Writer turned Dragon Boy: An Interview With Ian Weir

When Dragon Boys, the CBC dramatic miniseries, finally aired in January 2007, it garnered critical acclaim across Canada despite the surrounding controversy. With the ostensible Asian gangster stereotype lying on the surface of the show's premise, the crime drama was riddled with negative buzz from the public and media alike. But almost all of them were silenced once it aired, as it became clear that the show had managed to portray both sides of the Vancouver Asian gang underworld with painstaking accuracy. The show's creator and writer, Ian Weir, not only went to extraordinary lengths to research Asian gangs and the Asian community, but actually hired a slew of Asian consultants to ensure the portrayal of the community and the gang world was one of integrity and truth. With the miniseries now available on DVD through Omni Film, JXM spoke with Weir, an award-winning screenwriter and playwright, about Dragon Boys, his career in television, and his thoughts on writing.

JXM: Your career in television started out on the stage, as a playwright. Tell us a little bit about the course of your career and your history as a writer.

Ian: Initially I started out writing radio drama and then moved on to stage, which was my first love and in many ways is still my greatest love. Back in the late 80's CBC Television Vancouver started up an anthology series, which ran for one season, called Lives from Lotus Land. It was a series of half-hour one-offs set in Vancouver. They approached the New Play Centre and recommended me for that series. I wrote a half hour television play, which got produced and had favourable notice. One of the people who noticed it was Brian McKeown, the executive producer of Beachcombers. So he called up and asked if I would be interested in doing some Beachcombers.

At the beginning, I saw myself as a stage playwright and just kind of doing TV on the side, but gradually it got to the point where TV took over. I was, for awhile, 100% TV. Now I'm tilting back a little bit the other way with stage work as well. But from there, I worked on series' like Northwood, the teen drama series that the CBC did way back in the early 90's. That led to various different episodic contracts and doing freelance episodic work.

Around 1999, Michael Chechik, my business partner, and I, did a show called Edgemont for CBC, which was a teen drama that ran for five seasons. It was Kristen Kreuk's first show (laughs). That's my claim to fame! That was my first experience as a writer/producer in television. My discovery had been that if you're a writer in television, you really want to be a writer/producer if you can manage to dangle that, simply because the producer has creative control in television. Rather than just handing that off to somebody else, the writer/producer actually can exercise the control. I firmly believe it tends to lead to the best television. When you look at the really great shows, I think they tend, not exclusively, but overwhelmingly to the writer/producer driven shows. I mean, Chris Haddock's work - Da Vinci's Inquest, Da Vinci's City Hall, Intelligence - Chris works as a writer/producer. South of the border, David Chase of The Sopranos works as a writer/producer, David Milch of Deadwood works as a writer/producer, and David Simon of The Wire works as a writer/producer. Not to put myself on the same level as David Milch and David Chase, but just in terms of the way the overall process works.

As far as the origin of Dragon Boys, the CBC was very familiar with my work, and Michael Chechik and I were simply having a coffee one day. I said I always wanted to look at a gang themed series just because I find that that's something which lends itself extraordinarily to television and film. It means you can look at human issues like love, loyalty, identity, and betrayal - all of those human things, but within the context of literal life and death, where the stakes are extremely high. And so I just said, since we're here on the west coast, I've never seen anyone do a television drama, which entered the world of Asian organized crime on the west coast. And Michael bought that and found it great. But I said, "You know what, I betcha we're going to call the CBC and they're going to say we've got eight projects just like this in development." Because it seemed like such an obvious thing to do. I put together about three pages, just really a broad general pitch, because I really had no idea what the train was like at that point. I hadn't done any research beyond having a couple of beers with a crime reporter at The Vancouver Sun. But they [CBC] got right back to us and said, "We'd love to do this, let's commission four hours of script." And that's where it started.

JXM: Did you always have aspirations of writing in television?

