Nolan Sarner

The most obvious thing about 28-year-old director Nolan Sarner is that he is enthusiastic – enthusiastic and ambitious. He has squeezed a lot into his fledgling career and while everything he has done is talked about with passion and gusto, he also explains that the choices he has made so far have usually had a thought process behind them, rather than simply being for the hell of it.

Sarner first encountered filmmaking as a 17-year-old when he worked for a Canadian documentary maker as a runner. “I did that in my half-year off at high school,” he explains, “and I wasn’t really into film at that point.”

That was all set to change. Sarner signed up for a sociology degree at university – and admits that university life was more about the experience than the education – but it was here that the film bug took its first bite. “We had a class which had a really liberal professor,” explains Sarner, “and a friend and I approached her and said ‘look, we don’t really want to write an essay, we’d like to make a film’.

And we didn’t really know what we were doing but we went out and we shot this documentary which was on alcohol and alcohol issues. We approached it in a relatively light-hearted way and I really enjoyed it, I enjoyed every aspect of it.” It seemed his fellow classmates did, too. The screening of the resultant film was a great success and Sarner began to realise he’d found something he loved. But rather than jump ship on his sociology degree, he stuck it out while also making documentaries in his own time.

Documentaries were Sarner’s first passion, the flames of which were fanned by Michael Moore, whose Bowling for Columbine had just been released. “That was an amazing movie,” Sarner says. “It definitely inspired me.” After finishing university and coming back to Toronto, Sarner then began working a number of different film-based jobs; assistant to the director of live television programmes, working in the art department of a feature film, and helping out shooting short films.

It was after this whirlwind of work that Sarner finally realised that directing was what he wanted to do. “I wanted to learn more about film and the technical aspects of it, so I went to Ryerson, which is a university in Toronto, to a summer film programme, which was basically four years packed into 13 weeks. It was 13 hours a day for six days a week, so it was intense. But that was a good thing; when you’re working on a commercial, you’re working 13 hours a day for a few weeks and then when you’re done, you’re done – it was good preparation.

I made a couple of films there; I would never show those films to anyone but it was a learning experience.” After leaving Ryerson at the age of 24, Sarner’s introduction to the world of commercials was a four-month internship at Untitled Films. His enthusiasm for learning, he says, meant that when he was on a shoot he would spend as much time as possible hovering over the director and around the heart of the production.

To move him on “you would basically have to tell me to fuck off”. The young director realised that commercials were a great way to practice the craft of directing and allowed for challenges and creativity. “Commercials are great because you get money and you get toys to play with. You also get a lot of chances to try things, and I like that.” Sarner’s ambition comes to the fore from here.

Told that directing spec spots was not the road to go down, he focused on getting a real script to direct. That came with Hope is a Place, a spot for the Canadian youth treatment centre Pine River Institute, which came about via Manifest, a small boutique agency in Toronto. People liked the resulting work, but with only one spot on his reel he was a gamble to hire so again waited for another real script which, again, Manifest supplied and again came out brilliantly.

After that Sarner signed with Fever Films, an offshoot of Avion, and directed a further two spots there. “It’s been tough, I won’t lie,” he says. “The economy has meant that a lot of the veteran directors have taken what would normally be the projects guys like me would take on, but if I was at an agency then sure, I’d take that guy too.” The four spots that Sarner had directed up to this point were all very visual and he was keen to show that he could do dialogue, especially as his long-term goal is a feature film.

A year ago he wrote and directed Mortimer. “It’s very hard to get a job with a speaking board when you don’t have anything [on your reel]. So I figured I had to make something. I had to get out there and make it happen.” Sarner thought the process through and decided to appeal to both the film and commercial markets. “I wanted to make something pretty short and self-contained so that festival programmers could put it into any slot they wanted, and from a commercials standpoint, people have no attention span so I wanted to keep it short and sweet.”

Mortimer is basically about a guy attending a job interview. The interviewer doesn’t want him for the job but can’t bring himself say no, so brings in a puppet to do the job for him. It’s a fantastically funny film where the small facial expressions and the comic pauses between dialogue are as impactful as anything that’s actually said. The star of the show is, of course, the puppet.

“I bought the puppet off eBay from a guy in Malaysia,” laughs Sarner. “I commissioned him to make this puppet as I wanted a certain look but the puppet came to me naked and I had to buy the outfit. I must have seemed like a crazy person as I went into a children’s store with a naked puppet and said ‘I’m looking for suits’. People were looking at me like, ‘what the fuck?’” Now signed to Imported Artists, Sarner is positive about both his and his country’s creative future.

He realises that clients can sometimes err on the side of caution when it comes to advertising scripts, and understands why that is, but has “high hopes” for the Canadian advertising industry. As for his own future, his main aim is to make more commercials, work on some short films and, eventually, a feature. “I couldn’t be more enthused about working on commercials,” he grins. “I know there are some directors
who really don’t enjoy it and I’m like, ‘give me the job, I fuckin’ love it’.”