Curse of the past and troubled history don’t deter filmmakers – Winnipeg Free Press

You can’t say that Canadian filmmakers Stuart Stone and Adam Rodness are put off by a curse.

The pair filmed the infamous 2022 stoner comedy Vandits in Winnipeg in 2021, only to have hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of filming equipment stolen on the day scheduled for the first day of filming.

“After everything we’ve been through, people might think we didn’t fall in love with Winnipeg,” Stone says.

But the story of the theft proved to be effective in advertising VanditsStone claims.

“What a story that made!” he says alongside Rodness during a Zoom interview from Toronto.

“In the independent film world, you have to learn how to make chicken salad out of chicken shit, as they say. Despite this misfortune, we love Winnipeg, so we took the opportunity to come back and sort of pull back the curtain and show how to make a film in Winnipeg.”

With Stone directing and Rodness co-writing and both starring, the two returned to the city about a year ago to make another film, this time exploring some of Manitoba’s most haunted locations.

In the raw, unfiltered spirit of the film, it is titled Don’t f—k with ghosts.

So, in an opening with real-life Farpoint Films producers Kyle Bornais and Trevor Suffield, we see Stone and Rodness unveil another project – a documentary about the search for Bigfoot.

Bornais counters by suggesting that what the world really wants to see is cinematic evidence that ghosts are real. Stone and Rodness accept the challenge, but with a few exploitative measures thrown in for good measure.

Although there are some fictional elements, the film uses real local haunted locations such as Room 202 of the Fort Garry Hotel, Hamilton House and the Maritime Museum in Selkirk.

In the spirit of collaborative filmmaking, the film also features crew members in supporting roles, including location manager Karen Tusa and sound mixer Kevin Bacon (whose name may properly be used for promotional purposes).

“Winnipeg is a perfect backdrop for this misadventure we are experiencing, not only because of the great crew and spirit of the filmmaking community there, but also because of the spirit of the city,” says Stone.

“There are many enchanted places there. There are many crazy characters roaming the streets of the city center. There are a lot of people like the Winnipeg Ghost Society and the Winnipeg Magic Society.”

Along the way, they encountered some unexplainable things during filming,” says Rodness.

“We were ghost hunting for two or three weeks and people were feeling a little spooky inside. There are nosebleeds, there are headaches. “My radio does strange things with the frequency,” says Rodness.

In a startling scene at the former convent at L’Auberge Clemence Inn in Elie, Rodness says his throat actually closed and he began to choke.

“This is not an act. We don’t force anything that happens in this film. “Stu and I set out to write a story and literally the things we came up with came together in real life in front of the camera,” he says.

Although the film occasionally treats the idea of ​​ghost hunting with tongue-in-cheek, the filmmakers maintain that they are the main source of the humor.

“The joke isn’t on them. “The joke’s on us: we’re not there to make fun of these ghost hunters at all,” says Stone.

“If I am a skeptic, I will be skeptical. I have to be myself. I will be real with them because I want them to be real with me. If something was floating around and we got it, that would have been amazing. They thought we were crazy. And we thought maybe they were nuts, but if you throw a bunch of nuts in a bowl… you get mixed nuts.”

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