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In a way, BlackBerry, SFFILM’s Sloan Science on Screen Award recipient that screened at the Festival on Monday, Apr. 17, began with DIY woodworking videos on YouTube. Producer Niv Fichman (The Saddest Music in the World, Antiviral) approached Operation Avalanche writer/director Matt Johnson and writer/producer Matthew Miller with the proposal that they adapt the book Losing the Signal: The Untold Story of the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry, about the once popular precursor to modern smartphones. Finding those videos turned out to be key to cracking the story.

The story behind the making of BlackBerry

The book by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff spun the tale of Research In Motion (RIM), the Waterloo, Ontario, company that invented the BlackBerry through the eyes of its two CEOS, tech geek Mike Lazaridis and hard-charging businessman Jim Balsillie. What Toronto native Johnson wanted to find were opinions of people who had worked at RIM. His brother-in-law is an engineer and through him, he learned of the connection between that profession and DIY projects, leading Johnson to scour YouTube until he struck gold when he discovered that one of BlackBerry’s original engineers later started his own woodworking company, posting videos about his projects. Johnson reached out and managed to overcome the man’s initial reticence.

“He really opened up from his perspective as just an engineer on the ground,” Johnson said during a phone call in the days leading up to the Festival. “He told us everything that was happening in the day to day. That’s when it clicked with us that this company, yes, is an engineering firm. But to us, it’s a lot like what it’s like to start a filmmaking career. You’re working with your friends, you’re working all day, and it’s fun. You don’t go to work for the money. The camaraderie is more important than either the product or the compensation.

“That’s when it really took off. We came up with this structure, a story about a kind of exciting startup culture that gets transformed through success into a corporate culture. That is when, all of a sudden, we knew what the characters needed to be and we were able to dig into all of our research from that angle. So that was a real lightning moment for us.”

Fichman originally hired Johnson and Miller merely to write the script, but as the pair threw themselves into the work, it became apparent that they wanted to tell the story themselves. Miller became a producer. BlackBerry became Johnson’s first feature since Operation Avalanche and he took on the role of Doug, Lazaridis’ closest collaborator at the beginning and the company’s amiable and goofy conscience.

“Basically, as soon as I realized this was an opportunity to tell the story of my own life, I thought, ‘Well, it wouldn’t be right to write it and put it in somebody else’s hands,’” Johnson said. “It wasn’t that I wanted to do it so badly, but because I thought, ‘Well, what we’re writing is really not going to be manageable by somebody who hasn’t exactly lived through it in the same way. Niv agreed one to one. He was an amazing partner.”

The Trotsky’s Jay Baruchel came aboard to play the silver-haired Lazaridis, a man perhaps too invested in his company’s product, while It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Glenn Howerton is the id of the piece as the energetic, crude, take-no-prisoners Balsillie. BlackBerry represents another step in the evolution of Johnson’s career, after making his 2013 feature debut with the ultra-low-budget, Slamdance award winner The Dirties, followed by Operation Avalanche in 2016, in which film geeks working for the CIA during the Cold War get involved with shenanigans involving the space race and Stanley Kubrick–and a film in which Johnson and his crew managed to invade NASA.

What was it like to work on BlackBerry?

“By American standards, BlackBerry’s budget is quite small, 8½ million Canadian,” Johnson said. For me, it meant that all of the sudden I was working with the actors’ union, all of the sudden we were working with a crew of 40+ people and the marshaling and coaching that went on. It was so funny how life imitated art, trying to maintain the ethos of that early Research in Motion. We’re all doing this for the fun energy while knowing not only the stakes but also that there were way more people involved. I like to hope that some of that energy remains on the screen. That was, by far, the hardest part of the process.

“You may notice that we tried to shoot as much in the real world as we could,” he added. “A lot of the actors aren’t really actors. A lot of them are real people, all those engineers I’m surrounded by are all very young filmmakers from Toronto, who have no background in acting but have a certain vitality, a certain life. And we shot in all the real places Research in Motion actually was. We shot in Waterloo in a lot of the real factories. The kind of stuff was important. We didn’t necessarily break in to as many places as we did on my last film but certainly authenticity was important.”

What does Johnson make of the rise and fall of BlackBerry?

