Goin' Down the Road was an unlikely Canadian and international success story. It was made on a dime in Toronto, starring Doug McGrath and the late Paul Bradley as childhood friends who escape their limited lives in the Martimer to seek their dreams in Toronto. When Bradley's character meets a woman (Jayne Eastwood), their plans are derailed. The film attracted attention with its spare, verite style and bitter truths about being poor in Canada, and it's austere beauty. Shebib finally followed it up this year with Down the Road Again, as McGarth's character makes a cross-Canada trip to scatter the ashes of his onetime best friend. He meets his friend's estranged daughter (Kathleen Robertson) who joins him on the journey to heal the past. We spoke with Shebib on the Toronto set of Down the Road Again.
Do you feel there's a lot of pressure to match the iconic Goin' Down the Road?
I'm not a big fan of Canadian movies. I think it’s sad that’s its even still remembered. It should have been long forgotten, long surpassed and it hasn’t been, it should have been. If you did anything 40 years ago and you hadn’t done anything better in 40 years how would you feel? You’d feel pretty stupid.
Do you think you can catch lightning in a bottle twice?
I never thought anyone would ever have seen it. Goin’ Down the Road got a terrible review in the New York Times by Vincent Canby and then about a month after it opened, the New York Times re-reviewed it by someone else, a full page! Pauline Kael, Judith Crist, everyone got on the bandwagon.
When you made the original, did yiou think it was revolutionary?
No I never thought of that. The film was very rough, shot on the cuff, only me and three others in the crew, basically a doco crew. The lighting kit was in a suitcase. The nature of film those days wasn’t so good – very grainy, the quality of the film is very poor. The story has more relevance today than it ever did. There were no homeless people in 1970, very few. There were no organisations for them. I remember being in New York in the early seventies and seeing people sleeping on the sidewalk, being shocked. You see it here all the time. Whoever thought that would happen? It’s more relevant today. The film has a lot of sadness in it because there was a lot of humour in the beginning; otherwise it’s just a dirge. This film now is not a sequel, it isn’t a sequel. In a way it’s a prequel, its about what happened before they ever left, all told in flashbacks and about the falling out they had and Pete efforts to make up for a grave deed that Joey did Pete and now from the grave he’s trying to make up for it. In a way it’s a detective story, and he goes with Joeys’ daughter Kathleen, she’s a feisty gal and she goes with him because she wants to know more about his father.
What made you do that subject matter?
My parents were both from the Maritimes; my father who died at 97 was from Cape Breton. The Shebibs are actually mentioned in Anne Marie McDonald’s book Fall on Your Knees. There are a lot of them. My mother was Newfoundland Irish and my father was Nova Scotia Lebanese, a lot of Lebanese there. The Lebanese are called the Jews of the Maritimes.
That’s ironic.
You have no idea.
Did you notice a lot different in the environment now, socially economically now and then?
It starts in Vancouver where the two boys had gone out west. It starts there forty years later; I don’t mention the number of years. One of the characters, Peter, played by Paul Bradley who died in 2003, he’s alive for 5 or 6 minutes then he dies and leaves a bequest which he then fulfills and goes on this journey.
Is there the same movement of people from the Maritimes to Toronto or is it in the past?
Not as much as it used to be. The population of PEI is the same as Confederation and Manitoba has never gone over a million, Manitoba is always sitting at 900 thousand, it exports a lot. PEI is 100k in 1867 and 110 in 2010 now so it’s hardly any different, so it still exports a lot of people. And Newfoundland is the biggest exporter of people. There are still a lot of Newfoundland Cape Breton communities in Toronto.
Why aren't you listed as working since 2003. Have you been working on this?
I’ve always been working getting scripts together. I did episodic television in 2003, then I did a documentary A Song to Sing, the nicest film I’ve ever done. It’s about an amateur Gilbert and Sullivan company, Ste. Anne’s Music Society in Toronto.
Anne Brodie - I review films each week on Corus and Rogers TV and for Metro News Canada, AskMen.com and Monsters and Critics. I profile celebrities for ...
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