Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski from Montreal earned an Academy Award nomination Thursday for their stop-motion film, The Girl Who Cried Pearls.Scott McQuarrie/Supplied
Hollywood’s highest-profile Canadians didn’t exactly win over Academy Awards voters Thursday when nominations for this year’s Oscars were unveiled.
Homegrown directors James Cameron (Avatar: Fire and Ash) and Maggie Kang (KPop Demon Hunters) were, not unexpectedly, passed over in the big categories, although it was genuinely surprising that unofficial-Canadian/Toronto superfan Guillermo del Toro missed out scoring a nomination in the Best Director category for Frankenstein. (Del Toro, who produced the film alongside long-time Canadian collaborator J. Miles Dale and former Netflix film chief Scott Stuber, still got recognition as Frankenstein earned a nomination for Best Picture.)
Yet, as frequently happens, Canadian artists still proved their might in a handful of under-the-radar but no less worthy categories, including Best Makeup and Hairstyling, where Frankenstein’s team of Mike Hill, Jordan Samuel and Cliona Furey scored a nomination; Best Documentary Short, where Alison McAlpine’s Perfectly a Strangeness got a nod; and Best Animated Short, where the Montreal-based duo Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski earned a nom for their beautifully surreal stop-motion tale The Girl Who Cried Pearls.
Maciek Szczerbowski works behind the scenes. He said the National Film Board has set a high bar.martin gros/Supplied
Almost immediately after learning about their honour, Lavis and Szczerbowski, who were previously up for an Academy Award with their 2007 short Madame Tutli-Putli, spoke with The Globe and Mail about making Oscar-calibre art that takes time, patience and crucial public support.
How does the sensation of getting a nomination feel today versus when it first happened almost 20 years ago?
Chris Lavis: What was extraordinary about the first nomination is that it was our first film that we ever made. And that was all due to the enormous amount of trust that the National Film Board put in us to not just make a film, but a pretty ambitious one.
Maciek Szczerbowski: Unbelievably, they kept trusting us.
Lavis: I think we’re much more aware of the ambition and time it takes to make these kinds of movies. We’re also more cognizant of how huge a role the community around us plays in making these movies work. So when something like this happens, it’s a wonderful validation of the work that the NFB puts in, but also the work of Patrick Watson, who made such a wonderful score here, or Colm Feore, who narrated the English-language version.
Szczerbowski: We live here in Montreal, which is where we’ve done all of our work, and we exist inside of an artistic community that is just lousy with talent. The idea that these people keep accepting our invitation to play inside the sandbox together is so meaningful to us. And it’s a reminder that we need to have fun making these films, because something like an Oscar nomination might just never happen again.
Chris Lavis said stop-motion films require total commitment, as they can take years to make.martin gros/Supplied
How would you describe the commitment of the NFB specifically over the past two decades or so of your careers?
Lavis: It’s fair to say that we would not have become animators without the National Film Board of Canada. These stop-motion films take years to make, it is a total commitment that requires the vision of a unique institution. We’ve certainly noticed that in the U.S., there’s no government arts funding of any kind. In France, Spain, they do support animation. But there’s nothing anywhere on the planet like the National Film Board, which has a specific mandate to support short animated features. We’re proud to be part of that continuum of award-winning films.
Szczerbowski: They have raised the bar very high. Watching the work of colleagues like Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis, it makes you want to compete on an Olympic level.
On that note, there’s a perennial discussion about the crisis in Canadian arts funding, and I feel that’s reaching a new inflection point now with so much talk about cultural sovereignty, and protecting our artists. How bullish are you on Canada’s support for the arts?
Lavis: Well, if it were to ever end, it would be a goddamn shame. What the National Film Board allows with projects like this is to contribute to the dialogue of Canada. You know, when we were growing up, it was consuming Canadian music on MuchMusic, watching the films of Bruce McDonald, it all set a fire under us. And now we have a real wave of creativity that, for people like us who work in relative seclusion, we can participate in the larger dialogue of our culture, and compete on a global level, too.
The Girl Who Cried Pearls was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.Courtesy of the National Film Board of Canada./Supplied
Szczerbowski: As you know, “CanCon” as a goal is obviously not realistic any more. But I think the government ought to have the guts to ask Netflix and Paramount and Amazon and these other companies to contribute to the kitty of funding Canadian culture with [the Online Streaming Act]. I think we’ll have a hard time surviving if we don’t.
Lavis: We’re bullish, we believe in this country. And we also believe in the city of Montreal. It is still an amazing artistic city, in spite of the rent increases. It’s still pumping out top-shelf work.
Can you say what you might be working on next, and what the timeline for that might be given the long gestation periods it takes to produce stop-motion animated work?
Szczerbowski: We’re giving ourselves a little bridge project this time. Patrick Watson, our composer, had an idea to create a vinyl record, a radio drama version of The Girl Who Cried Pearls. So we’ve begun to think about that. It’s against the grain of what we’re maybe supposed to do ...
Lavis: The attractive thing is that it’s something that we’ve never done. The risk of failure is real. But without that, why bother, right?
The Girl Who Cried Pearls is streaming for free on NFB.ca.
This interview has been condensed and edited.