A
week after Jason Bourque’s spirits soared as high as the unmanned
aircraft featured in Drone, his new movie that just made its U.S. debut,
he is finally starting to feel Earthbound again.
Calling from
Las Vegas, where he is on vacation after spending four months in Qatar
shooting episodes of Medinah, an Arabic-English sci-fi series, the
Victoria-raised filmmaker said his giddiness was justified.
“It’s
been surreal,” said Bourque, whose slick, provocative thriller was the
No. 1 indie feature on iTunes for a time last weekend. It also shared
space on big-city movie marquees with Baywatch and Alien: Covenant.
“Aliens, bikinis and us,” noted Screen Media Films in a Twitter post
featuring a photograph of Drone’s prominent position on the marquee at
New York’s Village East City Cinemas.
Bourque, 44, was also
elated that the first review of his Telefilm-funded movie was from the
New York Times, which called it “a modest, proficient thriller.”
He credits his star, Sean Bean, for generating unexpected attention for
what he describes as a Canadian independent drama and character study in
the guise of a Hollywood-type thriller.
“We didn’t do that on
purpose,” Bourque said with a laugh. The University of Victoria Fine
Arts graduate gained experience making short films and music videos here
before his filmmaking career took off.
Bean, best known for his
roles in the TV series Sharpe and Game of Thrones, and the movies
Patriot Games, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and
Troy, plays Neil, an alcoholic American drone pilot. His wife (Mary
McCormack) and son (Maxwell Haynes) believe he is an IT specialist,
unaware that he has been secretly contracted by the CIA to fly covert
drone missions overseas from his home in Washington state.
He is
forced to face the consequences of his actions when Imir (Patrick
Sabongui), a polite but mysterious businessman from Pakistan, shows up
at their suburban home.
“We’re so used to seeing Sean play these
bigger-than-life characters, where you see him with a sword or a
machine-gun, the villain or the tough guy in so many huge Hollywood
movies,” Bourque said.
The British actor was a fan of Bourque’s
2015 backwoods thriller Black Fly. Bean also liked the Drone script
Bourque co-wrote with Paul Birkett, based on a story Birkett wrote with
his brother Ian, and Roger Patterson.
“Sean said he wanted to do
something that was more like a play, and to play a character he hadn’t
done before,” recalled Bourque, who soon learned why so many directors
love working with the actor.
“Everything was internalized, and
then he’d have these incredible bursts of emotion. He’s very instinctual
with his choices, quiet and contemplative on set, and very giving.”
Beautifully photographed by Vancouver-based twins Nelson and Graham
Talbot, Drone is both a visually stunning depiction of remote-controlled
warfare overseas and a contained drama on the homefront.
Bourque
said filming on a shoestring and a tight schedule last summer — 15 days
in West Vancouver and Langley, and three days in a town near Mumbai —
was an adventure in itself.
“We were shooting off-the-grid, in
this incredible town in India, where there was a river of garbage, so
deep that dogs could walk on it, that ran through the centre of it,” he
recalled.
“We blew stuff up. People were incredibly nice and we
could do these big explosions and wonderful stunts, all incredibly
cheap”.
Shooting in India gave the film the additional scope
Bourque wanted “as opposed to it looking like we shot it all in Maple
Ridge, like a TV movie,” he said with a laugh.
They teamed up
with model-builder Eamon Jones, with whom Bourque once worked at the
former That’s Entertainment video store on Yates Street, to build the
drone model in Jones’s living room.
While drone warfare and
surveillance have been addressed onscreen before, notably in last year’s
Eye in the Sky, Bourque said Drone’s timely focus on private
contractors sets it apart.
“Drone is very much ripped from the
headlines,” he said, referring to a Wall Street Journal story about U.S.
President Donald Trump giving the CIA the authority to conduct its own
drone strikes.
Bourque has explored the role of private
contractors before, in Shadow Company, his documentary about private
military companies, and a film about former U.S. National Security
Agency contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowdon that he had to
abandon.
“Whistleblowers, data leaks — anything along those lines
I’m fascinated with,” said Bourque, who acknowledged that Drone is “not
a completely American-friendly movie” based on mixed reviews stateside.
He said he was particularly intrigued by a drone’s chilling
surveillance potential — a development that sparks dramatic tension when
Imir spies on the family and uncovers secrets.
“The overall
scope was to have a psychological drone-strike on an American family,”
said Bourque, describing the impact on Neil’s wife and son as “emotional
collatoral damage.”
Drone, about to be rolled out
internationally, has already paid dividends for Bourque, such as being
hired to work on Medinah, the Qatari series featuring talent from 20
countries.
“It was a good time,” said Bourque who, ironically, is editing his Medinah episodes remotely.
Read more
here.