How did you start working on the movie?
In 2010 we had just finished a producing a Life of a Craphead play, Double Double Land Land, and wanted to become filmmakers. Making films was always a dream, but we had never shot anything before and had no idea how theatre and film were different. At the time we were invited to do an installation in a gallery and thought we could instead shoot our film there. The initial script for Bugs was written in 4 weeks and it had ideas like the whole film was set within one room and the room would have a slanted floor. We used about ⅓ of the total original budget building a raised, sloping floor out of plywood and 2x4s on top of the gallery floor. A friend told us not to spend time and money building a slanted floor because you wouldn’t be able to see it in the film but we didn’t listen to her. In the end, most of the shots from that original shoot are cut from the movie and there’s no shot where you can see or even notice that slanted floor.
Why did it take so long to make?
Bugs is a mega-movie that was shot every summer from 2011 until 2016. Originally we thought it would only take 6 months. We shot 10 scenes and edited it into a one-hour movie that was funny but bad. So we shot 12 more scenes the following summer, but it was still not perfect — and then we repeated that process 4 summers in a row. The original 2011 version of Bugs was a sci-fi film, where 2016 Bugs is a political satire.
Where did the story come from?
We wanted to write a Disney-style movie like A Bug’s Life but using a painful real-life story. The main character is named Dan after an experience one of our friends had in high school, where a group of skinheads bullied him about an anti-Nazi sticker on his locker that said “Nazi Punks Fuck Off.” They threatened him and made him take the sticker down and ripped it up and threw it in his face. The final plot is totally different but maybe the sense of no justice is still in the film.
Where did the story come from?
We wanted to write a Disney-style movie like A Bug’s Life but using a painful real-life story. The main character is named Dan after an experience one of our friends had in high school, where a group of skinheads bullied him about an anti-Nazi sticker on his locker that said “Nazi Punks Fuck Off.” They threatened him and made him take the sticker down and ripped it up and threw it in his face. The final plot is totally different but maybe the sense of no justice is still in the film.
Did you get permission to shoot in the public locations?
We didn’t get any permits for any of the shoots and because of that we are blessed. There were 2 incidents where we were almost stopped. In front of the Douglas Coupland sculpture of the toy soldiers, a bike cop rolled up and asked us what we were doing. Side detail: he was holding an ice cream cone and licking it while riding his bike at the same time. We told him we were film students and he was like “OK” and biked away licking his ice cream cone. Another time, at the parking lot where the Bird country is set, security guards drove in and told us we had to stop shooting. Our sound recordist Matt Smith started arguing with them while still recording sound at the same time. Liz Peterson (Gaston) is acting in the scene and in the background audio you can hear Matt saying stuff like “But don’t you guys like movies?!” They kicked us out and then we went back 20 min. later as if nothing happened.
Part of the reason why we wanted to shoot in front of locations like Tim Horton’s or the corporate logos beside the highway was in reaction to filmmaking conventions, where you can’t show branding or products. As a reflection of our lives in Toronto, it seemed important to keep in the frame these big corporate signs that are around us all of the time.
Why does the Bug world look the way it does?
We were inspired by amazing projects like Pee-wee's Playhouse and Ryan Trecartin and Lizzie Fitch films, where a visual artist like a painter or sculptor is the production designer for the whole project. Laura McCoy had designed our play Double Double Land Land, and she returned for Bugs. As Bugs is attempting to spoof Disney/Pixar animations, she wanted the film to have a cartoon look where real people resemble drawings, which is why there is so much black and white and flat lines. Laura's design had other exciting concepts like all costumes for all characters were bought at a convenience store by her house. This dictated the Halloween makeup and wigs, and t-shirts and sporty clothes that all of the Bugs and Birds wear.
What do the Bug and Bird countries represent?
It’s not a direct allegory but in a general sense the Bird Country is a more powerful country with an imperial history, while the Bug Garden exists in the Bird Country’s shadow. Some of the Bug characters would rather live in the Bird Country, where they perceive there to be more jobs and opportunities, and Shay as a Bug Prime Minister has used the mix of Bug resentment and envy towards the Birds for his own political gain. The politics in the film are dealt with in a pretty broad way, but the anti-nationalist, anti-imperialist themes come from the heart!
Why do the Birds wear do-rags?
The Bird costumes, consisting of cut-off dress shirts, briefs, and pantyhose with no pants, are meant to mess with representations of masculinity. The do-rags evoked, for Laura the designer, who is white, the white men from her high school. It was not considered that they are racialized pieces of clothing from black culture, worn by white people in the film as a costume. Because of this cultural appropriation, we and Laura regret using them.
Is it scripted or improvised?
Bugs began with actors memorizing lines and having rehearsals like a play. In our script we thought it was cool to abandon basic things that make films watchable, like character, storytelling, and the unity of text and visuals. But this strategy didn’t make sense the way it had on stage, so in the following shoots we tried make the characters more real, focussed on the story, and didn't think about dialogue at all. Instead we planned out beats and the actors would improvise all of the lines. At first improvising on camera is very terrifying! But it ended up being a lot funnier, faster and cheaper.
Will you make more films in the Bugs world?
In 2011 the movie Avatar had just come out and in an interview James Cameron said that he was only going to make Avatar films for the rest of his life, because “everything he needed to express he could express through the Avatar world.” This idea seemed so unjustifiable, we thought we would copy it and only make Bugs films, too. Unlike Avatar, though, Bugs asked our friends to spend 5 summers in grease make-up and hot wigs on rooftops in the hot sun. Afterwards we never want to impose that kind of stickiness and gnarliness on anyone again in a million years.
How did you fund it?
The majority of the funding came from arts council grants and most of that went to paying people and food. Because we shot the film over such a long period of time, we would get enough money to do one spurt of production and then edit and write more scenes for a year until we had enough money to shoot again. We learned that even trying to do everything for free still costs a lot of money. For example, we’d be like “Let’s stop renting lights, that will save money!” But then somehow it would still cost $300 to rent a car to go borrow a friend’s light and return it and borrow this other thing, etc. Because there are so many characters and large group scenes, we really relied on the goodwill of other artists. Bugs would not exist without the dedication and generosity of friends who stuck with it for many years, thank you all so much!