Filmmaker, musician and broadcaster Sook-Yin Lee in her kitchen in Toronto, on Aug. 8. Lee’s house served as one of the backdrops to her new movie, Paying For It, an adaptation of her former partner Chester Brown’s graphic novel of the same name.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
If Toronto is a city of neighbourhoods, then Kensington Market is a neighbourhood splintered into a thousand tiny, gritty dreamscapes. Wander down enough alleys, peer into enough windows, and you’re bound to encounter altogether different worlds. Which is what it feels like stepping inside the home of filmmaker, musician, actor and MuchMusic icon Sook-Yin Lee, whose two-storey row house located on a secluded Kensington Market street is a cozy repository of off-kilter wit and DIY whimsy, crammed with the art and artifacts of a life well curated.
Appropriately enough, the space is also where much of her new film, the provocative, hilarious and heartfelt sex-work dramedy Paying for It, was shot. And it is a doubly apt location given that the movie is based on Lee’s own life, reworking moments of intense personal history that unspooled inside this very home.
An adaptation of Chester Brown’s acclaimed 2011 “comic-strip memoir about being a john,” as the book’s subtitle goes, Paying for It chronicles the author’s encounters with Toronto sex workers after he becomes disillusioned by the concept of traditional romantic partnerships. But while Brown’s original work touches on his real-life relationship with Lee – her desire to open their lives to other sexual partners led Brown to explore the world of prostitution – the new film doubles down on the couple.
Director Sook-Yin Lee on set.Dylan Gamble/Supplied
Actor Daniel Beirne (The Twentieth Century) might be the focus of the film in his role as the introverted and gentle Chester, but Emily Lê (Riceboy Sleeps) is almost just as present playing Sonny, Lee’s fictionalized alter ego, who works as a VJ for a TV station called MaxMusic. And now this sometimes beautiful, sometimes painful slice of Brown and Lee’s lives will be on full display when Paying for It has its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival next week.
“It’s a double act of portraiture. There are some people who can just dream up scenarios, but even when I write fiction, like my last film Octavio Is Dead!, that’s still partly based on real experiences,” Lee explains. “It’s a little strange, living in this house and it sometimes being a set. It gets blurred. Those dishes are real, but those pots were brought in by the art department. After a while, it doesn’t matter. They are just items in our lives that float around.”
After Montreal’s Drawn & Quarterly published Paying for It, Brown was approached by filmmakers from the United States and Europe looking to adapt the book. Yet he refused to give the rights to anyone but Lee, who had made her first feature, the sexually adventurous comedy Year of the Carnivore, a few years before.
“Sex work was and is such a controversial topic that I couldn’t trust anyone I didn’t know to handle it properly,” says Brown, who makes a cameo in Lee’s film and was on set for a few days to double for Beirne’s hands when his character is at work drawing comics. “Sometimes we had pretty intense squabbles about this and that, but I was always clear I didn’t want to be a screenwriter.”
Lee went through several versions of the script over the years, struggling to balance Brown’s journey as a character with the political elements of sex work and its historical criminalization that were both baked into the story and given fuller life in the book’s copious appendices and notes.
“I thought it would be easy, we could just do every panel as a scene! But the memoir is not just a diary but a political treatise,” Lee says. “There was one version where it was very French New Wave, with Chester on a pulpit ranting.”
Eventually, Lee connected with screenwriter Joanne Sarazen (Tammy’s Always Dying), who added a muscular sense of structure, incorporating events in Brown and Lee’s lives. Even after Brown began seeing prostitutes and Lee pursued other romantic partners, the two shared their Kensington Market home for years.
“While reading the book for the umpteenth time, I noticed that Chester saw a sex worker on my birthday. So then it clicked as a story about questioning possessive pride, monogamy, how consensual sex work is still criminalized – arguments that could be hung on the setup of him and I living together,” says Lee, who now shares her home with musician Dylan Gamble. (Brown long ago moved to a condo that, as Lee describes it, is “modern on the outside and opens into an ancient wizard’s home jammed with books.”)
Lee’s research, and years of living with the material, helped her stare down a tight 20-day shooting schedule.Galit Rodan/The Globe and Mail
Another major change from the source material involved Lee ensuring that all the sex workers – women depicted in the book as strictly anonymous, their heads obscured to protect identifying features – are presented as full-bodied, layered characters, including one played by Andrea Werhun, author of Modern Whore: A Memoir (which itself is being adapted into a feature film).
“All the women I cast are visual artists, filmmakers, musicians, activists and all politically aware of sex work,” says Lee, who successfully petitioned the Canadian screen union ACTRA for leniency in employing amateur performers. “It was incredibly important for me to have that perspective and the nuanced specificity.”
Lee’s research, and years of living with the material, helped her stare down a tight 20-day shooting schedule.
“We had a limited budget, but I had made DIY movies with Dylan during the lockdown, which sharpened my skills to make movies with whatever I had and whoever I could ask for help,” says Lee, who rang up her old MuchMusic boss Moses Znaimer to use his Zoomer studio space to replicate the heyday of MuchMusic’s 299 Queen St. West era.
The film arrives at TIFF under the shadow of twinned losses, though.
Adam Litovitz, Lee’s former partner and long-time artistic collaborator who worked on permutations of Paying for It over the years, died in 2019 after battling anxiety and depression. And famed cartoonist Joe Matt, a close friend of Brown and Lee’s who appears both in the book and as a lightly fictionalized character (played by Ely Henry) in the film, died of a heart attack last September.
“Adam and I visited Joe in L.A., and he was so funny, such a deeply honest cartoonist – Chester and I needed to dedicate this film to him,” Lee says. “And losing Adam was just such a big wallop in my life. Yet he was inside me over the course of this movie. If I was ever confounded by a problem, his voice came along and said, ‘Just do it like this!’ That sounds bonkers. But he is everywhere here, even in the frames of this house.”
Paying for It will have its world premiere at TIFF on Sept. 6 at 9:30 p.m. at the TIFF Lightbox, with an additional screening on Sept. 7 at 11:45 a.m. at the TIFF Lightbox (tiff.net).