As she prepares for a date with another, Holly (Frosina Pejcinovska) finds herself being held back by her ex Chris in “Every Other Weekend,” still in possession of their child Max when it’s his weekend to take custody. Pictures of the once-beaming mother shortly after giving birth pinned to the refrigerator door now seem like a distant memory, and tchotchkes around the apartment from a trip to California now seem aspirational when Holly’s confronted with a crying baby, she doesn’t know what to tell Chris when after she’s finally able to connect with him, she’s seemingly asking for two things when she wants him to get there faster and pick up diapers on the way.
In Mick Robertson and Margaret Rose’s haymaker of a dramatic short, the walls seem to be closing in on Holly figuratively as much as literally in a cramped apartment that doesn’t appear to have an escape hatch. With no one else in the room but an infant co-star, Pejcinovska is able to wear all the emotions of this stressful event well before she can ever properly put anything else on for her date, frantically attempting to reach Chris, tend to an unhappy child and focus on putting on makeup in one fell swoop. The moment may pass, but Robertson and Rose have created something that’s bound to stay with you, building far larger implications around their star’s ferocious central performance when Holly’s inability to find a sitter exposes the precarious situation of living in a city where it’s already a struggle to make ends meet in the working class, but the possibility of moving onto a brighter future is stymied by being unable to shake the debts of the past.
The fact that “Every Other Weekend” is set in Toronto but ready to take on the whole world makes its premiere at the local Toronto International Film Festival particularly fitting and it was our good fortune to catch up with Robertson and Rose before the film takes its first bow to talk about how their collaboration came to be, luring their lead back into acting with a heck of a part and how the tightly shot drama could open up a moving story about society at large.
How did the two of you become collaborators?
Margaret Rose: We actually met in university. We were both in the theater program and only during COVID post-university when Mick was working on her first short, I ended up being in it and producing. Then we liked that so much we thought we might try co-writing and co-directing. That’s now what our focus is.
Mick Robertson: And it really was really lovely and very organic. Basically, we lived down the street from each other, so we would go for COVID walks together and we were both completely green to film. I was writing this first short and because [Margaret] was in theatre school with me, we would talk about the script and she would give me notes. Then that turned into “Well, I think you should act in it because you now know it better than anyone else” and then that turned into “I think you should also produce it because you’re now the most involved person out of anyone else in the world.” Then all of a sudden she was like the other half of the project, so when it came to making the second short, we started again with “How should we divvy this up?” And then all of a sudden it was like, “Let’s co-direct.” And now I think there’s no looking back.
It’s exciting to hear given how well this turned out. What were the seeds for “Every Other Weekend”?
Mick Robertson: It started with a personal story of a loved one, and they had shared it because we love each other, but also in the vein of, “I think this would make a really great movie one day.” I worked on the script for quite a while on my own and could never crack it, so I put it aside for a long time. Then our executive producer, Daniel Roher became really interested in the idea, but I was like, the script has never worked. So I brought it to Margaret, who did a big rewrite of it and all of a sudden it started working for the first time. It started with real life and then it became more and more fictional as time went on.
Margaret, what was it that unlocked it for you?
Margaret Rose: It was really about figuring out who the story was about. There were more characters at one point, and we were like, is this a love story? Is this a chase across the city? We both just realized zeroing in on this lead character of Holly and focusing on her journey over the course of just a span of 15 minutes was much more effective in communicating what we wanted to.
Mick Robertson: Because every time I had written it, it had been about a girl who’s on a date, so it was always two adults on a date and then she gets called by her ex-boyfriend to say that she has to leave to pick up her baby, so [setting it in her apartment as she prepared] was the biggest shift and it really, really helped it.
Margaret Rose: Another huge shift in the development process was a little further down the line when we had [Frosina] the woman who plays Holly in the film. We brought her on and had her read the script and started making edits with her in mind that really shaped the story as well, giving specificity to the backstory of this person and how they ended up here. The minutia of like her personality really came from the lead actress.
What led you to Frosina to play this role?
Mick Robertson: She’s the best. We went to theater school with her and we would work on school plays together. I would write them and then Fro and Margaret would act them and they would be directed by our friend Will, who’s now an awesome theatre director here in Toronto. Margaret and Fro were just always amazing. And then after university, Fro shifted her focus a little bit and became a high school teacher, but last summer, it was a meeting of the minds where she was really feeling invested and wanted to get back into acting. She’s always been amazing and we just have this feeling of being so excited to share her with the world because she is so talented. We’ve been good friends with her for a really long time, and she lives in that apartment that we shot in…
Margaret Rose: Which was a huge like benefit making this film, being able to be in the environment that we shot in. We were super lucky that she allowed us to rehearse there and we could get our cinematographer Rico Moran in there just before, so it was almost like back to our roots of theater as a rehearsal process in the space.
Mick Robertson: Fro was able to do the whole movie like a play, which was really helpful.
What was it like figuring out how to shoot in such a tight space?
Mick Robertson: It was definitely challenging. We got really lucky with the people we ended up working with and Rico is one of the most talented cinematographers in Toronto. By the time Rico was on board, we had a shot list going and we were making what we called our YouTube version of the movie, which was me shooting the whole movie on a Powershot, so some shots were already in there, like that bathroom framing and the opening image of the back of [Polly’s] neck. But Rico really developed the style of, “Okay, so we’re going to be on a tripod for all of the interior stuff, but we’ll be roaming and as soon as we’re outside, we’re on an easy rig.” What he really hammered home and taught us about was being really focused on motivated camera movement. He was as specific about camera movement we were about story beats in the script, so that was a really applicable skill to learn about how to motivate a camera movement. That nice little panning moment when [Polly] leaves the apartment to go with diapers and then the boyfriend is coming from the other side and we’ve got the bikers that bring us to the boyfriend, that was all Rico. We knew in the script it needed to be a “Sliding Doors” moment where she left one side of frame and the boyfriend came in the other. But he planted those bikers.
