JPod the BookShort: A Conversation With Judith Keenan and Bruce Pirrie

Second City alumnus, actor, writer, director and producer Bruce Pirrie has collaborated with BookShorts' mastermind Judith Keenan on multiple BookShorts (ahem short films), the latest, JPod, being inspired by beloved Canadian writer Douglas Coupland's novel of the same name.

Jpod is the story of Ethan Jarlewski and his burgeoning feelings for newbie Kaitlin Boyce, who by a systematic error has found herself trapped in the JPod of a massive game design company. The biting humour of Coupland and his insightful take on pop culture and its impact on today's world provided excellent source material for the BookShort that it even spawned it's own little details of inspiration.

JXM got the chance to talk with Judith and Bruce about existentialism dillemias, 780km walks across Spain and Portugal, and of course the amoral universe that is JPod

JXM: Judith, can you tell us more about BookShorts and how JPod the short film came to be?

Judith Keenan: My background basically spans all sorts of arts and disciplines, and when I came back from New York to Toronto I decided that film and TV was an industry that I haven't played in yet - I haven't played in that sandbox. So that combined with some background in book publishing in the publicity and the marketing side, had led me to BookShorts - that's the short answer. So obviously BookShorts are short films based on the written word. And although that part is not very new, people have been making films and short films for forever. The difference here is just in the time shifting and the packaging. That is to say we want to put the film out into the world at the same time that the authors' work is coming out into the world for the first time. Hopefully those two initiatives will support one another. Specifically for Coupland, being who is he and being a long-time fan, I was actually asking him for three books. It took three books before the stars aligned and we were able to work with JPod and circumstantially it turned out to be the best project.

JXM: How do you decide which projects to take on as a short film?

Judith: That's a little bit collaborative - it's partly me just trying to take the pulse of what's happening out there in terms of viewer and reader preferences. Part of it is the publishers and part of it is the authors themselves. And some authors are reticent to take on that particular extra level of interpretation, but at the same time their books are first making an entree. Which can be quite a challenging time for an author, getting your first book reviewed. We launched the first film in 2004 and now we're in '07, and I'm happy to say we're at the point now where the publishers are telling me that their authors are bugging them to say "are we doing a BookShort? Hey can we do a BookShort?" which to me is like 'Alright! We got somewhere!"

JXM: Bruce what are the biggest challenges you face in condensing a novel into a short screenplay? And with Jpod?

Bruce Pirrie: Well the idea is that the essence, I think of BookShorts is not to do a trailer, a scattergun of what the book might be like or to try to tell the whole book in four minutes, but to try and come up with four minutes that are indicative or representative of the book. So with JPod which was an immense book, but not only that, it is post-modern - its ultra post-modern - it's graphic, the way the type is presented is a part of the experience of reading the book. So when it came down to it, there wasn't a single episode that would give the sort of multifaceted approach that Mr. Coupland was bringing to modern life, especially as it was laid out in the situation and location of a pod. So it's capturing the essence of the whole book in a short film as opposed to, say a trailer or excerpt from the book and it varies - with JPod, it was getting the sense of Coupland's worldview and then almost coming up with something that wasn't quite in the book, like a couple of instances and dialogue that is not in the book, but being of the book but not from the book. Trying to get inside Coupland's worldview then coming up with something that represented it because there wasn't any kind of any single aspect or scene that existed in the book. I also brought some stuff from my own life. There was an incidence once where I thought a woman was talking to me, but she was talking on her cordless phone and said "Hi! How are you?" and I go "I'm fine!" and she turns around and says "Do you mind? I'm on the phone." And somehow or another that seemed to be how technology both aides and is a barrier in communication and the idea of relationships between people all sort of wrapped up in that one single thing that made its way into the BookShort of JPod.

Judith: And that's where it took from real life and saw it through Coupland's eyes. It feasibly could have [been from the book], which means that Bruce put his arms around that crazy Coupland world that he was talking about.

Bruce: And part of it too, and you know I might be the least qualified to talk about it, because the way I see the world, but my background is extensively with Second City where you turn to the audience and you get suggestions. And out of the mere suggestion or putting two suggestions together you create a third thing that is sparked by that. And somehow out of this unconnected chaos, by connecting them, something third is created. In particular with JPod, that was like a huge suggestion.

Judith:*laughing* Out of 567 people! And with One Bullet Away, which is a piece which we did for an American publisher, Houghton Mifflin. The author, Nate Fick became our documentary subject and we were trying to get to Nate's expression of an engaged civilian society, because that's a big concept to get into that little film and how we found that one anecdote evocative of that philosophy.

