Original-Cin Q&A/review: Bruce McDonald on that Easter Egg in Pontypool, and casting two Stephen McHatties in Dreamland

By Jim Slotek

As if the movie itself wasn’t weird enough, Bruce McDonald’s 2008 horror film Pontypool – about a zombie virus transmitted through speech - had a post-credits scene that made no sense in the context of the film. 

But it inspired McDonald’s current demented thriller, the aptly named Dreamland. Call it a kind of fever-dream sequel.

Shot in black-and-white, the “Easter egg” showed Pontypool’s stars, Stephen McHattie and Lisa Houle, dressed up as a high-end gangster and his femme fatale, and McHattie identifying himself as “Johnny Deadeyes.”

Hercules (Henry Rollins) and Johnny Deadeyes (Stephen McHattie) scan a vampire wedding for trouble.

“Dreamland basically came from those 45 seconds,” McDonald said in a phone interview from his home in advance of the movie’s streaming debut this week. It was the product of McDonald’s writing collaborator Tony Burgess (who also wrote the novel that inspired Pontypool). 

“Tony is this labyrinth of non-sequiturs and connections and wonderful random collisions. There’s a sort of Fun House of mirrors inside Tony Burgess’s head,” McDonald says.

The offspring of that 45 seconds, Dreamland, features the forementioned McHattie in both of the movie’s lead roles – the world-weary Johnny and a heroin-addicted jazz trumpeter referred to simply as Maestro. 

Both are in the employ of a castle-dwelling, deranged “Countess” (Juliette Lewis), and both hate their lives, especially now that the syndicate has turned to child trafficking (some of them are abducted to serve the sanguinary needs of the Countess’s vampire brother, played in an absurdist What We Do In The Shadows vein by Tómas Lemarquis).

ORIGINAL-CIN: So, you get two Stephen McHatties here for the price of one. How did that happen?

BRUCE MCDONALD: “I know. I think he did just a wonderful job with these two characters. But there was the thing at the end of Pontypool. And shortly after (Pontypool), we came across a short film by Robert Budreau, the Canadian guy who made Born to Be Blue (the Chet Baker biopic with Ethan Hawke). 

“But he’d first done this short with McHattie as Chet Baker. It was called The Deaths of Chet Baker and it imagines how he died. 

“He died in Amsterdam, he was found on the pavement. Apparently he fell out of his hotel room. And the short film speculates, ‘Was he pushed out by an angry drug dealer? Was it suicide? Or did he get high and just fall asleep and fall out?’ 

“It’s this really wonderful little movie where McHattie does a really great version of Chet Baker. 

“And Tony said, ‘Well, he can play two characters.’”

OC: What’s interesting is that the two characters are virtually identical and no one remarks about it. But even so, there were subtleties in his performance. After a while, I knew exactly which character we were seeing.

MCDONALD: “All in the way he would move and talk. He’s a guy who does his homework before he walks on the set. 

Countess (Juliette Lewis) and her brother (Tomas Lemarquis) dance to the music of the Maestro (McHattie)

“You do the take, and he does this weird thing, and you think he’s made a mistake. And you do another take and he does the exact same thing, and you realize, ‘That was no mistake. That was all worked out.’ It’s really thrilling to see a guy like that who thinks so much, the hair, the mannerisms, the voice.”

OC:  And Henry Rollins (who plays a gangster/nightclub owner named Hercules), he really loves the genre stuff.

MCDONALD: “I had the pleasure to meet Henry and work with him years ago in this TV show in Vancouver where he played this scientist. And we hit it off together and had a great time. I’m always a little intimidated to meet famous people, but he was really sweet and hard-working and really lovely man, generous and smart.

“He’s one of the hardest working guys you ever want to meet. After the shoot, he’d be back at his hotel room working. He had a column for a while in a weekly paper in L.A., he has a radio show, and a publishing house he kind of runs. It’s kind of amazing. 

“He’s very disciplined but without being annoying about it. He’s excited about ideas. He’s one of these guys you enjoy playing with.”

OC:  And having Juiiette Lewis (from Picture Claire). This is really a reunion film.

MCDONALD: “It’s great to have her back. She was very fun and it’s always a great to find something for people you like and admire. I think the title gave a lot of people permission to go wild, like the costume people and the actors.

“She had been in different things, like this show in Toronto called The Firm, all shows where you have to be a good citizen and do normal things. She’d say, ‘Bruce, I don’t know if I’m going too far here.’ And I’d say, ‘Sometimes too far is just far enough.’”

OC:  She kind of got to go nuts, running this hotel for depraved bigwigs. It was like Jeffrey Epstein on mushrooms.

MCDONALD: (Laughs). I like that! I remember us talking beforehand, and as we talked about what it was going to be, it turned out she knows some crazy rich people and stuff. And I think she brought some of that to the table. I’m not sure where it came from, but she was looking into the world of some of her rich entertainment friends.”

OC:  And I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that the locations are almost a character in themselves. I noticed Wallonia and Brussels in the funding credits. So, what were we seeing?

MCDONALD: “It was kind of stitched together between Luxembourg City, where the Countess’s Palace was - which was the Palace of Justice in Luxembourg. Remarkably, they let us in to shoot there.

“And then there was the ‘Below World,’ I guess, where Henry had his club Al Qaida. This was in a place called Charleroi, which is kind of the Detroit of Belgium, an hour outside Brussels. It’s an old industrial town, completely broken down and messed up. Our designers found it. I imagined when I went to Europe it would be more fairytale-y, with nice cobbled streets. And our designer said, ‘No, we have to separate the two worlds.’”

Review – Dreamland

Rating: B-plus

A movie about as grounded as a water lily, the strength of Bruce McDonald’s Dreamland is not the originality of its parts (a cynical hitman finds his soul saving an underage girl from a dire fate, a giddy vampire a la What We Do in The Shadows, a denouement full of gunplay). 

But it is committed to its title. And once you find its weird wave-length, it’s a hoot.

Dreamland is sprinkled with WTF moments, like an attempted robbery in a pawn shop that, out-of-the-blue, turns its tables sideways. It’s peopled by over-the-top characters who live out depraved fantasies in a luxurious Luxembourgian castle. And the Benelux background puts it in the league of In Bruges as a movie you could just simply watch for travelogue purposes.

But the best reason to watch Dreamland is it’s the most Stephen McHattie money can stream. One of Canada’s most underrated actors plays two doppelgangers, the forementioned hit-man Johnny, who is haunted by his main employers’ turn to human trafficking, and Maestro, a jazz trumpet legend who gave up his credibility (and gained a heroin habit) for a high-paying job as a mobster’s personal entertainer.

McHattie is an island of subtlety in a movie where everybody else has been ordered to release-the-hounds, acting wise. Among them: Juliette Lewis as the deranged Countess and Henry Rollins as Hercules, manager of a mob club called Al Qaida. 

McDonald has hinted that, if drive-ins are allowed under relaxed social rules, he is intent on programming Dreamland there. That would be perfect.

Dreamland. Directed by Bruce McDonald. Starring Stephen McHattie, Juliette Lewis, Henry Rollins. Debuts Friday, May 29 on Apple TV, Google Play, Bell, Cineplex, Cogeco, Rogers, Shaw, Eastlink, Microsoft XBOX and Telus.