Interview: Kevin Drew on Broken Social Scene Doc It’s All Gonna Break

"It's a story of a group and it's the story of community."

Toronto band Broken Social Scene have earned themselves fans far and wide throughout their over 20-year career. A massive musical collective with members Brendan Canning and Kevin Drew at the centre, the band owes their success to more than raw talent and determination – it owes it to friendship. Nowhere is this more evident than in the new documentary It’s All Gonna Break, directed by Stephen Chung.

Chung is in a unique position here; a friend of the band since the early days, he was always nearby with a camera in hand. A love of photography and cinema (and an eventual career as a cinematographer) resulted in Chung documenting the making of one of Canada’s great bands from within Broken Social Scene’s inner circle while still remaining an outsider.

Weaving his personal journey behind the camera into the story of the rise of Broken Social Scene, Chung’s debut directorial feature offers a fresh take on the music documentary genre, giving viewers an inside look at the band, their connections, and their friendships.

That Shelf’s Rachel West spoke to Kevin Drew about the film ahead of its two-night Canadian premiere at Toronto’s Hot Docs Ted Rogers Cinema on January 24 and 25.

Rachel West [RW]:  Stephen had this monumental task of sifting through years of footage. I’ve spoken with many musicians and actors and not everybody enjoys looking back at their careers. When it comes to you and your past performances, are you the type who wants to revisit them or is ‘the past is the past’ for you?

Kevin Drew [KD]:  I think the past is so important for any individual upon moving forward. I think it’s usually an insecurity when someone needs to make the past the past.  It’s something that you can live in and it’s something you can learn from. So when Steven approached me about four years ago saying he wanted to finish this film but had different ideas about it from where it’s ended up landing. We went this way and that way and this way, but it was only because he just had over 1000 hours of footage.

Stevie, I did warn him. Because as you know, the two P words that are haunting this is “past” and “patterns”. And when you look back, you are also looking back at patterns that will become in the present moment, just from the realm of going back into that world.

RW: Right, that’s a big challenge.

KD: My ultimate test, whenever I checked in with him was to make sure he was making what he wanted and to make sure that he was staying true to his vision as a filmmaker, because obviously in the music documentary world, we do have a formula that’s out there. And a lot of it’s like, Hey, let’s talk about the great times and then let’s get into the bad times. Cue the violin, get that ambient music going and people can talk about their disappointments of how things went.

The problem with us doing that with this film is Stevie didn’t have that footage. He had footage of us at a young age, figuring out what we were doing, figuring out a record we were making, figuring out how we were going to continue and just figuring out this community we were in as success was coming to us.

And that was in the end, the story you wanted to make, which kind of turned out to be this film just about friendship and remembering in art.

RW: So much comes through about this friendship dynamic that you all have together. How does it feel when you are watching not only your growth as musicians, but are also confronted with aging and time passing?

KD:  When I saw the final cut before it was colour-corrected and photos were added, I wrote the band said, Hey guys, here it is.

I smiled ear to ear. I said I just felt kind of happy that Stevie actually decided to do it because it was interesting for all of us to still be alive and to see what people sort of were thinking at the time. I did appreciate that in a band where we’ve gone through so much and we’re not as close as we used to be.

I like the fact that something was documented about what relying on people is all about.

RW: And not just that, but the city and how much Toronto has changed. Stephen captured a Toronto that doesn’t really exist anymore.

KD:  I do like that love letter aspect to community and to the artscape world that it was, and, and to sort of show people upon real estate, taking over our town that there was a time where artists did have a say, and there were privileged platforms to go to, to help yourself get things made.

I see this beautiful memory about a city that I knew, but I also have no time within the realm of doing some interviews for this to speak about it in a way where I’m the old guy going, Well, back in the day… It’s what’s happening all around us and it’s happening to us.

Credit: Stephen Chung

RW:   You’re spending all of this time hanging out with Stephen, and this is your friend, but there’s always that camera there between you and your friend. Did you feel like you were able to be your authentic selves when a camera is pointed at you?

KD:  You’re not your authentic self around your family sometimes, let alone a camera. And Chung, he clocked that very early on so sometimes you wouldn’t even realize he was in the room. You thought he’d left. And you’re jamming and you’re hanging out and you turn around and he’s in a corner using a mirror with a long lens shooting us and you didn’t see him for the last two hours and he was very stealth that way.

Stevie was really, really good at becoming invisible and not present. And there was a segment they took out of the film, which I think was a minute of just cuts of me going, turn the camera Stevie. Could you get out of here? Please? Steve, would you turn that off?

He’s just one of those people who, like many people, found communication through his work and through music. And once we really started going, he loved Brendan and I, and he loved what we were doing, that he just started showing up saying, well, I can jam too, but I’ll bring my camera.

When we were making You Forgot It In People, there were times where he would just come and we’d say, all right, he would just kind of meld himself into the walls and he would just forget he was there. So I thought that was pretty, pretty brilliant on his part.

Credit: Stephen Chung

RW:  Was there a moment that he captured that really stands out for you and you are just so happy he was there with his camera?

KD:  I adore David Neufeld, our producer, I adore him. When we worked with him, I was just getting to know him and I didn’t fully let the reins go. It was so cool to see that Stevie caught, Dave capturing this song that we came in with and changing it and watching Jimmy [Shaw] and Evan [Cranley] and just the band to the ideas of everyone speaking in that room. I thought that really spoke to how we did create songs. That wasn’t “Anthems For A 17-Year-Old Girl” and it wasn’t “Lovers Spit” or “Stars and Sons”, but it was this moment where you could see how bands create. But I was so grateful he had that footage.

David was such a huge part of You Forgot It In People that it was great to see him shine and the idea of, like, hearing this line and then suddenly we’ll we’re building this whole A line. He caught that. Jimmy Shaw suddenly steps in and is like, no, no, you should do it like this. And it shows you the open form of how it was a group effort.

RW: As you’re watching it and you are looking at your younger selves, what’s the sage advice and wisdom that you wish you could tell yourself at that moment?

KD: Accept who you are. Don’t don’t try to be what you think you need to be or what you’re supposed to be within the realm of all that this is. I don’t believe life is about figuring out who you are. I believe life’s about accepting who you are, and then you get to figure out a lot of stuff and I know we live at a time where there’s television shows telling you this and there’s t-shirts that manufacture this, but to actually practice and live it.

When I looked back, I saw freedom and I also saw hesitancy. I think that was the only thing I kind of picked up on watching it because it was kind of after You Forgot It In People and the self-titled album, there’s a decade there where I went out and started experimenting and being lost.  But that’s my personal story. And the one thing about this film is, is that it’s not a personal story. It’s a story of a group and it’s the story of community. It’s a story of the city and the success that I’ve had in my life, Rachel, is not the success of an individual. It’s the success of a group of people.

It’s All Gonna Break premieres in Toronto at Hot Docs Cinema on January 24. The first screening will feature a Q&A with members of Broken Social Scene. 



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