erin_broadley

The phrase "love it or hate it" was made for The Tracey Fragments, a boldly experimental new film that uses an aggressive split-screen technique to dramatize the chaotic, fragmented state of mind of its lead character -- a 15-year-old runaway named Tracey Berkowitz, played by a pre-Juno Ellen Page. As Tracey wanders through a foreboding landscape wrapped in a blanket, ostensibly searching for her lost little brother, screens of all shapes and sizes open up seemingly at random, like thought-bubbles appearing over her head or memories pushing in on her thoughts. Just like the thought-screens in our own minds, some are more repetitive, larger and louder than others. Often several screens play at once, conveying no extra narrative information but allowing the audience a way in to experience the state of mind of a confused and maximally stressed-out young girl. SuicideGirls recently spoke with director Bruce McDonald about the radical film and its burgeoning star.



Ryan Stewart: Did you ever worry that Ellen would be too mature to play 15? She's known for exuding this maturity in her work.

Bruce McDonald: I think that's what attracts people to her, cause she's very intelligent. She was 18 playing 15, I think, when she shot this film. It was funny, cause I was initially pushing to get a real 15-year-old, cause there is a big difference sometimes in that age. But she's got this great look and she's a very accomplished actor and I thought, well, actors often play five years on either side of their age so let her play 15. I ended up casting her because of her talents and physically she seemed very young and she had a lot to offer to the party.

RS: Her character is preoccupied with having small breasts and gets teased about it, even. Did you cast Ellen before or after that became a reality for the film?

BM: That was from the script and the book, that she was taunted by her schoolmates for having small breasts. I think it sort of gave Ellen some ammunition. She seems pretty happy with her body as a girl, Ellen Page, she seems pretty cool with it. It gets a little touchy sometimes when you're talking about body image and all that stuff to young women, but she was surprisingly comfortable in her own skin, which was nice to see. She didn't have any big hang-ups about getting a boob job done when she got to Hollywood. So yeah, I'd go into it more uncomfortable than her, like, "Gosh, I hope this works out okay," because of references to stuff like that.

RS: I'm sure it led to some uncomfortable moments.

BM: Yeah, and I was the guy shouting where there are a couple of times in the movie where you can hear people shouting at her, calling her names. I was trying to be kind of on her side by playing the part, you know what I mean? I'll be in the uncomfortable scene with you... I'll kind of carry the uncomfortableness of it a little bit. I think she appreciated that. She understood that it made me a lot more uncomfortable than it made her. There are a couple of points where she really goes into some dark places and I kind of went, "Are you allright with this? We can change the script ..." and she was like, "No, no, no, I'm actually quite excited about doing this scene. I kind of like going to these places because I'm curious. I'm lucky enough to be an actress and I can go and come back." I was impressed with her curiosity and her professionalism. She's method, but not method to the point where it gets retarded. She became more like a member of the band than a hired actress. She was very helpful in helping us choose some music. Some of the other cast members, like the guy who plays her sort of love interest and another character, the guy with the crows, she came into the final sessions. I invited her to have an opinion and help me make the final choices and I think she appreciated that. She liked to be in on the process and I think she felt like it was a film we were making together. And she had just done a big, giant Hollywood film. She'd just come from X-Men, I think, which she enjoyed, but she said it was a completely different experience where you're a much smaller part of this big machine. I think she had some fun on Tracey, because it was a little band of gypsies, you know?

RS: Every time I see the image of Tracey wrapped up tightly in the blanket I get the sense of her in a straitjacket. Did that ever occur to you?

BM: That's interesting. I think, yeah, there was a point where we sort of flashed on -- I don't know if it's just you bringing it up now and me going, "Oh my God, you're right" -- but I don't think I've ever articulated it and talked to people, but it could have been something that passed through my mind on the day. Or the fact that you're saying it now, it's kind of like, yeah, that's kind of great, actually.

RS: Do you think, as a character, she's in the range of "normal"? Or are we watching her fly off into the abnormal?

BM: I think she's a normal girl, but in a deep crisis. These are probably the two or three worst days of her life, hopefully. She's a girl with a bit of attitude. She's like the weird girl at school, a bit on the outside, and when a tragedy happens to anybody -- and it will, we all experience tragedy in our lives -- but at a young age it's much more shocking. It's much more bizarre to have to deal with. Ideally, it's her coming through the other side. I don't know if that comes through too well or whatever, but just some sense of dignity or hope on the other side, just, "this is me having a nervous breakdown for a couple of days." It's like, where do you go? What do you do? Who do you tell? We've all been in tight spots and done things we're ashamed of or have caused harm to other people. I guess Ellen is taking us through that and living to see another morning.

RS: So it's sort of a Holden Caulfield story, in a way -- the darkest moment before the dawn of adulthood.

BM: I think so. When we were shooting the movie that was one of the things we went back and looked at. Holden Caulfield was a guy and it was a different time, but he was on this journey to find, I think, his little sister, and there's this ongoing commentary, not a lot of story, but just an interesting way of being in the world. So it's maybe not a direct comparison, but cousins, Tracey and Holden Caulfield, you know? And the fact that it all revolves, in a way, around this big makeout scene and we just assume this is her losing her virginity in this awkward first time, so this is a story about a woman that, just before she lost her virginity, had a little brother named Sonny who was a kid and they played in the park and did kid things and then, moments after the event, she didn't have a brother. It was like "kid world" just disappeared. So it's this weird little bridge that she's on. It's like, "I don't want to go into adult world, I want a bit of both." I don't know if it was the writer's intention to have this metaphorical thing, like here's a girl standing in these two worlds, one foot in each, and can't go back. You can only go forward.