Bruce:We got suggestions from Nate and this is a guy that was a marine captain serving in Iraq, and the thing in his memoirs that rang through all of us when we were working on it was at a certain point in college he was confronted with the choice of either joining the Peace Corps or the Marine Corps. He opted for the Marine Corps and thought "how did that happen?" But he talked about being engaged and he thought the Marine Corps needed the type of people that were attracted to the Peace Corps, people who wanted to go somewhere, and not like that old bumper sticker and go to four places and kill them, but to go and take the idea of wanting to do good. Make a positive change. And it doesn't mean that the Marine Corps closes the door to people who - or it shouldn't close the door to people who have the same altruistic impulse that would lead them to the Peace Corps. So he had to try to rationalize or make it clear that he didn't dismiss the Marine Corps as the…

Judith: The brute force.

Bruce: The work of the devil or some sort of a destructive force as opposed to a positive force. Which was something that was, I thought, a relatively unique perspective as there was nothing similar to the Marine Corps and the Peace Corps.

Judith:Especially in someone so young, we're talking about a guy who was leading troops at 21, 22, 23. These are big thoughts for a kid.

Bruce: And he was saying that the most valuable asset that any society could have is an engaged public or citizen who cared and had input about what was going on and paid as much attention to politics as perhaps they would the sports page. Chomsky said "I can understand why people can't follow politics, I can't follow baseball." Anyway, I just wanted to point out the engaged citizen. And we had to do something that was four minutes long, which is the crucible of time and to get all this stuff out. So in his book there was this incident where there was an unexploded rocket propelled grenade shell in the - a schoolyard?

Judith: No it was in a backyard of a village, and essentially they couldn't continue to live, they had to tiptoe around this bomb.

Bruce: So the mandate of the Marine Corps "don't touch this stuff," you know because it's the military and everybody's got a job, so it's not up to the guy who are with Nate Fick in his United Marine Corps platoon, it's not up to them to disarm unexploded weapons, they're supposed to get somebody else and then they'll come in and do that.

Judith: They're actually supposed to move on.

Bruce: So they're supposed to leave it?

Judith: Yeah.

Bruce: So he said you know, if you're really engaged in this kind of thing and you've got some true essence of leadership, and he built bridges with the citizens of Iraq by not trying to explain to them that someone else would be coming along, but that he would do it there and then. He explained the situation to his men and guided volunteers, and crawled up and dug a hole underneath this unexploded piece of weaponry, and they blew it up. He did more for goodwill between the United States - it was a person to person thing, or a people to people thing, as opposed to explaining the bureaucracy of the military that doesn't allow them to do it. So they exploded this thing, they disobeyed orders, and if anyone had actually been injured, if one of his men had blown his arm off while doing it, there would have been so much hell to pay that it's not even worth considering. This was all part of his sense of engagement and true leadership and doing more of a Peace Corps thing in a Marine Corps situation.

Judith: He and Irene Duma, the director, found the essence of Nate's message, and again in this particular case it's more documentary so we actually used an actual anecdote that's in the book and built around it a message that was very germane to what Nate wanted to convey. So essentially we went to why Nate wrote the book for the plotline of the film and inserted an actual anecdote from real life to give it resonance.

JXM: Is that the approach with every novel when turning it into a short?

Judith: With non-fiction. So where JPod was a drama, or comedy from fiction. That was a documentary from a non fiction work, in this case a memoir. And Confessions of a Pilgrim is very similar. Confessions is a spiritual travelogue. It's the story of a woman, Sue Kenney who was downsized from her executive white-collared job, and used the opportunity to set herself on a whole other life course. Sue walked a pilgrimage called the Camino which is 780km across Spain and Portugal - I might be off a bit but you get the idea. She did one walk, it takes about a month, and basically it changed a lot in her world perspective. She went back took a camera person and shot 35 hours of footage (which was absolutely gorgeous) with the idea of making a feature length documentary. We went into that 35 hours of footage and Bert Kish [director], Sue and Bruce worked together to find a little story. In Confessions it is a synthesis, that whole book is really - it uses again one particular scene that is evocative of the overall journey that Sue made and is representative in that book. Again, why did Sue write this book, what affect did it have on her readership, that became the starting point for the film, and as you know, most messages that resonate are universal and very very personal at the same time. So those were the beats we were hitting in the adaptation.

Bruce: Bert, when we were talking to him about the ramifications of Sue's trip, said "oh that sounds like a fable." So we took the idea of a fable and that was how we wrote the narrative. The idea that we were able to take this whole trip that Sue had taken and tell it like it was almost a medieval fable gave us the structure, and we were able to condense, 'cause you know a fairytale is a masterpiece of condensation, bring everything down, huge concepts, morals, and journeys that last for years and bring it down into a very succinct story but with a very clear, broader message.

