The Trotsky Factor

By MATTHEW HAYS

As strange as it sounds, Jacob Tierney first conceived of The Trotsky as a drama. It’s difficult to picture the film, which became a hit in September when it premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, as anything other than a comedy. It is, after all, a feature about a young man who’s convinced he’s the reincarnation of communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky.

But Tierney, now 29, did first write the script when he was 19. And at that point, his vision for the final product was far different than it ultimately turned out. “I really wanted to make a Ken Loach film–a realist, progressive movie about life in high school. In my original script, a group of students lobby their high school to include the Spanish Civil War in the curriculum.” But a funny thing happened on the way through the creative process. “I picked up the screenplay several years later and read it again. It was a really bad screenplay. I was laughing at how bad it was. I realized this could be funny instead of painfully serious.”

The finished film, The Trotsky, garnered solid reviews and enthusiastic audience response at TIFF. With a budget of $6.5 million, Tierney directed his own script, casting childhood friend (and rising star) Jay Baruchel in the lead. Baruchel plays Leon Bronstein, a young man convinced he’s the reincarnation of Trotsky himself, much to the horror of his capitalist dad (played by iconic Canadian actor Saul Rubinek). Like a communist version of Ferris Bueller, Bronstein plots a revolution with his school chums. The success has been sweet for Tierney, but even with his father Kevin Tierney as a producer and driving force behind The Trotsky, the path to getting the film done was a long and complex one (see sidebar).

The off-kilter comedy marks a shift for Tierney. His first feature, Twist (2003), was a dark meditation on urban life, an adaptation of Dickens’ classic Oliver Twist, reset in Toronto’s sex-worker milieu. But Tierney says there’s a link between the two: “both are scripts that come from my adolescence. One is a tragedy, the other is full of optimism. There’s no grey area in either of these films. Either everything is amazing or everything is horrible. Twist, of course, was very sad. I see The Trotsky as a sweet romance.

“I was too young and inexperienced at the time to know what it really meant to shift genres. All I knew was that the original script I had written sucked. The characters were so annoying that all you could do was laugh at them. It really was like an apple falling from a tree onto my head–only way less important than when it happened to that other guy. I thought, ‘wait, people tell me I’m funny…maybe this can only work if it’s funny.’ I was too earnest to have gotten there on my own. I worked out a page-one rewrite. I didn’t know what that was at the time. It just poured out of me. In this case, the shift in genres was really organic. But I think it only applies when your script is an actual disaster zone. Though funnily, as I think about it, the same thing happened with Kubrick: he started making a serious film about the nuclear standoff but ended up making Dr. Strangelove.”

There were also key differences in writing a comedy in terms of audience, Tierney reports. “The scariest thing about writing a comedy is if no one finds it funny, there’s not a lot to talk about. With a drama you don’t expect everyone to have the same reaction–you want variety. Especially with a movie like Twist, which I knew wasn’t for everyone. Trotsky I was kind of hoping was.”

But making a film that you hope is for everyone can sometimes mean making the rounds to everyone involved in the film-funding business in Canada–and that can mean a lot of fingers in the pie. One of the biggest dilemmas he sees for the writing process in Canadian cinema stems directly from this situation: “I think a major problem is in our development process. So many notes from so many people, most of whom should probably not be allowed to give notes, can really suck the impulses out of a story. And often these impulses, strange or personal, distinctive moments, are what make films exciting and interesting.

An epic, committee-driven process, often featuring different financing institutions giving very different suggestions, doesn’t seem ideal to me.”

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