Humane nature: Director Caitlin Cronenberg and Jay Baruchel talk about finding dark humor in a time of extremes

As modern society speeds past dire environmental warning signs, indulges the clamorous embrace of fascistic tendencies, rejects empirical truth and the guidance of experts-in-field, and generally ignores any number of various other flashing red lights, it can be easy to take a fairly bleak view of humanity. For her feature directorial debut, though, Caitlin Cronenberg (yes, the daughter of David Cronenberg) locates and feeds a satirical tone which, in its own twisted way, allows viewers to have some fun with the world’s problems.

Scripted by Michael Sparaga, the darkly humorous horror thriller Humane takes place over the course of a single day, against the backdrop of a global ecological disaster and resource crunch which has forced developed nations to adopt dramatic population reduction goals by way of patriotic voluntary euthanasia programs. When their retired, well-off news anchor father (Peter Gallagher) decides to enlist, alongside his second wife (Uni Park), it thrusts the at-odds York siblings (Jay Baruchel, Emily Hampshire, Sebastian Chacon, and Alanna Bale) into conflict with the private contractor (Enrico Colantoni) who comes to collect on contractually owed bodies.

Recently, The A.V. Club had a chance to speak with Cronenberg and Baruchel about their film. The conversation is excerpted below, edited lightly for both length and clarity.

Caitlin Cronenberg: I will say that that was not originally scripted. The vibe, I think this came all out in the edit. We really, really wanted to create the first moments of this film, and it was written very differently. We shot different intros, and nothing about that felt right, given the rest of the performances that we had captured during the course of the film. So it was a creative editing choice to kind of bring in this needle-drop moment. We went through a few different song choices and that one just was the clear winner. The tone that it sets is just right. I think so much of the storytelling is really done in the edit—which I now know [laughs].

AVC: Caitlin, I know you had photographed Michael previously if I’m not mistaken, but how did the script for Humane first come your way?

CC: Yeah, Michael and I have always been in touch. We’ve been friends for a long time, and he literally sent me an email with the subject line “Have you ever thought about directing a feature?” He sent me the script and I read it and we talked a lot and I said, “I think tonally it’s not quite exactly the film that I think it should be.” We went back and forth and talked, did a lot of stuff writing-wise, and he did a darkness pass and sort of got it to what felt like me. I can’t believe that that was, like, November 2019.

Jay Baruchel: Yeah, and I don’t know if you guys are news junkies, but after November 2019, the world got quite colorful for a minute.

CC: Things happen. It was weird timing on that one.

AVC: Well, Jay, this is the perfect segue. How did the script register for you when you first read it?

JB: Basically, Caitlin just texted me and was like, “I’m making a movie and I think it’s cool, and I think you should take a look at it and see if it’s your cup of tea.” And, yeah, it was. I inhaled the script and I sent it to my wife. I was like, “This is something I think you and I would watch, and we would dig.” Then she read it and called me right away and said I had to figure out a way to do this movie. I’d known Caitlin for quite some time, probably more than a decade. I’d hung out with her a bunch, taking pictures of me and shit in hotel rooms during TIFF. That sounds more untoward than it was, but she’s somebody whose company I’ve enjoyed and whose art I’ve appreciated and admired. So I read that script with very friendly eyes, and I loved what I read. And then also the fact that Emily, another dear friend of mine, was going to be in it made it just sort of like the job offer you most hope you get: make a movie with your friends at home.

AVC: One of the things that intrigued me about the film was the idea of deflection that it addresses, both in the macro narrative sense, where there’s an external blaming of others for the need for this population culling, and then also within the York family. I’m just curious if maybe the film caused you to reflect back or come to realizations regarding misplaced blame from different times in your own lives.

JB: Yeah, no, absolutely. I hate to keep going back to COVID shit, but we got a pretty concentrated dose of shame and indignation and virtue signaling then, and I think that the world is inherently a gray area, and certain times we try to make things black and white and we make it us or them. And I think the “us-and-theming” effect that cataclysms and an impending collapse of our ecosystem have is that it can make people do a thing just so that they can feel better about themselves, when they go to bed at night or look at themselves in the mirror, you know? Like, I would posit that this movie is kind of a horror movie about recycling boxes. You know, there’s like a bunch of people that as long as they put their pop cans in a recycling box once a week or once every fucking two weeks, they’re like, “That’s it, I’m good. It doesn’t matter what else unfixable damage or irrevocable harm I’m doing to my planet and my civilization [because] I wash out my jars of tomato sauce and put them in a recycling box.” And I think that’s kind of what this movie is. Sorry, that’s a long-winded way to get there.

AVC: Caitlin, when you have an actor who is well known for his deft touch with comedy, how do you look to take advantage of those skills, but also thread the needle so that things don’t tip over into more overt comedy?

CC: That’s basically exactly what we did. We had tonal takes of different levels of comedy. And Jay is able to turn on, and even turn up or turn down, the comedy when necessary. Obviously this character, you know, he fits into the [category of] just kind of a despicable asshole, the kind of person that everybody hates—which is the opposite of Jay, who’s a very wonderful, lovely person to hang out with. So it’s a lot of fun, because when the character is so completely different than the person, there’s a lot to play with there. But I think because of Jay’s experience in doing all manner of things, there were often times when we would have both options. And we would just need to see how it would all come together with the rest of the scene, especially in the edit.

