8
view . summer 2008
though analysts expect the situation to
improve through the summer.
He says he hears accounts of people
getting out of the business after 20 years.
He looks at the Director’s Guild list of
available first assistant directors and sees
only six of more than 80 people working.
“And when I’m working now, going to
Cairo, it’s like I’m thanking my lucky stars.”
He got his first assistant director job
working with fellow UWindsor alumni John
May, Jeff Hewitt, Peter Freele and Jim
Soda on the YTV series Deke Wilson’s
Mini Mysteries.
Murphy’s career has followed the
traditional route of filmmakers. He moved
up to third assistant director where he
says you “got your hands dirty.” Next was
second assistant director, taking care of a
lot of paperwork and administration behind
the scenes. For the last 15 years, however,
he’s been a first assistant director and filled
in occasionally as director; once on the
last season of Finkleman’s comedy The
Newsroom, three times on May’s CBC show
Our Hero and on nine episodes of The
Comedy Network’s
Puppets Who Kill
.
Finkleman has allowed him to do
more than scheduling, calling out “roll the
camera” and repeating “cut” to get more
involved in the creative side of filmmaking.
Clearly, his job brings challenges.
Murphy relates how actor Christie
refused, at first, to be filmed in a 4x4
in
Away from Her
because she had
“campaigned against those things in
England.” She had to be convinced that in
such a cold, snowbound country, that’s what
people have to drive to survive.
Does it make him sweat at times?
“Totally. It’s nuts. It’s crazy. It’s things you
just don’t – you just cannot count on. But
it’s also, because it usually does work out,
it’s part of the juice. It really is. It’s a real
adrenaline thing.”
He says he dreams of directing his first
major film but concedes that he’ll leave the
making of the next great Canadian feature
to other people. He’s just happy to continue
assisting other directors and blending
into his neighbourhood where he’s known
as just someone who works in business,
said Murphy. Except to one neighbour, a
woman who was disappointed when she
learned he never worked with actor Richard
Chamberlain (
Shogun, The Thorn Birds,
and
Bourne Identity
).“She thought he was
the greatest.”
❍
v
ON
AWAY FROM HER
DIRECTOR SARAH POLLEY:
“I worked with a lot of first-time directors and sometimes, because first-time directors can look as
though they’re floundering or spinning their wheels a bit, the first A.D. has to step in and really
shepherd things and it looks to the crew and some less-informed viewers that the first A.D. is directing
the picture or the TV show. There was never any question that Sarah was the director. Never.”
ON ACTOR JULIE CHRISTIE:
“She can be extraordinarily disarming. She’s a fantastic performer and she can look through
you with those blue eyes.”
ON ACTOR KEITH CARRADINE, DURING THE FEATURE FILM
ALL HAT
:
“He’s an actor who had a day off and he phoned up my second assistant director and said, ‘I’m
sitting here in the hotel room not doing squat. You guys need me, you gimme a call because I’m
here to make a movie like everybody else.’ That never happens. It’s crazy, but he’s such a gentleman
and he was fantastic.”
ON DIRECTOR ATOM EGOYAN,
who after hearing Murphy compare scenes to Antonioni
or Bergman gave him a gift following the shooting of the TV movie
Gross Misconduct
, about hockey
player Spinner Spencer: “I unwrapped it and it’s a book on the cinema of Atom Egoyan.”
“It’s nuts. It’s crazy.
It’s things you just don’t –
you just cannot count on.”
DAN MURPHY
