What originally drew you to film?
Confusion. I decided to go to art school from high school because I was given the art prize, which surprised me. I knew I was sort of interested in art, but I was still trying to figure out what to do, so I went to the Ontario College of Art to study design. I started to paint, more or less on my own. A teacher, John Martin, the head of that department, was very, very helpful (he's dead now). He suggested what books to read and made comments on my work. He was fantastic. He suggested that I put a couple of paintings in a juried show, put on by a group called the Ontario Society of Artists. This was a big group show that happened every year, for members and other people. I was still a student, but my two paintings got accepted. It was a big deal because a student had never been in the show. It was very encouraging.
I had already started to play music. During high school I had met a bunch of ne'er-do-wells and started to play jazz. It was a fantastic part of my life. At school I had been rebelling (mildly) against everything. But when I found music, I really found something. I started to play a lot, and a band formed, and by the time I went to O.C.A., I was playing occasional jobs. So I was simultaneously getting into music and into painting and sculpture, mostly painting. I was influenced by a lot of people: Matisse, Mondrian, Picasso, Klee. I liked Klee very much.
When I got out of O.C.A., I found a job in an advertising firm that
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did catalogues and stuff like that. And I was miserable and really terrible at the job. I made stupid mistakes. I thought, 'Is this life on the other side of school?' So I saved what money I could and quit the job and went to Europe to find myself. I was miserable. Fortunately, I went with Bob Hackborn, who had been at O.C.A. with me. He was a drummer; we had played in some of the same bands. And some other musicians I knew at the time also went to Europe. I ran into some jobs with them, though not just with them: I played with the band at the Club Mediterranee (now known as Club Med), which had started just two or three years before. An amazing band. The guys were from French colonies or former French colonies like Guadalupe and Martiniqueblack guys studying dentistry in Paris. They were looking for a trumpet player and a drummer, and we were in Paris trying to figure out how to live on two hundred dollars for a year . . .
Two hundred dollars?
That's about what I had.
I had started to play trumpet about three months before I went (I played piano before that) and knew a couple of tunes. Anyway, we did an audition. I played 'Lady Be Good,' one of the few tunes I knew, and these guys really liked it. So I got this job and went from Paris to Italy, where the Club Mediterranee had a place on the coast of Tuscany and another on the island of Elba. We were paid our board and drink tickets. They'd give us a book of tickets, so we were plastered every night.
I also traveled around during the year; I went to all the museums and churches. And I did thousands of drawings and some paintings, including
. It's quite a big painting, at least for then, and for the circumstances.
When I came back, somehow or other, I was asked to exhibit some of the drawings I had made while I was away, along with Graham Koftree, another artist who had also been in Europe and was a friend of mineat Hart House, a University of Toronto gallery. When the show was on, I got a call from a guy who said, 'I'd be interested to meet you. When I saw your work, I thought that whoever did those drawings was very interested in film.' In fact, I wasn't. I didn't know what he was talking about! I went to meet him and it was George Dunning, who later directed the Beatles film
[1968]. He said, 'Do you want a job?' I didn't know what the hell to do with my life. I told him frankly that I had no special interest in film, but I certainly would be interested to try and do something. He and some other people who had been at the National Film Board had just started a film company called Graphic Films, and he was hiring people whose main interest or training was so-called fine art. So I took the job.
I met Joyce Wieland there and we eventually married.
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Had you been a film-goer as a kid?
No, not especially. That was a very strange observation on Dunning's part. In those drawings there is some inadvertent interest in movement. They're not futurist or cubist, but sometimes they include different positions of arms, of objects. Well anyway, he liked the work and saw something he thought could be applicable to film.
Graphic Films was the first company in Canada, or one of the first, to do television commercials. They were animated. Everybody, except for the cameraman, Warren Collins, was learning how to do the work. And it's hard! It was my introduction to film.
Your first film,
[1956], is an animation.
It had nothing to do with the work. It was just that the camera was available and Warren Collins was willing to help me shoot. Some of the other people working there also made their own films: that's when Joyce got started.
Then Graphic Films collapsed. I had been playing music all along, occasionally with a guy named Mike White. He put a band together, and all of a sudden we got a hell of a lot of work. We were playing at the Westover every night for a year; this is 196162. The band became quite popular, and the Westover brought in a lot of Dixieland stars. I was playing with the former Ellingtonians, Cootie Williams and Rex Stewart; and Buck Clayton, a really great
