Paul Cowan's inouisitive eye: war games porn stars and the Ghosts of Westray - cinematographer - Interview

TAKE ONE, May, 2002 by Maurie Alioff

PAUL COWAN WHOSE EMOTIONALLY CHARGED, INVENTIVELY CRAFTED FILM WESTRAY TOOK THIS YEAR'S GENIE FOR BEST DOCUMENTARY, SEES MOVIEMAKING AS AN OPPORTUNITY TO STEP INTO LIVES RADICALLY DIFFERENT FROM HIS OWN. COWAN SAYS THAT THE WANDERER IN HIM KICKED IN WHEN HE WAS A SUBURBAN TORONTO TEENAGER, AND HE DID THINGS LIKE "TAKE A BUS TO NEW YORK TO HANG OUT WITH THE WEIRDOS, THE PROSTITUTES AND PIMPS DOWN IN GREENWICH VILLAGE. I WAS IN HEAVEN." EVEN TODAY, LIVING IN THE COMFORTABLE MONTREAL HOME HE SHARES WITH TWO DAUGHTERS AND HIS WIFE OF 20 YEARS, CBC RADIO ONE JAZZ HOST KATIE MALLOCH, COWAN STILL HAS THAT INEXPLICABLE URGE. "I'M JUST A DABBLER IN LIFE," HE TOLD ME AFTER THE GENIE WIN. "I LOVE PARACHUTING INTO A NEW WORLD, FINDING MY WAY THROUGH IT, AND FIGURING OUT HOW CAN I CONVEY IT." IN FACT ACCORDING TO COWAN, IF DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKERS LACK THE NEED TO KNOW, "THEY'RE IN THE WRONG BUSINESS."

Born in Montreal, the long-time NFB staffer began his career as a cinematographer and has shot many of his own pictures. His involvement with the Film Board goes back to the early 1970s when director Giles Walker, then with the NFB, asked him to collaborate on a film about the Canadian downhill ski team (Descent, 1975). "He needed someone who could ski and shoot," Cowan laughs, amused by the random twists and turns of fate. "I could ski and shoot."

The burgeoning moviemaker had been building a career in Los Angeles, which is where, after the skiing project, he momentarily lapsed from a lifetime faith in documentary. Like Francis Coppola and others who learnt their craft grinding out genre pictures for Roger Corman, Cowan went low--rent on an item he and his partners designated a "tits and terror film." Targeted at the southern U.S. drive--in market, the movie was so mild--mannered it could play on YTV today. Back then, it went out to 600 theatres and must have earned a decent return, but Cowan and his fellow producers lost their shirts on the deal, sucker--punched by a combination of creative accounting and legal threats from the film's wily distributors.

Soured on Hollywood and plagued by green--card problems, Cowan fled back to Canada and wrangled a job at the Film Board, where he remains as one of the last of a once-flourishing breed -- the staff director. Cowan explains that whatever the NFB's limitations, it produces work that isn't necessarily driven by a hunger for big audiences. "That doesn't mean they're always good," he says, "but at least their intentions are generally honourable. At the Film Board one can fully explore and develop a subject like West ray and I honestly can't think of a film I'd rather do." Seguing into his ironic mode, he grins, "Also, it's all I know how to do. It's not that I wouldn't want to direct episodic television, but the fact is I don't know how,"

Cowan admires friends who have those skills. He is also deeply sympathetic to filmmakers at the opposite end of the spectrum, the ones who try to make ambitious, long--form documentaries without the cushion of a government salary, and could earn more income from a steady gig at Mc--Donald's. (Cowan is too polite to mention the elite indie documentary filmmakers who take full advantage of the system, travelling around the world -- from festival to festival, seminar to jury duty, buffet to buffet.)

Of all his movies, the documentary that pushed the limits of Cowan's creative freedom was The Kid Who Couldn't Miss, made in 1983. That picture triggered a national scandal, not to mention an emotional shock wave that threw his life off course. "It was totally demoralizing," Cowan says, clearly reluctant to reanimate nightmarish memories. "The pressure was so constant you couldn't do anything other than deal with it. I was hauled up before Senate subcommittees twice. Four or five hundred articles were written about the film in the press. My wife thought our house was going to be firebombed, There's nothing I could have done that could have aroused more anger."

For undoubtedly more than one motive, Cowan took on the subject of one of the few Canadian heroes anybody cares about passionately -- the First World War flying ace Billy Bishop. For his skill and bravery as a fighter pilot, Bishop won the Victoria Cross, the British Commonwealth's top military honour, and gained unlimited public adulation. In The Kid Who Couldn't Miss (which, like Westray, is said to have nudged close to an Oscar nomination), Cowan's insouciant mockery and anti-war mind set shot the golden boy out of the sky. The film suggests that whatever his accomplishments, Bishop was a spoiled brat who exaggerated them and ended his career as an aging poster boy for military recruitment, This icon--shattering view of the hero is supported by a new book, Historian Brereton reenhous's The Making of Billy Bishop. Scheduled to be published in June, it has already reignited the controversy.

Through ironically deployed archival footage, excerpts from John Gray's satirical musical Billy Bishop Goes to War and talking--head interviews that mix real subjects with actors playing long--dead veterans, young Billy Bishop is seen as a glib skirt chaser, who, according to the dryly ironic narration, "broadened his horizons to fist fighting and hellraising." You get the impression the Great Canadian Hero became a flying ace as much by fluke as by his excellent marksmanship. In one montage, cut to an anti--imperialist song from Gray's musical, he even gets obliquely linked to Italian fascism and the Nazis.