Ian: I'll be very honest, initially no. I didn't see television as something I particularly wanted to do. Television's a great lure to people working in other grammatical forms because television pays the best. Stage playwrights tend to get underpaid, and television writers tend to get overpaid, but who's complaining. My heart was still with stage, but television was something that was necessary just for financial reasons. I quickly discovered some things. You can't write anything if you approach it cynically. You can't simply say I'm just doing this for the money, I'll dash something off, cash the check, and go, because when you try to do that, you write crap. You actually must invest yourself creatively in it. As I invested myself in the scripts I was writing, I said, "Okay, actually you can do stuff which you find creatively fulfilling in television." Gradually, as I went along and got the chance to be in charge of my own series, like Edgemont and then a project like Dragon Boys, I found it immensely fulfilling, just as fulfilling as the stage is. You're working on a different kind of canvas, but when you have that kind of creative control, you're in the same position as a stage playwright is, and in some ways as a novelist. And it also paid the mortgage, which was kind of nice.

JXM: Are you still working for the stage in any capacity at the moment?

Ian: As a matter of fact, for the first time in literally years, I've got a stage play, which is being premiered up at the Western Canada Theatre, in Kamloops, next winter. And after that I'll see what I can do about shopping it around to Vancouver and Toronto. They're a great company, the Western Canada Theatre, they do really cool work. And I grew up in Kamloops, so it feels like going home. My parents still live there. So I guess in the future I would like to balance it a little more, and do more stage. Remaining at least 50% TV, I'd never drop below that, but I'd like to work in both.

JXM: Do you have any interest in doing features?

Ian: I've explored features to some extent. I did an adaptation of a wonderful novel called The Suspect by L.R. Wright, who died a few years back, God rest her. It's a wonderful story about an 80-year-old man who kills his brother-in-law. The whole novel is about the discovery of what it was that happened between the two of them. I did an adaptation of that, which three times has been right on the cusp of going, only to have the financing fall apart. So there's a fourth attempt at the moment. So I've made some forays into the feature world. That one hasn't been introduced yet, and I'm working on another screenplay, but we'll see. I tend to think I'm a more natural TV writer than I am a feature film writer. Also, features are so much a director-driven enterprise that for a writer I think there actually are advantages to working in television because as a writer/producer you are shaping the creative vision. Whereas in the feature world, the screenwriter is very much the helper of the director, as it were. The director is the one whose vision really shapes the entire thing.

JXM: Growing up, did you always want to be a writer?

Ian: Yeah, I did actually, from quite an early age. Certainly by the time I was ten, eleven, or twelve. My mom's a novelist. That was, for me, actually really quite freeing. Because I knew a lot of people who would want to work in the arts, but had parents, who would say, "Yes, I know you like acting, but what do you really want to do for a living?" And for me it was always the case of, if you want to be a writer, good, be a writer. The arts was seen as a viable way of making your way into the world. Most ironically, I recall my piano teacher, around the age of thirteen, said, "What do you want to do when you grow up?" And I said, "I would really like to be a writer." And she replied, "That's a nice hobby, but what do you want to do for a living?" This is my piano teacher! I went to high school with guys who had real talent, but they came from family situations which made it clear that, "No, no. The arts are dabbling. You don't do that. You get a degree and do something else. Or you get a trade and go find a job."

JXM: Discuss your process as a writer. What do you feel makes good writing?

Ian: I like to spend as much time as I possibly can in the gestation period. Or actually setting things down on paper, which is one of the reasons why I moved away from episodic television into long-form television. Writing episodic or series television, there's a real premium on speed. I can write at high speed, like anybody in the TV world can, but I don't find it as fulfilling, and I don't find it possible to write as effectively. To use Dragon Boys as an example, before I started writing at all, I spent a year researching, then I spent much of the rest of another year working on another project and jotting notes on story ideas for Dragon Boys at the same time. So it was a good two years plus before I actually started to write page one. I think what separates good writing from not so good writing is the ring of truth. And the ring of truth has to do with, not in terms of literal documentary type truth, but truth in character. Are we compelled by these human beings? In order to compel someone with these human beings you first need to know intimately who those human beings are. So for me, that's the process that takes the most time. As far as the structure of the story, I find that as a faster and easier process just because that's craft. You can learn how to structure a story. The stuff that's more intangible is trying to get in touch with what makes a compelling character. Why should I give up X number of hours of my evening to be in the company of this human being as an audience member? The older I get, the longer I spend on the note jotting stage and just ruminating and trying to get a sense of who my characters are.

