“This is the hardest thing I’ve had to do in my life and I include my years as a war correspondent,” Charles York (Peter Gallagher) tells his family in “Humane,” assembled around the dinner table where everyone looks about as happy to be there as he is. It can be difficult to get the Yorks together in one room, not because of space — Charles’ celebrated career as a TV journalist has afforded a mansion that one can get lost in — but their busy schedules when his eldest son Jared (Jay Baruchel) has taken his place as a talking head on cable news, thriving on making controversial statements, while his eldest daughter Rachel (Emily Hampshire) wishes she could be on TV far less as the CEO of York Therapeutics, which is embroiled in legal proceedings over false advertisement. His younger kids Ashley (Alanna Bale) and Noah (Sebastian Chacon), who was adopted, have far more free time, but surely don’t want to spend it in the company of their older siblings, nor does Charles’ second wife Dawn (Uni Park) especially, but that doesn’t keep her from preparing an intricate omakase for the family to chow down as its patriarch makes his big announcement.
To say much more about what writer Michael Sparaga and director Caitlin Cronenberg have cooked up would be criminal, but the pitch black horror comedy takes place in dark times despite the intense glare of the sun outside. As reported in its opening scene, international borders have closer and population reduction has commenced as a premium has been placed on resources on the climate challenged earth and while debate rages on outside the Yorks’ home where Jared is among those fiercely advocating for some to make the ultimate sacrifice, it appears that someone will have to make it within even the hallowed halls of their property when the Department of Citizen Strategy, the task force dedicated to picking up the corpses of those that volunteer, arrives to pick up a body at one of the Yorks’ request and Bob (Enrico Colantoni), the duty-bound public servant, won’t leave without fulfilling his mandate.
Like Bob and his partner Tony (Martin Roach) who bide their time as a decision is made, Cronenberg has waited to join the family business, doing so on her own terms when she established herself both on film sets and photo shoots as a celebrated stills photographer as her brother Brandon started making films such as “Antiviral” and “Possessor” and both her late mother Carolyn and her aunt Denise were crucial collaborators of her father David. It was actually a still photo that eventually led to “Humane” when Cronenberg was assigned to take a picture of its screenwriter Sparaga for a Toronto newspaper for his second produced film “Sidekick” and over a decade later, he thought it might be worth checking in to see if directing was something she’d be interested in.
Besides a sharp eye, Cronenberg clearly brings an equally incisive sense of humor to the proceedings as the family reunion on screen spirals out of control and while Sparaga wrote the film in advance of the pandemic, the film finds the tortured logic of the irrational calculus that develops due to a public health crisis as a wicked ensemble starts to challenge one another. With the film heading to theaters this week, the unusually experienced first-time director spoke about how she found a feature worth tackling, packing so much into every frame of the film and locating the most ominous setting for the film they could.
It seems like directing movies was predestined for you, but you have a thriving photography career, so was it something you were actually inching towards or just waiting for the right thing to come along?
I would say I was inching towards the idea of directing. I had signed with an agency in LA that was sending me scripts and I would say that the temperature taking of the first scripts that I read really taught me what I didn’t want to do as my first feature. I was really looking for an original concept that was tight and compact and smart and clever and funny and biting with just the right amount of gore. When Michael sent me the script [for “Humane”] originally, I very immediately connected to it, and I felt, “Okay, this is something I can sink my teeth into.”
It’s remarkable to think you actually read the script pre-pandemic because the kinds of choices the family is faced with in the film. Did it feel like you could get away with less context for the story?
It definitely did. Living through the pandemic gave us a lot to work with because it is the first time that as an entire world, we were having the experience of this shared catastrophe, and the idea in “Humane” is similarly international. Of course, the fact that it was written pre-COVID was hilarious, and we laughed about that all the time. What really struck me was the world’s response to these things, especially people trying to profit off of people’s fear and in our real world, you have to get a KN95 mask, and you have to wash your vegetables with this special soap, and companies were trying to put forward products that they felt were going to speak to people’s fear. And in “Humane,” we definitely played with a little bit of that to say the affluent families have these very special umbrellas that are silver on the inside and the less well-off families are waiting for the water truck with their homemade umbrellas with tinfoil on the inside. We definitely were influenced by living through the pandemic for that level of world building while we were developing the project, both directly and indirectly.
From what I understand, a lot of the cast had preexisting relationships with you and with each other. Did that help?
