Cockburn received a Chalmers Arts Fellowship in 2006 , which enabled him to leave his job for a year and work on the script . In 2008 , he received additional funding from the Canada and Ontario Arts Councils , which made it possible to go into production , though it was several months before he found a producer : " through a daisy-chain of meetings and recommendations , " he met Daniel Bekerman , and immediately knew that his combination of experience and " practical know-how " combined with a deep understanding of alternative cinema made him " an ideal collaborator " . Cockburn relied heavily on Bekerman for logistics , from assembling the crew to finding equipment and other resources . As for Cabot McNenly , the cinematographer , he was a colleague and friend from Cockburn 's York University film days ; they had wanted to work together for years : " so he was on board literally a couple of years before we went to camera . " The " micro-sized " budget ( estimated to be $ 100,000 ) was a challenge , as Cockburn had not written a simple script for a few actors in a single location , but rather " an incredibly ambitious script production-wise , with many , many locations , a large cast , and heavy demands on production design and cinematography . " The script as originally written was structured so that everything had multiple meanings . Cockburn came to greatly appreciate the crew Bekerman had assembled , learning from the experience : " if your crew understands the tone of the script , sometimes one telling detail can do the same cinematic-magical work as a whole swath of complicated ideas , and at one-tenth the cost . " Looking back , he also found his personal journey mirrored in the process of making the film : I started writing it as a very intellectual pursuit , and through making it and collaborating ... all these people with all of their ideas , and these actors who gave human reality to these concepts that I had written down , that creative evolution from script to human movie is parallel to the journey of realizing that intellectual traps and thought patterns have an emotional underpinning . The process of writing '' You Are Here '' from conception to final draft took two and a half years , the culmination of a " long conversation " he was having with himself over ten years ; in a sense , it is a lot of his own life " boiled down into 78 minutes . " Cockburn said he first conceived of '' You Are Here '' as " both a series of shorts and a feature-length movie , " like a concept album or short story collection that " halfway through , you realize is actually a novel . " In the Nayman interview , Cockburn complained that in previous screenings of his short films , reception depended a lot on what other films they were shown with , and he started to think it might be a good idea to make a series of short films that were " a whole program unto themselves , which were intended to be shown together , with certain recurring images and ideas . " Initially , there were six short film scripts , each section with its own title , separated by red pages : Someone read them and said that the red pages made sense with regards to the script as a physical object — as a way of organizing the pages — but told me to ask myself what they stood for in the film . This same person also told me that I needed to give the audience a way into the material , a kind of proxy character . From those two suggestions , I came up with the idea of the Archivist and her dilemma . Cockburn was familiar with Tracy Wright 's work in '' Me and You and Everyone We Know '' , as well as her short video work and her live performances , which he had seen in Texas in 2002 . He thought she would be perfect for the role of the Archivist after seeing her in '' Monkey Warfare '' . He contacted her through a colleague with whom he had worked in experimental theatre ( Jacob Wren ) , sent her the script , then met and talked with her for three hours or more , during which she said she did n't " get " the script , at which point he told her about the " paranoid-delusional breakdown " he had gone through , and how that was the " emotional basis " for what he had written : " I do n't know if that 's what helped her find her way in , but however it happened , she found the non-theoretical , genuine core of the character . " Moreover , Cockburn has since said " she built something more human and complex and real than what I imagined . " Wright shot '' You Are Here '' about a year before her diagnosis of pancreatic cancer , and saw the finished work a few months before her death . Cockburn recalled that after an early screening , before the final edit , Wright told him she liked the film , but not her own performance : " The edit took a long time , but eventually , with dialogue editing and narration voice work , we got the cut and did another screening . It means so much to me that Tracy came up to me and said , ' I did n't like myself in it , but I do now . ' " Cockburn said he originally tried to get David Cronenburg to play the Lecturer , but he was " unavailable " , which , with hindsight , Cockburn was glad about : Cronenburg is quite recognizable , so the