The story of BlackBerry reads like an Icarus tale, a company that flew too high and crashed and burned, as much a victim of corporate hubris as the invention of the iPhone, the product that slew BlackBerry with its more advanced features and sleek style. But Johnson sees another reason for the fall of Research In Motion and its phone.

“I think Michael Lazaridis really had a bit of falling love with his own product, to the point of obsession,” he said. “I think what the film highlights in its own small way is a kind of – I don’t want to say arrogance–but there is that myth of the man who makes a statue of a woman and he makes it so perfect, so beautiful, that he falls in love with it. It was like that with Mike, so that when all of a sudden there was another device that did things almost the exact opposite of what his did, his pride and love for his own creation made him completely blind to the positives of what the smartphone was going to become. He fell so in love with what he’d done that he was blinded by possible improvements, because he thought, ‘Well, this could never be better.’”

What can we expect from the in-person conversation?

Johnson expressed his delight at BlackBerry being chosen for Sloan Science on Screen honors and the opportunity it gave him to geek out with a scientist. He looked forward to the onstage conversation between him and physicist Joel Moore, the Chern-Simons Professor of Physics at UC Berkeley and a senior faculty scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab.

“I’m thrilled,” he said. “I spoke to so many scientists, specifically from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, when we were making Operation Avalanche, and my brother and brother-in-law are scientists. Although I am painfully ignorant of all sciences, I love the fact that I can interface with people who know what they’re talking about… I’m sure he knows so many things that I just teased in the film. He is going to educate me.”

See the full conversation here

About the Author

Pam Grady is a freelance writer, whose work appears in the San Francisco Chronicle, 48 Hills, and other publications. She also has her own web site.

Stay In Touch With SFFILM

SFFILM is a nonprofit organization whose mission ensures independent voices in film are welcomed, heard, and given the resources to thrive. SFFILM works hard to bring the most exciting films and filmmakers to Bay Area movie lovers. To be the first to know what’s coming, sign up for our email alerts and watch your inbox.

Mary Harron, whose latest film Dalíland screens twice at SFFILM Festival and who the festival pays tribute to on Friday, April 14, began her feature career in 1996 with I Shot Andy Warhol about the pop artist’s near-fatal encounter with deranged feminist Valeria Solanas. Harron later brought to cinematic life Bret Easton Ellis’ titular American Psycho, celebrated an iconic American pinup with The Notorious Bettie Page, explicated the life of a 19th-century murderess in her miniseries adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, and explored the lives of Manson family killers in Charlie Says.

“One of the reasons why you start a film is your curiosity about a character and how to put them on screen and how to tell that story and make that story work,” Harron says in a phone call.

“Most of my stories have had characters who are kind of outsiders in some way. And I think I’ve also been interested in sort of the price of fame that’s kind of factored in a lot of them—not all of them but a lot of them.”

Why did Harron Choose Salvador Dalí

While an artist as famous as surrealist Salvador Dalí (Ben Kingsley) may not seem to fit the definition of “outsider,” at the time Dalíland takes place in the 1970s, he has fallen out of fashion. He is still creating art and he still has an entourage that includes his great friend, model Amanda Lear (Andreja Pejic), and a young glam Alice Cooper (renamed Alex in John Walsh’s script and played by Scottish actor Mark McKenna), but his days as an art world sun that the world revolved around are past him.

“He’s not in critical favor at all, at the time of our film,” Harron says. “It was a time of abstract expression and conceptual art, and his was representational art.”

Dalíland views the artist through the eyes of James (Christopher Briney in a memorable screen debut), a young gallery worker who enters Dalí’s world when he is tasked with bringing Dalí and wife Gala (Barbara Sukowa) money. Nicknamed San Sebastian by Dalí, he becomes embedded in their household, a regular at their decadent parties, and a witness to the Dalís’ tumultuous marriage and to Dalí’s art-making both as creative impulse and necessity in keeping afloat the couple’s extravagant lifestyle.

The film’s producers originally offered Harron a very different script, one more concerned with art fraud as high-quality photo copies of Dalí’s art are passed off as genuine lithographs. Dalí’s signature is real but what he signed were blank sheets of paper before the art was reproduced. That does work its way into Dalíland as a minor subplot but the main thrust of the film is Dalí and Gala’s lives in the ‘70s as well as their marriage. (Ezra Miller, who looks remarkably like the artist, plays Dalí as a young man in flashbacks with Avital Lvova as Gala.) That’s what captured Harron’s imagination and that was the story she developed with Walsh, her husband.

