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| Vaughan Murrae and Dominic Lippa in Before I Change My Mind |
One of the most enjoyable films in the 2023 Inside Out line-up, Trevor Anderson’s charming coming of age fable Before I Change My Mind opens with a mishap in a sex education lesson involving a banana and takes its young protagonist on a literal roller coaster ride as they attempt to climb the social hierarchy and win the affection of a boy who may or may not be worth it, until bigger events take life in unexpected directions. It’s Trevor’s first feature after a lengthy career in shorts, and that’s what we initially got talking about when we met up just before the festival to discuss the film.
“I made about a dozen shorts over the course of 15 years, and I just felt like trying something new,” he says. “If you don't take a risk, you can get quite comfortable. I always had in the back of my head that I wanted to make some feature length films as well as shorts. I think them as being very different. I think there are certain things shorts can do that features can't, and I was quite hypnotised by that for a time. I still hope to make more shorts in my life, but I guess it just felt like the trees getting big enough to support some different branches. I didn't go to film school so the shorts were also, in a way, my film school. It just felt like time to give myself a new assignment.”
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| Before I Change My Mind |
Are there autobiographical elements in this one? It has that feel to it.
“Yes, there are. It started off almost entirely autobiographical. And then it became semi-autobiographical, it became more semi-autobiographical, and now it's fiction. It feels like my life is the soil with the nutrients from which the fiction grew, so certainly my life feeds the the story, but it isn't my story. I was a young teenager with a blurry gender in that time, in that place.”
Robin, the protagonist – played by Vaughan Murrae – is pretty clearly non-binary. I mention that it’s really nice to see that in a film set in the Eighties because a lot of people seem to think that nobody was like that back then.
“Thank you,” he says. “Yeah, I think, as you say, people might assume that non binary people had just been invented because we've just started talking about them. In fact, of course, people with all sorts of genders have existed for as long as there have been people.”
The other really interesting character is Carter (Dominic Lippa), the aggressive character on whom Robin quickly develops a crush. Early on in the film we see him panic because he’s accidentally picked up a gay porn magazine. It’s such a quick, defensive reaction that one wonders if he’s secretly interested in men, with some internalised homophobia going on there. He’s a refreshingly complex character.
“Absolutely. I mean, I think the original spark for the film was this emotional impulse to revisit the crushes I had on the guys who, well, we were all kids, but there were always boys who, from the outside, seemed to fit in easily. But you know, we look a little closer and there's a different story. And so films can look a little closer, and that's what I wanted to do with Carter. There's the temptation to make him the bog standard bully, or to make him the crush who comes out at the end. I didn't want such easy answers for anyone in the movie. Just like with Robin, there's the question of ‘Are you a boy or a girl?’ And that question is never really answered in the film. There’s no gender disclosure. It's just left as an open question.
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| Before I Change My Mind |
“I wanted to look at all the characters and think, what's their version of the opening question? Is Carter gay, straight or bi? Does he have a crush on Robin, does he have a crush on Izzy? My co writer Fisher Griwkowsky and I wanted to look at each character and try to find what part of their life didn't have easy answers. What were the questions that they themselves maybe didn't know the answers to? And how could we leave them open all the way through to the end?”
It's really rare to actually look at bullies in films. I’m also intrigued by the relationship that he has with his friend Shev beforehand, a seemingly close friendship which he suddenly throws aside completely?
“Sure, yes, and I love the actor who plays Shev [Rohan Khare], I think he plays that kind of rejection, that sudden loss of a friend, that vacuum that I think many can remember from middle school, really well. It's a common thing that happens. I think he plays the hurt which turns into anger quite nicely.”
Also important in the film is Izzy (Lacey Oake), a talented girl who comes into Robin and Carter’s lives when she gets involved in the same musical. She seems to have everything sorted and know exactly what she's doing with her life, but actually she has a really complicated home life. It strikes me that quite often the kids who seem cool are quite troubled, and that's why they seem different.
“They learn to not give much away at first, which always helps to act cool,” Trevor observes,
A lot of people seem to forget how teenagers work, as they get older. How has he managed to hold onto it so well?
“Well, my co writer, Fish Griwkowsky, is also one of my oldest friends. Neither of us has completely grown up. I think both of us quite easily slip back into the mindset of the early teenager. So there's that, and then we can't underestimate what those young actors bring to it. I was so lucky to get these kids. The camera can see them think, you know? That's a real skill, and to find it in so many young actors all at once and have them all be in one movie...”
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| Before I Change My Mind |
Was it just a standard casting process, or did he find them as a group?
“It was a casting process. We did a Canada-wide casting call for Robin because I knew the movie would live or die based on who we got to play Robin. Not only did we need an actor with a kind of visually cryptic gender, but also then they had to be able to draw the audience in beyond the question of ‘Is that a boy or a girl?’ – to get the audience to a place where they can abandon that question and hopefully fall in love with this character without the answer to that question. And Vaughan has all of that charisma and talent. And then also a Canada-wide casting for Carter because I knew the chemistry between Robin and Carter was as important.
“We had a small budget. We shouldn’t have been able to do a movie of this size on the money we had. So we knew that all the rest of the kids would have to come from the province of Alberta where we were shooting because we wouldn't have the money to bring in a kid and a guardian and put them up, and, you know, they had to be able to stay in process. But, boy, wow, we got great kids from my home province of Alberta. And, in fact, Lacey Oake who plays Izzy lives in this small town where I grew up, called Red Deer. It was very nice to find one of the main actors so close to the spiritual setting and, in fact, the literal setting of the movie. That just felt karmically correct.”
