From Sasha to A Chorus Line: A Conversation with Emily Tyra for the Home Entertainment and Arrow Channel Release of HARPOON
With his perfect family and perfect upbringing, Richard (Christopher Gray) appears to have it all. So when he thinks that his long-term girlfriend, Sasha (Emily Tyra), and best-friend, Jonah (Munro Chambers), are having an affair, it sends him into a fit of rage that leaves Jonah a bloody mess. Once Jonah and Sasha convince Richard the allegations are false, Richard tries to buy back their trust by taking them out for a day-trip on his family’s yacht.
Tension boils-over once out to sea, and, to make matters worse, the yacht’s engine fails. Stranded without food and supplies, the trio must set aside their differences in order to survive. One part post-modern Edgar Allan Poe adaptation, one part Knife in the Water with the cast of Seinfeld, Harpoon is a wickedly humorous and bloody deconstruction of friendship and love.
In our interview, The Fan Carpet's Jonathan Hughes in association with The Killer Spotlight Podcast spoke to Emily Tyra about HARPOON. In a interview spot forever known as HARPOONAPALOZZA, Emily tells Jon about working on a boat, the movie magic that goes into it and reviving A Chorus Line in DC....
So right, Harpoon, which is being released today on Amazon Prime and Arrow Channel as well. It’s’ a great film by the way, I watched it just the other day, it’s really funny, really sarcastic, really well written characters and humour and everything….
Thank you.
So I loved it. How long was shooting on the boat itself?
The boat itself? We did all the interior shots previous to the boat actually. So the boat, shooting on the actual boat was only about a week and a half, two weeks I want to say.
Okay. And the interior stuff, how long that take? Interior I want to say was about a month. We shot all the interiors in Calgary, it’s a Canadian filmmaking team, so we shot everything up there on a set and hilariously it was like the dead of winter so we where (laughs) supposed to be, like, on this ship on the sea and we were shooting on a sound stage with just the snowiest, coldest Calgary winter. And then we flew everybody down to Belize and we shot on a yacht on the coast there, and that’s where we did all the exteriors, so where you see the actual boat.
Right. Yeah when you’re watching the film, it’s a little bit of movie magic there as always…...
Oh yeah (laughs)
Because a lot of the time you’re up and down the damn thing and you wouldn’t think, how well it was edited, which is cool.
Yeah. It is cool. It was interesting for us because we, there’s only three of us in the movie, three actors, so we rehearsed it and shot it in chronological order which is sort of unusual, as an actor working on camera, you don’t normally get to do that, we kind of take bits and pieces and it depends on location. But with this because there where so few of us and we where locked in this one space for the duration of the film, we shot everything in chronological order for the interiors and then everything in chronological order for the exteriors. So despite the editing of it going in and out of the boat on the deck and then the interior, we actually got to kind of live it in it’s actual time space which was pretty cool.
That’s good. Was filming on a boat, filming on a boat in general, was that uncomfortable in any way, was there anyone unwell or anything like that… (Emily laughs)
Yeah one of the first questions that Rob Grant asked everybody was “are you okay shooting on a boat for long periods of time?” and there where definitely a few people who may have stretched the truth on that (laughs). One of my co-stars, not to be named, I think had a little bit of trouble with it. But, for the most part, you know, we where docked when we where shooting on the boat, just for logistical reasons and then when we did go out to sea it wasn’t for a super long period of time even though you would think so by watching the movie (laughs).
No no that’s good, because I can imagine being out there too long and you might go slightly go crazy.
Yeah just like vomit everywhere and nastiness, no we didn’t (laughs) have to go through that. Thank god.
Yeah. There’s a few scenes where you get to do some action in the movie, did you by any chance, during rehearsing, did you accidentally punch Christopher or Munro during some of the scenes?
(laughs) I didn’t but it definitely took some very meticulous stunt rehearsals to figure out all of that stuff. We had some crash pads, we had a stunt co-ordinator who was amazing and kind of helped us to make sure everything looked really real but without hurting each other (laughs). There’s a really cool move where Chris Gray yanks the back of my head and pulls me down by my hair and that was quite a feat actually, it doesn’t look like very much on camera, but when we had to shoot it I was like “are we really going to do this? I have to fly backwards, land on this crash pad?”. So luckily no one hurt in the shooting of Harpoon, but we definitely had to take care with everybody and, yeah there where a few moments I’d say towards the end of shooting where we all kind of wanted to punch each other but that was because we where sort of sick of each other at that point (laughs).
Obviously I assume you had fun working with Christopher and Munro and Rob...
(Emily interrupts) Oh my god yes.
...any fun stories or any fun little gossips you want to reveal for this podcast?
(laughs) Well, you know, I would say that life imitated art in a way in that, it was such a small crew and such a small cast, we got to know each other really fast, none of us had ever worked with each other before, we showed up in Calgary for our first day of rehearsal and, you know…..So we really really dove into these characters and for the most part Rob really kept his cards really close about how he wanted the movie to come out tone wise and, you know, how he would sort of shape it in the editing process and we really just took it from the page and took it very seriously and each of us really dove into these characters in a very deep way and so by the time we got to Belize and we where had just been doing this and being in this world 24/7 we had a little bit of cabin fever ourselves. And I want to say it was the last week of shooting in Belize where everyone was kind of like, we would cut, take a break and we’d all just go to our separate corners and kind of hunker down (laughs) so the fun was sort of over, but then once we had wrapped where like “ah that was just awesome, what a great experience”.
Harpoon Film Page | Harpoon Review | Rob Grant Interview | Munro Chambers Interview
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