Here There Be Tygers

An interview with Mike Johnston By Michael Stringer

Near the end of the 1950s a precocious pre-teen in Arizona wanted to see some trains crash. He destroyed his toys in this pursuit and his father was understandably hesitant to replace them. So, the young boy had the idea to film the collision with an 8mm Kodak camera, thereby sparing his family further expense. This boy was, of course, Steven Spielberg, whose youthful obsession with home movies has become the stuff of cinematic lore. J.J. Abrams’ Spielbergian adventure film, Super 8, starts with nothing less than a train crash and Spielberg’s own teenaged directing forays can be easily found online. These early works have come to stand in for the endearing notion we love to entertain, that every great artist has to start somewhere.

It is this same idea that fuels the Persistence of Vision Film Festival, an annual showcase of short films by students in their third or fourth year of the Department of Theatre and Film at UBC. Over it’s 26-year history, the POV Festival has proudly presented the works of emerging artist and produced Oscar and Emmy Award nominees, as well as countless international film festival favourites. This year’s festival takes place April 29-30 when audiences will gather, once again, hoping to glimpse the early works of a future cineaste.

Mike Johnson is one of the filmmakers featured in this year’s line-up. His film, Here There Be Tygers, is an adaptation of a Steven King short story of the same name about a young boy’s run-in with a giant, menacing tiger. Like myself, Mike is an Ontario expatriate tempted away from home by the beauty of the BC coast and Vancouver’s vibrant film scene. He has made four fiction films during his time at UBC, seeming to return to themes of family and community. I sat down with Mike at Arbutus Coffee to talk about his new film and some of his inspirations.

So, did you know you wanted to get in to film before you went to school or is that something you fell into?

Yeah, absolutely. The story I always tell people is, I grew up on Disney films and then my grandparents showed me movies like Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Arc and then when I saw Jaws that was the time I sort of knew I wanted to get into making movies. I quote it as my favourite movie, I know all the lines, I’ve got two or three t- shirts from Jaws. So, those movies sort of inspired me. I always knew I wanted to do something in film. I didn’t know at the time what that meant or where I was going to land. I started making movies in High School, got my first camera then. You know, make movies with your friends on the weekends with no budget or any of that stuff.

So, you got started pretty young then.

My interest in film probably goes back to being 10 or 11 years old and then I started making movies probably when I was 14 or 15, just with a little handicam, stuff like that.

I was going to ask you if there were other films that you’d worked on but it sounds like you’ve been making films yourself for a while.

Yeah, with my time at UBC I think I’ve done 4 short films now and a documentary, and some of those were inside of class time for assignments or some just on my own time but I would say those are 4 – I don’t think serious is the right word, but they had a proper cast, proper crew, a well structured screenplay, a little bit of money behind them. I also work in the lighting department on various independent productions. Nothing big or Hollywood yet, but I’m interested in the whole world. I’m not just like, “I want to direct.” I’m kind of interested in everything that goes into making movies.

And there’s a good independent scene here in Vancouver.

Absolutely. Especially now that everything is booming, the industry is booming, the independent market is on the rise too and there’s so many cool pockets of film and different things that people are doing in Vancouver.

And of those 4 bigger projects, did you direct in any of those or is this your first directing [project]?

All four of those projects I was writer-director, a little bit of producing too. But on this project, Here There Be Tygers, I’m solely the director. It’s the first project I’ve done where I’m not also the screenwriter. I’m sure we’ll talk about this more, but it’s an adaptation of a short story whereas my other films have all been original stories that I’ve written.

I want to get into the adaptation in a minute. But with these short projects, you know sometimes you look back on director’s short films and they seem to go on to do very similar things or they do something completely different. Do you feel like what you’re doing with this film, or some of the projects you’ve done before, is what you’d like to continue doing down the line, or if you had a big budget and could do whatever you want would you do something completely different?

(chuckles) That’s a difficult question. You know, I’m a big fan of Steven Spielberg’s work, always have been, his earlier work and his later work too and people have pointed out that I have a very similar style, just the way I choose to work the camera or a lot of the short films that I made, when I was writing them, they all centred around family, which is something that is a pretty reoccurring theme in his films too.

And even this one centres around children.

Yeah, even this one has family aspects to [it] and I think Steven King and Steven Spielberg, even though they’ve never really done a collaboration, they feel like two things that would go well together. I think I’m still pretty new to it to have a distinct style yet but the themes of family and togetherness have always been very present throughout my work and I think I’d like to continue with those themes. But if somebody says, “Hey, we want to give you a hundred million dollars to do this” I’m not going say no.