JXM: When you were starting out as a writer, did you focus on structure? Has your process changed over time?

Ian: When I started as a writer I think I did what all young writers do. I got the germ of an idea and I plunged in and started typing as fast as I could. The consequence was that I wrote thousands and thousands of pages, most of which were pretty crappy, but I was learning as I went along. You learn more about how to structure stories. I think one of the hallmarks of bad TV writing is that you can so easily get into a situation where your level of the craft is such that without really thinking things through you can hopscotch over the top of a story. And it looks like a real story. Except when you actually look at it closely, you realize there's nothing really underneath this. There's no ring of human truth in this. The characters are kind of two-dimensional TV characters. The same ones we've seen a zillion times, except there's nothing really compelling about them. So I'm looking at the story and thinking it all works, except guess what? I don't care! As an audience member why would I want to keep watching this?

I think it's a particular challenge in TV for two reasons. Number one because, as I said, there does tend to be the premium on speed in TV. If you're working in a series situation, I mean, my God, they shoot eight to ten pages of stuff a day. So someone has to keep coming up with that stuff. I think also in TV and film there's a real premium placed on structure, more so than in any other form. It's for various reasons. One of them is simply that it's a very popular medium. And in the case of TV, you don't even have somebody sitting in a movie theatre where they're likely to spend the two hours there because they spent the twelve bucks. In TV you've got seven zillion channels on the zapper. If you let the audience sit back in the chair, you've lost them. So in TV there's a real necessity to keep the structure of the story rocketing forward. The danger is you can get lost and simply attend to the structure and not attend to what's underneath the structure.

JXM: Regarding spending much of your time in the gestation period, how do you manage to maintain your inspiration for an idea before you actually start writing?

Ian: I was never able to do it as a younger writer. I think a lot of it simply has to do with developing a certain level of self-confidence. I know that when I was in my 20's, I had no idea whether I could write or not. I think every time I got an idea, I was desperate to get it written to try and find out if this one was the one that would actually be good. As you get to a certain age and you've achieved a certain level of success, it becomes okay to relax and say, "Okay, I don't need to wake up this morning and prove that Ian could write. What I need to do is to try and tell a compelling story."

JXM: Do you ever find that you actually do lose inspiration when you spend so much time in the conceptual phase?

Ian: Yes, but I find when that happens, it's a sign that the initial idea wasn't as good as I thought it was. What's happening is that a few weeks later I'm beginning to realize, "Oh, I'm not sure I actually care that much about these characters, so therefore if I want to tell this story I need to go back to the characters and focus on them."

JXM: Tell us a little bit about what your experience on Dragon Boys was like.

Ian: It was the most terrifying, exciting, and rewarding experience I've ever had as a writer. When I started to work on the project, I knew it was going to be a mountain, but I didn't know how big the mountain was. If I'd known how big the mountain was, would I have started? I don't know (laughs)! As a writer, there was two huge things going on. Number one, there's simply an issue of researching the gang world in the [Vancouver] lower mainland, which is a huge immense amount of research and I was starting virtually from scratch. It was that whole process of reaching a place where I felt I could credibly write about what was actually happening in the lower mainland. But the bigger one was of course simply the cultural mountain. When I started work on the project, I had it in my mind that the characters would be split evenly between Asian Canadian characters and White characters. As I started working the story ideas, I realized that no, you can't tell the story that way. That's just not what the story is, and that would be a totally bogus way of trying to approach the story.

So there I am faced with the fact that I'm obviously not a noticeably Chinese Canadian writer, writing a story about characters that almost exclusively come from a cultural background that isn't my own. So I approached that on a whole bunch of different levels. One was simply sitting down and pestering all of my Chinese Canadian friends with stories about growing up and what it was like. One of the first friends I sat down with was Derek Lowe, who was the assistant producer on the project. Derek sort of laughed and said, "Yeah, I'm happy to talk to you about this, but you know what? I'm not going to be able to tell you anything because I grew up in North Vancouver. I don't speak a word of Cantonese. Basically, I grew up the same way you did. Our experiences are the same." But as Derek began to talk, I began to realize, no, his experiences were totally different than mine. He told me about a time, at the age of fourteen, where he sat at the back of the city bus and a nice elderly gentleman sat down beside him and started talking to him in Cantonese. It was an old White guy. And Derek had to say, "I'm sorry sir, but I don't understand a word you're saying." But the guy's assumption was that because Derek was Chinese Canadian, he must speak Cantonese.

