Josh MacDonald’s Halo moves to the big screen

“I’ve done a lot of bracing over the years—I don’t think
it’s any huge secret that any low-budget Canadian film has about 10
near-death experiences on its way to fruition,” says Josh MacDonald.
“But here we were, first day of photography.”

The Dartmouth writer first put the idea for Halo to paper a
decade ago as a production for Canning’s venerable Two Planks and a
Passion theatre company. Set in the fictional rural Nova Scotia town of
Nately, it followed the fervour raised in the aftermath of a Jesus
sighting on the side of a Tim Hortons. Not a sign from above, the
figure was in fact the handiwork of bored, clever teen Casey
McMullen—whose family life had been damaged by the death of her older
sister—though that was a secret to the devoted hordes who descended
on Nately to witness tangible proof of their beliefs.

MacDonald has been working on a screen version of the story for
years. Production began on Halo, the motion picture, March 25
and wrapped in Shubenacadie last week. It stars PEI native Martha
MacIssac (Superbad) as Casey, a challenging role that required
the actor for almost every scene.

“The roots for this piece for me are deep and I’ve lived with these
characters a long, long time. I’ve seen incarnations of these
characters through its life as a theatrical play,” says MacDonald from
home a few days before departing with his wife for a Mexico vacation.
“But there’s something about the movie that’s for keeps. There will
never be another movie. As a play I’ve had beautiful, strong actors
like Sue Leblanc-Crawford, Jackie Torrens, Krista Laveck and Kristin
Langille play Casey over the years. But now having Martha MacIssac play
the film version, it’s exciting for me to see the über-Casey, the
definitive Casey. She never blows a take—she is on top of everything,
every day. She carries the whole film on her wee little shoulders.”

Halo—which will be released, hopefully this fall, under a
title to be determined—had a tight 21-day shooting schedule in
Spryfield and Shubenacadie, requiring MacDonald to be on set, ready to
change scenes or move them inside on the stormy early days.

“When you’re making an independent film and you’re a little bit at
the mercy of the elements and a little bit at the mercy of a shooting
schedule and you need to shift on a dime and shift a scene to an
interior from an exterior, we don’t have the luxury of saying, ‘Let’s
go home until the sun comes out,'” says Halo director George
Mihalka (My Bloody Valentine), from his Halifax hotel room. “To
have somebody there who knows every hyphen in the script to say, ‘Why
don’t we do this,’ it still keeps the intention of the scene. It’s been
a fabulous collaboration with Josh, and I’ve always loved working with
writers. I used to teach literature in high school—I know how
difficult it is to write and I admire writers.”

Now that Halo has wrapped, MacDonald’s life moves on as it
always has, working on various scripts in various stages of
development. A Linklater-like genre-jumper, he’s got a horror picture
that could begin shooting before the end of the year, a kid’s film and
a few other ideas that are not yet in readable draft form. He’s both
awed and excited by his first film experience, seeing words he wrote
come to life in front of him.

“For me it’s been like walking around in The Truman Show,
some 3-D rendering version of my imagination,” he says. “It’s the
biggest playground a writer can have.”

This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2009.