The tracey fragments series#
The tracey fragments tv#

I was dazzled right away but what cemented our collaboration on Tracey was Ellens recent discovery of Patti Smith, whom shed It took several months for me to get her the script and get her and Bruce in the same city for a few hours to discuss the role.īruce: Sarah watched through the 2nd floor office window as Ellen and I met across the street. Around that time her career was just kicking off in the US with the powerful response to Hard Candy at Sundance. I knew that Ellen Page would be perfect for the role. The most crucial early element was finding the right actor to play Tracey. Tracey was such a contrast to the many silent and brooding teenage characters in contemporary film and television. I felt her story to be tragic but also found her outspokenness and lurid fantasies refreshing.

Sarah Timmins, Producer: I immediately connected with the voice of Tracey. A few days later I handed her a script for The Tracey Fragments. Shed had some experience in features and producing shorts and I wondered if she wanted to produce a feature turns out she did.

The tracey fragments tv#

My day job in 2004 was as a director for a TV show called Degrassi, and someone Id see every morning was Sarah Timmins. Bruce got the essence of that kind of tragic-comic character.īruce: Efforts were made by me and various film producers to get The Tracey Fragments into production, but we couldnt gain any momentum.

When Bruce and I spoke the first time I knew he understood Tracey. Maureen: Id seen all of Bruces films previously, so I admired his work and knew it well, but it was when I saw Hard Core Logo that I thought this would be a perfect fit. The first draft was pretty much what we ended up shooting in the spring of 2006. Maureen was hired to write the screenplay. I loved it, loved Traceys voice, loved the writing, it reminded me of a modern day 'Catcher in the Rye.' So I tracked down Maureen, who lived in Vancouver, we had a great chat on the phone and I optioned the book by sending her my cowboy boots in the mail. I got to work on Tracey, and soon I had The Tracey Fragments that became the novel.īruce McDonald: Way back in the 20th century, my friend John LEcuyer turned me onto a novel called The Tracey Fragments. Eventually I studied dramatic writing at The University of British Columbia and got a lot of encouragement there from all my instructors. In the early 1990s, I performed the fragments as Tracey at punk shows in Vancouver before the bands came on. She got into the kind of trouble many women experience trouble with men both strange and familiar, bizarre miscommunications, power dynamics, that sort of thing.

The tracey fragments series#

The fragments were a melding of dramatic monologue and magical realist fiction, a picaresque series of tales about a young woman who got into terrific jams. As I was in a life or death situation, I threw myself into my writing and what Id started in Montreal became The Tracey Fragments.Īt that time, Tracey reflected how I experienced the world.

Soon after, I got stranded in my home town, Winnipeg, for a few years with a serious illness. I wondered if I could do the same thing with writing, and started working on the pieces at night. I was living in Montreal at the time and was very influenced by modern dance, which was very experimental and took tremendous risks. Maureen Medved, Writer: The Tracey Fragments began as a series of dramatic monologues I wrote in the late eighties. On screen for nearly every frame of the film, Ellen Page delivers a tour-de-force performance that cements her status as one of the most exciting actresses in film today. The result is a film truly unlike any other- intense, kinetic, and dark, yet breathtakingly beautiful. In the process, she begins to work through the mystery of her brother's disappearance, which is not all it is first laid out to be.īased on screenwriter Maureen Medved's novel of the same name, maverick Canadian filmmaker Bruce McDonald employs a dazzling non-linear split-screen style to represent Tracey's shattering anger, and sets the results to a swirling score from Broken Social Scene. Smart and acerbic, but still only a tender 15 years old, over the course of the film Tracey reveals to the audience (and herself) the truth about how she wound up there. Tracey Berkowitz (Ellen Page) is riding around a pre-blizzard urban wasteland on the back of a city bus, naked except for the tattered curtain shes wrapped in, looking for her missing little brother (whom she fears she has hypnotized).