viewer would know what is on the screen is fictional , whereas R.D. Reid is not so well known ( and , according to Cockburn , is also a much better actor than Cronenburg ) . As noted above , Reid saw his role and the film in general , as about " how to deal with deep-seated despair " , and Cockburn has said " it 's exactly what I saw in his performance , a performance which frankly went far beyond what I had expected for the role . " For the Experimenter , Cockburn wanted to cast himself , because he thought the role was similar to videos he made before where he was the performer , but changed his mind : I ... really liked , structurally , the center of the movie being about someone who puts himself in his own experiment , and I as the moviemaker , putting myself in the role . But when we were doing auditions I used Chinese room text as audition material as a test , and this one guy , Anand Rajaram , read ... in a way that was creepy and hilarious and upsetting at the same time ; he 's many things at once , he 's a really unique performer . As soon as I saw him , I thought I 'll fire myself and let him do it . And I 'm really glad I did . As with Wright , Cockburn thought of casting Nadia Litz after seeing her in '' Monkey Warfare '' . It was Wright who told Litz about Cockburn 's project . " I read the script five times before I could comment on it ... Sometimes I think it makes more sense on paper . Not in a bad way . " The film has a " lo-fi , anachronistic production design . " There are VHS tapes , Polaroid pictures , land line phones , large cell phones and dated computers , all of it intentional : " If the movie had been set in the here and now , and everybody had been surrounded by amusing cellphones and iPods and GPS , it would have made everything feel way too blunt and obvious . " Cockburn wanted to " shift everything sideways " and regrets there were " a couple of laptops in there " , but they were needed for the production . The end result is a film that takes place " in a time that has never actually existed . " Production designer Naz Goshtasbpour was given a working budget , that , according to Cockburn , " a lot of people in her position would have found laughable ; but she managed to build a number of totally convincing sets entirely from scratch , and came up with ingenious solutions for slightly modifying locations to make them exactly what we needed . " The books for the Chinese room were mostly styrofoam props ( one was a real book , and she said it was the most expensive film prop she had ever made ) . After finishing the film , Cockburn says he carried these fake books with him from home to home despite their having no use : " After eight years , I finally threw them out . " Although Cockburn had spent the previous decade making short experimental films , this was not is original ambition : " '' You Are Here '' represents a return to my early desire to be a narrative feature-film director , but it 's a strange , unorthodox way of storytelling which uses all the techniques I 've been exploring in the last decade in service of creating a long-form emotional story experience for the audience . " '' You Are Here '' was shot with very little rehearsal time for the actors , but Cockburn points out that he did get the chance to chat with them about the script and the ideas : " I think that was probably more useful than rehearsal would have been . " '' You Are Here '' was shot on almost all possible formats : 35 mm , 16 mm , RED , HD , MiniDV , Super 8 , and BetaMax . Cockburn was proud of the spectrum of visual styles brought to the work with this approach , and said BetaMax was his favourite footage in the entire film , once remarking that since only about 15 % of the work was actually shot on film , he avoids calling it a " film " . Having shot it entirely in Toronto , Cockburn deliberately fudged the city 's geography in the dialogue , making up " a mishmash of Toronto streets and also made-up names and numbered streets so nobody could ever watch the movie and try to correlate it with extant geography . " Editing the work took a year , during which time " a lot changed " . An example of this is the film 's opening lecture : as written in the script , it was not at the beginning , but rather about 25 minutes in . Fairly early on , Cockburn and McNenly knew it had to be moved up because of its importance : " if someone comes in three minutes late after that lecture , in one sense you did n't miss anything ... In another sense you miss everything . It functions as the keynote lecture to how to watch this movie . " The film 's world premiere took place at the 63rd Locarno Film Festival in August 2010 , where it was in competition for a Filmmakers of the Present Award . The Canadian premiere was held on September 15 , 2010 , at the 35th annual Toronto International Film Festival , in the Canada First section . It went on to be screened at the Whistler Film Festival in December , and then at the Göteborg International Film Festival and the International Film Festival Rotterdam in January 2011
35th annual Toronto International Film Festival
2010 Toronto International Film Festival
You Are Here (2010 film)