“It’s first and foremost, a story of a marriage, and also a less familiar time of his career,” Harron says. “We didn’t know that Salvador Dalí spent so much time in New York in ‘70s, that he was friends with Alice Cooper, that he was part of that whole world. Everyone thinks of him as surrealism in the 1930s. (Dalíland) is about marriage and this very unexpected aspect of Dalí’s career. I’d also say it’s about an artist facing death, old age and death.”

Connections Between the Filmmaker and the Film

The milieu of the film is also one familiar to the native of Canada who arrived in New York in 1975 at 22 shortly after graduating from Cambridge University. Though she was part of the punk scene and not the high echelons of the art world inhabited by Dalí that James enters, she knows the city of that period and the adventure of being young in it.

“New York was going bankrupt; it had hit the skids,” Harron says. “But it was also a really creative, wonderful, exciting time, culturally. It was a very fun time and it was sort of the end of glam rock. It was pre-AIDS. People were very kind of casual about sex and drugs. It was more playful, I think. People weren’t as worried about consequences.

“I wanted to capture a little bit of that party atmosphere and just a moment of a young person in New York,” she adds. “When you’re young, you can get swept up in something, because you’re young and unthreatening. You can just be invited places. You step on a merry-go-round, which is what happens with James. He stepped on a merry-go-round, and at some point, he gets thrown off but it’s still a fun ride. I wanted to really show someone on this ride.”

Harron is also proud of the fact that the film introduces audiences to Dalí’s late work. Pointing out that that it is not uncommon for an artist’s late work to be discounted or dismissed—she cites Warhol, Claude Monet, and Henri Matisse as examples—she and Dalíland make the case for Dalí’s relevance well into his twilight years.

“I feel like his work is so primal, and because it is about dream imagery, everybody in every country can appreciate it,” Harron says. “Everybody can understand dream life and the strangeness of it… I hope that people look again at some of the work he was doing in ‘70s. It’s just not true that all of his great work was in the 1930s. He continued to do interesting things and be inventive until the end.”

A Tribute to Mary Harron + “Dalíland”: 8:30 PM, Fri., April 14, CGV San Francisco. Click here for further information and tickets.

Dalíland: 7:45 PM, Sat., April 15, BAMPFA. Click here for further information and tickets.

About the Author

Pam Grady is a freelance writer, whose work appears in the San Francisco Chronicle, 48 Hills, and other publications. She also has her own web site.

Stay In Touch With SFFILM

SFFILM is a nonprofit organization whose mission ensures independent voices in film are welcomed, heard, and given the resources to thrive. SFFILM works hard to bring the most exciting films and filmmakers to Bay Area movie lovers. To be the first to know what’s coming, sign up for our email alerts and watch your inbox.

The Festival’s 2023 Mel Novikoff Award, named for the legendary San Francisco exhibitor and awarded to those who enhance appreciation of world cinema, goes to Firelight Media. Founded by award-winning filmmakers Stanley Nelson and Marcia Smith out of a desire to make their filmmaking lives more sustainable, the organization has moved well beyond that scope as the nonprofit expanded to support emerging documentary filmmakers of color. SFFILM Festival programmer Amber Love, whose short film, Lifetimes, was part of Firelight Media’s 2022 collection of regional shorts, HOMEGROWN: Future Visions, will engage Nelson and Smith in conversation as part of the awards presentation, followed by a screening of Nelson’s Emmy-nominated documentary The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution.

“It’s a thrill,” Smith says of sharing a stage with a filmmaker who has taken part in a Firelight Media program.

“And kind of surreal, but it’ll be fun,” Nelson adds.

How did Firelight Media begin?

Love is one of over 200 filmmakers that have come under the Firelight Media umbrella to date. The organization became operational in 2000. Nelson and Smith married and wanted to work together but it wasn’t practical given the nature of documentary filmmaking where projects can take years to reach fruition and raising money is always a struggle. It is a never-ending cycle. Forming a nonprofit production company to even out the highs and the lows of funding made collaborating on projects possible.

“That was really the inspiration for the organization,” Smith says. “The irony, of course, is we’re now supporting other people for the same reasons. That is still very much part of what we do. One can make the argument that documentary makers should be able to make a living making their work because what they’re doing is so important.”

