Sweet Virginia. Directed by Jamie Dagg. Starring Jon Bernthal, Christopher Abbott, Imogen Poots and Rosemarie DeWitt.
For his sophomore feature film, director Jamie Dagg needed a small town with a claustrophobic, no-escape vibe, a place terrorized by a psychopathic drifter. Ironically, he found all of that potential for despair in Hope.
In Sweet Virginia, Hope, B.C., stands in for a fictional small town in Alaska. Dagg and his team headed out on a scouting trip of towns with close proximity to Vancouver and the right terrorized-hamlet feel. “Immediately within five minutes of being there it met all my expectations, so I cancelled the rest of the scouting trip.”
The community could not have been more supportive, according to Dagg, who had meetings with the mayor, the head of the RCMP, and the fire chief. People around town weren’t jaded but were excited to help out. One day a scene called for several of the actors to wear bulletproof vests, but an accident on the highway delayed the truck carrying wardrobe. “One call later, and no problem: a cruiser pulls up with five bulletproof vests for us to use,” he says.
“It sort of felt like summer camp.” Dagg spent all of August and much of September in Hope. All the film’s locations were half a kilometre radius from one another, and he walked to set. Physically, too, the town was ideal: “It is completely hemmed in by this wall of mountains, and into September there’s this pervasive mist that hangs everywhere… it lends a sense of claustrophobia to the film.”
That’s important in a film whose characters feel as though they have nowhere to run. Things start out violently in Sweet Virginia, when a stranger crashes a late-night poker game at a diner and insists on being served the daily special. When he is refused, he goes out to the car and returns and shoots the three men.
It wasn’t a chance encounter, we learn. Elwood (Christopher Abbott) was hired to kill a young woman’s husband; there was only supposed to be one widow, not three. Elwood is staying at the Sweet Virginia motel, a sad sort of holding place for people disappointed by life. It’s run by Sam (Jon Bernthal), a broken-down former rodeo champion who happens to be having an affair with one of the widows.
Bernthal (Baby Driver, The Walking Dead) wasn’t an obvious choice to play Sam. The part was written for an older man, but someone had slipped Bernthal the script and he showed interest. “I was apprehensive about it because Jon’s used to playing really tough, masculine roles, and this character needed warmth,” Dagg says. Not only that, Bernthal had recently bulked up for his role in The Punisher, making him less believable as the underdog. The actor suggested that Sam be re-written with early-onset Parkinson’s caused by too many falls in the rodeo ring. A “fantastic and believable” way to convey weakness in his character, they decided.
Abbott too was something of a revelation to Dagg: “I had only really seen him in Girls at that point,” says the director, who did his homework and realized he was perfect for the part. Abbott was the first actor to sign on, and his ferocious calm and confidence anchors the film. Rosemarie Dewitt (La La Land) plays Bernie, Sam’s lover; Imogen Poots is Lila, the unhappy wife who sets everything in motion.
The director spent his first 18 years in Timmons, Ont., “for better or worse,” and then lived in Vancouver for a time: he still has a 604 area code on his cell. “Not a day that goes by that I don’t miss the West Coast,” he says by phone from Toronto, his current home.
His first feature, River, starred Rossif Sutherland as a volunteer doctor in Laos accused of a crime and on the run; his new film is no less despairing. “I don’t know why I’m drawn to these sorts of themes, I’m not a dark person,” he confesses. “I don’t see myself doing a rom-com anytime soon ... I know what my limitations are.”
With a pall of languid dread throughout Sweet Virginia’s script, was it tough to keep the mood on set light? “God, no. The minute we call cut it’s all back to giggles,” says Dagg. “These particular actors, they’re not method actors, so it’s not like you’ve got Chris moping around set and kicking stuff over, refusing to speak to anybody.”
Benjamin and Paul China wrote the decidedly noir script which features a flashback to Sam’s rodeo glory days. “I didn’t know anything about it,” Dagg admits of the rodeo circuit. The film’s stunt co-ordinator is a former bull rider and Dagg found himself at the Glen Keeley Memorial Bull Riding event south of Calgary. A bull rider had been hired to play the younger Sam and the crew was given permission to shoot in front of the actual crowd. “They were really generous with us… It’s not really my thing but it’s always interesting to step into a world you’re unfamiliar with. That’s what it’s all about.”
Another memorable detail is Dagg’s own: the decision to have angry Christian talk radio playing while Lila is in her car, showing the hypocrisy of a woman who has just had her husband killed. He and the film’s editor found a preacher online who was prone to some particularly un-Christian vitriol. And so “I wrote him pretending to be a follower because I thought I could use it in the movie,” he says. A few pious emails later, the preacher licensed the recording to them. Dagg isn’t worried about the repercussions, though he is prepared: “we’ve got the legal paperwork, so bring it on.”