That was just, wow. The whole introduction into the way we make assumptions based on somebody's visual cultural background, and the way that informs and defines our power relationships. Being a middle-aged White guy, I see power relationships instinctively a certain way, because the Western world is basically run by middle-aged White guys. You don't make these assumptions cynically. You just never stop to think about them.

From an early draft of the first segment of Dragon Boys, I had a really interesting experience from a Chinese Canadian reader. He was pissed off about the fact that the senior cop in the series was White. And I said he was White for various reasons: number one he's an asshole! Quite frankly, you get used to the fact when writing for TV and film that if you want to make somebody a dink, make them a middle-aged White dink (laughs)! And make sure he's a guy! So you can get away with it. But you know, also because it complicates his relationship with the main character, yada, yada, yada. And the fellow said, "No, you don't get it. Why is the boss always White?" So I thought, "Oh shit, of course." When you look at what's out on the screen. By and large, characters from visible minority backgrounds, if they're not second thug on the left, they're the third pharmacist on the right. They're in those kinds of roles as opposed to being the guy that runs the shop. And interestingly enough, just in the last week, the new police chief in Vancouver is Chinese Canadian. Not that the character is based on Jim Chu at all. It's a totally different situation.

So for me it was a process of just trying to see the world through somebody else's eyes. I also spent about a year reading every novel I could get my hands on by Chinese Canadian, Chinese American, and more broadly speaking, Asian North American writers. Just because, again, it has so much to do with their perception. It didn't impact the story directly. I read a wonderful novel called, Midnight at the Dragon Cafe, which is basically a coming of age story about a young Chinese Canadian girl in Eastern Canada in the 1950's. It has nothing to do with Dragon Boys, except her perception on her relationship with her friends - her White friends. It was a gold mine of information about the way she felt. But of course when the actors got involved that brought things to another level entirely. That was an absolute Godsend, because people like Byron Mann and Tzi Ma, quite apart from being brilliant actors, which they are, they're extraordinarily intelligent and perceptive people. So I spent hours talking with those guys, saying, "Okay, let's look at the characters. Tell me what rings true to you. Tell me what's bullshit." They're characters really evolved from those discussions.

JXM: With Dragon Boys, it was a bold choice to do a story about Asian Canadians, let alone Asian gangsters, what prompted the choice?

Ian: Basically, the concept led to that. My first impulse was, that since I'm obviously a White guy, to make the main police detective White. That way we're following a character close to me whom I personally understand, into not just the world of the gangs themselves, but also into a cultural milieu. I quickly realized that, no, the minute you do that, all of a sudden what you've got is a miniseries about a White good guy and a bunch of Asian criminals. That's a great idea (laughs)! So I quickly said no, absolutely not. That's when I decided, "Okay, Tommy Jiang is Chinese Canadian." Once I made that decision, I think in terms of the integrity of story, it was the only decision to make. But it also made it a massively complicated mind job, because now my central character was Chinese Canadian and I don't have that background.

JXM: Did you ever expect that people would view Dragon Boys as a stepping stone for Asians in Western media, being that it's the first program on Canadian television with an all-Asian cast?

Ian: Yeah, that was the positive effect, right from the outset, that I was really hoping it would have. There are so few shows in the industry of North American TV and film where the leads are anything other than White, apart from Denzel Washington movies. Basically, the movies are our fraternity. As far as the acting community itself, having cast in Vancouver for a number of years, I was aware of the fact that there was a really cool group of Chinese Canadian or Asian Canadian actors in Vancouver. So the CBC's nervousness when they greenlit the project was, "Can we cast this thing?" I said, "Seriously, don't worry. There are really strong people out there who you don't know about yet, but they're there. We've auditioned them and we know who they are."

