Phillip Barker | |
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Born | Bradford, Yorkshire, England |
Nationality | Canadian |
Alma mater | Ontario College of Art |
Known for | Production design, film direction, screenwriting, installation art |
Awards |
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Website | phillipbarker |
Phillip Barker [1] [2] is a Canadian production designer, filmmaker and visual artist based in Toronto, Ontario. [1] [3]
He is best known for his work as a production designer, particularly his work with director Atom Egoyan, which includes ten feature films and two live operas. In 2006, Barker received a Directors Guild of Canada Award for Outstanding Achievement in Production Design for his work on Egoyan's Where the Truth Lies.
Barker's production design has also been featured in films by directors such as Brian De Palma, Mira Nair, Lisa Cholodenko and Neil LaBute, as well as on the television series Reign (2013–2015), American Gothic (2016) and Star Trek: Discovery (2020).
Shadow Nettes, a short film written and directed by Barker, won the award for Best Canadian Short Film at the 2017 Vancouver International Film Festival.
Phillip Barker was born in Bradford, Yorkshire,[ citation needed ] England. [4] His father was an auto mechanic. [5]
Barker's interest in filmmaking began in 1967, when his father brought home a Super-8 camera and projector. [6] Barker's family moved to Canada the following year. [4] His father had purchased the film camera to document the trip. [7] He completed his high school education at Thomas A. Stewart Secondary School in Peterborough, Ontario, where his brother Mike was a founder of the city's Folk Under the Clock concert series. [8]
He attended the Ontario College of Art, starting with commercial illustration, later transitioning to more experimental forms of art, including installation art that incorporated elements of film and video. [4]
Barker spent a year and a half in Paris, before moving to Amsterdam, where he lived from 1982 to 1987, supporting himself by working as a scenic painter. [4] [9] In 1986, he debuted his performance piece titled Trust a Boat, 'Film-sculpture for a House' inside a canal house on the Keizersgracht. [1] The performance was viewed from the street below as scenes were performed in nine windows of the three story building. [1] [10] These scenes consisted of a mixture of live performance and film projections set to music. [1] Barker also served as production designer for the 1987 Dutch film Zoeken naar Eileen (Looking for Eileen), by director Rudolf van den Berg. [11] [12]
Upon his return to Canada, Barker continued to create installation pieces that incorporated elements of film, video, sculpture and live performance, often exhibited in public places. [4] [9] He also worked on commercials and rock videos to help support himself. [4] [9]
At the Seville Expo '92, Barker contributed an art piece to the Canadian pavilion. [13] His work consisted of a flooded tent set up in the middle of a vast pond. Images of Canadian ecological disasters were projected onto the walls of the tent. [13]
In 1995, Barker released the short film A Temporary Arrangement. The film won the Best Experimental Film Award at the 1996 Melbourne International Film Festival, [14] and was also featured on TVOntario's two-part series Exposures: The Art of Film and Video, which aired in 2005. [15] The film features composite images that were made by combining nine frames, all shot in Super 8 film and arranged into a grid that was then transferred to 35mm film. [16]
Barker worked on Egoyan's stage production of Richard Strauss's opera Salome , presented by the Canadian Opera Company in 1996. [17] Barker created elements of projected film and video for the performance. [18] [19] The first of many collaborations with Egoyan, the two met after Egoyan attended one of Barker's shows that was being held in an abandoned building once owned by the CBC. [20] The work involved a delicate paper house that was suspended over a shallow pool of water and projected on the walls were black-and-white super 8 film images of various people floating on a river. [21] Egoyan said of the experience: "Sometimes it just happens. You see a piece by a new artist and it answers something within you in a direct and powerful way. I had that experience nearly twenty-five years ago when I first came across Phillip's work." [21] After the show, Egoyan left Barker a note in the show's guestbook, inviting Barker to work with him. [20]
