Wolf Koenig

Wolf Koenig is one of the stalwarts of the National Film Board. Over a period of nearly 50 years, he produced, directed, shot and even animated a wide range of films. Included among them are the incisive Glenn Gould: On and Off the record, Stravinsky and that acclaimed study of pop stardom, Lonely Boy. Koenig shot Corral for Low and codirected with him the much-acclaimed City of Gold.

He recalls the ’50s as being ‘the great time at the Film Board, when there were no borders. The departments weren’t delineated clearly so there was no territoriality. You could shift around and do anything.

‘Roman [Kroitor] and I had done some experimental work, practice shooting in black and white in 16mm. Colin must have known about it. He asked me if I’d come out and shoot for him in Alberta.

‘Being in Cardston, Alberta [Low’s hometown] was fascinating. Colin knew all the people. It was interesting to see him recollect his youth there. He took me around to various places: ‘You see that house that’s falling down? My family used to live there.’ And there would be cattle running through the house when we came on it.

‘He was right at home and knew everything that had to be looked at and seen and photographed and where to set up the camera.

‘Colin has a sense of the historical quality of this country. This transcribed itself into everything he did. Many of the animation films that he worked on like Romance of Transportation in Canada were historical.

‘With Corral, it was contemporary history, but it was looking back at how it had been one hundred years before and nothing had changed, really.’

Roman Kroitor

ROMAN Kroitor’s collaboration with Colin Low goes back nearly 50 years to The Age of the Beaver (1952). The native of Yorkton, SK worked on the script and the innovative camera techniques in City of Gold, codirected the visionary documentary Universe and was one of the three directors of the Expo 67 project, Labyrinth.

One of the founders of Imax Corp., Kroitor has long been acknowledged as one of the great technical innovators in documentary cinema.

Speaking about Universe, Kroitor recalls, ‘When I said we should make a film about astronomy, what I had in mind was something that would not have been terribly interesting. Basically, if you were going to see a planet in relation to something else, it would have been kind of literalistic in terms of the size of the things and how fast they moved.

‘Colin said, ‘If we do that, you’ll have touched absolutely zero sense of the scale of things.’

‘He had a very strong sense of how things should move, how they should look to convey the weight and size and grandeur of space. It was a gigantic contribution to that film.’

Four years later, ‘the National Film Board decided that it should try to do something for Expo 67. I was head of the committee that started thinking about what it might do. Labyrinth was something I came up with as a concept; then, immediately Colin got involved. The idea was that it was a combination of cinema and architecture. He said, ‘You could do interesting things – images in the floor and so on.’

‘He became involved early in the game and was very much part of the planning process. He was really interested in how different sorts of images might be combined, the multi-image thing – again it was film design, graphics, aesthetics and content all married together. He was a key figure in Labyrinth.’

Tom Daly

TOM Daly recently received the Order of Canada for his contributions to Canadian film. At the NFB he was the executive producer of the legendary ‘Unit B’ where Colin Low, Roman Kroitor, Stanley Jackson, Bob Verrall and many others made their first significant films in the ’50s and ’60s. Over a period of more than 40 years at the board, Daly produced and often edited a number of very successful documentaries including City of Gold, Circle of the Sun and Lonely Boy.

‘Colin’s background, his family life, had a lot of good thinking, good emotion in it. I think that it’s particularly valuable in understanding the qualities that Colin later showed in terms of actually inventing things, inventing systems for showing the stars [in Universe] and other things.

‘I once said to him, ‘How did you ever come by with making do with what there is, and finding ways of making original new things that are better than what we would do if we had all the stuff that we wanted?’

‘He said, ‘It’s really simple. If you’re familiar with being out west and ranches in general, the house is near the highway and the barn is a quarter of a mile away. If you’ve forgotten a tool that you should have brought out to the barn, you’re not going to walk back for it. You’re going to look around the barn for what there is, some wire here, some string, and make something do while you’re right there.’

‘This characteristic seems to be bred into him.

‘Colin knew how to deal with people who were physical, and with the horses. That’s why Corral came off so interestingly. It was not the way Americans dealt with horses, whipping them into submission. It was a way of actually winning them over. That was actually quite wonderful. Once a cowboy was able to touch the horse and let the horse feel he was friendly and helpful, the horse got interested in doing what he wanted it to do. Then they could teach the horse.’

Graeme Ferguson

GRAEME Ferguson, the founder of Imax Corp., has known Colin Low for five decades, since he was a summer student at the NFB in 1951. At Expo 67 in Montreal, Ferguson’s Polar Life film was a parallel success to Low’s, Kroitor’s and Hugh O’Connor’s Labyrinth. Soon afterwards, he formed Imax Corp. with Kroitor and Robert Kerr. Low was one of their main supporters.

‘One of the greatest of Colin’s enthusiasms was that he wanted to make an IMAX 3D film. When we first invented IMAX, we kicked around the idea that you could put two of these enormous projectors together and two cameras together and do 3D.

‘We could see how it could be done, but it was so difficult to get the funding together to build each 2D theatre that we never figured out how to make it any more than a faint dream. But Colin took it very seriously. He wanted to do IMAX 3D from early on and worked very hard on doing tests at the Film Board and persuading us – he was always a great persuader – to do it.

