The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Roger Avary is the first to admit he's a quirky guy. So it's only fitting that the Academy Award-winning screenwriter-turned-director began his life in a community with an equally out-of-the-ordinary name. "For the most part, it sounds like an unbelievable place, especially if you know my personality," says Avary, referring to Flin Flon, in a phone interview. Best known for co-scripting 1994's Oscar-winning Pulp Fiction, Avary was born in the northern mining town in 1965 to a mining engineer father, Edwin, and his wife, Brigitte. Though the family left for Arizona about two years later, the southern California resident has scant memories of the community Ð and remains intrigued by it. "I remember a long walkway going up to our house and there was a little bridge with an open sewer beneath it," he recalls, referring to the above-ground sewer boxes along Callinan Street, where the family lived. Some of the other recollections aren't all that pleasant. "I always remember my mother telling me stories that she would find me in my crib with flies in my eyes and that the mosquitoes were like the size of her fist," says the 40-year-old, laughing openly. Though it was happenstance that he spent his early years in Flin Flon Ð the family moved from one mining town to another Ð the filmmaker believes fate was at work. 'Mythological' "It's almost like this place for me has become sort of slightly mythological," he says. "My whole life... I've had this odd mythology in the past... and always known that I was from this place. In some ways, I'm obsessed and fascinated by it and in some ways I'm afraid to actually go see it because the build-up is so great in my mind... it's almost like going to meet your favourite director, and you build something up in your head about who they are, and I don't want to be disappointed." Though he's sure he would not be disappointed by Flin Flon, Avary can't control the reaction he often gets when the subject of his birthplace comes up. "Whenever people who know me say, 'Where were you born?', I say, 'Canada,'" he says. "'Where in Canada?' 'Flin Flon.' They're like, 'No, come on.' And then usually it's followed with 'Flim Flam?' and I say, 'No, no, Flin Flon. F-l-i-n F-l-o-n.' I've done a lot of correcting throughout my life." Even some of his famous friends have trouble grasping the name. "That actually happened with Al," says Avary, referring to the famed actor Pacino. "Just imagine Al in his voice going, 'Flim Flam?' And actually Oliver Stone said almost the same thing without the Pacino delivery." Avary describes himself as a filmmaker whose past experiences, no matter how buried, influence his work. He says elements of Flin Flon and other small towns in which he grew up are found in his latest directorial outing Silent Hill, which debuted in top spot at the box office over the weekend. See 'Film' P.# Con't from P.# Based on the popular video game of the same name, the film centres around a mother who must track down her ill daughter in a deserted mining town. "If you're going to be some place, the experience of the place, the spirit of the place, finds its way into the work, and I have to think that there is a reason that I came from this place," says the deep-thinking father of two. Success Story The story of Avary's rise reads like an inspirational Hollywood script about an overnight success story. A dedicated film enthusiast, he initially found little work in the industry. He directed and produced a minor 1983 flick called As the Worm Turns and was a cinematographer for 1987's My Best Friend's Birthday. His big break, appropriately enough, came at a Los Angeles video store. There he shared shifts with an unorthodox young man named Quentin Tarantino, who shared Avary's passion for the silver screen. The men spent hours watching and critiquing films, bouncing ideas off one another. It seemed like a natural progression when they pooled their talents for 1992's Reservoir Dogs, which Tarantino directed and Avary helped write. The following year came another Avary/Tarantino collaboration called True Romance. The box office returns were disappointing, but many critics took notice. It was 1994 that cemented Avary's name in filmdom. That year, he directed Killing Zoe, a dark work that won several independent cinema awards. But overshadowing that success was the work for which Avary and Tarantino are best known. Violent and groundbreaking, Pulp Fiction became one of the most popular films in cinema history. The box office smash also earned an Academy Award for best screenplay, an honour he shared with Tarantino, who directed. The film's popularity was overwhelming. "It's one thing when you're two guys working at a video store cranking out cool ideas," says Avary. "It's another thing when you start bringing in producers and lawyers and managers and publicists and money and fame and all of these abstract things that have very little to do with the essence of what makes cinema exciting. We got pretty big pretty fast." Over the next decade Avary would continue to write and direct, further developing his solid fan base with entries like The Rules of Attraction and Glitterati. He even tried acting, appearing in the low-budget horror flick Phantasm IV: Oblivion. His quirkiness again surfaced when he chose to be credited in reverse as Yrava Regor. Ascension Now with the success of Silent Hill, Avary's career appears destined to continue its ascension. Yet despite all of his prosperity, Avary has never forgotten his small town Canadian roots. He vows he will one day come back to Flin Flon Ð and may even have a camera in toe. "I want to see what it's like now," he says. "I want to see if I can actually walk down a street and actually have some connection. I think that's a documentary in the making." Even the people of Flin Flon fascinate him, particularly the group of his dad's mining buddies his mother christened "The Muck Turtles." "I'd actually like to make a movie about them," he says. "I think miners are fascinating people. They're people literally of the earth and you know, it takes an extraordinary kind of human being to do that kind of work with those kinds of risks in that kind of environment that is so unnatural. I don't feel that anything has ever really captured what it's like." And Flin Flon's Roger Avary may be the filmmaker to do just that.
