It doesn’t get top billing – or any billing at all – but snow is without a doubt one of the stars of Numb.
Ice, too. And cold. Especially cold: It’s prickly presence can be felt in nearly every chilling frame of Jason R. Goode’s feature film directorial debut.
And so it’s fitting that Numb – an adventure-thriller about two couples on the trail of a cache of stolen gold in BC’s interior during the deep-freeze of winter – will close out the 2015 Whistler Film Festival, a fest that promotes itself as “Canada’s coolest film festival.”
“I had just about every crew member at some point walk up to me and privately go, ‘Man, you picked a doozy for a first feature,” laughs Goode during a recent phone interview.
Numb filmed on location in Vernon, Enderby, Lumby, and Kelowna over 18 days this past February and March. Cast and crew regularly had to snowmobile to set. The average daily temperature was -15 C. Sunlight was often limited to 10 hours per day.
“You’re fighting the weather all of the time,” recalls Goode. “Everything is slower.”
But in hindsight, the cold, ice, and snow “made everything better,” he says. “As a director, you have to decide what is absolutely essential in that moment, because there was no time to shoot anything that wasn’t essential to the movie.”
Stripped of the snow and cold, Numb is a character-driven drama. Fractured people, pushed beyond their limits, face off against each other and their inner demons in a nuanced modern-day gold rush tale.
It’s heavy material, and Goode says the actors –Jamie Bamber (Battlestar Galactica), Aleks Paunovic (iZombie), Stefanie von Pfetten (Cracked), and Marie Avgeropoulos (The 100) – were more than up to the task.
As the flawed hero, Bamber is “a risk-taking actor, and when I think about Jamie and some of the characters he’s played, I think of a really strong character who has it together or is putting it together,” says Goode.
“That was really compelling in Numb because it’s about a character whose life has been deconstructed and his identity as a working man has been taken away from him.”
Goode knew that Paunovic was ideal for the character of ex-convict Lee.
“Aleks is a jazz musician in total control of his instrument,” says Goode of Paunovic, who he directed several years ago in a stage production of Danny and the Deep Blue Sea.
“He has been one of the untapped gems in the Vancouver acting community, but the secret is out.”
Paunovic pointed Goode in von Pfetten’s direction for the character of Dawn. Goode envisioned a character with a warm but aristocratic bearing – which the prolific actress, whose full name happens to be Stefanie Baroness Christina von Pfetten, possesses in spades.
As for the final member of the quartet, Goode says he’d been having a hard time casting the role of Lee’s sister – the fiery Cheryl – until The 100 star came along.
“The people who read for Cheryl were all fantastic, but they often fell on either the ferocious side or the vulnerable side, and Marie came in, and she was both,” says Goode.
Numb was written by Andre Harden and produced by Dylan Jenkinson and Robyn Wiener (Black Fly). It caps off the 2015 Whistler Film Festival with a red carpet gala on Dec. 6.
• Tickets for the WFF closing gala can be purchased at WhistlerFilmFestival.com
