“You look like you took the Blue Night Bus home,” Mr. Sherna says in “Shook” after getting an eyeful of his son Ashish (Saamer Usmani) and his friends after a night at the club where any hangover they have has been exacerbated by missing the last subway to make it out to the outskirts of Toronto. Coffee might improve the situation, but for Ash ordering it has become a little death when to give a name for his Americano is to feel publicly embarrassed when inevitably it’s pronounced wrong at the counter and his eyes might be a little redder when he is loathe to see his father in the first place who has been estranged from his family since divorcing his mother, leaving her to find a new apartment for herself and her two sons. The bad news isn’t over yet when Mr. Sherna wouldn’t have come to see Ash without a matter of pressing importance, but in his endearing feature narrative debut, director Amar Wala shows a gift for making difficult things a little easier to swallow with a healthy dash of humor.
In this case, it comes in the form of the Hakka cuisine that Mr. Sherna steals away from Ash’s pals before not-so-politely telling them to scram when he’s about to apprise his son of an early diagnosis of Parkinson’s, which becomes just one of many concerns that the recent Fine Arts grad has to shoulder in the dramedy. When Ash has attempted to take care of everyone in his family after his parents’ separation, he doesn’t seem to be helping anyone, least of all himself, which might explain his twitchy reaction to being flirted with by Claire (Amy Forsyth) on the rare morning he dares to get coffee, too consumed with everything else that’s going on to notice. Being a friend of his friend’s girlfriend, Claire has a second opportunity to pull him out of his shell, but there’s still reason for Ash to climb back in when she’s planning to move to Montreal by the end of summer, stifling the potential for a serious relationship despite the serious chemistry they have.
Ash may not be great at handling all that’s coming at him at a time when he probably should be putting himself first, but Wala deftly balances tones in witnessing the little tragedies that make his life a lot harder than it should be, from having a schedule endlessly at odds with how the Metro actually runs to placing his energy in all the wrong places. The details are what make “Shook” cut deep in both its laughs and its more dramatic moments, the kind you realize usually don’t make it to print as Ash is obliged to pitch a book around town as an author who probably gets meetings based on his cultural heritage as much as his talent, but finds those doors closed when bringing up the microaggressions that are part of his daily life. As the film sees Ash caught between caring his profane father and having people tell him they love him without really being interested in who he is, Wala presents a compelling portrait of someone who has to find his place in the world before he can really start to grow.
With “Shook” having its hometown premiere at one of the biggest film festivals in the world this week in Toronto, the director spoke about all he had to overcome himself, having started out in the nonfiction space, to make his first narrative feature, finding out inadvertently he made as much of a comedy as a drama and having everyday life rise to the level of cinema.
This may be a bit silly to start, but how much of this film and perhaps your life in general has been shaped by the Toronto transit system?
More than I would like, let’s put it that way. But a fair amount. What city are you in?
I’m in Los Angeles, but I do come in for the festival every year.
I think L.A. is probably similar in that there’s a ton of traffic and it’s very spread out, so if you’re from certain neighborhoods in Toronto, you have to rely on transit. It was very normal for me growing up to be on a bus for an hour-and-a-half each way to school and back and think that was normal. Now that I’m a little older, I’m like, “The transit system probably should be a bit better in a city this size,” but [that realization] is a defining moment and you spend so much of your time when you’re young and you’re an aspiring filmmaker, just sitting there on the bus, and you can’t help but think about that moment cinematically because there’s nothing to do. Your mind just wanders, so I always just imagined filming on the transit system because I spent so much time on it and we finally got to do it.
It’s a really elegant way of presenting Ashish’s place in the world, as is this starting idea of avoiding using his real name to buy coffee when the baristas will no doubt butcher his name. How did that come about?
