Peter Raymont follows his passion with Lawren Harris doc

NL: Nancy Lanthier for POV magazine
PR: Peter Raymont

NL: Co-director Nancy Lang says, “when we heard Steve Martin was curating a show with Harris’s work, we jumped on the opportunity” to make this film. I’m wondering about everything that inspired you, and, of course, how was it working with the great actor and comedian?

PR: It started with the film we made about Tom Thomson. I’d wanted to make that film from the time when I was a kid going on canoe trips in Algonquin Park, and feeling his spirit. When we showed that film, people said we should do Lawren Harris next. He’s the founder of the Group of Seven; he went through this huge arc, from painting houses in Toronto, to painting icebergs, and then on to abstract work. With that kind of extraordinary arc, he’s a natural subject for a film.

But the way films get made, all sorts of factors come into play. And timing is very important. The fact that Steve Martin was co-curating an exhibition of Harris’s work helped considerably with the funding.

We met Martin briefly, but the interview with him was supplied. It was done by curator Andrew Hunter at the AGO because there was so many requests for his time. It was well done and touched the bases that we needed. He’s there at the beginning explaining why he’s such a fan and a collector of Harris’s work.

Of course, Steve Martin has been an actor and a comedian and a banjo player and an art curator. Like Harris, he’s very much a renaissance man, someone who wants to find all the wonderful things that life has to offer and not stay in one place.

NL: The film portrays Harris as an inspired man. Did his artistic and spiritual philosophy influence you while making this film?

PR: I think we all try in some way to find that spiritual place. I lost my wife 10 years ago to breast cancer, and I’ve lost several close friends in the last few years. The more you feel own mortality coming towards you, the more you seek that spiritual peace. I’ve always done it by going on canoe trips, and by getting into the wilderness, and climbing mountains and getting away from the noise of the urban environment. But I’m also doing it more now in the films I make. Exploring Harris’s life and learning of his spiritual quest—and the same with Tom Thomson and with Glenn Gould, who was also very much a spiritual seeker—is a useful way to grow for a filmmaker. And the films also have a powerful impact on viewers; so they seem to work for other people as well as being therapeutic for ourselves.

NL: In what ways did Lawren Harris’s paintings inspire the project?

Also Nancy Lang is a professional painter. She did some of the paintings we used in the film. So you see the actor Ben Low painting Mt. LeFroy in various stages: Sketched first, then painted in the field, then painted again on a big canvas back in Toronto where Harris had a studio. We re-enacted the creation of that huge canvas right from the beginning. And at Maligne Lake, in the Rockies, you see him sketching with a pencil—Nancy re-created those pencil sketches. I think it’s really useful for audiences to see the process of how a creator creates. We tried to do that with our Glenn Gould film as well—to take the viewer inside the head of a creator.

NL: When you saw all that Harris could do with paint, did it make you realise the limitations of film or, perhaps, the endless possibilities of it?

PR: I don’t feel the limitations of film at all! In fact, we found this very much when we made the Tom Thomson film, as well: a really close scan of brush strokes projected on a movie screen that’s huge gets you much closer to the work physically and emotionally than you can get by just standing in an art gallery or looking at a picture in a book. And then, when you add the sound of that place where it was painted, and the music and voice-over and all the other ingredients that go into making a film, it becomes a very emotional experience.

NL: Harris and the Group of Seven strived to create a Canadian identity through painting. Do you strive to do the same through film?

PR: There was a great debate among people who decide policy on what is Canadian film and therefore what should be funded with public financing. And myself and others agued very strongly that a Canadian film doesn’t have to be shot in Canada, it doesn’t have to have Canadian characters or subject matter. As long as it’s made by a Canadian—and therefore has a Canadian sensibility to it—then it’s a Canadian film. Institutions have accepted that now.

The Canadian sensibility is many things. We’re a vast country with many different types of people. This richness through diversity is one of the strengths of Canada.

But it’s also a type of filmmaking, and a type of writing, and artwork, that gets beneath the surface. It looks for the subtext and the hidden meanings, the other meanings.

I think it’s also a sense of the land—an appreciation and respect for nature, because we have so much of it, and a lot of it is still in pristine condition, thank God. So, those are aspects of the Canadian personality, the Canadian identity.

I mean, Trudeau said, we’re sleeping with an elephant, or beside this monster, and especially in this election year, it’s so clear how different our country is from the United States. Being just one step outside, and yet so close, allows us to analyse, to appreciate, to have a perspective on the world, the American world, that’s a step outside, which is very useful.

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