KM: For the filming of it, you mentioned that you had the interiors and the exteriors… so how did you film this, did you actually get a boat, did you go out on the ocean? How did you get all this to work?

RG: Mike and the production company are all based in Calgary, Alberta, which is the farthest from the ocean you could get, so that’s where pre-production was. We were looking into Fiji at first because they get like 60% tax breaks across the board, but Fiji turned the script down due to moral reasons. So we then looked into Hawaii where they shot Lost, but that also turned out to be a bit of a disaster because apparently for us – for Canadians – to shoot there, there was some weird thing where we’d need to fly to a third party country and then enter the States from there. With the entire crew that would have been…

KM: A nightmare!

RG: Really expensive, yeah. So we ended up gambling on ourselves and we said “ok, well let’s build the interior of the boat in the middle of Calgary, Alberta in winter, in -30C”. And so we started shooting the interior of the boat before we had our exterior location or a boat picked at all. We just got lucky that Tim Rutherford, who was our production designer, built a gorgeous interior boat that was like the perfect level of hand-me-down from Richard’s father. And then Mike and Kurtis and the rest of the team managed to find Belize at that point.

I didn’t know anything about Belize, but because Australia’s reef is dying, they’ve got the largest live reef break in the world, and that helped to keep calm waters. We had an entire scuba and snorkeling resort booked out to ourselves on the beach with our own private dock, we just had the boat docked up there. So that was kind of the reward for shooting in -30 weather in Calgary. It was an interesting way to shoot a movie, that half the pitch to the actors was like, “hey, come on board to do this movie! We’ll get to go to a tropical location for at least the second half”. So that took some of the bite for working with some crazy Canadians. 

KM: I like that you shot it in order, because with the interior of the boat, the way it sort of just disintegrates…

RG: Yeah that was such a relief too, on everyone’s part. It’s like “Ok we’ve got that scene, now we can mess the boat up and not have to worry about returning it back to that state”. So that helped just with continuing forward. The big one was actually their facial hair. It’s like, ok day one — don’t shave for now for the rest of the week and a half. It helped to get them to the right level of peach fuzz. 

KM: It’s a fine detail, but if they were clean shaven the whole time, then you would definitely notice the difference.

RG: Yeah for sure, that was such a stressful thing, too, like how are we going to accomplish this without it being like, you know, the glued on fake beard.  

KM: I love that Harpoon is kind of about pushing the boundaries of friendship and, you know, can you ever go back once you get to a certain point. What brought you to want to explore that fucked up level of friendship? Where did that idea come from?

RG: At least for me, when I’m writing something it’s kind of a therapy session. I’m constantly wrestling with ideas like friendship and betrayal, and I like to think those are pretty universal themes that people are worried about. But beyond that, the other thing was how would I react in what’s supposed to be a heroic situation? I think about that often. If I’m on a friend’s boat or something like that, like how am I going to react? Would I be worried about self-preservation or would I act selflessly?

So all three of these characters in some way – between all the different ideas and worries that I have going around in my head – I see a bit of all three of these at any given time, they’re like the worst parts of me. That’s one way of putting it… I’m not like these characters! [laughs] As they exist. But a lot of these thoughts and worries that they do talk about are at least what I’ve thought about in my head, about either myself or about friends. I just felt it’s a good time to exercise all these thoughts that hopefully other people consider as well.

I’d like to think that if nothing else, people have that one friend that they’ve fallen out with for various reasons and I just wanted to push that to the extreme. It’s actually been really interesting in Q&As and stuff, people either understand these characters – they understand that they’re villains but they can still engage with them as human beings – or you get the people whose knee-jerk reaction is “these are awful people, why would I ever want to watch these kinds of people act this way”.

I feel like it has to do with the ability to admit that they maybe have some of these flaws in them, or refuse to admit that they have some of these flaws in them. They’re all very specific self-centered flaws. And I mean, you don’t have to like it, but I hope they understand that not everyone is a nice person. I have various levels of these kinds of character traits in my friends, not to this extreme, obviously, but I feel like they are human behaviors that we should recognize. 

KM: Yes, there’s something about pushing humanity to that level of extreme that brings those negative characteristics out. We all have that darkness deep down in us, but how do you get it to come to the surface.

RG: Yeah, I have had conversations with the actors like, look, don’t ever consider yourself to be the bad guy. All these people think they’re doing the right thing either for themselves or for the group. And that helps it to be not so one-dimensional. The decisions at least, if you traced them back, they have sound reasons for the behaviors that they’re doing. And I hope that that’s recognized by at least some of the audience members as to why you can end up in this place. 

Harpoon is screening at Fantasia Fest on Saturday July 27.

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