I haven’t thought about Steven King and Steven Spielberg together so much but they both have this tendency towards something really creepy going on in very safe and familial spaces. Sometimes it’s disturbing or sometimes, like E.T., it’s just an alien that comes down and is benevolent, but there’s something abnormal happening in a really safe place.

And that’s something that really interests me about this story, Here There Be Tygers, it’s such an ordinary situation about a kid who really needs to go to the bathroom and then you just throw in this absolutely ridiculous sort of situation where there’s a full grown tiger in a bathroom. And that was a reoccurring thing – I did research on a lot of different Steven King short stories before I settled on this one, and they’re all, again, very similar premises. Very familiar situations or a very relatable situation but then with this sort of sidebar that’s just completely ridiculous but also strengthens the theme in a way.

I was actually a little curious about how you came into contact with the short story, is it something that you had read before or is it something that you sought out?

I’ve always been a huge Steven King fan, mostly of his novels. I’m thinking of It or The Shinning or The Mist, things like that. More of his “Hollywood” work that people are mostly familiar with. I was coming into my fourth year and I was looking for another story to do my next project. I’d written a bunch of things and I just wasn’t really happy, I wasn’t really finding – I wasn’t pushing. For me I always like to push myself in the next project, so I always like to go – not necessarily bigger but just try something a little more difficult or outside of my realm. For instance, here it’s working with kids. I’d never really done that before, so that was my push point. But then I just started doing some research on adaptation, what was available, and I came across Steven King’s “Dollar Babies.” They’re essentially a very select number of his short stories he makes available for independent filmmakers and students. You don’t own the rights to them or anything but you have the permission to make these films for one dollar. It was really intriguing but I thought, “I’m just this kid from Vancouver, he’s never going to respond to me.” It was 3 o’clock in the morning when I wrote this long-winded letter explaining what I wanted to do with the project, probably way too much information. Then two days later, I got a contract in my email that said here’s the permission, just follow this and that and send me a buck when you’ve got a chance. And that was the start.

And how do you send him a buck? Like, is that an e-mail money transfer?

(chuckles) It was actually just – the contract was very specific, it was like “we can’t take cheques, money orders or paypals” so I put an American dollar in the envelope and there it went.

There ya go. Old fashioned.

Yeah, very old fashioned.

When you were looking through the short stories, what was it about this one in particular that interested you?

When you’re a film student, and at UBC we have to finance our projects ourselves, it comes down to do-ability and budget. So, I was looking at a few of these [stories] and then I started to read Here There Be Tygers and there was just something so innocent and relatable about this story. This kid who thinks he sees a tiger in the bathroom. The story itself is very ambiguous; is there an actual tiger in the bathroom, is it a figment of his imagination? It left me to figure that out and I just took it as a kid with this amazing imagination – this kid who just, sort of wanders. It resonated with me because I was certainly that kid in elementary school who was not paying attention in class and off in another world thinking about “what could I be doing out there instead of being in math class?”

It was almost as if the character was in those “choose your own adventure” stories. It felt like he wanted to be this kid, in this little mini-movie, where he’s running away from a tiger in a bathroom. It was just very wholesome. Last year I did a sort of dark, dramatic story. I was looking to do something a little lighter, a little different. A light fun movie with some great dialogue between the kids and it just seemed like the right one. The other stories I was reading were pretty dark – dark Steven King ones. This is little lighter, a little more bizarre. Certainly it’s not the easiest one to pull off – the idea of having a tiger in a bathroom and everything. But, that theme of this kid and his overactive imagination just resonated with me.

You said you never adapted before, how did you find that process of adapting a written short story into a script, into a visual work?

I had a really good time doing it. People have asked me “Did you change the story?” For this one, because it was my first adaptation, I played it pretty close to the written word. Pretty much when I was adapting it I had the short story open over here and I was making my notes and going along with it. The only thing I changed was just for budget and the ability to be able to do it in the time we had. In my adaptation, the kid starts out in detention whereas in the original short story he’s just in a normal Monday class or something. We just didn’t have the time to be able to find 26 kids to sit in class.

And then manage that on the day.

And manage that, yeah. That was sort of causing me a brain aneurism just thinking about it. So, we did change that but otherwise I played it pretty close to the original. I had a great time, you know when you’re not writing your own screenplay you’re really – you’re not obsessing over the little details, “oh, this has got to be red – the curtains have to be red” because that’s what I see. This year [with adaptation] you’re kind of locked into certain things. I certainly think I created my own world for the characters to live in but there’s certain things that were written that I had to adapt. And I don’t want to say it’s easier but I found it certainly more fun for me, to not have to be obsessive over every word or every chunk of dialogue.

