Naturally, music is the entire backbone of Mile End Kicks–What was the process like for curating the soundtrack? I was a particular fan of the Autolux and R. Stevie Moore needle drops…
Oh! Thank you so much. A lot of those songs, including the Autolux song, were written into the script from the very first draft. I just love [“Asleep at the Trigger”] so much. The first time I heard it, I was completely blown away with how beautiful it is. I was like, this has to end the movie. It just feels so cinematic to me. It's a crazy music movie... there's like, God, I don't know how many, probably thirty needle drops, as well as the original songs that we wrote for the film that are performed by the fictional band Bone Patrol, and then Chevy's solo project music, which is its own thing. Then there's two musical performances by live bands from Montreal at that time, and then there's also a score. So, I think with the needle drops, for me it's kind of a mixtape of songs that I've been obsessed with my entire life. It’s also songs that kind of reflect the era and are meant to be nostalgic, whether that's like Simian Mobile Disco the first time she walks into the loft party, or the Joanna Newsom song that she's reviewing in the office late at night while she starts crying. Alanis is also just really crucial to the movie because [the character, Grace] is writing a book about Alanis Morissette. So there were a lot of songs where I'm like, this movie doesn't work if we don't get this song in the film, it is everything to me. And I worked with an incredible music supervisor, Evan Dubinsky, who really fought hard to honor what those songs had to be and help me write personal letters to Peaches and Joanna Newsom and Alanis and Deerhunter to kind of beg them to give us their music for discounted rates.
Were there any songs that you really wanted to be in the movie that didn't make it?
There was a whole scene that I unfortunately had to cut for length. It was this dance party scene and it was set to “Rip It Up” by Orange Juice which is one of my favorite songs of all time. It was really fun and Grace was grinding with a guy on the dance floor and then this girl sat on her like she was a couch. It was really funny, but the movie was too long. I was really sad not to be able to have that song because we had to track down Edwyn Collins in Scotland and he gave us permission for this song and it's just incredible. So, I'll have to use it in another movie or something because it's just so good.
Definitely. Another aspect of the movie that I loved was the production design. It’s sort of its own character, in a way. I loved seeing the Nathan Fielder magazine cover, the book stack with Chuck Klosterman and Hunter S. Thompson, and of course the Almost Famous poster. Could you tell me more about the choices you made for the set pieces and is there anything that you really love that you put in the film that people might not notice on a first watch?
I mean I love production design and I think it's always an incredible way to build up the world of a character. I think, because my films are so personal, I want them to have as many real world objects that I remember from that time and create production design that feels like a memory. I get really obsessive about all the little details. So my production designer Jess Hart, who's absolutely incredible, really went the distance with this project and really honored the things that were very important and specific to me. I worked at an Alt-Weekly office that looked a lot like the Alt-Weekly office in the film and the photographer Joe Fielder, who's great, lent us all his photos that he took in 2010. He had taken all of these pictures of Nathan Fielder at a comedy festival in 2009 or something and then we got permission from Nathan Fielder to make a fake magazine cover because he was a real, alt/indie comedian in Toronto at that time. Everything just had to be as realistic as possible. The vape that Archie smokes, that's modeled after a vape that my best friend in Montreal smoked weed out of all the time. It had to be this specific vape, the original DaVinci, because I would always joke, I'd be like “Your vape looks like a walkie-talkie” and then they’d be like “420– OVER” and then we'd laugh. They don't make that vape anymore because it's ancient and the props person could not find it. I had like four friends looking on eBay for it so we ended up getting one from San Francisco that someone won in an eBay auction… just all these little details, for me, they just make the movie. I was like “I cannot sacrifice on the vape, it has to be the weird blocky one that looks like a walkie-talkie.”
Speaking of the Almost Famous poster, your film feels like its spiritual successor. I'm sure everyone's asking you about Cameron Crowe, but could you tell me about your first experience watching Almost Famous and how that led to your first venture into music criticism?
