Vancouver is a city accustomed to masquerading as other locations for Hollywood movies and various TV shows--sometimes to the extent of playing a part as incongruous as Albuquerque. In the film Everything's Gone Green, written by Douglas Coupland, who grew up in this Pacific Northwest city, Vancouver is featured on its own merits. The city’s obliging nature as a host for a variety of Asian cultures, marijuana grow-ops, dramatic real estate ups and downs, along with the business it does in film and TV production all set the scene for a story about Ryan, played by Paulo Costanzo (40 Days and 40 Nights, Joey). Ryan’s happenstances with his family, new love interest, and new job as a reporter for a magazine about lottery winners contribute to his exploration of who he is--which is mostly someone confounded by these elements while maintaining Coupland’s humor.

The hero initially meets and is smitten by Ming, played by Steph Song, at the site of a beached whale that draws legions of suited office workers to climb beach boulders and check out the huge mammal mortally off its course. A theme of alienation recurs for the main character as Everything's Gone Green captures the surreal nature of Vancouver. In a scene set on a residential street, Ryan finds a cast of space aliens taking smoke breaks around the craft services table outside the house that has become a set for an alien takeover movie across the street from his parents' house.

Alien to many independent films these days, Everything's Gone Green was not shot digitally. Director Paul Fox and Cinematographer David Frazee visualized Coupland’s concept on film in 19 days. “One of the reasons we wanted to shoot on 35 is that we were using landscape so much,” says Fox. Fox reasoned that many of the independent films shooting digitally take place on a much smaller scale. “We were going for a larger canvas, using the environment a lot, and Vancouver was another character. It made sense to go film, 35.”

Cinematographer David Frazee notes, “We were in production two years ago. The [Thomson] Viper system wasn’t a reasonable alternative for us. It was fairly expensive and hard to get a hold of. The other cinematic digital systems weren’t in place yet.”

Lending to the tone of Coupland’s off-kilter humor, S4 wide-angle lenses from the Cooke prime lens family were used to create a sense of Ryan as being put upon in office scenes with the typical office fluorescents weighing upon him.

Shooting took place with Moviecams, which Frazee says were fairly light, fast and easy to use. “The S4s are really beautiful lenses, flare-resistant and nice in high-contrast situations. They don’t breathe at all when you’re racking focus. For the most part, we were on the wide collection. We used all the lenses, but mostly we seemed to end up on the 18 or the 24,” said Frazee.

A priority was to keep a constant relationship between the characters and their environment. Fox says, “It was more of a compositional choice to keep the sense of Ryan’s world being off-kilter.”

Frazee and Fox had talked at the time about shooting the film in a widescreen format. That possibility fell by the wayside for budgetary reasons. “At one point we were toying with the idea of doing a digital intermediate, but because of our budget, that option proved not feasible. Along with the DI went away our chance of shooting in scope.”

They still approached the film as though they were shooting in widescreen format. “Even though we were shooting in 1.85, we really wanted to compose within the frame as though we were shooting a scope movie: really bold composition, using all the edges of the frame, using a lot of negative space at the top and sides of the frame,” says Fox.

This concept took some reiteration for the rest of the crew. “We were trying to shoot a walk-and-talk sequence with Ryan and his boss through the office,” notes Frazee. “The Steadicam operator was walking backward ahead of them, and David and I kept encouraging the operator to frame higher and add a whole lot of extra headroom above the characters--which you wouldn’t normally do.”

The production team used a Losmandy Porta-Jib to help depict the whimsical nature of Coupland’s writing. “We wanted the film to have a very fluid feeling to it,” says Fox. “There was a fair amount of camera movement, which is tricky when you’re on this kind of schedule and moving around really fast. We kept the camera on the Porta-Jib a lot of the time because it really allows a simple setup.”

“We were going for oddball frames,” explains Frazee. “We had the camera able to move around wherever it could. It was different from a Steadicam in that you can have a still frame or a slightly moving frame that can be very precise in how we were framing it and what we are including and excluding from the frame. There was a lot of noodling, which the Porta-Jib allowed us to do.”

Since the culture of Vancouver plays such a big part in the film, Director Paul Fox went the extra mile to be accurate. “I did more to get it right just because I’m from Toronto. I didn’t want to be the outsider coming in and making geographical mistakes. I was asking everybody: Where would this character live? In what part of town would Ming’s Granny live? Then we worked very hard to make sure we actually got all those locations.”

“I’ll tell you what was challenging: doing process work on the Sea-to-Sky Highway and hanging off a process trailer at 50 miles an hour," says the cinematographer. A very scenic drive with Ryan, Ming and her Granny was an example of the dedication to accuracy. “We had a hard time even getting the city to allow us to shoot on a stretch of highway up there in the mountains,” said Fox. “We really wanted that look when the two main characters are talking as they are driving through the mountains. The cheap way would have been to drive circles around Stanley Park. On the process trailer, David was hanging off the side of the car with a camera on a coastal highway that goes right up the side of a mountain with nothing but a sheer drop off on the other side down to the water.”

Everything's Gone Green was a co-production between Ontario and British Columbia, requiring Fox, based in Toronto, and Frazee, based in Vancouver, to bounce back and forth. The film was shot in Vancouver. The picture edit was done in Toronto, the sound mix in Vancouver and the lab work in Toronto.

Distributed by First Independent Pictures, the film has made the rounds at film festivals, winning Best Canadian Feature Film at the Vancouver International Film Festival last fall. At the Edmonton International Film Festival, Paul Fox won the Citytv Canadian Feature Award. Everything's Gone Green also screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, the Pusan International Film Festival in South Korea and South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin.

This was Fox’s second feature. The first was a psychological thriller called The Dark Hours. He also has experience directing episodic television like Degrassi: The Next Generation. In terms of where his place in independent film is, Fox said, “I just want to keep making stuff, whether they’re small films or big films.”

Frazee concurs: “I love watching movies. That’s why I’m in the business. It’s not always the most profitable thing to work on an indie film. I generally don’t get paid very much. I do it because I like the script and want to see the movie made. It seems to be getting harder and harder to make movies, just because I think it’s harder and harder to sell them.”

Whether it’s on digital or film, it always starts with the script. “I read a lot of scripts. Really good scripts are rare and valuable,” said Fox. “You’re seeing these fantastic little small HD cameras coming out which can make a very beautiful movie for very little money. The thing is you still need to find a good script, good actors, and somebody with vision to make it happen.”

Written by Doug Coupland, the Everything's Gone Green script was his first specifically for the screen and not adapted from any previous work. Coupland’s first novel, Generation X, was published in March of 1991 and has sold more than one million copies as well as coining the phrase “Gen X.”