Paul Almond: talks about his marriage to Genevieve Bujold, the creation of telefilm Canada and the beginnings of feature filmmaking in Canada

TAKE ONE, Sept-Dec, 2003 by Wyndham Wise

Did you have CFDC backing on this one as well?

Yes, we had the CFDC and some distribution. I'm very proud of Journey because it was born out of such angst. I was really in a mental state. Genevieve had just left and her new lover was hanging around the set. Being the early 1970s, everyone was smoking dope, but not me. It might have been better if I had been, but I was too straight.

It was supposed to be a hippie commune in the hush, wasn't it?

Well, it turn out that way, but the original idea was more Christian, with the 12 disciples. I just had enough money to make the film. So I got the actors to come up the river with me to live, like on a commune, and we would shoot the film. But then some of them wanted to get paid for overtime because we were working long hours. I didn't think so because some days we would be working all day, then we would take time off the next couple of days. Anyway, it ended up hl a big mess and ACTRA got involved. I saw it at a retrospective just recently. It's so beautiful. I'm amazed I pulled it off. It's so lovely and strange; but a horrible experience to make. It opened here and in New York, but I don't remember what happened to it after that. I must confess that period of my life is a bit of a blur. I took off for a trip around the world and tried to figure out what I wanted to do next.

There is a sense in Canadian film history that what you did with those three films was something quite different, something that hadn't been done before. You were creating an art-house cinema out of whole cloth. You were, in a sense, a pioneer.

Well, I guess if I wasn't consider that today, I wouldn't be remembered at all. So I'm delighted. Those two first films and Journey are unique, the beginning of the Canadian feature-film industry. If I hadn't done it, maybe someone else would have. Who knows? If I hadn't started something, then when would it have started?

There was a lot going on in Quebec at the time, especially at the NFB with Pierre Perrault, Michel Brault and many others. They were making docudramas and cinema-verite. Wouldn't it have been easier for you to work at the NFB?

But my background was drama. I had been directing television dramas since 1954 and I was being hailed as the best director in television, so it was only natural for me to want to make dramas when it came to film. I had been directing drama in England for the BBC and I also wrote plays, one of them being The Hill, which was a religious drama. I had directed Pinter and Shakespeare. That was my background. I didn't know anything about documentaries. When I was at the CBC in the 1950s it was all new and we were all pioneers, so we could do pretty much whatever we wanted, lf I said I wanted to do Julius Caesar, they would say, "Okay, you can do it."

You were there with Norman Jewison, Ted Kotcheff and Arthur Hiller.

Arthur was only there for a year and did some half-hours. Norman wasn't doing drama. He was doing the variety specials. Ted was my floor manager and then he directed some stuff before he left. We were shooting at Studio One, which was on Jarvis Street, and Studio Seven which was up on Yonge Street at Summerhill. Those were the best times. We had the freedom to do what we wanted. Sydney Newman was in charge until he moved on to the BBC and later he served as the film commissioner. I was doing a drama every two weeks. I started doing half-hours first before I got to one-hours and later 90 minutes. I did 120 or so dramas for the CBC, and they were going out live. It was tough but a lot of fun. There has been nothing like it since those days in the 1950s.