In his 2011 graphic novel Paying for It: A Comic-Strip Memoir About Being a John, Toronto artist Chester Brown recounted how his determination to avoid romantic entanglement led him to start seeing sex workers.
Brown sketched out a seedy late-’90s Toronto where his longtime girlfriend Sook-Yin Lee fell in love with someone else, leading Brown to explore other alternatives to dating. Brown and Lee remained friends, and now Lee has directed a film adaptation of Paying for It, which she wrote with Joanne Salazar.
After making its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) last fall, the movie launched its Canadian theatrical run this week at Toronto’s Scotiabank Theatre.
To tell their story properly — with Daniel Beirne playing Brown and Emily Lê as Lee’s alter-ego Sonny — Lee and her crew had to re-create the Toronto where it took place a quarter-century ago. As Lee explained in an interview earlier this week, some of those locations were easier to recapture than others.
“The easiest, of course, was my house,” Lee laughed. “I've had my house used in movies before and had it totally [trashed] …. But Paying for It had a really small budget and I was like, ‘If the crew promises to be careful, OK.’”
Shooting in the Kensington Market row house where Lee and Brown’s real-life story actually played out had some obvious benefits. If her actors needed a specific prop, it was right there on the shelf.
“There’s this beautiful book of The Happy Prince, by Oscar Wilde,” Lee said. “Chester had painted over the cover and specifically made it about him and me. I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, here it is.’ Those moments were really wonderful.”
The production shot in Toronto landmarks like Sneaky Dee’s and the Paradise Theatre, and in iconic stores like Come As You Are and Courage My Love. For Chester’s regular lunch dates with his fellow cartoonists, Lee took over Sammy Lam’s beloved Buddha’s Vegan Restaurant on Dundas Street West, a short walk from her place.
Lee said budget constraints led her to choose one consistent eatery for the on-screen friends, who sit in the same booth throughout the film.
“I just love Buddha’s Vegan — the natural light, the exposed pipes,” Lee said. “At first the crew was like, ‘Should we cover the pipes?’ ‘No! I love the pipes!’”
Other locations were just as easy to redress. Daniel Vila’s Market Video — which Lee described as “a kind of space-age bachelor pad hangout” — became the location for Chester’s first visit to a sex worker.
“All we had to do was bring in a big circular bed with purple satin sheets and put it in the middle there,” she explained.
The toughest, though, was re-creating Sonny’s job as a VJ at “MaxMusic,” a play on MuchMusic, where Lee was a well-known VJ from 1995 to 2001.
Location scouts found a studio in Burlington but the cost to rent the space and fill it with extras proved prohibitive.
“TV studios are expensive,” Lee laughed.
Fortunately, she knew a guy. Her old boss, Moses Znaimer, now runs ZoomerMedia, which has its very own studio in Liberty Village. The production wrangled weekend access, only to find out the studio they were shooting in had been dressed for a modern variety show.
“We had been told explicitly, ‘Do not move anything. You can work around it, but do not move anything,’” Lee recalled. “But that variety show had totally different semiotics — it was jukeboxes and stuff.”
“And so in my brain I was like, ‘OK, the formula for MuchMusic was very simple: Exposed brick wall. Ladder leaned up against exposed brick wall. Two warring gel lights of a colorful orientation behind me. A carpeted wedge for me to sit on and a big TV beside me.' Voila. You got MuchMusic.”
Of course, when you rebuild your own past you end up spending an awful lot of time there, and Lee admitted that adapting Brown’s memoir was a more fraught project than she initially expected.
“I'd lock it away, because it was so frustrating,” she said of the script. “And then I’d always open up the drawer again and revisit it.”
“I lunged at life as a young person and made a lot of mistakes, and I can look at those times with a lot of love and care,” Lee said. “Young people do throw themselves at life, [screw] up and then get back up and try again.
“Oddly enough, you do become wiser.”
Paying for It is now playing in Toronto at the Scotiabank Theatre and will return to the TIFF Lightbox on Feb. 9 as part of TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten festival.
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Norman Wilner has written about entertainment and culture since 1988, most recently as the senior film writer for NOW Magazine. He currently hosts and produces the Someone Else's Movie podcast and publishes the Shiny Things newsletter.