Barker and Egoyan next worked together on the film The Sweet Hereafter . [22] Barker was nominated, along with Patricia Cuccia, in the category of Achievement in Art Direction/Production Design at the 18th Genie Awards for their work on the film. [23] He also worked with Egoyan in 1997 on a film featuring cellist Yo-Yo Ma that aired as the fourth episode of the six-part television film series Inspired by Bach . [22]
In 1998 Barker worked with director Mira Nair on the TV film rendition of the novel My Own Country , [24] as well as with Egoyan on his production of the chamber opera Elsewhereless by Canadian composer Rodney Sharman. [22] Barker also released his short film I am always connected, which used repurposed footage from an installation piece that he made for the Lumen Travo gallery in Amsterdam in 1984. [25]
The following year he released his film Soul Cages , which features a grid of forty-five Super 8 film frames arranged into one frame of 35mm film—an expansion of the technique that he employed in A Temporary Arrangement. [16] Soul Cages won best short film at The Atlantic Film Festival, [3] Best Dramatic Short from the Canadian Society of Cinematographers [26] and, with producer Simone Urdl, Barker shared a nomination for Best Live Action Short Film at the 21st Genie Awards. [27]
The 2000s saw further collaborations between Barker and Egoyan. Barker was the production designer for the films Ararat (2002), [28] Where the Truth Lies (2005), [29] Adoration (2008) [30] and Chloe (2009). [31] Barker received Genie award nominations for his work on Ararat [28] and Where the Truth Lies. [29] In 2006 he was presented with a Directors Guild of Canada Award for Outstanding Achievement in Production Design for Where the Truth Lies. [32] His work on the sets for the film were featured in an issue of Canadian Interiors magazine that same year. [33] Barker built a 3,000-square-foot presidential suite at London's Shepperton Studios, inspired by the architecture and design of Morris Lapidus during his MiMo period, for the film. [33]
The Toronto International Film Festival included Barker's short film, Malody, in their list of Canada's Top Ten Short Films of 2012. [34] In 2013 Malody received the Prix Créativité (creativity prize) at the Festival du nouveau cinéma in Montreal, [35] in addition to the Le prix Hors Pistes (the "off-track" or "off-road" prize) at the Festival Hors Pistes held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. [36]
Barker served as production designer for the television series Reign from 2013 to 2015, [37] [ citation needed ] as well as on the 2016 CBS series American Gothic . [38] He was nominated, along with Robert Hepburn and Brad Milburn, for Best Production Design or Art Direction in a Fiction Program or Series for his work on Reign at the 2016 Canadian Screen Awards. [37]
In 2017 Barker released his short film Shadow Nettes. [39] In the film, a fisherman teaches his son about the use of the "shadow nette", a traditional fishing device worn by the fisherman that projects their silhouette on to a screen. [39] Using their projected gestures, the fisherman draws prey to their nets. [39] Shadow Nettes was featured at several film festivals internationally in 2017 and 2018 and won the prize for Best Canadian Short Film at the 2017 Vancouver International Film Festival. [39] [40] It was also featured on the CBC series ' Canadian Reflections . [39]
Barker again collaborated with Egoyan on the film Guest of Honour , which was released in 2019. His work on the film earned him a nomination for Achievement in Art Direction / Production Design at the 2021 Canadian Screen Awards. [41]
Also in 2019, Barker and fellow filmmaker Mike Hoolboom, launched a tour featuring a retrospective of Barker's films, titled Strange Machines: The Films of Phillip Barker. [42] The tour also featured the release of a book by the same title that was edited by Hoolbloom. [42] The retrospective was presented at the TIFF Bell Lightbox, [43] the Canadian Film Institute, [42] as well as the 2019 Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival in France. [44]
Barker also sat on a panel of production designers at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival, alongside François Audouy ( The Wolverine , Logan , Ford v Ferrari ), Craig Lathrop ( The Lighthouse , The Witch ), and Zosia Mackenzie ( Castle in the Ground .) [45]
