Mile End Kicks Director Chandler Levack Talks Montreal Music Scene, Grimes & More

Devon Bostick and Barbie Ferreira in Mile End Kicks — Photo by Joseph Fuda

Chandler Levack’s latest semi-autobiographical feature film Mile End Kicks follows Toronto music journalist Grace Pine (Barbie Ferreira) who moves to Montreal in the summer of 2011, ostensibly to write a 33 ⅓ book on Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill, but is unexpectedly sidetracked from her goal by her romantic interest in Chevy and Alfie (Stanley Simons and Devon Bostick) who are members of local buzz band Bone Patrol. The film is stacked with music by musicians from Montreal and beyond with TOPS playing the music of Bone Patrol in the film and noted Montreal musician Cecile Believe providing the score. We spoke to former Polaris Music Prize juror Levack about the critical role music played throughout the development and filming of Mile End Kicks, which hits theatres on April 17.

You were on the Polaris Music Prize jury at one point. Did this kind of overlap with this semi-autobiographical time that we’re talking about in Montreal?

Chandler Levack: I think I was on the jury from probably 2009 or something to maybe 2012 or 2013. Those dates might be a little bit rusty, but yeah, I definitely voted. I never got to be part of the Grand Jury that decided the prize. That would have been cool.

Do you remember any particular Montreal bands that you championed at any point that you were just like, “I’m gonna go to the hilt for this one”?

I was the music columnist for Maisonneuve magazine for three or four years, so that was exciting. And I think I felt a very personal role in that position to certainly highlight Quebec artists. And I wrote this article in 2012 for Maisonneuve that was about the birth of Grimes and the ‘new’ Montreal music scene again, and sort of what her success, and the success of other Arbutus bands meant for the City of Montreal.

I was really lucky to get to collaborate with two or three of them in this movie, like TOPS, who wrote the original songs for the film and Cecile Believe, who did our score, who is formerly of Mozart’s Sister, and Think About Life and stuff. But yeah, I’m just obsessed with bands from Montreal. POP Montreal is my favourite thing ever.

One thing that we really did want to know about was that you assigned a playlist to the characters and also what records you gave out people at the end [of filming?]

I just wanted there to be a real intertextual element in playlists that I was sharing with Barbie (Ferreira) and Devon (Bostick) and Stanley (Simons) and the band to just get them into character. There’s a lot of Mozart’s Sister, TOPS, Grimes, Mac DeMarco, Arcade Fire.

And I guess one of my favourite ones – that was my incredible assistant director, Catherine Kirouac – who’s just an unsung hero in the film and just such an incredible person to work with. She’s a big Homeshake fan, and I love Homeshake, too. And I went to his show, I think he was at POP Montreal, and I got him to sign the record and I gave it to her as a gift. So that was a real treat to be able to give her a signed Homeshake record, because I love him, too.