Most of the grown-ups that you encounter on a daily basis probably graduated from kindergarten. Aubrey Arnason is not one of them.
You wouldn’t know it to look at her. She has every other grade under her belt, and she’s certainly thrived in her career as an actress, writer, producer and lifestyle show guru who co-hosted two series for Shaw TV: The Wedding Belles and The Proposal.
But despite her Leo Award win and other accomplishments, she’s not a kindergarten graduate. She wasn’t ever a kindergarten student; her elementary school journey began in Grade 1.
Arnason didn’t think she’d missed out on anything until a few years ago, when she mentioned this gap in her education to a friend who happens to teach kindergarten – and her friend suggested otherwise.
“She looked at me and started laughing, and she said, ‘That makes sense,’” says Arnason in a recent phone interview. “She just thought that some of the life skills you learn in kindergarten, I don’t really have, once you get to know me. She’s like, ‘You walk to the front of the line, you go places without a ticket, you don’t think about this or that, you have terrible handwriting’ – and so I started laughing and I go, ‘That’s kind of funny.’”
Funny enough, in fact, to be the foundation for an original narrative short film, entitled Kindergarten Da Bin Ich Wieder, which Arnason wrote, co-directed, and starred in last year.
Kindergarten Da Bin Ich Wieder was created as part of the 2015 Crazy8s (that annual filmmaking carnival in which six teams are selected to shoot and lock a short film in eight days) and screens this week as part of the 2016 Vancouver Short Film Festival.
In Kindergarten Da Bin Ich Wieder, Aubrey Arnason plays Audrey Ragnarson (get it?), a television jingle writer who is forced out of her job and into kindergarten when her scandalous gap in education is revealed.
Arnason shares the screen with Daniel Arnold (Lawrence & Holloman), Noel Johanson (Unleashing Mr. Darcy), and 11 five-year-olds.
“I learned not to underestimate kids ever,” says Arnason. “Those five-year-olds had more energy than any of us, and they were magic.”
Arnason co-directed Kindergarten Da Bin Ich Wieder with her frequent collaborator, actress-comedienne Kalyn Miles.
“I didn’t want it to have a [Billy Madison] feel, or a rom-com feel,” says Arnason. “I didn’t want [Audrey] to be a woman, or to be sexual at all. I wanted it to be a fable, and that’s where the idea to give it a storybook feel came from.”
Speaking of storybooks: Once upon a time, Arnason was a little girl growing up in Winnipeg, watching worn-out VHS tapes of Grease and Olympic gold medal skating, and spending all of her free time figure skating at the local rink.
Arnason’s dad, Chuck, had spent a few years in the NHL, and operated a driving range and golf course. Her mother worked with her dad and sewed all of her skating costumes.
“Because my dad had done something that most people don’t do… they were more about dreams and aspirations,” says Arnason.
After what Arnason describes as three tough teenage years (“I went from being a figure skater and my mom having my schedule, to my parents waiting up all night wondering if I’m coming home”), she turned it all around and entered the theatre program at the University of Manitoba.
At some point in her journey, Arnason transferred her passion from theatre to film and television.
“What I love about television and about film is that there are so many different types of people and so many different types of roles, and they all come together to create one thing,” says Arnason, who graduated from the acting program at Vancouver Film School.
“From the production assistant blocking off the street, to the dudes who haul all of those heavy things off the trucks, to the make-up girls in the trailer: it’s a whole town in itself. It takes a village to make a film, and that’s what I love about it.”
Sometimes the village can be quiet, especially for actors waiting to land auditions and book roles.
It was during those stretches of quiet that Arnason began to develop her own projects. This is how she came to create, produce, direct, and co-host Shaw TV’s The Wedding Belles (about entrepreneurs working in the wedding biz) and The Proposal, in which she got to play on-screen co-conspirator in numerous marriage proposals.
“This industry has taken me in so many directions and given me so many different experiences that I couldn’t have possibly fathomed on my own,” says Arnason. “Sometimes when you don’t get exactly what you want, you get something else that’s pretty amazing.”
Arnason is currently producing and directing Hip Hop With Travis Lim, a 13-part half-hour series about the 14-year-old world champion hip hop dancer and his crew, and working on a short film about hockey-playing kids in 1980s small-town Canada.
“I can’t seem to do anything original,” she chuckles. “It all comes from somewhere in my life.”
Kindergarten Da Bin Ich Wieder screens this week as part of the 2016 Vancouver Short Film Festival. The sixth edition of this celebration of short-form cinema runs Jan. 29-30 at Vancity Theatre. Tickets and schedule at VSFF.com.