In 2020, Barker served as production designer in the third season of Star Trek: Discovery . [46] He was suggested to the show's executive producer, Alex Kurtzman, who had seen some of Barker's experimental films. [46] He was also nominated for a Directors Guild of Canada award for Best Production Design – Dramatic Series, for his work on the show. [47]
Year | Film | Director | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
1987 | Zoeken naar Eileen (Looking for Eileen) | Rudolf van den Berg | |
1997 | The Sweet Hereafter | Atom Egoyan | |
Bach Cello Suite #4: Sarabande | Atom Egoyan | Short film, later televised | |
2000 | Ararat | Atom Egoyan | |
2004 | Cavedweller | Lisa Cholodenko | |
2005 | Where the Truth Lies | Atom Egoyan | |
The River King | Nick Willing | ||
2006 | The Wicker Man | Neil LaBute | |
2007 | Redacted | Brian De Palma | |
2008 | Camille | Gregory Mackenzie | |
Adoration | Atom Egoyan | ||
2009 | Chloe | Atom Egoyan | |
2011 | Breakaway | Robert Lieberman | |
2013 | Cottage Country | Peter Wellington | |
Devil's Knot | Atom Egoyan | ||
2014 | The Captive | Atom Egoyan | |
2017 | Perfect Citizen | Paris Barclay | TV movie |
2019 | Guest of Honour | Atom Egoyan |
Year | Film | Notes |
---|---|---|
1984 | I Am Always Connected | Short film |
1996 | A Temporary Arrangement | Short film |
1999 | Soul Cages | Short film |
2003 | Regarding | Short film |
2008 | Night Vision | Short film |
2010 | Slow Blink | TV short |
Little Films About Big Moments | One in a series of short films | |
2012 | Malody | Video short |
2015 | Dredger | Short film |
2017 | Shadow Nettes | Short film |
Year | Film | Creator(s) | Notes |
---|---|---|---|
2013-15 | Reign | Laurie McCarthy and Stephanie SenGupta | |
2016 | American Gothic | Corinne Brinkerhoff | |
2020 | Star Trek: Discovery | Bryan Fuller and Alex Kurtzman | Season 3 |
2021 | The Sinner | Derek Simonds | Season 4 |
Year | Award | Category | Nominated work | Result |
---|---|---|---|---|
1996 | Melbourne International Film Festival | Best Short Experimental | A Temporary Arrangement | Won |
1997 | Genie Award | Best Achievement in Art Direction/Production Design (shared with Patricia Cuccia) | The Sweet Hereafter | Nominated |
2001 | Genie Award | Best Live Action Short Drama (shared with Simone Urdl) | Soul Cages | Nominated |
2003 | DCG Team Award | Outstanding Achievement in a Feature Film (shared with film crew) | Ararat | Nominated |
Genie Award | Best Achievement in Art Direction/Production Design | Nominated | ||
2006 | Genie Award | Best Achievement in Art Direction/Production Design (shared with Carolyn 'Cal' Loucks) | Where the Truth Lies | Nominated |
DCG Team Award | Outstanding Achievement in a Feature Film (shared with film crew) | Won | ||
2009 | DCG Craft Award | Production Design - Feature | Adoration | Nominated |
2010 | DCG Team Award | Outstanding Achievement in a Feature Film (shared with film crew) | Chloe | Nominated |
DCG Craft Award | Outstanding Achievement in Production Design - Feature Film | Nominated | ||
2012 | Bratislava International Film Festival | Best Short Film | Malody | Won |
2013 | Montréal Festival of New Cinema | Creativity Prize | Won | |
2015 | Canadian Screen Award | Achievement in Art Direction/Production Design | The Captive | Nominated |
2017 | Vancouver International Film Festival | Best Canadian Short | Shadow Nettes | Won |
2018 | Canadian Screen Award | Best Production Design or Art Direction in a Fiction Program or Series (shared with Aidan Leroux, Joel Richardson and Rob Hepburn) | Reign | Nominated |
2019 | DCG Craft Award | Outstanding Achievement in Production Design - Feature Film | Guest of Honour | Nominated |
2021 | Canadian Screen Award | Achievement in Art Direction/Production Design | Nominated | |
DCG Craft Award | Outstanding Achievement in Production Design - Dramatic Series | Star Trek: Discovery | Nominated |
Atom Egoyan is a Canadian filmmaker. Emerging in the 1980s as part of the Toronto New Wave, he made his career breakthrough with Exotica (1994), a film set in a strip club. Egoyan's most critically acclaimed film is the drama The Sweet Hereafter (1997), for which he received two Academy Award nominations. His biggest commercial success is the erotic thriller Chloe (2009).
Arsinée Khanjian is a Canadian actress and activist. She is widely known for her collaborations with her husband, filmmaker Atom Egoyan. She won the 2003 Genie Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role for her role in Ararat.