Margaret Rose: Yeah, we really were so lucky to have Rico.
Mick Robertson: He has such a sharp cinematic eye, but then he also is such a kind leader and head of department. He really takes care of the people around him and I think it really shows.
And Frosina really has to operate as if this was one-person show, despite the baby being there. What could she react off of?
Mick Robertson: Well, this is a fun one. Because we made this on such a tight budget, we could only afford to have the babies for one day.
Margaret Rose: And just to be clear, they were twins.
Mick Robertson: Yeah, we had two babies and we shot all of the baby coverage on day one, so basically half of every scene essentially. And then on day two, we had Fro perform the whole thing again and we flipped the camera and did her coverage, so Fro was acting to nothing the entire time.
Margaret Rose: Which is a huge testament to her.
Mick Robertson: Yeah. We planted the stuffed animal equivalent of a baby for her eye line.
Margaret Rose: It was a unicorn. [We had to find] a stuffed animal as close to an eight-month-old sized baby, which we learned was so hard to find because of course toys for babies would not be the [same] size of a baby. So this was the biggest stuffed animal we could find and it was a unicorn. We put the baby’s jacket on the unicorn, so that Fro could have it really feel like a baby and she just went for it.
Mick Robertson: For example, in the scene where she’s changing the diaper, it’s just one of those things where unless you’re Fro, you don’t know how challenging that is, having to pretend to change a diaper [of a nonexistent baby].
Margaret Rose: We put x’s on the counter where she could move her hand, but it was two different sides of her brain working at once.
Mick Robertson: Famously, “try not to work with babies” is what people tell you, but we got really lucky. We were really aware that babies are going to be what they’re going to be and we had a really good conversation with their mom the week before [filming] where she was just saying, “Listen, the reality is little babies are different every single day, so if one of them wakes up a bit cranky that day, that’s what it is.” We had written a script where the baby was always content because we wanted to ensure the baby’s safety, so we’d always written in a comfortable sitting place for the baby. For example, [Polly] walks over to the baby who’s in a playpen, just making sure the baby would always be in a place where they could be taken care of in a really comfortable way.
Then we prepped [Frosina] for if the baby cries, your character always has to comfort the baby because we were not interested in letting a baby cry while we film. It just was not worth it. We were really tight on time, so she was going to have to learn how to improv, comforting the baby and finishing the scene simultaneously. That never happened. The baby never cried. And if the baby did cry, the other baby was ready to go, so we would just let the baby have a break. The only time the baby cried on camera was for that very last shot, and when the baby started crying, [Frosina] started comforting the baby on camera as per instruction and then it was this really great final image of the baby crying and her telling the baby that it was going to be okay. And it’s up for the audience to decide what they think about that.
You may have just described it, but was there anything that happened that you may not have expected that made it into the film and you now really like about it?
Margaret Rose: Definitely that last image. We definitely discussed with Flo allowing intentions in the moment. We didn’t need it to hit everything the exact way every time, so there was some fluidity there, but because of all the rehearsals, we prided ourselves on knowing what we were getting into and what we wanted to get.
Mick Robertson: The scene where she’s deciding whether or not she’s going to go on the date where she’s standing in the kitchen alone, we had a version in the script that was much more reserved. The character makes the decision without crying, and we got that version of the scene within about one or two takes, but Margaret asked Fro if she could give us one that had some tears in it and that’s what ended up being in the film. That final breakdown that she performs was Fro acting on the fly and again just speaks to how great of an actor Fro is.
This really is a universal story, but it speaks to the pressures of living in Toronto specifically right now. What’s it like premiering at TIFF?
Mick Robertson: I’m just so excited. It’s nice to hear you refer to the film as feeling universal because our intention was always universality through specificity, [where] if you’re hyper specific about something, how does it then open up doors for other people to relate to it. This is a story that’s about someone our age in downtown Toronto, but then it’s also about someone who comes from Fro’s specific cultural makeup, which is Macedonian-Canadian, so all of these things are really specific and we were both really hoping that they would make it feel like a way in for other people. The hometown premiere is really special.
Margaret Rose: Yeah, it’s very special. It’s really all we could ask for. Making the film came from another seed of what it is like to live in this city, and even though that is a bittersweet experience, getting to share that with people that might connect to it on that level of specificity of it being Toronto, it’s super fun for that to be a part of the hometown premiere. We’ve gotten lots of people that have worked on the short in post going, “Is that College Street?” Being able to identify physically where we are in the city and understanding what it means to live in the downtown core.
Mick Robertson: Yeah, and everybody is coming out. All of our friends who worked on the film and all of our friends who aren’t in film at all, it just means that everyone can be there. And Margaret and I really love Toronto cinema very deeply, so it’s really special and cool to be the emerging filmmakers and to be in the room with all these people that we really look up to. They don’t even necessarily know us or know that we really look up to them, but we do. And it’s really special. It’s an honor.
“Every Other Weekend” will screen at the Toronto Film Festival as part of Short Cuts 2024 Programme 2 at the Scotiabank on on September 6th at 9:15 pm and September 10th at 1:30 pm.