A.J. Bond doesn’t consider Stress Position his feature film directorial debut — even though it’s technically his first time at the helm of a feature-length motion picture.
The venerable Telefilm considers Stress Position a feature film — they funded it, after all — as did the Leo Awards, who nominated it for seven awards, including Best Motion Picture and Best Direction (it didn’t win any; Ben Ratner’s Down River took home the top prize).
But for Bond — a Vancouver-based graduate of the University of British Columbia’s film program whose 2007 short Hirstute has played at more than 50 film festivals around the world — Stress Position is less of a feature film and more of an experiment in relinquishing control.
“It was, ‘let’s go on an adventure, let’s try making a film in a way that I have never made a film and that is the opposite of my style in general, which is much more calculated and controlled,’” he says in a recent phone interview.
Unlike the yet-to-debut feature he does consider his first (a thriller entitled Wisteria, which will be produced as part of the Canadian Film Centre’s First Features program), Stress Position was unscripted; though not a documentary per se, it found its participants toying with real emotions for the sake of on-screen drama.
Bond wrote a 30-page outline — which he says he all but discarded once cameras rolled — and no dialogue. Just how it would play out, and how it would play to an audience, was a mystery to its director until its first screening.
In Stress Position, Bond (who has a long list of acting credits to his name) plays a director named A.J. and his friend, actor Dave Amito, plays an actor named Dave.
The jumping-off point is torture tactics that were handed out at Guantanamo Bay. The friends bet that they can each withstand a week of torture at the hands of the other; whoever caves first will win access to a bank account containing a whack of cash.
It’s the perfect set-up for a horror flick, which it isn’t, even though it gets horrifying pretty quickly. The tortures — especially those coming from Bond, who quickly emerges as the big bad — are clearly designed to inflict maximum psychological damage.
As the film progresses, the lines become increasingly blurred; are the characters of Dave and A.J. not just characters? Are these old friends actually hurting each other?
The question of “what’s real?” is one that’s followed Stress Position around since it premiered in London last year.
“It’s hard for me to say how much of this movie is actually real because I didn’t even know at the time,” says Bond, who adds that he and Amito didn’t speak for a long stretch after Stress Position was in the can. “During the process of filming, we both had a hard time distinguishing what was real and what wasn’t.”
Their initial reactions to the various tortures were indeed real, says Bond — but then they’d need to reshoot that first reaction from different angles, so those subsequent takes would be re-enactments of real reactions.
Audience and critics’ reactions to Stress Position have been passionate and extreme. “The reviews we got in Toronto blew us out of the water, they were so great, and then there were a handful of reviews that were, ‘I hate this movie, it’s a piece of garbage,’” says Bond. “I have no idea how you’re going to react, and I hope it’s thought provoking at least, but you might just want to kill me afterwards.”
Stress Position screens at the Vancity Theatre (1181 Seymour) this week. For tickets and screening times, visit Viff.org