‘He saw the opportunity when the Film Board agreed to make Transitions for Expo 86 in Vancouver. He thought that he could persuade the sponsor, CN, to pay for a 3D film. Lo and behold, he got them to do so, and got us to put two projectors together and supply two cameras to the Film Board. The Film Board built the first rig to hold the cameras together. And he went out and did it!

‘He did all the pioneering work in IMAX 3D. The credit should be totally his. We all helped, but it was his vision and enthusiasm that led to IMAX 3D.

‘Interestingly enough, after Expo, it didn’t particularly take off. It seemed like a lone experiment. And then at Expo 90, Colin’s son Steve used IMAX 3D to make The Last Buffalo.

‘After that, IMAX 3D really took off. Now almost every projector that’s been put into the market in the last several years is 3D. Which proves Colin is the one who was right all along, and we were the ones who were blind to the future!’

Stephen Low

GOING into the same field as your father can be a difficult thing, but Stephen Low has turned it to his advantage. The younger Low’s dramatic documentaries for the National Film Board and Imax – The Challenger, The Last Buffalo, Titanica – have garnered critical and audience kudos around the globe. He took time off working on a ‘deep ocean project’ to talk about his father, Colin Low.

‘I spent my youth on film sets and thought that nothing much was going on. It was boring. In retrospect, if I’d known the significance of Colin’s early films’but no, I was just a kid.

‘Gradually I gained an interest and then decided I wanted to see if I could make my own movies. That’s when my father really helped me. I wrote many film proposals in the middle ’70s. He taught me a lot about how to look at movies, how they’re made: character, conflict, all the things you need that are so often ignored in filmmaking.

‘My first film was about an airplane – the Challenger Executive Jet. The jet was a really big success before they even built the first one: they sold 50 of them on paper. It was a natural conflict: can we build it, can we continue to sell it.

‘Colin helped me through that film. A lot of people bumble into non-fiction and think it’s not very disciplined: you just have to film a lot and somehow work it into a movie. But Colin taught me that it was very disciplined: you had to know why the audience should sit and wait for an hour to resolve this conflict, or figure out the nature of this character. What is moving this thing forward? What is the engine?

‘He directed me in areas that had some promise, like this airplane story, which most people would have dismissed as being a boring industrial. This was probably the first film to treat business and technology as romantic endeavors. It won a whole pile of awards around the world.’

Anne Wheeler

ANNE Wheeler, the director of Loyalties, the multi-Genie winner Bye Bye Blues and Better Than Chocolate, started her career cutting documentaries in Alberta in the early ’70s. It was there that she first met Colin Low.

‘One of the first films I worked on was a Challenge for Change film called Promises, Promises. Our company, Film West, shot it in Alberta. Colin was very much a part of Challenge for Change. It was all about communities communicating with government. Film West was one of the first, if not the first, company to get a National Film Board contract from Alberta. Colin was instrumental in getting us this contract.

‘With Promises, Promises, we shot too much footage so I became the editor of it. At that time, I had only cut on rewinds. We didn’t have much equipment either! Colin arranged that I come down to Montreal where there was more equipment.

‘He cut with me, along with Tom Daly, and became my instant film school. I hadn’t met real filmmakers before. They had a very strong philosophy. We had set out to make a film that was anti-government and really show the people side more than the government side.

‘Colin was very much a leveler and made sure both sides were well represented so no one would watch it and think the film was slanted in any way. He wanted it to be a two-way dialogue. He walked through that whole exercise with me.’

When Wheeler’s first feature, A War Story, was released in 1978, ‘I can remember him and Bob Verrall tromping down to the cinema on a snowy evening in Montreal, sitting with me, being moved by it, and taking me out afterwards and talking.

‘I really miss that whole philosophical level to filmmaking. Now it’s go go go, and what’s commercial, what’s the market, how are we going to sell it, better get a name star and all that. With those guys, it’s what’s it’s saying, how can it affect us, do we agree or disagree. It was a whole different level of filmmaking that I miss very much.’

Mark Zannis

MARK Zannis has been Colin Low’s producer at the National Film Board for the past 17 years. During that time, they have worked together on the giant-screen projects Transitions, Emergency and Momentum and the smaller and more personal Moving Pictures. An NFB veteran, Zannis has produced the documentaries Acts of Defiance, The Great Buffalo Saga and Dinosaurs: Piecing It All Together.

‘We’ve all stuck together forever, from ’84 on, our little group with Colin, Ernie McNabb, Tony Ianzelo and myself. We’ve done a pile of work together.

‘Colin came up with the concept for Transitions. He was very interested in the idea of 3D from the writings of Spottiswoode and McLaren. With the large screen, we could bring objects out closer to the audience. I remember going to the first test screening. I had never seen IMAX before, frankly, and I didn’t know if this thing was going to work or not. But it did work.

‘That was a year before the show opened. We lost only one show during that entire summer due to a power failure. The lineups were incredible. It was really, really successful. After that, going from being in sheer terror of it, I was more confident in IMAX.’

When Zannis first met Low, he admits to being in awe of him, but that soon passed once they started to work together. ‘He’s a terrific artist. He’s modest, so you don’t really know. A friend was visiting one day and Colin brought out his drawings from Ethiopia. That’s how they wound up in Moving Pictures. I had never known that he had done that stuff.’ *