By Sarah Brewer
If you find yourself interested in Travis Grant’s adaptations of the Ryan Drake series, click here to watch the trailer for the Ryan Drake Short Film Trilogy. Click Here
Sarah: You attended Vancouver Film School and have been making films for many years. What are some of the things that filmmaking has taught you that would otherwise be difficult to learn in a classroom?
Travis: Film school gave me a really solid foundation. When you're in that classroom setting, you're learning the theory, but at Vancouver Film School there was also a lot of hands-on work. You're doing it in this relatively safe, enclosed environment where you have instructors telling you what you're doing right, what you're doing wrong, and what you could be doing better. You're also surrounded by the same group of people for a year, so you become very close-knit.
Once you get out into the real world, though, everything changes. I'm typically the guy producing and directing these things, so a huge part of what I've learned is how to manage people, manage time, deal with expectations, solve problems and actually execute the things you said you were going to do. You really only learn that through trial and error — things go wrong, people react differently under pressure, plans change. You have to make decisions and keep everything moving forward.
I'd say one of the biggest things filmmaking has taught me is simply how to deal with people and how to deal with the unpredictability of the environment. That's very hard to simulate in a classroom.
Sarah: You recently adapted a few of Will Jordan's Ryan Drake novels to film. What initially drew you to the series, and what excited you about bringing those stories to the screen?
Travis: I had read Will's Ryan Drake novels and really enjoyed them. They're these fun, fast-moving, airport-style thrillers that are very easy to get into. There's all the spy and action-thriller stuff, but there's also this larger narrative arc running through nine novels, which I really liked. So, I reached out to Will and asked if he'd be interested in teaming up and doing something with it. Originally, the idea was essentially a television pilot, and he was up for it. From there, things just continued to grow.
What really excited me was that I had always imagined the Ryan Drake series as living somewhere in the world of The Bourne Identity, Mission: Impossible and Jack Reacher. Those are all things I really enjoy watching, so the opportunity to create my own smaller-scale version of that was incredibly appealing. It also meant getting to work with things you don't always have access to on smaller projects: a larger stunt team, practical effects, squibs, explosions and bigger action sequences.
Then, there's the size of the crew. When you're making a smaller short, you might have ten people working with you. On Rogue Elements, I think we had around eighty people involved. Suddenly, you're working with all these different departments and people who are incredibly good at what they do. It takes you to another level as a filmmaker. It forces you to hone your skills, become a better storyteller and, inevitably, discover a whole new collection of mistakes you didn't know you could make.
Sarah: How did you balance bringing your own creative vision to the films while maintaining the core narrative themes and imagery of the Ryan Drake novels?
Travis: At this point, I sometimes joke that I know the books better than the author does. I have read them several times, and I've gone back through the first couple of books two or three times in particular, so that world is pretty firmly ingrained in my head.
As far as bringing my own creative vision to it, a lot of that comes through things like casting, performances, visual choices and the overall tone of the films. That's where you can really begin putting your own fingerprint on the material. The stories themselves were also very collaborative between Will and me. Rogue Elements takes place between novels two and three. Trial by Fire is based on one of Will's novellas, and Complications is an original story that also fits between the existing books. Because of that, there was actually quite a bit of room for us to invent new adventures without disrupting the larger story.
At the same time, there are limitations because you know where these characters eventually have to end up. Ryan Drake in particular is intentionally a bit of a mystery for a large portion of the series — he doesn't even completely understand who he is yet. That's an interesting challenge when you're making a film, because you still need to give your lead character something to do emotionally. You want him to grow and change, but you can't suddenly reveal things or push him somewhere that contradicts what happens later in the novels. Finding that balance between creating something satisfying as a film while preserving that mystery was probably one of the more challenging, but also interesting, parts of adapting the material.
Sarah: What was challenging about adapting the novels to film? Was there anything in the stories that did not translate to the screen or was not possible to recreate?
Travis: Trial by Fire is probably the best example because it's directly based on one of Will's novellas. A novella is obviously a little easier to adapt than an entire novel, but you still have to make decisions about what stays and what goes — there are things on the page that simply aren't necessary in a movie. A book might spend paragraphs explaining what a character is thinking, whereas an actor can sometimes communicate that same idea with a look that lasts two seconds.
The bigger challenge was scale. In the novella, Frost ends up on a fairly large mission in Europe, and there was simply no way we were going to reproduce that mission exactly with the budget we had. So, the challenge became figuring out how to shrink it down while keeping it exciting and, more importantly, keeping the spirit of what was happening in the original story.
We ended up twisting and restructuring the mission so that it was achievable for us but still worked dramatically for the audience. We were also able to take a character who appears in the original novella and replace them with someone we introduced in Rogue Elements. That wasn't something that was strictly necessary, but it helped connect the films together and made the three projects feel more like pieces of the same universe. That's the interesting thing about adaptation: sometimes a limitation forces you to make a change, and that change actually ends up strengthening the film.
Sarah: You received a lot of community support for the Ryan Drake films. What do you think made your outreach successful, and what advice would you give a filmmaker who wanted to crowdfund their own project?