I think I watched it when I was fifteen in a movie theater at the Burlington SilverCity where I'm from in Burlington, Ontario and the movie made such a seismic impression on me. I could not believe how much I related to it and how funny and cinematic it was. It really opened up something inside of me. I thought it was the coolest film I'd ever seen and I watched it over and over again and I loved the soundtrack… It's still my comfort movie, I go back to it every time and it kind of coincided with this period where I got really obsessed with music criticism and I was discovering more about music and just loving it. The Strokes were my favorite band and I saw them on the cover of Spin Magazine and I was like, “How can this band be on the cover of a magazine? I thought I only knew about them.” So I bought the magazine and then there was this really long essay by Chuck Klosterman and that led me to read Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs. That really brought me into this journey of becoming a rock critic. I interned at Spin when I was eighteen, three years later. I think I was so obsessed with Almost Famous that I was like, I just want to live in the movie. How do I just live in the movie forever? I thought “Well I’ll become a music critic.” I interned at an Alt-Weekly and then I interned at Spin and I lived in New York in December of 2007. I remember this one moment that really felt like my Almost Famous moment. I got invited to go to the Baltimore Virgin Music Festival and it was the last day of the festival and M.I.A. had just played. Spin that year was doing a 1977 punk issue because it was like the 30 year anniversary of 1977, the seismic year for punk. So they were like “Chandler, try to interview as many musicians as you can and then get quotes from them on what they think about the 1977 punk scene.” So M.I.A. had just played a show and at the time she was like the biggest rapper of all time. I was just waiting outside for her and all of these people were like, “You'll never get to talk to her. Don't even bother.” But I just kept tenaciously standing there and I was like, “M.I.A.! Do you have five seconds to talk about 1977 punk rock?” And she looked at me and she went, “I've got five minutes for this girl!” So I grabbed up my tape recorder and she talked about the Sex Pistols and what they meant to her and it was an incredible quote.” Then I ran out into the whole giant field of people. It was night and everyone was leaving and there were just all of these crushed water bottles on the ground, a whole sea of crushed plastic water bottles. I was running across them to make the bus to take me back to New York and I was like, “I'm doing it. I love being a rock critic!”
I read that the screenplay of Mile End Kicks won a competition hosted by Zapruder films and that Matt Johnson and Matthew Miller were both involved in the creation of the film. I also saw in your Letterboxd review of Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie that you said that the movie and Mile End Kicks were “basically the same film.” Could you elaborate on that? What was it like working with them?
I mean, they've been a supporter of the movie since 2016. When I won that contest, they were like, “Not only are we going to help you develop the script, we're going to make this movie.” And they've really honored their promise to me. It's been about ten years of us trying to make this film happen now. I'm really extremely grateful to Matt Johnson. He has been really invaluable in the development of the screenplay and the movie. When we were getting close to production, he sat with me for like six hours and we just went through the script together and he was like, “Oh, well, you should cut this scene because you can't afford a car accident. It's never going to look good. All your money is going to go to that. You won’t have time to properly do it.” I was like, “You're right.” He made me kill a lot of my darlings, but in a very positive and effective way. Matt Miller has been the person that I've been working with on this project with for years and he totally made the film happen. I'm so grateful to him and my other producers, Pat Kiely and Julie Groleau, for making the movie happen. But yes, I think it's really weird. It was really uncanny watching Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie– which I absolutely adored– and just realizing we're both trying to replicate this past Toronto that doesn't exist anymore. That film is about a frustrated band also! It's very poignant to me having lived in Toronto my whole life when the time travel element happens and they go back to 2008. My heart just leapt to see Queen Street and the Rivoli at the time because I remember walking those streets. I also watched the web series when it first started. I've known Matt for like twenty years. So to see everybody doing Matt Johnson, Jay McCarrol lookalike contests and that my entire Twitter feed is just Matt Johnson thirst traps... I'm just so excited that they're these unlikely 40 year old sex symbols.
Do you have any advice specifically for women in their twenties navigating the world of music as someone who survived it and lived to tell the tale?
Oh, that's such a lovely question. I mean, I really hope that it's gotten better for young female music critics and women working in the music industry than what it was like for me in a pre-Me Too era. I do think it's really unfortunate that just as we're starting to see more of a plethora of queer voices, people of color, female-identifying writers that the music journalism industry has completely eroded and there's no opportunities to be a staff writer at a music magazine anymore. All the institutions that, when I was there–that were monolithic like Pitchfork or Stereogum–they just don't exist anymore how they used to. It’s almost like the occupation of music critic kind of feels like being a clockmaker or something. I don’t know, I think that the most important thing that you have is your voice, right? Knowing your voice, knowing your tastes…I think for a lot of time at the beginning of my career, I just wrote like the writers that I really admired. I just tried to sound like Chuck Klosterman. I didn't know how to sound like myself yet, you know? I think that the more you write, the more you develop your own taste and art and you have experiences that inform it. The more you read widely and get exposed to things… It's really important to be curious and throw yourself into situations and learn what your taste is. That's all you can do.