RS: By the way, the coda of that virginity scene is so harsh and sad. The moment he's finished, he literally kicks her out of the car.

BM: It's fucking brutal. I love it too when she stands up and half her body is missing. She sort of stands up and then the other half joins. But it's harsh. All the girls in the audience are like, "Oh, that's so horrible!"

RS: Was there a linear script for the film that you followed?

BM: Oh yeah, the script was like a normal script. When we got the script we didn't really have this in mind. She just wrote it and was like, "That's the script" and it wasn't until we sort of went banging around for money that we thought, "Let's pitch this as a split-screen kind of thing."

RS: How much did the actors know about the split-screen ideas before they started on the project?

BM: We told them it was going to be a split-screen kind of thing, but none of us actually when we shot it knew what it was gonna look like. We didn't really have a map. So it was quite a surprise to us -- not quite as much to us as to them -- but with Ellen seeing it for the first time, we were like, "God, hope she likes it. What if she gets squirrelly about using two performances at once?" You know, you're nervous, right? You're not sure how people are going to respond, especially the people who are giving you the most. You know, she was totally cool with it and the writer, it took her a few days to kind of respond, because she knew sort of what it was going to look [like] but she wasn't really prepared for the full on juggernaut, I guess. Cause you have it in your head, what you think it's gonna be for such a long time and then when you're presented with something that's as opposite as you can get, you're like, "Oh, okay, it's gonna take a few days to switch gears."

RS: What was Ellen's initial reaction to seeing it?

BM: Well, she brought her mom. Her and her mom came to the editing room. That was a great day, I'd never met her mom before. There were a couple of rough spots in there for mom, but if she's alright with that, she's welcome. And yeah, the first time seeing things is always a matter of who you are, I think, as an actor -- it's always a little bit alarming because it's just, "there you are." But, yeah, she had a good response. It was more thoughtful and then she came back again with this actor friend of hers -- this guy Mark -- and after the initial shock she kind of came back and watched it again and, you know, loved it. I was really happy because no matter if it's a giant split-screen movie, you show your lead actor the cut and they're always like, "Where did that scene go that we spent two days on?" because things happen in editing that they don't know about until they see it or until they come in to do ADR. So, it's always nice when the actor and the writer end up loving the movie.

RS: Can you talk about the challenge of showing an audience multiple images at once? Is it your job to direct their attention towards one primary image at any given time?

BM: Yeah, sometimes. We would play with that, with sound. We would direct people's attention with sound, which frames had live sound and which didn't, we would try to understand out of all the shots in the scene, which is our "hero" shot. There were things we would to do direct the audience, but we also wanted people to feel free to wander around with their eyes. The split-screens weren't so much about extra information as they were about a kind of echo of the moment, you know what I mean? Sort of saying, "as this is going on, across town the robbery is taking place" or whatever. So instead of using the split-screens for that function, which was more the popular function for those, like, sixty split-screen movies, I guess, giving you information, saying, "These are other things happening in the town while they're robbing the bank." So we thought that instead of doing that, we would try to hook onto her emotion and try to amplify that, rather than give extra information. I can't speak for everybody, but generally it's been the case that people have been quite surprised at how much the emotional content comes through of the girl. They're like, "Wow, that was a really interesting way into her, rather than the formal aspects kind of showing off."

RS: You decided to put the raw footage of this film out there for the fans to re-edit however they wanted -- why? Doesn't that compromise the integrity of the piece?

BM: Well, I figured that that piece is done. It will always be there and nobody can take away from that. There's the debate of demystifying a project, but I thought that in the spirit of the fearlessness of the performance, the fearlessness of the shooting and cutting of the film, I thought why not carry that on into the promotion of the film? Just throw open the doors. I knew that it was the kind of film where we're never going to get a lot of heat from the upstairs, from big publicity budgets or that sort of thing. I figured maybe it would come more from the ground up, you know? I thought, 15-year-olds and older people are so savvy when it comes to sharing things and communicating in this system we had just worked in, this computer editing system, I just thought this will be interesting for people and if it catches on, people can trade and share. And you've got Ellen Page. If I was a young editor or filmmaker, it'd be cool to have Ellen Page to make a short out of. So, does it compromise the thing? I don't think so. I mean, I think if anything it can demystify a project. We've almost gotten to the point now where there's too much back story, too much information on how it was made and who did it. David Lynch doesn't do commentaries because he wants to keep it more about the work, rather than stories about the work. David Cronenberg is kind of reluctant to do commentaries.

RS: Some blockbusters now boast of "60 hours of special features" and things like that.

BM: Yeah, yeah! In a way, maybe it was a response to that, and we just thought, fuck it, let's just put the whole goddamn thing on as a special feature. It could be, unconsciously, some kind of cheeky reaction to that kind of voracious appetite of "what else you got on the special features?" I hadn't really heard of anybody doing this before, so we thought let's give it a go. A couple of people cut a whole feature. I haven't watched them all yet, but there were some and I was impressed by people's fortitude and their curiosity. They're being let into the studio in a way. We're sort of like, "Here's the keys to the cutting room. You can fuck around while we're away on the weekend!"


The Tracey Fragments is in theaters now. For more information, check out the official site.