tMF | The Movie-Fanatic

I have not heard of Ryan Ward before, and I felt sorry for myself. I guess, understanding what this movie - Son of the Sunshine - is all about, which is directed by Ryan himself, will help me understand him as an actor and as a filmmaker.

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About the Movie: Life is hard for Sonny (director and co-writer Ryan Ward). He's 24 and still living with his poor, negligent, heroin-shooting mom. He's unemployed. He's alienated and lonely. And he's got a wicked case of Tourette syndrome. Twitching, scowling and spewing random curses, he's a social outcast and victim of a vicious personal cycle: his illness isolates him, his isolation makes him angrier, his anger mixes with his condition and isolates him even further...Faint hopes for a livable future include a risky operation, a prospective lover, and a distant chance of getting to the bottom of his brutal past and achieving some semblance of closure and understanding.

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This is a movie with a lot going for it. There's great characterization, handheld camerawork that throbs with raw energy, and a parade of haunting landscapes and suggestively grubby vistas shot with a sure sense of film poetry. Being above all a harshly intimate character study, however, the film pivots on its brilliant lead performance. Awkward but forceful, repressed but dangerously energetic, Ward's Sonny is a ticking time bomb, stumbling through a hostile world and bursting at the seams from a lifetime of swallowed rage. Sonny is so recognizable, so true to life as a character that it's impossible to maintain a safe distance from him. This is a bold, abrasive and deeply moving film.

Watch the trailer below via youtube:

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Director's Statement

When I first came up with the idea for Son of the Sunshine, I was in my early twenties. I was about to graduate university with a BFA in Acting with which, for all intents and purposes, I could
basically wipe my ass for all the good it would do me in the real world. Needless to say, I lacked the necessary skills to survive comfortably. Taking serving job after serving job and being fired every three months for ducking out to audition and chase agents; I was broke, disillusioned and terrified that I had taken the wrong direction with my life. I was angry. I was the angriest angry young man you were lucky never to know, still am to a certain extent, though I have mellowed with age.

One evening, after a long shift of bad pay and copious verbal abuse, I was subway-ing it home. It was on that fateful evening that I saw an older blind man sitting alone at one end of the car,
holding his face as though in intense pain, a mass of empty seats surrounding him. Then suddenly, the man began to bark, crying out obscenity after obscenity, all followed by what I
finally deciphered as the word, "Sorry." Clearly the man suffered from Tourettes Syndrome though, being from a smaller city, I had never encountered it before. I was intrigued to say the
least.

Imagine not being able to focus your thoughts or emotions? Imagine having an uncontrollable urge to scream at everyone and everything all the time? Imagine feeling so angry? It was like
looking into a mirror. It was then and there that it hit me: What better metaphor for unfocused anger than Tourettes Syndrome? What better means of expressing the indescribable way I felt than a story about a young man with Tourettes?

As I got off the subway, I took off like a bullet, running the entire way home. I opened the door, flicked on my computer and began typing. A few hours later, ticking and screaming his way into the world, Sonny was born. And while no one in my life has ever been afflicted with TS, I think all of us can identify with the feeling of being ill-at-ease in our own skin; the feeling of not knowing who you are and where you fit; of being totally isolated from society. This was the theme that I needed to explore. With it, my goal was to capture the essential struggle we all go through in our twenties as we search for our place in society. And at the end of it all I was determined to come up with a conclusion that was positive.

After several years of toil and some help from my brilliant co-writer Matthew Heiti, we had a draft we were happy with. And then I met Paul Fler but that is another sordid story...

In directing this film, I wanted to capture the feeling of that specific struggle as no one had before. I wanted to present it in a way that was very personal and specific to me and the people of my generation. The one thing I did not want to do was make a ‘disease movie'.

Martin Scorsese once noted that when he received poor reviews across the board for his 1982 film The King of Comedy (despite the fact that it is a great film) he knew that it was, "the death of the personal movie." This statement always felt like such a tragedy to me and in making Sunshine one of my biggest goals was to bring back the personal movie. For me there is nothing
better than a story where the filmmaker's voice rings out so clear and true that it is as though you are watching his real life being played out in front of you. These have always been my favorite
films; films like Rumble Fish, The Outsiders, Midnight Cowboy, The Warriors, Drugstore Cowboy, Taxi Driver and Badlands.

It was this conclusion that inspired the decision to create the film as a throwback to the late 70s and early 80s; the time in which myself and the bulk of the audience I was trying to reach grew
up. To be clear, the film is not set during that time period, rather it is set in the present. However the way in which it is presented is meant to be reminiscent of that time.
To achieve this effect we chose to ‘push it' and shoot S16mm film though there was much discussion of going HD due to budgetary restraints. We dressed the characters in clothing that
was suggestive of that time, straddling the line between past and present.

We chose a lens package specifically from the late 70s, which have a higher tendency to flare, which was very common during that time. We used soft diffusion causing light to halite around its
source, creating a soft pastel look. We also shot a large portion of the film at dawn and dusk, a technique used by Terrence Malick, one of my favorite filmmakers from that period.
The effect is a movie that is equal parts then and now. A present day nostalgia piece starring a 70s style anti-hero as he struggles to come to grips with himself and the dirty life he has had to
endure.

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The choice to play Sonny, for me, was an obvious one: If you want to make a personal movie dealing intimately with your own struggles, how better to achieve that than by playing the
character that is essentially, you? If, as a writer / director, my goal was to capture with brutal honesty, the struggle for identity of our early lives, then as an actor I knew that I needed to portray that feeling of longing and ill-ease with as much a sense of rawness and wild abandon as I could possibly muster. I needed to be fearless and willingly lay naked in front of the viewer if I hoped to create any kind of real kinship and willingness on the audience's part to go along with a character so strange and dark. And I needed surround myself with other actors who were equally willing to do so.

Of all the characters I have created as an actor, I believe that Sonny will always remain the closest to my heart. Similar to a first sexual experience, he is like something that you always
remember with equal amounts nostalgia and terror recalling what you gave up. In researching the Tourettes element of the film, we were lucky to have the support of the Tourettes Syndrome Foundation of Toronto. Through the foundation we were put in touch with Gord and Michelle Anderson, a couple both living with Tourettes who were kind enough to allow
us into their home to interview and study them. I asked them both to appear in small parts in the film, but being obsessive compulsive (one of the many disorders that commonly comes with
Tourettes), and the shoot being on a weekday, neither could resolve in their minds the idea of missing work. I understood.

Son of the Sunshine is a film that is very special to me. In it I have tried to express something that I feel strongly, something life affirming, unique, subtle and beautiful. It is a story of hope and
of finding one's value in the world. It has been a long hard over 5-year road getting from the initial idea to completion. It has been grueling, beautiful, terrifying, inspiring, agonizing, a ton of work and the most satisfying thing I have ever done.

From all that, comes the angriest story of an angry young man, written and directed by the angriest young director, and brought to you by the chippiest, grittiest producer in bitch cold underfunded Canadian film. We hope to bruise, batter, shock, elate, frighten, inspire and fill you with hope.

Fuck off! - Sorry.