Going into it, my first impulse was that we could cast this whole thing locally. But then I discovered, which was an extraordinary jaw-dropping discovery, that there was this entire stratum of movies stars who are of Chinese background and have Canadian passports or are Canadian citizens that are willing to work in a Canadian television project because there are so few lead roles in North America for Chinese Canadian or Chinese American actors. I mean, Tzi Ma, he's a brilliant actor. Byron Mann. These guys are movie stars. They came in and graced the project. Then you get a guy like Eric Tsang. He's one of the biggest stars in Hong Kong. He's a Canadian citizen, which means he can work in Canada. It never occurred to me when we began that we would have a chance of getting actors or artists of that level.

JXM: Was it ever an issue to you or the CBC that it was an all-Asian cast?

Ian: The CBC felt a note of caution going in. Simply they didn't know how a mainstream White audience would respond to a show where all of the leads were Asian. They wondered if that would be an issue as far as the audience went. But God bless them they had the courage to say, "We don't care about that, we're going to do this anyway."

JXM: With the obvious baggage carried with the stereotype and subject of Asian gangsters in Dragon Boys, did you have any concerns or fears about doing the show?

Ian: Absolutely. I knew going in that there was going to be real concern. And sure enough when the CBC first announced that they had greenlit the project in the spring of 2005 - it was just a one sentence description of the show about Asian gangs in the lower mainland - there was an immediate ground swell of extreme concern. It was coming from the Chinese community in Vancouver who had been burned in the past, or people who assumed, and for obvious reasons, the worst. They thought that we were simply setting out to exploit and stigmatize. My response to that was no. Quite apart from hoping that like the rest of us I have a decent social conscience, why would I want to create stereotypical characters? That's just bad drama. What we want to create is compelling characters. We worked with consultants from the Chinese community, who weren't dramaturges and weren't from the TV and film world, but simply who read drafts of the script and just responded. As a White writer it's so easy to stumble upon a stereotype without realizing you're doing it. But having people around who would say, "No, no, you don't realize what you're doing there. You've pushed that button. That's a hot button, and here's why." We walked through the script that way, and once the actors came on board it was a discussion that went on throughout the writing process.

JXM: Was there any negative response whatsoever after the show had aired?

Ian: I heard almost no negative feedback, in a broad overall sense. And I hope that means that we actually did what we were trying to do, and told the story with integrity. One fellow wrote me a very thoughtful e-mail saying that while he enjoyed the show, he didn't feel that the young characters reflected the life he lived when he was in high school. To which I could only respond, "I fully understand that - when I watch Intelligence. I mean, Jimmy Reardon is a middle-aged White guy and he doesn't reflect my life because he's a drug dealer and I'm not."

There kind of became this assumption that the show needed to be representative of individual lives of people who grew up in Richmond and Vancouver in a way that no show was ever going to do. Jason is a guy that gets mixed up in gangs. 99.9999% of kids that go to school don't get mixed up in gangs. So Jason's set apart because of that. I was amazed actually by the number of really positive e-mails we got, quite apart from the reviews. The reviews in the mainstream press were laudatory across Canada, which was really heartening. And I've been on the other side of the reviews so I'll take them when I can get them! I was expecting a sharper response from Chinese Canadian and Asian Canadian writers about the fact that a White guy could write this story. I ran into some of that, but that was all from writers who were emerging or not yet emerged or haven't actually gotten there. From established Chinese Canadian writers I got actually quite a different response. Their response was they're sick to death of the assumption that if you're Chinese Canadian, all you're allowed to write is Chinese Canadian coming of age stories. They want to be able to write anything they damn well want to write. So their response was I'm not going to criticize a White guy for writing about Chinese culture, because they think it's perfectly fair for them to write about any other culture.

JXM: Why was now the right time for the show?