JXM: Is it ever difficult to leave certain aspects of the book out?

Judith: Oh my God, yeah, are you kidding? The Upside of Down is a three to four hundred page of non-fiction work and talk about getting big concepts down. We're talking about the philosophies of the future of the world this is a pretty heavy duty non fiction work written by a credentialed academic. Essentially it's the same kind of thing applied in a non fiction world. Michael McGarry wrote that particular adaptation and we specifically asked Michael though he's not a screenwriter, he never has written for television - he took some acting in high school *laughs*. But what he is is a philosopher studying in the same realm as Professor Homer Dickson, and Michael's got this particular knack of saying things, of condensing things down to simplistic statements that has lots of relevance. For instance "a chunk of ice the size of 11 thousand football fields just dropped off the side of the arctic because of global warming." Wow, that's a pretty impactful statement that goes ripple ripple ripple in your brain cells. We had to use pictures of floods and disaster and that kind of stuff, as Homer Dickson was speaking to those issues and [the pictures] added about a bazillion layers of meaning, there was no way you can speak through it in three minutes or four minutes. We used those pictures to add all those incredible layers and make a statement which of course is the beauty of film.

JXM: Are there any certain aspects from the original work that you wanted to add to the shorts but knew wouldn't work? Such as certain characters and situations, such as Ethan's home life and quirky parents for JPod?

Judith: I think JPod was similar to other BookShorts in a couple of instances (especially on the fiction side) like with What Casanova Told Me and The Fighter. We started out with scripts that had a plot and a subplot, because most feature films do. We almost always typically drop the subplot. Four minutes, three minutes, nine minutes is just not enough time to give credence to that, it would be more like a montage or music video and that's not what we want. So with JPod we had a subplot going on there which we dropped because it took away from the effectiveness of the simplistic one.

Bruce: I think the essence of, pardon of my going back to my Second City background, is a relationship between characters then you've got a scene. It doesn't matter what they're involved in doing, especially when its something that brief, you're not going to get an involved heist movie plot, or anything like that, it's the relationship between characters. And in our JPod adaptation it became about the relationship between Ethan and Kaitlin. And the idea of everything that is in the way, that gets in the way of people actually communicating, or having a deep profound relationship with each other, including themselves. The idea that it was in the JPod, and that she wanted to get out and all that was secondary or tertiary to the idea that these two people were reaching out to each other in the dark to establish a relationship. With their dialogue I tried to think of all the pressures that are brought to bare on a relationship, and particularly other people. We had an ongoing thing where people said "oh you really like her don't you?" And he didn't even know himself, he sort of had an existentialism dilemma. And she says "everybody says you dig me, do you?" and he goes "I think I do." And she says "Thanks for saying you think you do." Everything is sort of post-modern and ironic and post ironic where people don't even know what they want themselves, its no longer like the hero that says 'I've decided I want to do this' and then they do everything step by step to achieve what they want. We're dealing with people who don't even know what they want.

Judith: So yes, to answer the question, we did have other subplots and we did have other characters and rough cuts, but we found at the end of the day, the clarity of the film came from focusing on that static exchange from those two leads.

JXM: Was Douglas Coupland involved in the writing process for the short script? Or in the filmmaking process?

Judith: We developed the first draft, and he had a look at it and said "more of this, less of that" and that were the notes. And he and I sat in Random House's publishing office and he actually made physical mark ups, and suggestions and margin notes, et cetera which we either incorporated or didn't depending on what made sense when we were actually shooting. So yes he was involved in that sense, and he like any other author that we make a film with, are involved and we're out on the road for the next two or three years in front of these films. They're the ones that people ask about it, and the authors have to be involved, because if they're not and they don't like it then we haven't helped them at all. And if they are involved then chances are it's a more resonant piece because its their world that we're representing.

JXM: JPod the short film works independently and successfully from the novel and vice versa, but is there ever a fear that one may outshine the other?

Judith: No because they're different mediums. If it does prompt a response there is no downside. If someone hates the book and loves the movie, that's fantastic. If someone hates the movie and loves the book that's fantastic. We've accomplished our goal on either side because our goal is to get people talking about it, to get people engaged. So there is no such thing, it sounds trite and pompous of me to say so, but its true. And a lot of the authors feel its representative and if they're happy to have it out there alongside, then that's cool. Any conversation it prompts is exactly the effect we're looking to make.

JXM: How do you decide to adapt these novels to shorts rather than features? Or do you ever consider making features?

Judith: BookShorts is in the business of making short films. And if people ask us do we want to make features, I say no way! Do you know the development time of a feature, especially in Canada? The shortest is five years, the longest 15, I mean I don't know about you but I've got cash flow issues! *chuckles*

Bruce: The feature film rights are something else that has to be acquired.

