a new

voice

There must be something about living in Manitoba that produces distinctive, quirky, offbeat talents the likes of Guy Maddin, Bruce Duggan, Tracey Traeger and now John Kozak, who wrote and directed the soon-to-become controversial film, Strays.

Maybe it’s those endless winters spent holed up warding off the cold that stir even the most stagnant imagination. Maybe it’s the big Prairie skies that stretch into infinity or the roads heading off into nowhere that leave a lingering sense of isolation and keep the creative spirits alive. But Kozak doesn’t think so. ‘In fact,’ he says, ‘I don’t feel isolated at all. I think it’s just that we all have our own stories we want to tell and, coincidentally, we just happen to be telling them in Manitoba.’

Film school

Like most filmmakers, Kozak became interested in filmmaking by going to the movies. But the 38-year-old Winnipeg native decided to go several steps further. In 1975, after spending several years making Super 8 movies and realizing there wasn’t much happening in the way of productions on which to hone his craft in Manitoba, he headed off to film school in New York.

The head of nyu at the time was Laslo Benedek, an old Hollywood director whose credits include The Wild One starring Marlon Brando. As for other influences, Kozak says he draws inspiration from anywhere from John Cassavetes to the late great Federico Fellini.

In 1981, after being spoiled by the stimulation of big city life, with easy access to actors, production facilities and labs, much to everyone’s surprise, and maybe even to his own, Kozak headed back north to Winnipeg. ‘Sure there was a lot less going on there, but that’s where I’m from, what I know and where I’m most comfortable in terms of storytelling.’

He started working variously as an editor, sound recordist, script supervisor, gaffer, boom operator, focus puller and even an actor – getting his big break playing a salesman in a paint commercial – anything to pay the bills while he continued to write and direct his own short films.

In 1990, with the help of arts grants from the Canada Council, Kozak tackled his first low, low, low-budget film, Celestial Matter, and then followed it up with a one-hour, low-budget drama, Dorry, a psychological drama about two sisters living in a small Prairie town who torment each other through an intense power play until one eventually tries to kill off the other. It attracted considerable attention.

Stressed

Kozak says he’s most interested in characters who are stressed in one way or another. ‘I don’t know why, but it intrigues me.’

Once again, Kozak has chosen to explore this theme in his feature film, Strays, which completed production earlier this fall and, budgeted at $1 million, is his largest undertaking thus far.

‘The characters are all stressed in their environment or in their own heads,’ says Kozak. ‘Strays is about things getting out of hand, getting out of control, people who don’t always do what is best for themselves. I try to follow the dynamics of why people do that and explain visually in a story, step by step, why these people went haywire.’

Produced by Ken Rodeck and Phyllis Laing for Rode Pictures, Strays revolves around a group of 13-year-old suburban teenagers left totally on their own.

Kozak elaborates: ‘They have too much energy and no focused world in which they can function. They’ve become adrift, bullies wandering around looking for trouble and not running into any resistance, so their behavior escalates as they push for reaction. However, they get away with everything until it culminates in a very violent confrontation.’

He hastens to add that while what the characters do is violent, it’s not visually violent on-screen.

Kozak wrote the script two years ago. ‘Now,’ he says, ‘every day when I open up the newspaper there’s something that mirrors what I had written in the script reaffirming the nature of what I was exploring in the story. These kids find themselves in a world that has no rules because they’ve been largely ignored. And like a modern-day Lord of the Flies, they’re having to make up their own rules, and when 12-year-old boys make up their own moral code, it’s usually a horrible one.’

Kozak’s primary aim as a filmmaker is to be a good storyteller. ‘A story is something that will communicate a shared experience.’ In Strays, he says there’s a huge difference between getting information out of a newspaper about what kids do rather than seeing it told through a story.

‘When you just get the facts there’s no human understanding to it. When you see it played out in the drama of a story, no matter how horrible it is, you start to understand how it can happen; there’s always a story behind it, and why it happens can be communicated so that an audinece can participate in a shared understanding. And that’s powerful.’