Ian: One of the elements of course is simply the maturing of the Chinese Canadian acting pool. It would have been difficult to do years ago because there weren't that many Chinese Canadian actors working in Vancouver and across Canada. With a large cast like Dragon Boys you need a large pool of people to draw from. In the twenty first century that pool now exists. It's an incredibly strong and rich pool of talent. Culturally, I think it would have been extraordinarily difficult to do a show like this ten or fifteen years ago. It would have been overwhelmed at that time by the cultural and political issues that the show points toward and involves. I mean, forty years ago, nobody would have noticed a White writer writing about Chinese Canadian characters because that's the only way things were done. There was a blindness to the issue in the first place. I think ten to fifteen years ago the political climate was such that it would have been much more difficult for a network to have done the show at all. The Dim Sum Diaries, a radio series from a few years ago by CBC Vancouver, was extraordinarily controversial. That came at a point when Vancouver itself was feeling the tensions over the Hong Kong immigration and the Chinese takeover of Hong Kong in '97. Those were the days when newspapers were full of stories of White neighbours in Shaughnessy being outraged because somebody built a house that was too big beside them. All that crap was coming out. So everyone was incredibly sensitive at that point and might not have gone for something like this.

Even before the show was made and aired, in terms of the response from people who were seriously concerned about it, overwhelmingly the concern was from people over about the age of 45. Young people didn't ever respond that way. I think it has to do with the fact that people who are my age and older - you're dealing with people who were a certain age in the 70's and it's a different political way of seeing the world. Younger people have grown up in a world that's completely multicultural. There's a whole different set of assumptions. Basically, people who were fearing the worst of Dragon Boys were people my age. Younger people's response tended to be more laissez-faire. They tended to be more along the lines of, "Yeah, this may be bullshit, but if it's bullshit, I'll turn it off." As opposed to feeling a need to counter it right off the bat. I also wonder if part of that had to do with the movie culture, and its change over the years. The younger movie audience is familiar, certainly the Asian Canadian audiences, with urban Hong Kong gangster movies.

JXM: Why do you think Canadian television has had such a tough time reflecting its multiculturalism, being that Canada is one of the most multicultural countries in the world?

Ian: I don't think it was ever and is ever deliberate. I'm especially convinced of this after my own process of discovering my blind spots and my stupid assumptions culturally when researching Dragon Boys. I think you're dealing with a situation where the gatekeepers of Canadian culture have all along been middle-aged White guys and some middle aged White women mixed in with them. I don't think it's easy for them to stop and say to themselves, "We're not being inclusive." Because I think there's the assumption that as long as there's a few non-White faces on screen, we're including. It's just honestly not sitting down and realizing the world really has changed since I came of age. Growing up in Canada in the 1970's, basically I can count on my thumbs the number of people I went to school with who weren't from European White backgrounds. That's what the world was then. I don't think it's done maliciously.

JXM: In terms of diversity, what are your thoughts on the comparison between the American and Canadian film and television industries?

Ian: Byron Mann, the star of Dragon Boys, carries a Canadian passport, but lives much of the year in L.A. He pretty much grew up in L.A. When Bryon read the first draft of the script, one of Byron's responses was, "You couldn't possibly do this in the States. In the States they would never allow Tommy's wife to leave him in the end. You would have to tell the entire story in a different way." He said, "More than that, you couldn't tell the story with Tommy being the hero to begin with. Tommy would have to be the Asian sidekick or whatever. So this is great. It's great that in Canada people are happy to tell the story this way."

JXM: Do you feel the Canadian film and television industry has changed a lot culturally since you first started?

Ian: I think it really has. I know that the networks, the CBC certainly and CTV as well, are really consciously reaching out to people who are from different cultural backgrounds. The CBC, when they greenlight a project in development, one of the things they ask the producers to demonstrate in writing is how they intend to make this a culturally diverse project. If not in terms of the storylines, then in terms of the crew, the writers, or the directors. So there really is the attempt to say, "You can't just fall back on the same group of middle-aged White guys." And obviously, the results aren't yet as visible as they should be, but I think they're getting more visible by the day. I really do like to think that Dragon Boys was kind of a milestone. It's a project that is a showcase for Asian Canadian talent on the west coast and across Canada.

There's now a new series in production as we speak, Iron Road, which is a co-production between a Canadian company and I think a mainland Chinese or Hong Kong company. It deals with the building of the railroad, and it's told, as far as I know, from the point of view of the Chinese workers on the railroad. So again we've got a situation there where it's, as far as I know, a show driven by Asian leads and it's going to be on a mainstream Canadian network.

