I was standing at the Loblaws checkout, watching my vegetables get punched in, thinking, "the cost of produce here is murder," when I looked up and swore I recognized the cashier. After a few seconds, I remembered he had been my waiter at brunch the weekend before at the New York Café across the street on Broadview. And wait, wasn't he also that guy who works behind the counter at the fish 'n' chips shop Deep Blue, also on Broadview just south of the Danforth?
"Yeah, I have three jobs," he told me.
I knew rents in Riverdale had got bad, but three jobs?
"For a while, I had four. I'm financing my horror film."
When he spoke those words, I saw my golden opportunity to live the Hollywood North dream, and I took it. That's how I became FBI Agent Number 4 in the Orwell-inspired sci-fi thriller I See You.
The actor/director/grocer extraordinaire is 22-year-old Rick Jordan. A look at his eponymous website reveals that, among other things, he has completed an autobiographical documentary and once appeared on Canadian Idol (a show that is a different kind of horror). Two weeks after we first met, I arrived wearing a white button-down and black tie to one of his friend's pads, an apartment in Riverdale's Broadview Mansions. A prewar complex built in 1927, it probably has more than a few ghosts, I thought to myself as I entered the brick building.
That night, however, the ghost was being played by Sara Miller, a recent Ryerson University film-program grad. Ms. Miller was wearing skin-tight black jeans and a revealing green sweater, dressed to kill, which she would be doing with a plastic automatic handgun that Mr. Jordan had picked up at a dollar store.
But before that climactic scene was committed to digital video, I leaned back into a black leather desk chair, stroked my chin thoughtfully and delivered my first ever on-camera line. "Yeah," I said to the FBI agent sitting next to me, "so then six years ago I moved to Toronto. It's really nice here, I like it. The people are kind."
"Cut," said Mr. Jordan, raising an eyebrow at me from the other side of the room, where the actual scene was taking place and where he was about to get his head blown off for the fourth time.
"Oh, were you filming?" I blushed.
When he'd finally nailed it, Mr. Jordan looked over the panning shot of the results and vented his frustration to the director of photography.
"You're not getting the gore! Try it again."
"I don't know how I'm supposed to get that low and still get you in the frame," the DP replied.
"Dad, just hold up the camera and tilt it downwards."
Mr. Jordan's father - also known as the Kingston Butcher (not because he's a serial murderer, but because he actually is a butcher living in Kingston) - complied.
Spying over their shoulders and noticing the shot was a bit dark, I decided to redeem myself and took charge of lighting, which meant holding a standing lamp sideways so that it illuminated the ground beef that makeup artist Sonia Godbout had applied to Mr. Jordan's head.
I thought raw brain matter would be less gruesome behind the camera, but as Ms. Godbout applied the various consistencies of fake blood that she kept in a series of plastic vials, my stomach turned. "Does anybody want to take the rest of this home?" she asked, holding up the ground leftovers. "I don't need all of it."
My moment finally came in the fourth hour of shooting, as three other FBI agents and myself came bursting into the room, guns ablaze, to discover the dead body. To inspire the subtle shock of a young Fed new to the force but who has seen some blood in his time, I thought about the hollowed-out squirrel carcass I'd seen over on Parliament Street the week before. Whether or not my method acting worked, you, the audience, will have to judge.
Mr. Jordan hopes to screen his nine-minute micro-budget creation at future film festivals and perhaps at the Bloor Cinema. However it turns out, I have to admire the hours of minimum-wage work he puts in to live his dream. After all, it's not the size of your budget, but how you use it. And of course, the immensity of your bit-part acting talent.