Judith: Same with television rights. But that's not our core business. Our core business is to help authors and filmmakers get their artistic product out into the world. And it's not really to make feature films per se. That's that and that's over there and this is this. You know what? There have been deals, Confessions is a good example, and there was in fact interest that came in in a documentary feature. I don't want to lay claim to it, but when we did ICE, the same time that ICE was in the world and supporting its book release, Pauline also did a feature documentary deal on the subject of ICE. So again, it would be grandiose to say that BookShorts caused that, but it certainly was part a part of that package.

Bruce: It was the hype!

Judith: Yeah the hype. And it was part of the package that was presented to have those deals happen. So again, great! We're accomplishing our goal of getting more viz for authors and filmmakers.

JXM: Was there ever a struggle with the script, in terms of possibly feeling like you were not being faithful to the novel or to Coupland?

Bruce: We were working sort of hand in glove with Douglas. But as Judith said, he is so savvy as a pop culture guy that he could see that his book was one thing, and a feature film or a TV series that comes from the book is one thing and a short film like a BookShort was something else altogether. And they're like, forgive me, like remixes. And I think he was able to see it, I think he saw it perfectly clearly for what it was - a separate entity entirely.

Judith: That is to say that he was savvy enough to know that you had to simplify. He was savvy enough to know that you couldn't have three subplots.

Bruce: And he also realized that there was stuff in the short film that wasn't in the book.

Judith: The first big thing he had to be okay with was the fact that we would create a narrative arch based on the interface between those two lead characters. There were a lot of other approaches we could have taken. We could have taken Ethan going to China. We could have taken the interface between the marketing guy and Ethan. We could have taken the family - Ethan and his dad, Ethan and his mom; we could have chosen a lot of different combinations. So Coupland had to first be okay with the fact that we were going to pluck out, as Bruce said, one aspect which happened to be the exchange between the two of them. So our next biggest challenge working with Doug was trying to convey to him enough in a bare bones script, the confidence that we were going to populate the set physically and in pictures in such a way, the culture of JPod. Then we had to think of the music. The music is also indicative. It's frenetic, it's repetitive, and that has a whole dimension too. So there are a lot of layers and Doug was fun and cool to work with because he asked the right questions and he demanded of us to pre-think all those elements. And Bruce is such a pro, again from all of his stage work, he can get to the nut of things very quickly, so surprisingly the actual script writing part of it, went quite quickly.

Bruce: I think what we owed Douglas Coupland, when he allowed us to in one way, make it into a boy meets girl, or a relationship thing, we had to follow, what we had interpreted as his worldview that he had established. It's not boy meets girl, and live happily ever after. At one point she steps on his hand to get his attention, and this was how their relationship worked, it was rocky to say the least. In the end she doesn't actually go and wake him so he gets in trouble with the boss, but at a certain point she kisses him through a pane of glass which I thought really summed up the whole difficulty of modern relationships when everyone is aware of "I'm supposed to be asking you out" - it's a boy meets girl movie for the 21st century, where everybody is totally self-conscious of what they're doing and there are all kinds of impediments that Cinderella and Prince Charming didn't have to deal with.

JXM: What has BookShorts been able to do for the literary world?

Judith: *chuckles* Well don't you know that all 13 authors are millionaires with three picture deals with Sony and Universal? No I'm kidding you. Gosh, I'm not quite sure how to answer that. Do we have authors thinking about the fact that theirs' is an entertainment medium? Gosh, yeah.

JXM: Do you find that BookShorts has opened up film auidences to books and vice versa?

Judith: That's a hard measurable, I don't know how to answer that because a lot of this stuff is qualitative and not just quantitative. Could I give you a statistic on how many times these things have screened and how many eyeballs have seen them? Yeah I could do that. Can I tell you that a couple of authors have gone on to make other media deals in television and film? Yeah, that's a marker. Can I tell you that I get fan mail from all around the world because people in Spain have seen the Casanova BookShort because the Spanish publisher put it up. The Russian publisher wanted to dub the film with subtitles and release it with the book. So there are all kinds of variables to answer the question 'what have you done for authors?' *chuckles* A book is sold by word of mouth and reference. Unlike a lot of other types of media, I think films and books are similar in that sense. How do big studios sell films? Well they get you saying to your friends "I saw a great movie yesterday you gotta go see it." That's how books are sold too.

JXM: Thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us!

Judith: Thanks very much, it's been a pleasure!

Bruce: Thank you it was wonderful! I hope my coffee intake hasn't been too scatterbrained!

To Watch BookShorts:

JPod

One Bullet Away

Confessions of a Pilgrim

The Upside of Down

ICE: Beauty Danger History

What Casanova Told Me

The Fighter