Did you find it a little more freeing, just not having to worry about those things?

A little more freeing, yeah. Just to know that you’re already adapting a Stephen King short story, you know you’ve already got a strong writer behind the screenplay. It’s just a matter of how you interpret that onto the screen. I think it’s healthy for a filmmaker to obsess over certain things but [now] I was obsessing over the story, the theme and not the colour of the curtains or whatever. It was an interesting process, definitely one that I want to explore more.

You kept the title the same and in the title “tigers” is spelled with a Y instead of an I. What do you make of that from the short story and why did you keep it?

It’s a really interesting question. It’s one that, now that we’re a week away from the film premiering, I get quite often. And the truthful answer is, I honestly have no good idea. Even in the short story or in the dialogue when he directly writes the word “tiger” he spells it T-I-G-E-R. It’s just the title that’s different and I tried to do a little bit of research on it. The best thing I could come up with is that there’s also a Ray Bradbury story called Here There Be Tigers and it’s spelled the exact same way. I think when I looked it up, Stephen King was either influenced by [Bradbury] or they were connected in some way in their early careers. So, I don’t know if that’s an homage to him in particular but in terms of the story, there’s no really good idea as to why. If I ever get the opportunity to interface with Stephen King further, that’s certainly going to be one of my first questions. But I think, to me, it adds a little bit more mystery and intrigue to it, because when you read the title it’s like, “Tyger, can’t be an actual tiger, what could it be?” It adds a little bit more mystery to the title and to the story itself, which I think is kind of cool.

So, talking about how this was a slightly lighter topic, and the idea of this kid who needs to go to the bathroom and finds a tiger and is worried about peeing his pants, there’s something sort of frightening there with that tiger but there’s also a potential for comedy and humour. Did you go that route, to try and bring out the comedy of the story?

Absolutely, I really wanted to. It’s something I tried to do and hopefully something that translates in the final film. I really wanted to paint a scary scenario but then also bring out the humour in it. There’s a great exchange between Charles, the one who has to go to the bathroom, and another boy in the class, Kenny. They’re just on the stairs talking, “I can’t go to the bathroom because there’s a tiger in there,” and Kenny’s like, “Tigers don’t use bathrooms, you idiot.” It just a very childish exchange, these two kids who are nine and ten years old. It was hard for me to direct because it’s hard to tell [a kid] what to do as a kid, but they just brought it out naturally and it’s that child[like] innocence we tried to play up. I think there are a lot of funny moments in it and a lot of the dialogue is taken directly from the story, it’s just sort of ridiculous. The teacher, Ms. Bird, we really tried to make her a very menacing figure, taunting Charles throughout the whole process. There are humorous moments and we definitely tried to make it scary [too].

How did you find trying to manage those two? Trying to keep it a little bit funny and a little bit scary.

I wanted to play the humour in moderation because I did want it to be, [and] I always pitched it as, a monster movie. It was an homage, even in the way we constructed the cinematography and some of the editing, to 80s monster movies. We didn’t have the budget to put an actual jungle cat in the bathroom, as you can imagine. So, it was [also] playing with the idea of the scariest thing is the thing the audience can’t see, and playing toward films like Jaws and Alien where you go most of the movie without seeing the creature. I certainly wanted to be truthful in that, I wanted to make it a true Stephen King story where it’s very creepy, very scary but I didn’t want to ignore the humour altogether. I’d like to take credit for it but a lot of it was the actors and the performances they turned in on the day. I think it’s funnier than I expected it to be and certainly [in] the critiques and the reviews I’ve done people have found it quite funny, which I think is great. I never wrote it as a comedy. I wrote it as a monster movie but I wanted to, because the situation is so absurd and ridiculous, I really wanted to highlight those funny moments. I did want to make sure that it was a monster movie through and through but that a ten-year-old kid could walk out of it not crying.

I find it interesting that you say you wrote it as a monster movie but that the comedy was just there, to a degree. When I think of a lot of filmmakers that are associated with thrillers or horrors or even just creepy movies, like David Lynch or Hitchcock, there’s a lot of humour in all their films too. Do you find that fear and humour go hand in hand naturally, or is it something that you need to put together more artificially?

I think they can go together naturally. A friend of mine actually makes horror movies – like gruesome horror movies, blood and guts horror movies – but something I always found very interesting that he said was that there’s something so cool about being able to go to a movie and be scared and then go home and everything’s fine. It’s not a real scenario. Which, I think taught me about humour and I think that’s something that’s associated with this movie, Here There Be Tygers. I think it’s great that people can come and watch this monster movie about an absurd situation but then also walk out laughing. And I think that’s, again, something that just naturally came out, you know? I never planned to have a connection with the horror and the humour. But I think those are two things that naturally go together.

