Pioneering filmmaker R.T. Thorne goes deep on the past, present and future of making work in Canada
Watch the extended interview with the Utopia Falls creator and CBC Arts: Exhibitionists host Amanda Parris
Director, writer and producer R.T. Thorne was a highlight of this past weekend's season premiere of CBC Arts: Exhibitionists, which focused on the art of movies. Our host Amanda Parris sat down with Thorne (two meters apart, of course) at the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto, and the above video is an extended version of that interview that you didn't get to see in the episode.
Thorne got his start in music videos, directing for the likes of Snoop Dogg, Simple Plan and Sean Paul. In 2012, he made a move into long-form filmmaking and television, where the Canadian media landscape still has a long way to go when it comes to representation of Black voices.
"You turn on Canadian television and you don't really see a lot of faces that look like us," Thorne tells Parris. "If you do see faces that look like us, we're usually, you know, the sidekick character, we're someone's friend or or maybe a boyfriend. But you don't often see a narrative that's centred around us, that's for sure."
Thorne has certainly helped change that, creating the genre-bending, Afrofuturistic science fiction television series Utopia Falls and being named the first chair of the Director's Guild of Canada's newly formed BIPOC Members Committee.
"There's a lot of people that are interested in filmmaking and storytelling, especially now, but they still don't have those inroads into that industry," Thorne says. "They still don't know exactly how to make the jump from — maybe they're doing music videos to get into film or to get into television. And, you know, we're working on that."
"I mean, that's that's one of the reasons that I took the role of the chair of the BIPOC Members Committee for the DGC. It is to try to change the environment that people step into when they get involved in this industry and to shift that."
Watch the full interview above, and tune into this week's episode of CBC Arts: Exhibitionists — which centres on architecture — Friday at 11:30 ET on CBC.
