After almost thirty years working within the Canadian film and television industries, director and producer Kevin McMahon is set to receive one of the most prestigious honours of his career. On Wednesday, October 12 at the gala opening to the Planet in Focus Film Festival (7:00 p.m., TIFF Bell Lightbox), McMahon will receive the Canadian Eco-Hero Award for a body of work that exemplifies his commitment to community and the environment. The award places McMahon in the same rarefied air as past recipients David Suzuki and Margaret Atwood.
McMahon, the founder of Toronto-based production company Primitive Entertainment, has covered a wide range of topics from musician Yo-Yo Ma to the nature of public relations, but he is probably best known for his work directing the 2009 documentary Waterlife and his producing of this year’s popular National Parks Project for Discovery Canada. McMahon has also traveled across Canada to take looks at the results of nuclear proliferation in the Arctic, a righteous journey made by a tribe in the Pacific Northwest to reclaim their stolen history, the Atlantic fishing industry, and pollution in his own hometown of Niagara Falls.
McMahon talked with Criticize This! for an in-depth look back on his career in anticipation of receiving his latest honour.
Andrew Parker: What does getting the Canadian Eco-Hero Award from the Planet in Focus festival mean to you?
Kevin McMahon: It’s a great honour, obviously. It’s really great to be recognized this way. It’s strange because no one really rationally thinks of themselves as any kind of hero, but it’s nice to be recognized for doing environmental work. For me it’s an opportunity to reflect on 30 years of being able to report on this kind of story and think about that. It’ll give me an opportunity to talk about that the night the festival opens. I’m amazed and humbled to be in the ranks of some of the people they have given this award to in the past.
AP: How did you really get into documentary filmmaking in the first place?
KM: Well, I was a journalist. When I was in university I started working on the student newspaper, then I went to college and studied journalism specifically. I spent the first five years of my career writing a column at a daily paper. But I loved film and I liked photography and I just decided that I wanted to go into film. So I went back to school again and did a post-grad course to learn the technology of film, and then documentary was just the natural outgrowth of film and journalism together.
AP: The first film I wanted to talk to you about was The Falls because you were originally from the Niagara Falls area. What made you want to take on the things going on in your own backyard for your first major feature film?
KM: I guess I felt that Niagara Falls was this famous place where no one had ever looked at it in all of its different colour, both in terms of the beauty of the place with the kitchy overlay of tourism and with the kind of toxic overlay of what industrialization had done to the place and the effect that it had on the river. I thought there was value in putting all of these things together and looking at this place in a kind of whole way. Plus, it’s just such an extraordinary place for a filmmaker. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel because it’s just so beautiful, and amazing, and tacky that I knew it would make for a great subject visually.
AP: For a first feature shooting in and around a major national park sounds pretty ambitious. Was it a tough film to make and get clearances for?
KM: No, that was easy. Now, keep in mind that this was twenty years ago. It was a lot easier to get into places twenty years ago than it is today. I think there might have been one or two of the factories that turned us down, but even then we were allowed to shoot inside a chemical factory. We went in, wandered around, and shot what we needed, and today there is no way you would get that. That wasn’t the hard part of that film at all.
AP: The Falls also marked your first Genie award nomination. What were your feelings about that at the time?
KM: Again, it’s a great honour, but, you know, one of the reasons the Eco-Award I’m receiving is special to me is because you’ve done all this work and they want to recognize you for it, and that feels great, it feels like a real honour. But when you’re competing against other films… I never liked that. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. It’s always a crap shoot. And, I mean, I’ve been on those juries and I know that it’s very often that you win because you are the lesser of however many evils. There’s usually two people who really like something and you can win simply by coming up the middle and splitting the difference. To be honest, I don’t put much stock in those awards. They’re useful from a business point of view because you can put them on your resume, but emotionally I try not to care about them.