You’d mentioned Jaws and Alien as kind of inspirations for how you filmed the tiger – the monster that’s not seen. Were there any other films that inspired you in terms of the style of visuals? I mean, the trailer I’ve seen so far definitely has a strong mood and is very atmospheric.

I’d say Alien was probably the biggest inspiration just in terms of the cinematography and the colour. I didn’t want the bathroom to be your traditional high key, high lit bathroom. The inspiration for it was the spaceship on Alien, this creepy sort of bathroom that creaks and you can hear the boilers shaking, you know? I think people can walk away saying that’s weird, why would he go in to a bathroom like that? Well, it’s a monster movie. None of this is grounded in reality. None of this is real life here. But Alien was certainly the biggest one in terms of establishing the colour and the look. Everything is pretty dark and pretty low-lit because it’s not the bathroom you want to walk into. It’s not the one you want to find yourself in alone. And then the early 80s, 90s movies that I love so much. I’m not a big fan of overly “cutty” films that just cut here, cut there. We put a lot of time and effort into dolly shots, a lot of continuous takes, and we really tried to use that dolly as much as we can. Wherever we were, we tried to make something into a push or a pull or slow creeps and stuff that really accentuates the sort of dread and terror. I’ve always said the finished product is kind of a throwback to the movies that I used to like watching. Even when we were editing the other day I put in a couple wipes, you know those old Star Wars wipes, because it’s fun, it’s cool.

And Jaws was the whole inspiration for the score. I’ve had a composer for three or four films now and we were talking about how to do the score here and I’m like, “Let’s try Jaws and Stranger Things, put those together and see what happens.” And it was pretty cool.

Lastly, you mentioned working with the kids. How did you find the process of directing children different from directing adults?

Incredibly challenging. Just from an administrative standpoint, when you’re shooting with kids you can only shoot for ten hours, whereas with adults you get up to twelve hours. So, that already condenses your shooting schedule and how much time you have. I did about a week and a half’s worth of rehearsals with just the lead, and then additional rehearsals with the other kids as well. And that was invaluable. I don’t think I could have just walked onto set and been like, “Let’s just try this and we’ll see what happens.” They always teach us in directing not to say exactly what you want. Like, “I want you to step here and ACTION!” When I was directing last year I always tried to push myself to not tell an actor exactly what to do. Because something I’ve learned is, don’t lie to an actor. Because they’re students of human behaviour so they’ll smell it on you. I did that once and it kind of came back to bite me. It’s like, “you know what, I need you to stand over here because it looks nice on the camera

and the light coming through the window is really good.” As opposed to trying to lie like, “Oh, yeah your character would [do that].” So I always tried to push myself to not tell an actor what to do but with kids you have to tell them exactly what to do. In that sense it was a little bit easier because you weren’t searching for that motivation every time. You, as the director, knew what the motivation was but for the kid it’s just A, B and C. Walk here, walk there.

With the lead actor I was actually struggling for quite a bit. We didn’t have a tiger on the day so it was all on him to make the reactions and everything play. I was struggling for quite a while in rehearsals to get the character out and there was a day when I was [wondering], “What have I done, did I cast the wrong guy, did I not put in enough time, did I pick the wrong story, what have I done?” Just going through everything. And then I sat him down and started talking to him and found that he had this love for video games. When I was his age I loved video games and he was telling me about this one scary video game that he plays that kind of freaked him out a little bit. So, we just started relating the situations, the different scenes, to the situations in the video game. It’s like, “Hey Logan, remember that moment in the game where the girl pops up and scared you? I want you to react just like you’d react to that.” As soon as we started doing that [he] nailed it. He got it a hundred percent. It was really cool actually, to watch a kid just click in like that. After that it was smooth sailing all the way along. It’s funny, with kids you have to just find that thing that they can understand. I think a lot of times my language was just a little bit too advanced for a nine or ten year old to understand. So, I had to sort of think, “Okay, I’m nine years old how would I say this?” It was difficult. Ten hours of shooting is hard on these kids. We had to take a lot of breaks and there are certainly moments where you could see them tiring out or just getting distracted. The first thirty minutes after lunch was usually pretty hard. So, it was definitely a challenge but it’s not like I wish I didn’t do that. I’m glad I have that experience and I hope that next time I go to direct children, whether they be the same age or a little bit older, I have that experience under my belt so it’s a little bit better. But they did a great job especially the lead actor, Logan, he carries that film. It’s really his movie. There are a few other characters in the film but they each have one scene here and there, and Logan’s in every scene. The success of the film is really on his back, and I think he did a great job.