I was intrigued by the school trip to West Edmonton Mall and Theme Park. I explain that I'm in Scotland and we don’t really have things like that. Is it a common thing in Canada?
“Yes. I mean, we didn't, when I was a kid, take a school trip to West Edmonton Mall, but it would be a common thing for kids from a small town in the Eighties. West Edmonton Mall was the largest shopping mall in the world. It's since been replaced, but it's still there and it's still going strong, and I love it actually. Edmonton kind of has a love/hate relationship with that shopping mall. But my co-writer Fish and I love it. We just go there. “What do you want to do today? Oh, you want to go to the mall. Sure, we’ll go and walk around the mall.” And that roller coaster, in fact, was opened in the Eighties, the indoor rollercoaster, triple loop, the Mind Bender. It was just announced after we shot the movie that they're dismantling it, so we got in right under the wire to get it into our movie.”
Moving on to another part of the film, how did he come up with the musical?
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| Before I Change My Mind Photo: courtesy of Inside Out |
“I come from theatre first. In fact, musical theatre was my my adolescence. I was in the community theatre musical productions. And so I knew I didn't want to see science class, I didn't want to see math class. For me, it was important that the bits of school we did see would be the arts because to me, the arts, in my experience, were the moments when the rigid social hierarchy of middle school could be manipulated, could be could be broken down. You had a chance to have some social mobility, when you went on school trip with the school band or if you volunteered to be in the community theatre musical. That is useful in a in a drama because suddenly the characters can jockey for position and things can change.
“It seemed like the right thing for these characters to have this opportunity to enter this upside down world at the community theatre production. We originally thought it should be Jesus Christ Superstar, of course, but for this size of movie we could never get that. It became a great gift because then I play the community theatre director, also named Trevor Anderson, and the joke is that my character couldn't afford the rights either, so had to create this original musical from the point of view of Mary Magdalene, which allowed for a parody of in the middle of the movie.
“I'm old fashioned and I like it when movies just stop and there's a big musical sequence in the middle. This became an opportunity to do that and also also offer a level of parody that spoke to the themes of the film. We have Robin and Carter with ‘What are you, what am I? What are we?’ And then we have the parents with their romance. What are you? What am I? What are we? And that can all be parodied with Jesus and Mary Magdalene. I mean, ‘What even are we? Boyfriend and girlfriend or what?’ It'd be the the parody level for the more serious themes of the movie.”
And there's also a film in there. Satan’s Seedlings, which the kids watch at a gathering in Izzy’s house.
“We originally wanted Carrie by Brian De Palma but we couldn’t afford it,” he explains, “and so it became an opportunity for us to make our own false, imagined 1970s low budget horror film, Satan’s Seedlings. My friend [Lyle Bell] who was the composer on the film and is also a graphic designer made me a one-off fake promotional merch t-shirt for Satan’s Seedlings.”
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| Before I Change My Mind poster |
I tell him that it was a big part of the Eighties for me, going to parties like that as a young teenager, where there would be about five people and we’d watch a horror film.
“Yeah, and it's maybe a film you're not emotionally prepared for in that experience. And so again, it becomes an opportunity to push our main character into a new emotional state, like Robin's watching the movie and then sees Carter and Izzy snuggling up and is also emotionally not ready to be dealing with his movie that maybe reminded them of some storyline with their mother, perhaps, and there's a mother in that movie, and it just becomes too much. And it pushes Robin out of the room. So again, for me, it was an opportunity to go for the laughs and then turn it into something that did something serious to our hero.”
Robin is doing a lot of things to try to fit in, but something that stood out to me about it that's maybe a little bit subtler is the way that they keep paying for things, or just gradually putting money out there in order to keep on having friends. That’s the kind of problem that often stays with people later in life as well.
“I'm glad that you picked up on that,” Trevor says. “Robin notices that Carter doesn't have the money to go on the band trip and that Carter’s current best friend Shev’s family is paying for it, so Robin thinks ‘Oh, well, if I start paying for things, I can get Carter’s attention. That’ the way in.’ You know, you work with what you've got, and in Robins case, it's an allowance. But you're right. The whole movie, I think, is maybe trying to look at the origin story of certain unhealthy dynamics that we tend to carry into adulthood and that hopefully we unpack, if we're lucky, later in life.
“My great pleasure with this movie is that the student audiences have been liking it. We've won two youth jury awards, in Philadelphia and in Dieppe. And to me, that's the greatest stamp of approval, that actual teenagers like it. I don't need to teach them any lessons. The whole world is trying its best to do that. I want to entertain them for 90 minutes, and I'm happy to hear that it might be working.
“I love Inside Out. It’s the only film festival in the world that has screened every film I've ever made: all my shorts and now my first feature, and so it really feels like an opportunity for a homecoming. It feels like a chance to reach this specific audience that I love very much.”
He already has another project in the works.
“My co writer Fish Griwkowsky and I are halfway through the fourth draft of what I think will eventually become a five draft script, set in Montreal in 1995. We're going decade by decade. We did the Eighties, now we're doing the Nineties. And Quebec, of course, is Canada's primarily French province, so it's a bilingual movie, but chiefly in French. Two protagonists: an 18 year old queer kid named Tadpole from northern Alberta who moved to Montreal to start his fabulous new life despite not speaking any French. And meanwhile, a parallel story about a thirtysomething Francophone nurse who lives in the shadow of her successful novelist boyfriend and needs to find balance between caring for others and caring for herself. It's called Goodbye Forever.”