But when it was Jay on his own, like in his individual moments, it was all about options. Because there was certainly discussion amongst the producers and the behind-the-scenes people about the fact that we have a very comedy-heavy cast. With Emily and Enrico and Jay together, it could have just been a comedy. But as I always say, “People are funny if they’re funny. People are funny in dark times.” And I think that it was important to allow the characters to still be funny in those darker moments, because that’s what they would be like if this were actually going on. So it was fun to see the range and have options. There were some takes where we would really need to try and have a straight one, and then there were takes where the entire crew was, like, biting their fingers to stop themselves from laughing. And that was fun too.

AVC: There’s a line in the film, addressing the family dynamic, where someone says, “We don’t even really know each other,” speaking about the siblings. Caitlin, you come from a famous family, and have a filmmaker father and filmmaker brother. Have you ever gotten a different or fuller sense of who they are as a person through these external objects of art that they’ve created?

CC: I mean, that’s very, very interesting. And I’ve experienced a lot of strange times with my family, as creatives. I think I couldn’t have shared the experience of sitting around the dinner table talking about how the sex scenes in my dad’s movie garnered an NC-17 or an X rating. No other kids in my grade four class were having experiences like that [laughs]. But at the same time, my family’s always had a very, very close relationship. Very, very open. We’ve been through a lot of shit together. We lost my mom a few years ago, and we’re just very, very, very close. And I think that as I grew up, my dad and I, our relationship just changed into an adult relationship anyway. We speak to each other as openly as possible. So I don’t believe that I’m learning anything new about their personalities from the films that they make. Although I did call my brother after I watched Infinity Pool for the first time and I asked him if he was okay. Because it was definitely something where I was like, “Do you need a hug? Like, do you want to talk? Are we good?” But I think that that’s all I had.

JB: I had a few questions too after that one.

CC: Yeah, there were, you know, a couple of questions [laughs]. But essentially the men in my family are the sweetest, most mild-mannered intellectual nerds possible. And I just really enjoy being with them and having an adult relationship with them. You know, I have two kids, my dad is a grandfather, we hang out all the time, it kind of is what it is. But I think the most interesting experience I had with my dad from a creative perspective was working on this short film with him that we sold as an NFT, The Death of David Cronenberg. That was very odd because it was literally him getting into bed with a corpse of himself and embracing it tenderly, and I was filming it. That was a very strange experience, I would say. But you know, if you don’t have those experiences with your dad, are you even living?

AVC: Caitlin, you talked about finding the tone for the film in the edit. You’ve made music videos, short films, and had a successful career as a visual artist. What did you anticipate being the biggest challenge or toughest day of physical production, and what ended up being the toughest day, whether it was the same or different?

CC: Well, I think just dialogue in general is something that was new to me from a career perspective, because obviously in still photography and even in my shorts and music videos, there’s no dialogue. On the dialogue-heavy days, I would actually feel a sense of relief after blocking, knowing that I wasn’t responsible for having to remember the dialogue. I would be so nervous as we were about to go, and then I’d be like, “Actually, I’m good! I don’t have to do this. I’m just listening. I’m good.” You put your trust into your actors. They’re the ones who have to deliver the dialogue, and that is a huge relief.

But I think one of the bigger challenges that I was not anticipating was having so many key players in each scene. We had four siblings in almost every scene, and a lot of it took place in the same area of the house. So the blocking of that, and how to make that interesting the next time you’re back in the same area, for example, was challenging. I think that the dinner scene was the meatiest scene that I was the most, not nervous about but excited to see how it would play out. And then it was like watching a play. We would run through the entire scene from every angle and it was like watching a play, because you didn’t have as much stop and start with that. We really let it play out and it got more exciting every time. That’s the core moment [showing] this family dynamic, and it all had to come out in that scene. And it did. It was great.

AVC: Some of the small bureaucratic details in the movie serve up pinprick satire. Do you share in the cynicism these tidbits suggest, at least as far as how humanity might hypothetically respond to the type of situation the film indulges?

JB: So one of the weird takeaways for me of being 42 is I’m actually more optimistic at this point in my life about the world and people than I’ve ever been, which feels counterintuitive. Like, anecdotally, the world’s a piece of shit, and there’s a lot of people that are suffering. I don’t need to list all the reasons why the world sucks right now, but if you zoom out further I think that we are living longer and we are probably reading more, more literate, safer. We have to fight fewer diseases. We fight each other less. As awful as it is, this is kind of the best it’s ever been—on average, across the world. Yeah, we find a way to fuck up a ham sandwich. So, yeah, this [film] is satirical, it has its tongue in his cheek the whole time. But it’s like, really only like one bad week away from becoming reality, you know? So, here’s a hokey platitude: I have no faith in humanity, but I have faith in people. There it is.

CC: Ooh, that’s a good one! I’m going to steal that later. My version of that is just that I believe that, the same way that people reacted to COVID, you’re going to see every range of insanity and levelheadedness in a crisis. That’s where people really let themselves go, in a crisis. The best way that you can tell who a person truly is is to put them in a crisis situation and see how they react. So if this or something similar should happen to us [in real life], you will get the people who are setting themselves on fire and jumping off a cliff, both literally and figuratively, and then you will get people who really want to attempt to make the best of it and actually try to solve things—the way that people do now. There are always people who are scared and who are sharing the worst-case scenario in every situation, and there are people who are literally trying to make the world a better place, and lift each other up.