Travis: Crowdfunding is a tricky one because I had done it years earlier, and what I learned pretty quickly is, if it's just you putting something on Kickstarter, there's a good chance the people backing it are going to be your mom, your dad, your friends and maybe a friend of a friend. It's very difficult for something to explode beyond that unless you already have some kind of audience. I recognized that early on with Ryan Drake.
Will already had this enormous built-in audience: he had well over a million followers, and now he has over two million. So, there was a community there that already knew him and trusted him. Interestingly, Will was initially nervous that nobody would back us. I had to convince him that there was an audience for it.
Then, we launched the campaign. I believe we were originally looking for somewhere around $30,000, and it eventually climbed to roughly half a million. So, obviously, that completely exceeded our expectations; but what I learned from operating a campaign on that scale is, the job doesn't stop once people give you money. In some ways, that's when another job starts. Those people are now invested in what you're doing. You have to communicate with them and give them updates. You have to answer questions and, essentially, treat them like customers. If dealing with people, communication and sales aren't your strengths, then you probably need somebody on your team who can handle that side of things.
We also learned something interesting on the second Kickstarter. We removed almost all the physical rewards. Instead of posters, toys and things that have to be manufactured and shipped, we concentrated on interviews, behind-the-scenes material and other digital rewards; and it really didn't hurt the campaign. That reinforced something I had already suspected: people aren't usually backing your movie because they desperately want a poster, they're backing it because they like the project, they like you, or they want to see the thing exist.
Physical rewards can be great, but they also cost money to manufacture, package and ship, and they can become an enormous logistical headache. So, my advice would be to concentrate first on giving people a project they genuinely want to support and building a relationship with that audience.
Sarah: I've heard you have a new project in development. What can you tell me about your upcoming short film and what sparked the idea for it?
Travis: This project actually came directly out of the Kickstarter. Part of the campaign involved us making two short films set in the Ryan Drake universe, but we also created an opportunity for people to submit an original short-film script. We ended up receiving close to three hundred submissions, and I read every single one of them. From those, we narrowed it down to our top ten, and then we let the Kickstarter backers vote on which one they wanted us to make.
The film they chose was Last Exit Diner. It's this fun little horror-thriller, almost a whodunit, set in a greasy-spoon diner on the side of the road late at night. You've got this collection of slightly shady characters sitting around the diner, and the audience is trying to figure out which one of them is actually the killer. By the time you figure it out, unfortunately, that person has pretty much killed everybody else in the room.
One of the things I'm particularly excited about is that we're shooting this one back home. The last couple of films I've made were in Ontario, and I really enjoy working there, but there's something different about shooting in New Brunswick. It's a little more laid-back, and because people aren't constantly surrounded by film productions, there's still a real excitement around making something. There's almost a summer-camp atmosphere when you're working with everybody. I'm also really looking forward to working with Ryan Barton, Josh Linton, Ariana Marquis, Jon Blizzard and Crystal LeBlanc. They're all people I'm excited to have involved.
Creatively, this project a departure for me. I tend to work in action or comedy. I haven't had many opportunities to play around with horror, gore and that kind of material, so it's fun to dip my toes into a completely different genre.
Sarah: What are you most excited to explore with this new project?
Travis: Some of this overlaps with what excites me about Last Exit Diner in general, but I'm really interested in playing with tension and release. It's about figuring out how long you can hold that tension; how much information you give the audience and how you slowly make them realize that something isn't quite right. I also want to sneak some comedy into it because that's naturally something I gravitate toward. I like giving the audience moments where they can laugh and relax a little bit before things suddenly go in a completely different direction; and then eventually I just want to go completely full-cock with it. People start dying in horrible, gruesome ways, and the movie stops pretending it's going to behave itself. That's the fun part for me. It's a different filmmaking toolkit than the one I've been using recently. Instead of trying to figure out how to stage a big action sequence, I'm thinking about suspense, pacing, reveals, practical gore effects and exactly how much to show the audience.
Sarah: After spending so many years making films, what is it about filmmaking that still makes you want to tell another story?
Travis: I've always been a storyteller. Even when I was a little kid, I was writing stories. I still have binders somewhere filled with things I wrote back then. I used to sit in class instead of paying attention and write stories. That's actually how I learned to type in high school — we still had typewriters when I was in high school, and I'd use them to write these little short stories. So, it's just something I've always done.
I have what feels like an infinite number of stories floating around in my head, and there's still something incredibly fun about taking one of those ideas, putting it down on paper and then bringing together a group of people who are all working toward the same goal. The interesting thing is, everybody has a slightly different idea of what that goal looks like. The actors bring something, the cinematographer brings something, production design brings something — every department has its own interpretation.
As the director, you get to take the best pieces of all those ideas and shape them into the film; you get into the editing room and the movie transforms again. You take everything you captured on set and start building this completely new thing out of it. Then, the music comes in, the sound design comes in, the visual effects come in, and you slowly watch the movie become what it's going to be. And after spending a year, two years, three years, or however long it takes working on something, you finally get to sit in a room full of people and watch them experience it.
Hopefully they laugh where you wanted them to laugh; hopefully they're tense where you wanted them to be tense. Afterward, everybody gets to talk about this thing you all just experienced together. That communal part of filmmaking is still incredibly fun to me.