That scene has been in the script going back to our first draft and it’s always something I’ve thought about. When you’re a South Asian guy, or any sort of ethnic minority who has a name that isn’t a normal Western name that gets mispronounced, for a moment there, it almost became cool for people to say, “Oh no, let’s pronounce your name the correct way.” But my name is actually pronounced Am-Aer, which has a very specific intonation that a lot of people who aren’t South Asian can’t do, so I’m fine with Amar.
Before that, I would give fake names at coffee shops just because I didn’t want to deal with it and when I started dating my wife, who I’ve been with for 15 years, the first time she heard me use a fake name, she was like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, what is that?” She’s Italian, and she was angry at me for not using my own real name. Sometimes it’s just easier and I don’t want to explain the real pronunciation of my actual name. I think it’s very common for people, and as an aspiring filmmaker, we just spend a lot of time in coffee shops when we’re not working, so it just became a thing that worked its way into the script.
Originally, you made a short that was centered around the father-son relationship before expanding it to a feature. Did either making it or the reaction to it shape how you wanted to approach this?
A little bit. I had been making documentaries for a while, and I knew for a while I wanted to make a [narrative] feature. In Canada and probably the States too, the industry wants you to just pick a lane and stick to it. And artists don’t really wanna do that. We want to try different things. So I knew I wanted to establish myself as someone who could do scripted work and when I knew I wanted to make a feature, I wanted to expand beyond the father-son story and do a more general family story and a romantic story about this city. But I had a feeling that I needed to prove something before I would get a shot at doing that. I read a lot about how “Whiplash” had started off as a short and become a feature as essentially a scene from the film that then got expanded, and I decided that scene [between the father and son] could really be a great vehicle to kind of demonstrate my skills as a fiction filmmaker.
I got some arts council money up here and [the short] became a chance to prove that I can work as a scripted filmmaker, even though I felt like, as an artist, you shouldn’t have to do that. And it made a lot of sense to me [in terms of getting a feature set up], but also it gave me the chance to work certain muscles that I didn’t get to work for a few years while doing docs.For example, just writing a screenplay is not something we do with documentaries, [nor is] working with actors, so I just wanted a chance to like exercise those muscles again and it was a really fulfilling experience. It gave me the confidence to know I can make a feature.
Not only do you get to show your own range, but you give that chance to an actor as well. What was it like to find someone who could take this on?
If I can be perfectly honest, when we were talking about casting a South Asian lead who could carry a feature film in North America, in English, there aren’t that many names, especially somebody who has done enough work that they could be a bit of a draw and could be of interest to funders. We knew we wanted someone that had that classic leading man quality, like the handsomeness and the charm of what classic leading men roles were like, even though the character I think has a lot of flaws. I grew up in India, so of course I’m very used to South Asian men and women having really large, robust and dynamic roles. But in Western cinema, it seemed the archetype that broke through was the nerdy comedic Indian guy, right? And not that there’s anything wrong with these performers, but like the Aziz Ansari type or the Kumail Nanjiani-type, who have done an incredible job with their work, but it always seemed like the brown guy was never allowed to be hot or the stud in the room.
We wanted to challenge that a little bit with the casting, and of course, Saamer is one of the most handsome people you’ll ever meet in your life, but he’s also an incredible actor. He’s in literally every scene of the movie and he has to play a range of emotions and really carry the thing. When I spoke with him about the script and his career and what he was hoping to achieve, I was just really taken by what a standup guy he is. He’s from Toronto originally, so he knew the city well and I just had these instincts that this is someone that could carry this extremely demanding role. It worked out beautifully for us. We actually had a different actor that we believed would play the role for a while before Saamer was cast, but that actor was busy and that’s really nerve wracking as a South Asian filmmaker with South Asian cast in mind because again there’s not that many names and there’s a lot of actors that were never given that opportunity over the years coming up to play these lead roles. We’re still growing the database of incredible South Asian actors, so Saamer coming on board at the right time was just the ultimate blessing for the movie and I cannot imagine making the movie without him now.
When these things often take on a life of their own, was there anything you may not have anticipated that ended up in the film that you really like about it?
