Who Loves the Sun has been showing at festivals around the globe the past year, including two screenings at SXSW earlier this week. Corey Marr, the film’s producer, joins director Matthew Bissonnette to talk about budgets, being Canadian, and filming on an island. For more on Matt and the ideas behind the film, read this recent SpoutBlog post. You can also visit the official movie site and the film’s MySpace page.

K: What have been the primary ups and downs in making and distributing Who Loves the Sun (WLTS), from a producer’s point of view?

C: It certainly has been an adventure. I think the two highest highs were getting the phone call from telefilm that they were investing in the film, and arriving on the first day of principal photography and seeing all those people and trucks. Plus, no one drowned that I know of. The biggest down was having to make a huge insurance claim because one of our cans of film got fogged. And using the porta-potties was never pleasant. On the distribution side, the film comes out in Canada on April 6th, and we are currently working on US and foreign sales, so ask me again in a few months.

K: How much did the movie cost to make?

M: about a million and change canadian, which is like about five hundred american dollars.

K: How did you keep costs low?

M: we tried to keep costs low by being mean and cheap. however, in my limited experience, once you start working with people who aren’t in your immediate family, stuff just gets expensive: folks gotta eat! in some ways, it seemed we had more time on Looking For Leonard[Bissonnette's first film], and that was a really, really inexpensive movie. i mean, we made that one out of spit and scotch-tape.

K: What ended up adding expense to WLTS?

M: greedy price gouging by oil companies, who were cynically using the cover of their iraq war, nearly sunk us. canada is a big place, so we did a lot of driving. oh yeah, setting the film on an island and shooting on water didn’t help. so cost overruns were half dick cheney’s fault, and half mine.

C: Matt is being a bit hard on himself. the way our financing worked out, we actually had mandated days that we had to shoot across two different provinces. So a story that is ideally suited to one main location turned into about six or seven different unit moves. I\’d lay 10% blame on funding bureaucracy, half on cheney, and the rest on matt. It’s funny, though, because now that it’s done, it’s strange to think of it being done in any other way.

K: Tell me more about the funding, and in particular how it helped to be Canadian.

M: telefilm canada, manitoba film and sound, and christal films (our cdn distributor) kindly paid for the film (helped along by cdn tv sales at tmn and movie central) …i love all those people. i mean, i really really love them.

C: and we can’t forget the Canadian Television Fund, a television pre-sale to showcase, and our awesome Canadian tax credits.

K: What has the marketing/distribution process been like?

M: well, since the film comes out in canada april 6th, and the us theatrical is still up in the air, we haven’t really gotten too far into that mess yet. In general, i always want people to spend more money, and to market the thing for what it is, if that’s possible.

on the festival level, the getting it out there level, reaching out to the people via the internet level, corey has been doing a real good job. these days, with a bit of hard work, it seems you can put your thing into the world, even if you don’t have much cash, or insider status, or what have you.

K: What has been your experience at film festivals?

M: i really like most fests. i enjoy the audiences, and seeing where people are at regarding film in particular and the whole ball of wax in general. i don’t have super faves, don’t care if it’s big or small, but sxsw, los angeles and london will always have a very special place in my heart, as they gave us our first breaks [with Looking for Leonard and WLTS].

K: Corey, what is your background? How did you get into film production?

C: My background is in advertising, having worked at a number of ad agencies, both on the creative end and on the strategy side, but never really being satisfied with either one exclusively. Probably something to do with my megalomaniac complex, and probably one of the reasons I got into producing. Plus, I have always been fascinated by the permanence of film, and art in general. WLTS is my first feature length film.

K: What are you focusing on these days?

C: Getting ready for the Canadian theatrical release (April 6th), working with our sales team in the US, and building an online community for the film. you too can be our virtual friend. just visit us on myspace, iklipz and imeem, as well as the facebook group who loves the sun-the movie. and, of course, on spout.com. I’ve also been developing some new projects, including two features with Matt. And none of them takes place on an island.

The Spout team went to Billy the Kid (2007) last night and really loved it. Paul interviews director Jennifer Venditti before the premier about her new documentary. By the end of the interview, we were sold and the doc definitely lives up to Venditti’s hype.

As a follow-up to my Love and Movies post, a related article that was published earlier this week in the LA Times. The article, titled “Not in the Mood for Love,” looks into the decline of romantic comedies and what might be to blame for that decline. Maybe our penchant for humiliation? Or our generally lowered standards of entertainment? As Rachel Abramowitz, the article’s author, writes:

Some blame the decline of the romance on the cultural climate. One of America’s favorite pastimes these days is ritual humiliation–a penchant for shame that can zap even the sturdiest lovers.

Or maybe it’s just more difficult to string out a good love story in the wake of the sexual revolution of the 1960s:

As film historian Molly Haskell notes, “Sex is so easy you can’t pretend that it’s the holy grail. The condition that made for the sparkle and sexiness of the old films was the fact that there wasn’t any sex. You could easily keep two people apart for an hour and a half. Now the ways of keeping them apart are increasingly strained.”

Abramowitz looks into other possible causes, too. Give “Not in the Mood for Love” a read and let me know which theory you buy.

Although she must be burnt out from Sundance, Anne Thompson put together a nice Oscar nomination analysis on her Risky Business blog.

Here are my main two thoughts about the nominations and her post:

- It’s fascinating that a film like Dreamgirls can get eight nominations, including best actor and best actress, but not get nominated for best picture (or director or writer, for that matter). Each year at this time, when I’m puzzling over the system, I tend to be a bit surprised that it’s not more of a science. Then I remember that falling in love with a person isn’t a science–why should our love for a movie be something calculated? (But, on the other hand, when you compare two best picture nominations–Babel and Letters from Iwo Jima, with seven and four nominations respectively–you have to admit that Babel seems a more likely and deserving pick. Sure makes it seem kind of mathematical.)

- Secondly, when I think of this ideal I have–this inexplicable but genuine falling in love with a film–I quickly snap back to this reality: The Oscars, while not a science, are, in many ways, a game. (Yes, I’m well aware love can be a game, too, but the best love isn’t.) In her post today, Anne Thompson references the Clint Eastwood/Warners “Oscar strategy,” and the “trick with foreign films.” Ah, yes. There are strategies and tricks involved. I can’t help it, though. I want to be a purist. I want the film that wins Best Picture to win because, as Thompson says, it is “beloved.”

We love them and crave them-they’re the glue that holds people together at Spout. They inspire us to respond in some way, or in other words, to be more human: to laugh, cry, form an opinion, develop a new idea, sit in stunned silence.

When we Tag them, we sort our films into categories that work for us. The video store may call a film "Action" when, for me, it’s a "personal classic." Listing is similar. When you make lists of films, you use their stories to tell your own.

(These screen shots are of the Spout Alpha site and may look very different from the Spout Beta site that will soon be available to the public)

Exercise your freedom to love what you love, but don’t love it because you’ve never tried anything else. Say you eat one soft-boiled egg with a piece of white toast every morning for breakfast. Or maybe you only ever watch films that show up in the theater or at the big rental establishment down the street. We believe change is good. And if you don’t like the change, you can always go back.