Bruce McDonald is a Canadian film and television director, writer, and producer. Born in Kingston, Ontario, he rose to prominence in the 1980s as part of the loosely-affiliated Toronto New Wave.
Ararat is a 2002 historical-drama film written and directed by Atom Egoyan and starring Charles Aznavour, Christopher Plummer, David Alpay, Arsinée Khanjian, Eric Bogosian, Bruce Greenwood and Elias Koteas. It is about a family and film crew in Toronto working on a film based loosely on the 1915 defense of Van during the Armenian genocide. In addition to exploring the human impact of that specific historical event, Ararat examines the nature of truth and its representation through art. The genocide is denied by the Government of Turkey, an issue that partially inspired and is explored in the film.
Don McKellar is a Canadian actor, writer, playwright, and filmmaker. He was part of a loosely-affiliated group of filmmakers to emerge from Toronto known as the Toronto New Wave.
Patricia Rozema is a Canadian film director, writer and producer. She was part of a loosely-affiliated group of filmmakers to emerge in 1980s from Toronto known as the Toronto New Wave.
Ronald Mann is a Canadian documentary film director.
Mychael Danna is a Canadian composer of film and television scores. He won both the Golden Globe and Oscar for Best Original Score for Life of Pi. He has also won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Music Composition for a Miniseries, Movie or a Special in his work on the miniseries World Without End.
The Sweet Hereafter is a 1997 Canadian drama film written and directed by Atom Egoyan, adapted from the 1991 novel by Russell Banks. It tells the story of a school bus accident in a small town that kills 14 children. A class-action lawsuit ensues, proving divisive in the community and becoming tied with personal and family issues. It stars an ensemble cast featuring Ian Holm, Sarah Polley, Maury Chaykin, Bruce Greenwood, Tom McCamus, Gabrielle Rose, Arsinée Khanjian and Alberta Watson.
David Hemblen was an English–Canadian actor who frequently worked in Canadian film, television and theatre. He was born in London, England, and grew up in Toronto, Ontario. He is known for his role as George in La Femme Nikita, Customs inspector in Atom Egoyan's Exotica, Lord Dread/Lyman Taggert in Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, Detective Dick Hargrove in T. and T. and as Inspector Winterguild in TekWar. He is also known for his role as Johnathan Doors in Earth: Final Conflict and for voicing the character of Magneto in the X-Men animated series from 1992 to 1997.
Chloe is a 2009 erotic thriller film directed by Atom Egoyan, a remake of the 2003 French film Nathalie.... It stars Julianne Moore, Liam Neeson, and Amanda Seyfried in the title role. Its screenplay was written by Erin Cressida Wilson, based on the earlier French film, written by Anne Fontaine.
Peter Thomas Donaldson was a Canadian actor.
Helen Lee is a Korean-Canadian film director. Born in Seoul, South Korea, she emigrated to Canada at the age of four and grew up in Scarborough, Ontario. Interested in film at a young age, she took film studies at the University of Toronto and, later, New York University. While in university she was influenced by gender and minority theories, as reflected in her first film, the short Sally's Beauty Spot (1990). While continuing her studies she produced two more films before taking a five-year hiatus to live in Korea beginning in 1995. After her return, she released another short film and her feature film debut, The Art of Woo (2001). She continues to produce films, although at a reduced rate. Lee's films often deal with gender and racial issues, reflecting the state of East Asians in modern society; a common theme in her work is sexuality, with several films featuring interracial relationships.
Michael Hoolboom is a Canadian independent, experimental filmmaker. Having begun filmmaking at an early age, Hoolboom released his first major work, a "film that's not quite a film" entitled White Museum, in 1986. Although he continued to produce films, his rate of production improved drastically after he was diagnosed with HIV in 1988 or 1989; this gave a "new urgency" to his works. Since then he has made dozens of films, two of which have won Best Short Film at the Toronto International Film Festival. His films have also featured in more than 200 film festivals worldwide.
Frank's Cock is a 1993 Canadian short film written and directed by Mike Hoolboom. The eight-minute production stars Callum Keith Rennie as an unnamed narrator who discusses his relationship with his partner, Frank. The two met while the narrator was a teenager and spent nearly ten years together. Frank has since been diagnosed with AIDS, and the narrator fears his death. The story was based on the experience of one of Hoolboom's friends at People With AIDS, which Hoolboom adapted after receiving a commission to create a short film about breaking up.
