ECRÃ FILM FESTIVAL 2024: Interview with Kurt Walker, director of Hit 2 Pass and S01E03.

 

Kurt, I want to thank you very much for coming here to Brazil, and I wanted to ask about something that touched me while watching S01E03 which was this feeling of community. In your films I reconize the contribution of many names from the independent film scene in Canada, for example filmmakers such as Sophy Romvari and Neil Bahadur, so I wanted to ask: how important is for you this sense of a collective upbringing in the experience of making your films? Would you make films alone?

Kurt Walker: I´m not monolisthic about the subject, I think it depends on what type of film I´m making. I would make a film alone, depending on what I want to express, but in this case with S01E03 it is a film frankly about love, friendship, and this integration of a virtual experience. So it was natural that it be a more participatory and kind of community oriented style, because I´m trying to depict an online friend group that crosses the globe. So I naturally kind of embraced not only that subject but also that production model, a community oriented no budget production model. 

And it´s very touching for me to be a film about an online friendship that also evolves and relates to the real world because that is a way of connecting to others that my generation experiences a lot. How did it came the germ of the idea of making a film about online relationships?  

Kurt Walker: So the film comes from just years of personal experience of growing up playing MMORPGS (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) and having these experiences of meeting people online and going on, you know, adventures together and becoming friends and adding each other on messassing services. And then one day they just never come back online again. And it´s just like ''what happened to them?" You know? And I hadn´t seen that in a movie before. And I wanted to express that. 

And also how did the changing of formats in the film developed? For example, it´s a desktop film in many ways, but it also uses material filmed in 16mm and some more geometrical shots of people in the external part of the city. So how did you relate this different aspects of filming the exterior and the interior during the montage of the film?

Kurt Walker: Well, when you´re working with a low to no budget, because this was a no budget film made for less than 10.000$, what you really have at your disposal to kind of elevate your means of expression is in the form. Is in the editing, the color, the montage, and the mediums you choose. So with that I just embraced using a multitude of different cameras and styles. But also trying to, you know, use as much color as possible. Because I do not have the means to do a kind of beautiful, perfect style of cinematography. So instead, with the help of my cinematographers, I just embraced a wide but specific palette of colors in this film.  

I also wanted to talk about the other film exhibited earlier today, Hit 2 Pass, which I´ve liked a lot. And like S01E03 it´s also a film you made with friends. And it´s a very physical film, because it´s not only about racing and cars but also about the idea of destruction and reconstruction. How did this project came to you?

Kurt Walker: That project came to me trough the subject, a filmmaker friend of mine named Tyson Storozinski brought the idea to me after his dad invited him to go back to his home town of Prince George, which was the set of the Hit 2 Pass race. So I was kind of invited to develop and direct this film. And from the get go I didn´t really knew what type of movie it would be, I certainly didn´t wanted to be just about racing and cars. But myself, Tyson, Neil Bahadur, and John Lehtonen all became pretty close friends during the entire process of making it, and I wanted this film to kind of capture that. That connection between us, and turn it into something tangible. And hopefully kind of translate it, by making a film that was more broadly about friendship. 

In your career as a feature lenght filmmaker you dealed with different topics, cars and racing in Hit 2 Pass, and the online virtual sphere of S01E03, how did making these films changed your perspective about the kind of cinema that you want to make? And what type of film are you working on next?

Kurt Walker: I mean, with Hit 2 Pass and S01E03 I feel like I´ve expressed everything that I wanted to do in that form, around the subject of friendship and love. Hit 2 Pass I think it´s very much about platonic love, while S01E03 deals with romantic love as well as platonic love. And next I think I´m going towards expressing the theme of familial love, and all the different kind of complexities and nuances that it brings. And try to express it in a different form, one that will still adress the topic of videogames but from a different angle. So I attempt at least to make a new, different type of movie each time. I don´t want, and I hope that I´m not repeating myself.