DANIEL IRON

ABOVE IMAGE FROM “CAIRO TIME”

JPR—Yeah for sure. Did you do any commercial or music video work before you got into film, television and documentaries?

D—No, never. I went to law school when I was very young, and I articled at Telefilm Canada, oddly. When I was about 23 I started working at Telefilm as an articling student and then they hired me on as a lawyer. I spent five years at Telefilm, basically doing legal work…

JPR—…So you got straight into getting paid, unlike most filmmakers. [laughs]

D—[laughs] …as a junior lawyer at Telefilm Canada… I probably made less than a junior grip (low paid film technician)… After about five years as a lawyer, I was ready to get out and go work for a production company. As fate would have it, Rhombus Media approached me and asked if I would come work there as a business affairs person. So, I left Telefilm and went to Rhombus, as the lawyer in business affairs, and when I was there, I started producing.

JPR—What kind of projects were you producing when you worked with them?

D—Well, Rhombus Media did a lot of high-end performing arts films… sort of like Yo Yo Ma, working with the top dance companies and classical music, musicians from around the world. The first feature I worked on there was Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould.

JPR—I’m a filmmaker myself and I know some producers are creative producers but your background definitely seems to be in the law and business side. Is that more what you focus on when you’re involved in a project?

D—No, it’s both for me.  I got into producing for the creative stuff, so I work quite closely with writer-directors. I can do the business stuff because of my law background and my background at Telefilm, but I like to do both.

JPR—Do you usually try to develop your own ideas, or do you buy the rights to scripts?

D—It’s different for everything. I don’t normally buy the rights to scripts. A lot of the people I work with, like Ruba Nadda or Sarah Polley, are writer-directors. I like to work with writer-directors creatively, but it’s often their ideas and we start with a treatment and build a script together. On occasion, I’ll buy the rights to a book and then hire a writer-director to work on it.

JPR—You’ve produced all sorts of projects for TV, film and documentaries.  What are the biggest differences, on the producing end, between the three areas? Are there any specific things that you could point out?

D—Well, the big one is, in television, you actually often get paid.

JPR—[laughs] Yeah.

D—I find, like with a lot of the television I do, it’s not that different of a creative process. It all sort of starts from the creative, and hiring the director and the crew. The financing’s quite different for all of them, I guess.

JPR—Yeah, I guess a documentary is a lot harder to get financed?

D—There are fewer and fewer outlets in Canada for docs, so it’s becoming increasingly harder.

JPR—Who owns Foundry Films and when did you start that company?

D—It’s just me. I was at Rhombus for eleven years, I was one of the five partners there, and I decided it was time to leave. Two of the partners were directors so, a lot of the time I had to produce things, just as part of the company, and after awhile I just wanted to work on my own, so I started Foundry Films.

JPR—What was Foundry Films first feature length production?

D—The first feature I did was Away From Her, Sarah Polley’s movie which had two Academy Award nominations.

JPR—And the next film after that was Cairo Time, which won Best Canadian Feature Film at 2009 Toronto International Film Festival?

D—Yeah, it was.

JPR—Congratulations, that’s amazing. Not a bad way to start a company, with two award-winning films. So, Cairo Time was all shot in Cairo? What were some of the issues with filming there?

D— I mean, the biggest one is that the city is insane.

JPR—Insane? [laughs]

D— Yeah, it’s twenty million people squeezed into a space I think that was made for eight million.  The hardest thing is crossing the road. [laughs]

JPR—Is there an infrastructure for the film industry there? Or did you bring a lot of gear with you?

D—No, it’s like the Hollywood of the Arabic world. When you throw on the television there’s these amazing black and white films from the Thirties and Forties where everyone’s dressed in tuxedos and drinking champagne. It has a really long history of filmmaking. It’s now where all the Saudi Arabian commercials are made, but it’s very hard to navigate ‘cause it’s extremely corrupt.

JPR—Is Ruba Nadda, the director of Cairo Time, from Canada?

D—Yeah, she was born in Montreal, and her family lived all over Canada.

JPR—Oh, okay. And what was it like working with the Oscar-nominated actress, Patricia Clarkson? Have you worked with her before?

D—She’s fantastic! This was my first time working with her. In Away From Her, Julie Christie was also an Oscar winner. We definitely had to pick the right actress to bring to Cairo. The amenities are not what they would be used to in the U.S. It really is “fly by the seat of your pants.”  There really is no police protection there.

JPR—Yeah, I can imagine it would be pretty crazy. Were you operating with a pretty small crew there, or was it a normal size?

D—No, no, pretty big. Especially because, in Egypt, labour’s not really that expensive, so, if you want a scaffold built, all of a sudden fifty people show up and build a scaffold.

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