JXM: In the same context, where do you see, or hope to see, the Canadian film and television industry going in the next ten years?

Ian: In a broader sense, like anybody else working in the industry, I'm hoping it's still here in ten years time (laughs)! Because the industry's always in crisis, and right now it's in particular crisis in a lot of ways. As far as diversity goes, I think ten years ago directors like Mina Shum really were pioneers. There were almost no Chinese Canadian directors at all. In addition to Mina, you now see people like Julia Kwan and Sook-Yin Lee who are attracting a lot of attention. I think you're seeing more and more Asian Canadian directors and writers emerging. In the last ten years of trying to reach out to people who haven't traditionally been included is starting to bear fruit. You don't obviously train a director or writer overnight. It takes a gestation period for those people to reach their maturity as artists. Over the next ten years you're going to see a whole swelling of people from outside the traditional White community developing and maturing and blossoming as artists. Because of that I would think that the landscape is going to be completely different in ten years.

JXM: Is a second series for Dragon Boys in the works right now?

Ian: Yeah, I'm working on a two-hour movie of the week sequel. The CBC actually approached us after it aired and asked if we would want to do this as an ongoing series, like thirteen episodes a year. And I said no, because firstly I don't think the material lends itself to that and secondly I also know we couldn't get the cast. You're just not going to get people like Byron, Tzi, and Eric to commit. Basically, as an actor, that ties up five months of your life, and these are movie actors. They're not going to tie up that much time in a TV series. So my pitch to the CBC was that we all really want to do it but it needs to be done either as a movie or a miniseries so there's more of a limited time commitment for the actors.

JXM: What can we expect from the sequel to Dragon Boys?

Ian: The story begins three years after the first part. So lives have changed in somewhat unexpected ways. We pick up with the same main characters. There's a couple new leads added. Three years have passed and things have changed. There's a new set of issues.

JXM: So what stage of the process are you at right now?

Ian: I'm writing the treatment. I promised to give them a draft in September. So with luck they'll greenlight us in the spring, because that's when networks in Canada make their greenlighting decisions. February or March. So with luck we'll be shooting about a year from now.

JXM: Is there any estimate of when it will be released.

Ian: The earliest it could be released I guess would be in the fall of 2008.

JXM: Are there any other projects you're working on right now outside of Dragon Boys?

Ian: I'm working on a couple of TV movies for CTV. One has actually been ordered for production but there's still a big shortfall in the financing. So we'll see what happens. It's a biopic about a woman named Birute Galdikas. It's a wonderful true story. She's doing for orangutans what Dian Fossey did for mountain gorillas. It's one of those incredible stories where somebody goes across the world to save a species. I'm working on a couple of stage plays and a novel as well. So I'm bouncing back and forth.

JXM: Finally, what advice would you give to aspiring writers out there trying to break into the entertainment industry?

Ian: A couple things. I'd say, ask yourself why it is you want to write for film and TV. I think that there are some people who set out to write for film and TV because they like the money or they like the profile, but aren't necessarily in love with those two forms. So I'd say, first of all, decide what it is you really want to write. Keep in mind that as a TV or film writer, basically you can only write the stuff that you'd like to watch. So if you actually read more novels than watch TV, I'd say you should think about being a novelist rather than a TV writer (laughs)! Beyond that, what I always say to emerging writers is that there's an awful lot of writers who have talent. A majority of those people will get discouraged and fall by the way side, because it takes time to get established as a writer. You can expect to spend several years getting nothing but rejection slips. That's just what the process is. A lot of talented people don't manage to stick it out. They get discouraged, they lose confidence in themselves, they get disheartened by the whole thing, and they go do something else. Assuming you have the talent to begin with, if you simply can find a way to keep going through those rejection slips - and assume it's going to take five to ten years to get established - keep at it. The ones who manage to keep tightening will be left standing.

JXM: That's about all the questions we have. Thanks for chatting, and congratulations on your success with Dragon Boys!

Ian: Thank you!