Filmmaker of vision: Take one's interview with Colin Low pt2

TAKE ONE, Dec-Feb, 1999 by Wyndham Wise, Marc Glassman

In the Spring issue, No. 23, Take One ran the first half of this interview with veteran NFB filmmaker, Colin Low, someone who has committed 50 extraordinary years to Canadian filmmaking, and still, in his 74th year, remains active. From the visually and technologically stunning Labyrinthe installation at Montreal's Man and His World in 1967 to the raw, hand-held footage from Fogo Island, Low has done it all. His job description includes animator, director, producer, administrator, innovator and is known as one of the most accomplished storyboard artist ever to work at the Board. His sympathetic and authentic work with the First Nations people through films such as Circle of the Sun earned him a special place among the Bloods of Alberta and his Transitions film for the 1986 Vancouver World's Fair (co-directed with Tony Ianzelo) was the first to be shot in the IMAX 3-D process. His creative energy is boundless and his vision uniquely Canadian. On the occasion of the National Film Board's 60th anniversary, it is appropriate to remember where we came from.

Where did the idea for the Labyrinthe project come from?

Roman [Kroitor] and I used to talk about myth and legend quite a lot. I told him about my interest in Theseus and the Theseus myth from Mary Rennault's book [The King Must Die]. Roman came back several months later and said we should do a project for the Montreal World's Fair and why not a labyrinth? I thought about it for a while and told him about an idea I had been working on. The audience walks through a door into a darkened room and everything is subdued. Suddenly, the room lights go out and they are standing on a glass floor looking down 1,000 feet into the middle of Montreal. Roman liked it and rented a helicopter, clamped a 35mm Ariflex to one of its skids, and flew across downtown Montreal to do some aerial shots. We had a portable projector put up in the rafters of the Board sound stage and projected the footage onto a screen on the floor. We got up into the rafters, lay on our stomachs, and looked down for a long time. Roman said, "It doesn't quite work, does it?" It didn't have the effect we were looking for. Roman had some more ideas, so I came back in the afternoon and we got up there again. He had recorded the sound of traffic and put a couple of loud speakers on the floor. Suddenly it was magical. It gave the sense of space and reinforced the whole idea of looking down a great distance.

Roman, being a genius with promotional ideas, said we had to sell this to the Board. We needed a big screen, 70mm, and to put the audience above the thing, we needed a glass floor. We went to Grant McLean and asked for $10,000 to put on a show for Mayor Drapeau and the Expo committee. We also talked to Guy Roberge, who was the commissioner of the Film Board at that time. They both loved the idea. So we used some footage that I had done for Microcosm, a zoom through a crystal lattice. We had it blown up to 70mm and projected it with a mirror system on a back screen.

You mean rear-screen projection?

That's right. We had a catwalk and a glass floor. The mayor came with his staff and they were quite enthralled with the whole thing. We had sound effects, music and some of the aerial shots blown up on the screen under their feet. Then we took them into a theatre and showed them Arthur Lipsett's Faces film on two screens with an incredible soundtrack by Arthur and Maurice Blackburn. I had also done a few sketches of what some of the chambers might look like. That's how we sold the Mayor and the Board on the project.

How many chambers did you plan?

We planned more than three [the final installation had three chambers] and we guessed at a budget of $4 million. The city asked what resources we would need to proceed and we said we would need about $75,000 to continue development and go onto the next stage, which was an actual architectural plan. It was my job to relate our ideas to the architects. We had to make a mockup of the pavilion in a space large enough to hold it so that the technology could be done at the same time. We looked around Montreal to no avail and then someone suggested Canadair. I met with the president who said, "Yes, we have an old hanger." I asked how much he would rent it to us for three years. He said $110,000. And even though we only had $75,0001 said, "we'll take it." [Editor's note: The Board subsequently advanced the funds necessary to cover pre-production expenses.] This way we got out of the Film Board; however, we took quite a lot of the Film Board with us. We hired staff and built in the changes. I was in the drawing room most of the time, working back and forth between the architect and doing the storyboards. We bought 30 years of Life magazines and tore them up, filling the room with pictures, trying to create the feeling of going from childhood, to confident youth, disillusionment, then to reaffirmation of the spirit. Then we went out and shot test material. We made a trip around the world to about 10 countries. I went to Ethiopia and had a good shoot there.