In 2008, the company split into two arms. Firelight Films was born as a for-profit documentary production company under Nelson’s leadership. As president of nonprofit Firelight Media, Smith oversees the programs designed to help launch up-and-coming filmmakers, including its Documentary Lab; The Goundwork Regional Lab, which convenes in underserved communities to introduce the documentary world and apprise new filmmakers of opportunities that exist for them; and much more, including funding programs.

Smith says mentoring emerging makers was something that she and Nelson had been doing all along and it is something she says is common with documentary filmmakers. As that kind of work increased, it became evident that they should institutionalize the work they were doing.

“We built a structure and a framework to support other filmmakers, and that is what became the documentary arm,” Smith says. “That was the evolution of that.”

“Part of the realization came when I made a film called Shattering the Silence, which was about academics of color in major institutions all across the country,” Nelson says. “One of the things they constantly told us was that there was an extra expectation on them to mentor people. If you’re a Black professor, you’re supposed to mentor all the Black students you could gather. If you’re a Latino academic somewhere, you’re supposed to work with all the Spanish-speaking people. It made me think about that, that that was an expectation of filmmakers of color, and that there was a way to institutionalize that mentoring we were all doing anyway and that filmmakers would benefit if the thing was institutionalized and there was a structure.”

The Importance of Documentary Filmmaking Today

One thing Smith emphasizes is that while some think this is a golden age for documentaries, the ones that have the easiest time getting funding are celebrity-driven or true crime. The type of serious documentaries that Nelson and Smith make, like 2021’s Oscar®-nominated Attica (written and co-directed by Nelson and executive produced by Smith), and the kind of work being done by makers in Firelight Media’s programs still face challenges. Yet, the work they do is vital, particularly in light of mainstream media’s often shallow reportage and state governments, such as Florida, that are outright hostile to teaching subjects as basic as American history.

“We used to argue 20 years ago that documentaries played an important role because of mergers and the corporatization of newspapers and radio and television news,” Smith says. “But now, in some states, I think documentaries are going to be the only way you know anything about history. That makes the work all the more important. It was already important but now it is critical. It’s one of the things that gives me a powerful sense of mission.”

“It’s a cliché but we have to look at history in a clear light, the light of day, as we say. It’s just really that fundamental,” adds Nelson. “History doesn’t blame anybody; it doesn’t shame anybody.”

“One of the things that film does is introduce you to subjects in a very entertaining way. You might not want to read a 700-page book but you’ll watch a documentary that’s an hour long or two hours. You start to learn a little bit, then maybe you will want to read that 700-page book…As the media keeps shrinking, documentaries become more and more important, where you look behind the story and investigate the news. TV news, cable news are not doing that at this point.”

What began as a way for married filmmakers to work together and support their family has grown into something so much bigger as Firelight Media helps so many others achieve their own ambitions. When Smith and Nelson look back over the past 23 years, how do they feel?

“I feel really proud,” says Smith. “I think a lot of organizations that started in 2000 are not around anymore. But we are and we plan to be here on into the future, for the next 50 years. Because the reason we exist, it’s not going to go away. So, we plan to be here.”

“When we started out, there were two things that we felt. One is that this thing, Firelight Media, was sustainable, that we could raise money and sustain it,” says Nelson. “It’s been different. It’s very different from making a film where you raise the money and you’re done and now you make the film. This is an ongoing process, raising money.

“Two, and probably more importantly, there are filmmakers out there who are really talented and have great stories to tell. We can help them tell their stories. They can stand on our backs and make the leap. Every year we find more talented filmmakers than in the last. It’s been an incredible ride.”

Mel Novikoff Award: Firelight Media + “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution”: 3:15 PM, Sat., April 15, CGV San Francisco. Click here for further information and tickets.

About the Author

Pam Grady is a freelance writer, whose work appears in the San Francisco Chronicle, 48 Hills, and other publications. She also has her own web site.

Stay In Touch With SFFILM

SFFILM is a nonprofit organization whose mission ensures independent voices in film are welcomed, heard, and given the resources to thrive. SFFILM works hard to bring the most exciting films and filmmakers to Bay Area movie lovers. To be the first to know what’s coming, sign up for our email alerts and watch your inbox.