Walton

Karen Walton: Never the Same Day Twice

By Philip Moscovitch

Karen Walton became a screenwriter because she loves to work with other people.

“To me, filmmaking is a team sport,” she says. “I don’t know why you’d be writing film if you didn’t love working with directors, and love the challenge of market input, and–in the case of LA–love walking into a room with 16 strangers sitting there who expect you to have all the answers.”

Walton’s start in film came at the margins of the business–as an administrator, and later, executive director of the local film and video co-op in Edmonton. While others attracted to the co-op aspired to direct, that had no appeal for her.

“What I really wanted to do was to work with lots of different kinds of directors on lots of different kinds of projects. If you are a screenwriter, your primary occupation–besides obviously, the hair-pulling part of writing–is working with such an amazing range of artists on a whole spectrum of projects. When I quit my day job, my motto was ‘Never the same day twice.’”

In the early 1990s, Walton entered a CBC radio drama writing competition and won, then wrote a feature film script based on the radio play. It gained her entry to the Canadian Film Centre’s Screenwriting Residency.

Walton first came to national attention with Ginger Snaps–the cult teen-werewolf-horror flick she wrote. The film won Walton a Canadian Comedy Award, an International Horror Guild award, and a special jury citation at TIFF. That project truly drove home the power of collaboration. Filmmakers in the CFC program held roundtable workshops with each other over a nine-month period. “I wish everyone could have that experience,” Walton says.

After Ginger Snaps, she recalls, “I signed onto several projects all at the same time. In the States, I signed to a huge studio adapt for Universal, with several noteworthy producers. Meanwhile, in Canada, I signed for The Pornographer’s Poem, and at the same time I was writing The Many Trials of One Jane Doe and was hired for Queer as Folk.”

The Pornographer’s Poem, based on the novel by Michael Turner (Hard Core Logo), is currently out for packaging–seven years after Walton first became involved. “I loved the book. But how to honour it? It is a very ambitious project. It’s a massive book. An epic story that takes place over many years of our boy’s life, and one of the challenges of reading the novel is knowing full well that this is a narrator who is fundamentally unreliable,” Walton says.

“The book has all kinds of elements–like explicit underage sex. Obviously there were things I had to consider, both legally and ethically. That means sitting down with your outline–or third draft or fifth draft–and saying here are the issues of depiction. What is my job in terms of telling this story? What is the director’s job in terms of supporting or assuaging content that may be seen within the mores of the day as controversial?”

Walton, a self-described workaholic, is currently co-writing Shoebusiness, a French-language screenplay with Jean-Marc Vallée (C.R.A.Z.Y.), and adapting Guy Vanderhaeghe’s My Present Age for John Hazlett.

Walton and Vallée wrote the outline for Shoebusiness in English. “That came down to both of us sitting in rooms and jamming down our stories, and then I would write it up. Jean-Marc is exquisitely fluent and an incredible writer himself. We have similar sensibilities. In fact, reading C.R.A.Z.Y. helped me improve The Pornographer’s Poem in the late stages.”

While Walton enjoys the “luxury” of co-writing with a director who is in the same city, she says the process is the same as for many of her other projects. “You find as much time to talk. Then someone will begin, put it on paper, and send it to the other guy. They add their thoughts and pass it back. It’s like a real old-fashioned correspondence. There’s constant conversation and constant back and forth.”

Walton is also supporting and carrying on conversations with screenwriters across the country through “ink canada”–a Facebook group she created. “The group is social, sometimes it’s educational, and sometimes it’s political. But it’s user-generated content. It’s a chance for the community to get to know each other, which is essential when we need to come together–like on Bill C-10. To get a sense that we’re all connected and we should all be aware of each other,” Walton says.

“We’re as good as what we know about each other. It’s an extension of that old co-op ethic.”

Please see the print edition for additional W-File - a profile of screenwriter Vera Santamaria.