I would say so. Michael and I made extensive lists as well, because you never know who will be available and who’s going to spark to the material. But Michael did write the Bob character for Enrico Colantoni. That was a voice that was in his head that whole time, and [we couldn’t believe] that we actually got him to play Bob, not that we were worried he wouldn’t like it, but everything worked out for us, and he just blew that role completely out of the water. He’s so incredibly talented. But I have worked with Emily many times in many different ways, and she was the first person cast. She and I had many conversations about it, and she came on board, and then when we reached out to Jay, Jay and Emily thought it would be very fun to play siblings, so that really solidified Jay in that role and then once you have two siblings, you’re just putting together a family. But what a boon it was for us to get Peter Gallagher [to play the father], because my God, I couldn’t imagine a better Charles. And it was quite thrilling for everybody.
It felt very real and very organic, because Jay and Emily have this shorthand together [since] they’ve been friends for a long time, and they know each other in a way that siblings know each other, and [the entire ensemble was] all so talented that any time they felt like taking their character to another level, I was just there for it. There’s a reason that you cast the people that you cast and you’ve got to just trust them. And the way that they just immediately interacted with each other was beyond anything that I could have ever dreamt, especially having this father figure character, and Peter’s able to be so calm and sweet, and also very, very stern and fatherly, so it was a really interesting balance to strike with all of them on how that family works.
That house is amazing, and I understand it’s actually pretty famous in Ontario, but did you know of it from early on in the development?
The house was actually the first character that we cast. I hadn’t seen it before [being] in Hamilton, which is about an hour outside of Toronto, so I didn’t know the history, but when we drove up, Michael immediately said to me, “Oh, bad things happen here.” [laughs] And Michael originally wrote [the story] for a Georgian colonial layout, which is more of a Center Hall home, but that was not something that we could find and when we landed that house, we just reorganized all the action for that layout. We had also discussed, “Well, what if we can’t find a house that works from both the inside and the outside?” But we could shoot the whole thing in that house and outside, so it was fantastic and the history of the Ravenscliff Castle gives a bit of more legitimacy in storytelling to the reason that we chose it because it’s gothic, crazy, and gorgeous. What’s not to like? It has gargoyles, like legitimate gargoyles. [laughs]
There’s a real richness to the image as well and you use light in a really interesting way where the brightness will often emphasize the darkness. What was it like to figure out that interplay?
Our cinematographer Doug Koch is a master of lighting and he and I spoke for weeks leading up to the start of production about the lighting because the first half of the film is in daylight and there’s a strange quality to the light outside because of the sun’s harmful UV rays. Then the light inside the house, although it’s daylight outside, we did have this film on all the windows meant to be a prop to protect the house from the rays. But at the same time, that film cuts the lighting by two stops, so there was this element of blasting this really, really strong light through the windows, stopping it down and then lighting the inside with practicals to give it that kind of eerie vibe [of] why is it so dark in here when it’s daylight and all the windows are open? Then of course, the second half is darkness outside and it’s mostly lit from practicals from the inside, so we did spend a very long time not just trying to make it beautiful, but have it be part of the storytelling.
When you have an ensemble like this and so many group scenes, is it hard to keep the energy up while having to get so many angles on the action?
It really was. I did not anticipate was how difficult it is to choreograph four to six people in every single scene and Doug and I would stay after or come early and discuss the blocking just so that we could make sure that we had at least a base of where everybody wanted to be to start off, especially because so much of it takes place in the foyer of the house. We really needed to maintain interest because the foyer gets a little old and [even] the whole crew is like, “All right, we’re back in the foyer,” so we really did spend a lot of time choreographing these moving pieces. Then you bring the actors in and someone may say, “Well, it doesn’t feel natural for me to walk over there and sit down on that step. I think it makes more sense for me to do this,” and then we would explore that and work together in that way. But I always came in with a plan and I didn’t even let that enter my mind when it was four siblings or five or six people in the scene, it would be so hard.
It came out wonderfully, and I had to ask from your Instagram, it looked like shooting might’ve fallen on your birthday?
That was the best day. And every day was a good day on set, but it was very fun to have my birthday on set and that was a really big, important day [for the film] as well, which was a lot of fun. [The crew] brought me a big cake with a knife in it. Honestly, we had the best cast, the best crew and I felt loved and just loved every minute of it. We also had Halloween on set and I dressed up like a [Department of Citizen Strategy] agent. I had blood all over my powder blue jumpsuit. Honestly, I couldn’t have asked for a better experience in doing this film.
Was it any different from what you thought it would be, even with all the experience you had?
Everything was different, and every moment of it was a new learning experience. Every person I spoke to, I learned something new. I will take all of these lessons and hopefully be able to learn continuously as I make another project, hopefully in the future. But there wasn’t a moment that went by that I wasn’t learning 20 things at once. And I think that’s it. You just have to absorb those lessons and hope that the audience of the film feels the way that we felt when we were making it.
“Humane” opens in theaters on April 26th.
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