5 Questions with Jesse de Rocquigny
1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?
I grew up in a rural town outside of Winnipeg, Manitoba, a pretty modest town with not a lot going on. I begged my mom to get me a camcorder from Sears and I started making videos and films with my friends. My buddies and I would hang out on the weekend and film pretty dumb videos, we'd play assassins with airsoft guns and chase each other on snowmobiles, normal prairie kid stuff. I even started a YouTube channel where I would upload these videos for friends and family to watch. In retrospect, they are very embarrassing and cringy to watch. I never really thought a filmmaking career was even possible in a place where I lived, but I always admired movies and movie-making. I remember truly falling in love with film after watching the behind-the-scenes of James Cameron's "Avatar" (Of course, that movie inspired me a lot too during my early teens). The DVD had like 4 hours of BTS footage and I would watch it on repeat; I was totally fascinated by the process. I only realized I wanted to pursue filmmaking when I was in senior year of high school when I learnt the city University had a Film Studies program. During my last two years of film school I began to make some really meaningful connections in the Winnipeg filmmaking community, shooting music videos and short films outside of school. Everything snowballed from there, and working on as many different films as I could!
2) What’s the backstory here - what was the initial idea and how did it evolve from there?
The idea for "The Other Side" came from when I attended the biggest film festival in our province, the Gimli Film Festival for the first time. Gimli is this beach town about an hour north of Winnipeg, it has a lot of character and its kind of like our Caribbean here in Manitoba. On one of the last days of the festival, my friends and I were walking around town on the verge of heat stroke and probably still a little drunk from the night before, my one friend Matt said, "Prairie boys make the best sailors because they aren't afraid of the wide open sky". I thought that was the funniest thing ever and for some reason it resonated so deeply within me. From there I sat on that proclamation for about a year, it kinda disappeared as I was shooting a lot of other peoples movies and developing another short of mine. It came back to me during the winter and I got to work on trying to come up with a story about this prairie boy sailor.
3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And generally what part of the creative process do you enjoy the most, and the least?
The biggest challenge was the hidden logistics of shooting on location far outside of the city with a big crew and no money. I had everything mapped out pretty decently, I rented an AirBnB for everyone to stay in that doubled as a location, I had permits to shoot at the harbour and a crew that was all hands on deck. What I didn't see coming was the weather, trying to teach my lead actor how to drive a boat in five minutes and having crew members driving away a push ignition vehicle while I had the key fob in my pocket, leaving them and the vehicle stranded wherever their destination was...far away from set.
For this film specifically, I really enjoyed post-production, I worked closely with my sound designer and composer and experimented lots with different sounds. They did incredible work and I'm so stoked on how it turned out.
My least favourite part about this project was my ambitious scheduling, it was very overwhelming to shoot because I wasn't used to delegating to a crew the size I had and just feeling kind of bad because a lot was going wrong and I was rapidly losing faith in my vision. But we all pulled through and I am forever grateful for my cast and crew that stuck with me.
4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?
I recently watched "Cast Away" by Robert Zemeckis for the first time. I had so much anxiety watching it because I was going on a trip to Florida at the end of the month and saw this film as some sort of bad omen. I also seen "Parasite" by Bong Joon Ho recently, it surpassed my expectations of what I thought it would be, truly a masterwork of cinematic language and storytelling.
5) What’s next for you?
I have a couple shorts I want to make in the summer, but am beginning to develop a hockey film that I've been sitting on for a few years and will try and secure some funding for.
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http://vimeo.com/derocquigny
IG: @jessederock