Sean Menard's documentary Run Terry Run draws on 96 reels of restored and largely unseen footage of Terry Fox.Run Terry Run/Supplied
In the Canadian film world, there is a typical path to follow.
If you’re lucky, your project gets accepted into a festival at home or abroad. If you’re really lucky, it’ll show in a handful of theatres. If you’re exceptionally lucky, that theatrical run will lead to a healthy long shelf-life on streaming and television.
But most of the time, it is a constant fight for attention and eyeballs. And if you’re releasing a documentary instead of a feature narrative film? Well, good luck.
Canadian director Sean Menard doesn’t believe much in chance – he’s more a do-it-yourself-or-die-trying kind of guy. In 2023, after securing a premiere at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Tex., for his MuchMusic documentary 299 Queen Street West, Menard skipped the theatrical-release playbook and rented out Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall for the film’s hometown premiere (spreading the charges across three credit cards).
Menard at the Roy Thomson Hall premiere of 299 Queen Street West in 2023.GEORGE PIMENTEL/Supplied
That gambit led to what the director calls a successful road-show across the country that brought in $600,000 in ticket sales – an unusual method of self-distribution that Menard is looking to replicate with his new Terry Fox documentary, Run Terry Run. The film will have its world premiere at Roy Thomson Hall Nov. 10, featuring a live musical score performed by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.
Ahead of the premiere, Menard spoke with The Globe and Mail about Fox’s Marathon of Hope and his own long-distance run in the film industry.
There have been several movies and documentaries about Terry Fox’s life. What did you feel was missing?
I just never got a sense of who he really was, and why he was doing the race, straight from his perspective. I wanted to make a documentary that brought people back to 1980. The entire film is set then. There are no look-backs, no view from the modern day. And I had a feeling that there would be missing reels out there somewhere, because I was watching all this footage on YouTube and it was incredibly low, VHS quality that someone had put up from some other source. If I could track down any original film, I could digitize it into 4K and we’d have an image of a Canadian icon that no one’s ever seen before.
You say this film features footage from 96 previously unseen reels, and unheard audio interviews. How did you track that down?
I started just asking questions, with Terry’s family. It then became a treasure hunt for nine months, and I was eventually pointed in the direction of a storage facility, which ended up being five street lights from my house in Toronto.
Who did the footage belong to?
The Terry Fox Foundation had accumulated a bunch of this footage over the years, and were paying to store it. At some point, no one had the ability to view the reels any more, so nothing was properly labelled. It was me trying to piece it all together. Years ago, a filmmaker named John Simpson was the first to film Terry on the East Coast. He started gathering stuff, and the foundation had acquired his footage. But he’d say for years that the stuff was thrown out, so he was pretty shocked to find it existed.
The entire film is set in 1980, during the Marathon of Hope.HO/The Canadian Press
Does John have any involvement with this project?
I’ve spoken with him on the phone and invited him to the premiere. He’s coming, and he’s excited. But he’s very shocked it existed. I started digitizing the reels in February, then conducting interviews. But I only have four interviews in the film, just the people who were directly tied to the story. I had a long rough cut three or four months later. It was the fastest I’d ever gone through a story, because it’s a linear narrative. The MuchMusic film, that was 30 years’ worth of archives, so it was much longer.
Why premiere this at Roy Thomson yourself, and not go the traditional route of a festival or a theatrical release?
We’re calling it an “advance screening,” because we still want to be able to hold on to a festival opportunity for a premiere. I wanted to have something where ticket sales could go to the very thing that Terry was running for. I spoke to the Foundation, and they came in and handled it.
So you’re not putting your own money into this, like the last time?
Well, I put my own money into making the film. But not the money to screen it or distribute it.
What was your takeaway from that first time, with the MuchMusic documentary? Did you make your money back?
We did 15 concert halls in that tour, and the money I made off of that I put directly into funding this project. Distributors would tell me back then, “Oh, no one is going to pay $15 to see a documentary in theatres.” And I’d say they’re wrong, because people want to have that experience, especially if the subject matter lends itself to an emotional response. I didn’t set out to try and break the distribution model. I just tried to make my money back.
I have to ask about the status of the MuchMusic film, because last I heard, it was set to stream on Crave and then it was pulled just before the release date. The word out there was that there were rights issues with the music used.
I don’t know legally how much I can speak on it, other than to say the record labels and the rights holders have reached an agreement, and they’re just getting the necessary approvals from publishers and artists. There’s hope that it will come out by the end of the year.
Run Terry Run screens Nov. 10 at Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto. More information at terryfox.org.
This interview was condensed and edited.