I had always intended the music to be that prominent within the film. Ironically that band became one of the real central characters in the film because the music plays such a significant part. I ended up going in a bit of a 180 and picking an entirely different sounding record and different sounding bands.
#SMALL TOWN MURDER MOVIE MOVIE#
It was gently hugging the movie instead of challenging it or pushing it further. By the time I had finished the movie and slapped the whole soundtrack onto it, it no longer felt that it was creating any conflict between the image and the audio.
I started writing I explored them deeper and deeper. These just became ideas and questions I was fascinated by. Anyways, thinking about that community got me thinking about the conundrum of being both a pacifist and a police officer or of being known for violence within a community of pacifists and being shunned for it. I’ve been really influenced by their music. As I started writing it I would realize things like, “Oh fuck, if we combine these characters it makes an arc,” or “What I really want to write is a story about a guy with a history of violence who’s trying to redeem himself within a small community.” Two of my close friends grew up Mennonite. I thought it was going to be a lot artier.
When I started writing I thought it was going to be more of a Jim Jarmusch-esque collection of scenes that were not necessarily going to follow the same characters. The irony is, by the time I finished the movie, all of the music ended up being not from the album that inspired me to make the film in the first place. I also wanted to structurally base a movie around a record, a specific album. I was initially inspired by the idea of writing a movie about the ripple effects of a murder on a small community. There wasn’t a whole lot of time for self-reflection. We were shooting by October of the same year.
The whole thing happened over such a short period of time. Gass-Donnelly: It was a bit of an odd process. Is that how the inspiration to make a film within this specific community took hold? Small Town Murder Songs director Ed Gass-Donnelly įilmmaker: You grew up not far from the Mennonite communities depicted in your film. After a festival run that included stops in Turin, Krakow, Palm Springs and Munich, the film opens domestically at Brooklyn’s ReRun Gastropub Theater this Friday. Featuring what may become thought of as a career-defining performance by Peter Stormare ( Fargo, Armageddon) and sturdy supporting work by people as seemingly far flung as Jill Hennessy (NBC’s Law & Order and Crossing Jordan) and Martha Plimpton ( The Mosquito Coast, Running on Empty), Small Town Murder Songs follows a solemn police officer, an outcast in his own Mennonite farming community for his own sordid past, who finds himself in over his head after a young woman’s body is found by a rural riverbank with all clues pointing to his ex-girlfriend’s drunken, violent boyfriend. Gass-Donnelly was back at TIFF last year with Small Town Murder Songs, an eerie, impeccably acted film that is both an incisive character study and a portrait of a community whose values are embattled by modernity and a ghastly killing. A favorite at that year’s Toronto International Film Festival, it went on to be nominated for four Genie Awards (Canada’s equivalent to the Oscars). He broke through as a feature director with his 2007 drama This Beautiful City, a look at five disparate citizens of Ontario’s largest metropolis that is at once a sprawling ensemble piece and an intimate investigation into ordinary lives intertwined by extraordinary events. One of Canada’s hottest filmmaking prospects for much of the aughts, Toronto-based Ed Gass-Donnelly made a reputation for himself as a prolific short filmmaker, making the festival rounds with several shorts during the first half of the decade. Armageddon, Canada, Crisis of Faith, Crossing Jordan, Ed Gass-Donnelly, Jill Hennessy, Law & Order, M Night Shyamalan, Martha Plimpton, Mennonites, Murder, Peter Stormare, Police Procedural, Prison Break, Rerun Gastropub Theater, Signs, Small Town Murder Songs, Toronto International Film Festival
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