The tone of the film surprised me and Adnan, my co-writer as well, in that we always saw the film as a drama that has some humor in it. But I feel like with the laughs that we got the first time we screened the film for cast and crew — and I’m super excited to see how an audience reacts at TIFF — we were shocked at the level of laughter. It feels like the film is almost evenly a comedy and a drama now, which is not something I expected when we wrote it and I’m really glad it’s working out because that’s a really difficult balance to go back and forth. In fact, when we were editing, we did have a couple of other jokes that were a bit broader and what I realized during the process with my editor Sean Rikus was that because those broader jokes were there and it’s a pretty intense personal drama, it was pulling the film in these two different directions and making neither feel as powerful as it should. So when we pulled some of those broader jokes out of the film and really focused on humor that was rooted in character, then it made the drama really sink in and still gave us that lightness that we needed.
You also nicely balance a casual quality in the camerawork with some real cinematic moments – I’m thinking of the scene when Ash is asking his mother to bring in the father back and you’ve got that beautiful shot in the mirror. Do you have to give yourself permission to do something slightly surreal like that?
Because it’s my first scripted feature, but I’ve been filmmaking for a while, so I felt very lucky to get a chance to make this feature. A lot of the times with filmmakers, particularly filmmakers of color, who are grinding out a microbudget first film, you’re forced to shoot handheld or take that doc style approach to things because of the lack of resources and throughout the film, my DP Peter Hadfield and I talked about taking a very simple, classic approach to the cinema because we felt like the story really deserved that. Even though it’s a very down-to-earth, simple story, I wanted a few moments to really show what we could do with the camera, and I didn’t want do any crazy one-ers or anything that was like drawing attention to me as the filmmaker, but that moment felt like, A, we knew we wanted to do a mirror shot, and B, our production designer Nicole Simmons, brought in this absolutely stunning mirror, which plays as a device throughout the film. In an earlier scene, the mom is setting herself up for a night out in the mirror. And there’s another short [scene] that takes place without any movement within that mirror itself and you realize later in the film what the mom was getting ready for, and that Ash is just completely oblivious to [because he’s so preoccupied with his own issues].
Because the mirror played so well the first time, we felt how can we take this second moment, which is a bit of an ugly moment between Ash and his mom, and break it and bring some drama to it without drawing attention to itself. To me, this is the mark of a good one-er is that a lot of people don’t even know that that’s a one-er…
I’m sorry to have brought it up. [laughs] It really is part of the fabric of the film.
Thank you for pointing it out because when you talk to people enough and no one points it out, you’re like, “Does anyone even know it?” [laughs] But if people who perhaps aren’t cinephiles don’t notice, that to me is the ultimate compliment. That means we’ve done our job and not taken away from the actors. There’s a couple of moments like that where we really tried something with the camera that still feels like it’s within the world of the film, but allows us to play a little bit. It wasn’t hard to give myself permission to do it because I really wanted it. It was harder to stay subtle and not overdo that stuff because the film didn’t require it.
The premiere is still to come, but what’s it like just getting to this place with it?
I’m still wrestling with that, to be honest. Independent filmmaking is such a grind. It’s so difficult to get work made. We spend 80 to 90% of our time trying to make things and not getting to actually make them, so to be in this moment where I’ve made the film — it’s a low budget film, but still make it with adequate resources and by far the most resources I’ve ever had — and have it be the film we wanted to make and to have the audience respond the way they have so far, it’s a blessing and a dream and a privilege that is so rare for independent filmmaking. So I’m trying to allow myself to enjoy it, but I still feel this knot that independent filmmakers always feel when they finish something, which is that you just want to get it out into the world and then it no longer belongs to you. It just belongs to the audience. That’s the moment where you can feel truly relieved and free. I’m really excited for that.
“Shook” will screen at the Toronto Film Festival at the Scotiabank at 5:15 pm on September 7th and September 9th.