Director Jason Buxton’s Sharp Corner feels both like a natural piece of Canadiana and an ambitious, well-financed bid to imagine a culture that’s more off-road.COREY J ISENOR/Elevation Pictures
In the grand tradition of Canadian cinema, director Jason Buxton’s new film Sharp Corner combines vehicular destruction with perverted obsession. But his psychological thriller is as far away from Cronenberg as the film’s Halifax location is from David’s beloved Toronto.
Adapted from Canadian author Russell Wangersky’s short story of the same name, Buxton’s film follows a deeply unhappy family man named Josh (Hell or High Water’s Ben Foster) who becomes fixated on the car crashes that keep happening outside his new countryside home, much to the concern of his wife Rachel (Avengers mainstay Cobie Smulders). The long-gestating follow-up to Buxton’s 2012 TIFF award-winner Blackbird, Sharp Corner feels both like a natural piece of Canadiana (Smulders, the setting, the unnerving mix of sex and speed) and an ambitious, well-financed bid to imagine a culture that’s more off-road.
Ahead of Sharp Corner’s release across the country this weekend, Buxton spoke with The Globe and Mail about taking a cinematic detour.
I understand that this film started with a very Canadian experience: wandering the aisles of a local Chapters, which is where you found Russell Wangersky’s collection of stories.
After Blackbird, I was on the lookout for IP [intellectual property], something that would be a good jumping off point to attach myself to. Because Sharp Corner was a short story, it was perfect because it had a great concept at its core, but I could add the three-act structure. Its story wasn’t autobiographical, but I could relate to it in some way.
You’re based in Nova Scotia – was part of that pull to put some of yourself into it why you shot it in Halifax?
Not really – that was something we decided back in preproduction. Like, why not make it Halifax? Why not make it Canada? Why not have Canadian money on-screen? When I wrote the script, I did imagine a loosely imagined version of Halifax, because I wanted it to be where you could be in the city, and then the country within a 30-minute drive.
I’ve been hearing about this project since 2017. How difficult is it to get a project of this size off the ground in Canada?
It was an incredible challenge. I won’t go into all the details, but the market shifted around. In 2017, it was peak TV happening. Then COVID. Then streaming. And it became a real challenge because our core financing is based on presales, which is based on certain actors on a certain level. We needed someone around the market value of Ben Foster. But then the strikes happened, and once they’re over every actor is so damn busy working on everything from movies to limited series. But we managed to get a little window in Ben’s schedule.
It’s funny talking about actors in terms of market value – I’d love to see a chart somewhere, every actor’s ROI percentage charted. But you did get two big, world-friendly actors here in Ben and Cobie. But I understand it was a tight shooting schedule, still.
We had 30 days, which, I mean, there are tighter schedules. But considering some of our accident set pieces, those would take a few days to shoot one sequence. It was tight, and you always wish you could have more, but we had just enough to be able to preserve the quality of the picture.
The house that production designer Jennifer Stewart built is remarkable – you’d never guess it was purpose-built from the ground up for this film. What was that process like?
We scouted all during the pandemic, just driving around different places in Nova Scotia. We were looking for either a house on a sharp corner, or a sharp corner where we could build a house. As you would imagine after watching the movie, not that many people build houses on sharp corners. So we found land that was remote, with no close neighbours, on a road that wasn’t well-travelled. And it turned out that the province of Nova Scotia owned it, and they leased us the land for just $150 a year.
Watching the film’s opening, which starts as a sex scene before it’s violently interrupted by an accident, you can’t help but think of Cronenberg’s Crash …
That’s a movie that comes up a lot, but it actually wasn’t a big influence for me. I love Cronenberg’s films, A History of Violence is a favourite, The Fly, too. And I’m a big fan of J.G. Ballard as well. But I was more interested in movies like Taxi Driver – exploring the mindset of a character looking to find purpose in his life.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Sharp Corner opens in theatres across Canada May 9.
