                 Why a Murder Mystery?

 

Foley:                     Even when we started working on it we weren’t thinking of it as a murder mystery. I think originally it was just the title “Death comes to Town” and the image of death personified getting off of a grey hound bus in a small town. We just sort of like that opening image and everything sort of came out of that image, once we had death in the town then said that somebody should be murdered and then once someone had been murdered, someone had to have murdered them. So really it just all came from death personified in a small town as an image.

 

Clayton:                 How is it to be working together again as the group: Kids in the Hall?

 

Foley:                     It’s been really pleasant and productive. I think that we’ve been a lot more productive than we’ve been in quite a while.

 

Clayton:                 Would you ever consider doing stage performance or theatre?

 

Foley:                     I would consider it mostly because I have never been in a play in my life. I’ve been approached by some Broadway shows to come try-out for producers on Broadway. They called me first after Mathew Broderick left and then after that everybody that would leave, I would get a call but I never had the time to go out and try it. And besides, I don’t know how to sing so that would take some work. The play that would really appeal to me would be doing “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” it would be fun to play George because I am actually the right age to play George now. My ideal would be to play George and get Maura Tierney to play Martha.

 

Clayton:                 How has the Canadian Film & Television Industry changed over the span of your career?

 

Foley:                     The biggest change was the influx of American work in Canada when suddenly with the tax breaks and everything, you had this huge volume of American productions coming up to Canada to shoot and that created a demand for a lot more skilled crews and facilities which then were here for Canadians to use. There was suddenly enough money to build studios, crews got trained and there is more highly skilled crew people than their used to be. It used to be that you could put together one or two crews in Toronto, now there are dozens.  The technical facilities and the skilled crafts people make it very different from the way it was in the mid 80’s.

 

Clayton:                 There are multiple productions filming in the Nipissing & Parry Sound District. Is this the beginning of a trend starting?

 

Foley:                     There is a bunch of stuff coming through North Bay, its good in terms of being financially great for productions because you have a lower cost in that you have lower location costs, tax breaks from the government and a local population that isn’t as jaded, which is nice. It’s true, in Toronto now filming isn’t seen as exciting, it’s seen as a traffic nuisance. The extras have been the best, when we were doing the execution stuff in the hockey rink scene, some of the best crowd reactions that I’d ever seen. It really was like the audience was a character giving a performance. They were very enthusiastic, it’s not that jaded professional extra vibe.

 

Clayton:                 Where is Canadian Film going from here?

 

Foley:                     Not just in Canada but around the world the thing that is going to make a huge difference is when distribution goes fully digital, then it will be possible for Canadian Films to actually get on screens , which is impossible right now because screen space is so valuable and Americans can afford to dominate them and you can’t afford to do up prints for a bunch of theatres and it costs a huge amount of money to make the physical prints of movies and ship them and they wear out very quickly, so when things go digital it’ll be very cheap to distribute a film because you make just one digital version of it and then send it out by satellite and theatres can screen it, making a real Canadian distribution system.

 

Clayton:                 Any advice to emerging actors?

 

Foley:                     No.