Next Floor is a 2008 Canadian dark comedy short film directed by Denis Villeneuve. The film, largely wordless, depicts a group of eleven people endlessly gorging themselves on raw meats at a banquet.
The Mysterious Moon Men of Canada is a Canadian short film, directed by Colin Brunton and released in 1988.
The Making of Monsters is a 1991 Canadian short film, directed by John Greyson. Made while Greyson was a student at the Canadian Film Centre, the film's premise is that playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht is alive and living in Toronto, and actively interfering with the production of "Monsters", a heavily sanitized movie of the week about the 1985 death of Kenneth Zeller in a gaybashing attack.
Daniel Ernest Cockburn is a Canadian performance artist, film director and video artist. Cockburn won the Jay Scott Prize in 2010 and the European Media Art Festival's principal award in 2011 for his debut feature film You Are Here.
Soul Cages is a Canadian short drama film, directed by Phillip Barker and released in 1999. Inspired by the old legend of The Soul Cages, in which the souls of drowned sailors are trapped in clay pots at the bottom of the ocean, the film adapts it to the present day by depicting the interactions between a photographer and the clerk processing her film in a one-hour photo lab, around the philosophical question of whether the souls of photographic subjects are trapped in the image.
Barker, 46, is a slim, soft-spoken man in black jeans and a white shirt.
Born in England, Barker moved to Canada at 13. By high school, he knew art was his calling, and went to the Ontario College of Art, moving from commercial illustration to experimental and video art by the time he graduated. He spent a year and a half in Paris, busking with his mandolin in the metro, moved to Holland, where he got a job as a scenic painter, then came back to Canada and worked as a set builder on David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone, gradually rising up the film hierarchy, working on commercials and rock videos to fund his "art habit."
I've always been an artist--a painter, a sculptor--and it's like my habit, you know, that I had to support myself by working in films. So like many of my friends at the time, we would get jobs as scenic painters. I was a special effects technician for a number of years, I've built props, all the time making my own art, which was like installation using film, using film projection in buildings, exterior performances. So I continued now to still make my own art and support it by working commercially in the film business. So I find they both go hand in hand, and I sort of need them both, you know? I need to make art to feel good about myself and working in film as a production designer, it's super creative and I get to experiment and try things I normally wouldn't be able to afford, and work with teams, which I really like doing--the collaboration aspect of filmmaking.
All the while, he was gaining an international reputation for his installations and graphic pieces, usually involving film projection. At the 1992 Seville Expo, he represented Canada with a controversial project. The chosen theme was water. "is this your work?" a bureaucrat from the Quebec ministry of culture asked Barker, looking at a flooded tent set up in the middle of a vast pond where images of Canadian ecological disasters—dead moose being airlifted from the floodplains behind the James Bay project -- lit up the canvas walls from the projectors inside. "It's s---," the bureaucrat pronounced.
Atom Egoyan concedes that it was a great marketing ploy for the Canadian Opera Company to ask a film director who made a remarkable movie about a strip clubto stage an opera with the Dance of the Seven Veils.
Finally, working with set designer Derek McLane (who had provided sets, previously, for the COC's Jenufa and Lulu) and artist/filmmaker Phillip Barker, a definitive vision of Salome came into focus—almost literally.
Yeah. There are projections, there is film, and I'm working with a really great collaborator, Phillip Barker, who is designing a lot of the video and film projections.
At a show held in an abandoned CBC building, Egoyan saw Barker's work and left a note in the guestbook, inviting Barker to work with him. Barker thought the note was a joke and didn't call Egoyan for six months. Since joining the movie business, Barker has designed two other films, directed several short films of his own and hopes to direct his own feature art film soon.
Barker has worked with Egoyan on one other feature, The Sweet Hearafter, as well as a television film featuring cellist Yo-Yo Ma, and two operas, Salome and Elsewhereless. Their working relationship resembles any that Egoyan shares with the rest of his regular cast and crew: rigorously polite, based on shared aesthetics and a common vocabulary. It might not have happened as Barker, until very recently, never had any intention of becoming a movie production designer.