Nathan Douglas is a Vancouver-based writer and director. Originally from Ajax and Cobourg, Ontario, he studied film at Simon Fraser University, graduating in 2012 with a BFA.
Since 2015, Nathan’s short films have screened worldwide at festivals including Locarno, Clermont-Ferrand, Busan ISFF, FNC Montreal, and the Vancouver International Film Festival. His first feature, Honey From the Rock, is in development. Nathan also writes at The Vocation of Cinema, a newsletter about cinema, philosophy, and theology.
A teenager overhears a phone call and inserts himself into the father-son story behind it.
We had the opportunity to show your film during our 2015 festival - it was our very first Audience Choice Award recipient! Tell us a bit about the journey of bringing this film to life?
SITB's journey was a bit of a roller coaster. I had the idea in 2012 when I was going through a tough spot and went to get a haircut. I felt very isolated and while I was in the chair and the barber was positioning my head that this was the closest I was going to get to any sort of human contact that week. Nobody knew, of course, what I was feeling - barbershops are fun, lighthearted places which glide along. That was a pretty hard thing to realize but the feeling of a character going through that isolation surrounded by people struck me as a potent film idea. So I held on to that and later the idea of bringing a father-son conflict in as the main dynamic came up. For me, to get through procrastination is always a matter of getting the key collaborators onboard and then I have no choice but to accept that I'm making the film. I knew I wanted Donat Kazanok as the lead; I'd worked with him on my student films and kept wanting to do more challenging material with him. Alexandra Caulfield enthusiastically came on to produce and that helped me to commit to ending the post-school malaise I was in and embrace the reality of making a new film. I asked Devan Scott to shoot it and he blew my mind during our preparation process; we've never stopped working together since. We found Michael Meneer (the dad) through an audition process and he just came in and blew us away. We shot in that same barbershop - Top Barbers in the Burnaby Heights - in April 2014. We did eight takes, and only five or so were usable. I had locked picture by May and had done a rough sound design, and then made the mistake of sending that version out to the fall Canadian festivals as an official rough cut. It was rejected flat out and I took that pretty hard and shelved the film for eight months. In March 2015, I had an opportunity to attend a young adult conference in Rome, and it was suggested to me that I present a film. I took SITB with me and screened it for the 6 or so other people in this arts category and a small jury and we received an award. So that put a bit of wind back in the sails and I came back to Vancouver ready to finish the film. Will Ross and I tackled the sound edit and mix and finished it, and we premiered with CineSpec a couple weeks later. And then the film's festival life was a whole other adventure...
What was your biggest victory with this project?
The biggest victory was taking a chance on a risky idea and seeing it work as I'd hoped it would. Making this helped me build confidence in my filmmaking instincts. In terms of measurable outcomes, the biggest practical victory came eight months into our very eclectic festival run, when I got an email saying the film had been selected for the international competition at the 2016 Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival in France. That was a stunner. I attended the festival and experienced the most enthusiastic film culture I've ever seen - all focused on the art of short films. Sold-out screenings attended by the townsfolk of Clermont, every film screening every day to thousands of people, schools on holiday during the festival so entire families are showing up to watch a random film from Canada about a sad haircut, press conferences for every short filmmaker - it was a delight. It was one thing to receive the industry validation that Clermont offers but then to have that outweighed by the audience response to the film and realize that yes, "average" people do connect with it - it's a lot to process.
What was your hardest lesson learned?
The hardest lesson was learning that I need to just get the film done and not worry about how it is going to be received, by festivals or otherwise. I wasted a lot of time feeling sorry for myself while not finishing the film - and while those feelings were real and deserved to be processed, for me it became very easy to just not do anything in response.
Where do you look for inspiration?
This is a hard one, because it comes from a lot of places. Certain life situations or thick moments that happen to me personally (like with this film). Sometimes it's from spending time in prayer, or dealing with a moral or ethical question that is bothering me - I put it into the hands of a character and am struck by what they want to do with it. Music, especially liturgical music - Gregorian chant and Renaissance polyphony - has a way of opening up doors for me. All that said, the most consistent inspiration for me comes from certain turns of phrase that strike me while reading history, philosophy, theology, etc. I am a collector of potential titles; I have a document with probably 100 unused titles waiting for their story or character to meet them. Sometimes the title suggests an idea very quickly. I don't know how to describe it but I guess I'd say I try to be awake to the poetry of everything in front of me and ideas just come out of that.
What's a favourite piece of Canadian media for you right now?
My two favourite Canadian films of the last year are by Vancouver transplants to Toronto - Sophy Romvari's "Still Processing" is an incredible short film about grief that is on the circuit at present, and Kurt Walker's S01E03 is an undefinable slice of Vancouver summer vibes (available online). And to continue my obvious biases, my favourite Canadian podcast at the moment is Film Formally, produced by Devan Scott, Will Ross, and Paige Smith. They are having conversations about filmmaking and film-viewing that I find stimulating and all-too-rare in the present landscape. I also love The Way of the Heart Podcast, which is locally produced and focuses on conversations around men's spiritual and mental health.
What are you working on now? And what's next for you?
Right now I am developing what I intend to be my first feature, Honey From the Rock. It's a gently comic character study about a devout Catholic who is feeling left behind while all his friends get married. I swear it isn't a rom-com, but that synopsis is making me second guess. I am also starting a Substack devoted to writing about cinema, philosophy, and theology. It's called The Vocation of Cinema. Not sure if it will be up by the time this is out, but you can bookmark it for when it does (link below).
Website - Vocation of Cinema Substack - Instagram - La Cartographe on CBC Gem
RSVP on Facebook and join us April 18th 2021 for Choice Cuts to see Son in the Barbershop and catch up with Nathan during our Q+A!
