A beautiful landscape, a vivid story, an electric performance: this first film is as intense as impressive. As if, according to his young director, “Lord Of The Flies had met Stand by Me”.
“During my childhood, my parents took me up to northern Ontario to spend the summer in a tiny beach community. Though the story of the film is fictional, this community serves as the setting for it. During my childhood, my parents took me up to northern Ontario to spend the summer in a tiny beach community. Though the story of the film is fictional, this community serves as the setting for it.”
“I wanted to capture the inferno of this stage of youth for boys, before the transition to adulthood. I wanted to capture the sting of unrequited love, the joy of true friendship, the excitement of pushing boundaries with reckless abandon. The rugged, unforgiving landscape of Lake Superior was a natural setting for this kind of story, as both possess a sort of unpredictable violence.”
“The film was actually a feature concept before I decided to make the short film. My team attempted to get a feature film, but was unsuccessful. We had already discovered Reece Moffett and Nick Serino (Riley and Nate in the film), and we wanted to capture their essence before they grew too old for the roles. So we decided to make a very small short film as a "study" for the feature. These boys had never acted before, but were so natural and eager to collaborate with me, the process we developed together inspired how I approached the feature in a profound way.”
“I had a very strong idea of what I wanted the film to explore early on in the process. Adolescence to me is the awakening of strong creative and destructive impulses. In the film, the boys are aggressive, and I think that it is part of figuring out how one fits in the world.”
“What was most difficult for me was the long journey I undertook to find the most fitting process for realizing the film. It started as a traditional screenplay, and we ended up deconstructing from there, coming up with a less conventional method of production in order to capture the authenticity of our young cast.”
