TIFFG's relationship with the talented filmmakers/visual artists Nick and Sheila Pye began in 2005, when we presented one of their early short films, THE ARSONIST, at our annual Student Film Showcase in May. At that time, they were both students at Concordia University. In 2006, Nick and Sheila made their TIFF debut with the mesmerizing A LIFE OF ERRORS and Sheila was a participant in our Talent Lab.

This year, the Pye's return to the Toronto International Film Festival with their latest film, LOUDLY, DEATH UNTIES, a rhythmic and visually striking experimental exploration of mortality. Check out this interview with this dynamic, husband and wife team by Marty Spellerberg:

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Nic: Hi I'm Sheila Pye.

Sheila: Hi I'm Nicolas Pye.

Nic: We have a film playing at TIFF this year called ?Loudly, Death Unties.? It's in the Short Cuts Canada programme. It's eleven minutes long.

Sheila: Part of the original idea of the film was based on the Celtic myth of the banshee, who would be a death messenger that would arrive at a place to warn people of death. In this film what happens is a little small child arrives and burrows her way into this shack. And this couple who are in the front room, once she arrives they're very unnerved by her presence and try to get into this room. And that door is forever shut and they can't actually get in.

Nic: Throughout the progression of the film Sheila's character shows up behind me, almost as an afterthought, following me around. And when she stops being affected by gravity there's all these games where I'm tying her down to the ground. It's about me releasing her memory.

Sheila: The interesting thing about this film, this funny part of our process ? we have an idea, but very simple and a very vague idea, but we won't have a specific story from beginning to end until we start shooting. We'll go in with that idea and really leave a lot of space for experimentation and different interpretations of themes. It becomes like a play; we build on each, from one scene to the next. We'll have a few key images, three or four that we'll draw out and go ?we have to hit this and this,? but other than that it's pretty intuitive the way it develops.

Nic: At the time of the set construction, that's when a lot of ideas come together. We will do a ten page treatment and then, when we're fabricating the set, we start loosely choreographing things out.

Sheila: Very much a lot of the process of building and creating the sets is as important as writing. When we're going though that process we come up with a lot of the ideas for the films. The production design, if you could call it that, the painting of the set and the layering of all the walls becomes a really important character in the film. We don't approach film making like we could ever have somebody else do that, we do it ourselves.

Originally, our very first film was only two rooms and the camera never went into the set; it was always on the periphery, panning back and forth. For our second film, ?A Life of Errors,? which played at the Festival last year, we decided to add a room so we had three rooms.

Nic: We actually let the camera enter the room with this film, so within the set there were an infinite number of smaller sets. Before we were always outside or around the set; now we're actually inside the space. That's the main difference in shooting style for this new film.

One huge mistake we ran into when we first started shooting films was building a set from specs in our head and then realizing that even if you had a case full of lenses you couldn't accommodate the set the way you were thinking. So now what we do is we have a director's viewfinder and we're actually building to a lens. We build to specific lenses so we know much we can fit in the space and what kind of lenses we need. I think we've leaned quite a lot over these three films.

Caption: Nic and Sheila began working together as students at the Ontario College of Art & Design. This is not the Pye's first year at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Sheila: I was in the Talent Lab three years ago (2005) which was amazing. The year before that I was in the Student Film Showcase that Toronto International Film Festival puts on with a film called ?The Arsonist,? one of the films we didn't work on together. So I guess it's been four years that I've been participating in the Film Festival.

Talent Lab was amazing. The people you got to meet ? it was so small and intimate. Carlos Reygadas, one of my favorite filmmakers, I got to meet him and talk about photography and how he sees his cinema much like photography and I found that really inspiring and interesting and something that, as photographers and filmmakers we really approach cinema more photographically than narratively.

The next year our film ?A Life of Errors? was in the Festival and then it went on to do really well for us. Like Nic mentioned, The Smithsonian Institute Hirshhorn Museum just bought it along with a photograph as well.

It's interesting to do still photographic work and incorporate it into your films. When you exhibit them people sometimes think they're film stills and will watch the films to find those specific images but they're never there. They're always reinvented images based on the same themes the films deal with but different articulations. One of those photographs from our very first film we incorporated just as a small detail of the set for the new film.

Nic: It's exciting. It's an exciting festival. It's one of the top few festivals in the world. It does a tremendous job of bringing people together. I feel, coming from Toronto, the sense of community between the programmers and the filmmakers, they really put forth an effort to make a good sense of community. They treat us very well and it does really feel it's all about the filmmakers. It's a great festival to be a part of. We've been a part of a lot of festivals and I don't think we've ever been treated quite as well as in Toronto, for sure.

Caption: ?Loudly, Death Unties? screens as part of Short Cuts Canada.