Award-winning filmmaker M.H. Murray tackles the hardships and anxieties associated with modern dating in his new short film GHOST. The film features no spoken dialogue, to formally echo the experience of being “ghosted” and explores feelings of anxiety, dread, and isolation. We caught up with M.H Murray to discuss the film, his career, and future projects.
Thank you for agreeing to catch up with Occhi Magazine. How did you get into filmmaking?
I remember being a kid and watching The Little Mermaid. I felt completely hypnotized. It was like a beautiful dream. That’s what a great movie does to you. Once I felt that feeling, I knew I wanted to feel it again and again and again. And I wanted to make other people feel how I felt. When I entered high school, my parents bought me a DSLR camera and I began writing stories and shooting little films with my friends—melodramatic slashers with heaps of expositional dialogue and bad fake blood. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I was having so much fun. It wasn’t until I was accepted into film school at York University that I began to take filmmaking more seriously as a potential career path.
York is where I met some of my closest friends and collaborators and it is also where we started making Teenagers. While in film school, I created a production company called Black Elephant and I have been a fledgling filmmaker begging for gigs ever since.
Your first large-scale project, a three-season web series titled Teenagers, is award-winning. Please share with us the impact these accolades have had on your career.
Teenagers changed my life—not financially because it was released for free on YouTube, but in terms of building my confidence as a filmmaker and developing a name for myself online and in the industry, it helped a lot. We were lucky to be screened at festivals around the world and win trophies, which was really gratifying and tangible, and I was able to meet mentors that I still work with today. Each season was a chance for me and my collaborators to grow and practice our craft.
We started making Teenagers when we were teenagers ourselves, and it was a very grueling and stressful process to put a show together with no money, a tiny crew, and such a big cast; half the time I felt completely overwhelmed, but I think we created some magical moments in that series and I am eternally grateful for the friendships I made along the way and the support from our viewers has been really touching. In the end, it was all worth it.
Please tell us about your latest project Ghost and what audiences can expect?
Ghost is a short film that follows a gay Torontonian man named Benjamin as he is “ghosted” by his lover, Simon. The film stars my friend Mark Clennon in the lead role. He is a talented and passionate musician, writer, and actor. We wanted to collaborate on something that combined our skills and this short film was our way of doing that. The film features original music from Mark and he plays instruments on screen as well.
What encouraged you to take on this subject, particularly as a short?
I hadn’t shot a short film since graduating from York, and after working on a web series for four years, I wanted to make another short film before jumping into a feature.
The film features no spoken dialogue, to formally echo the experience of being “ghosted”. How did you decide to use this approach?
I have always been interested in the way that silence is used in film. All of my previous work features loquacious characters expressing themselves through monologues. With Ghost, I wanted to experiment and challenge myself to try to tell a story without any speaking on screen.
Can you tell us more about the filmmaking process?
Filming Ghost was an emotional experience because I hadn’t directed anything since the last season of Teenagers in 2017. I took a bit of a “hiatus” from directing to focus on writing, and working odd jobs, and living… I worked in television as an extra for a few months. I think I just needed a break. Getting back to directing with Ghost was cathartic. I cried.
I started writing the script for Ghost during the summer of 2018 and we shot the film that December. The shooting took place over the course of just one day, in Mark’s apartment in Toronto. We had a tiny production team, which consisted of myself and Dmitry Lopatin (my beautiful and talented cinematographer and friend), two camera assistants, and a sound recordist.
I spent a lot of 2019 hunched over my computer in my bedroom editing the film; watching all of the footage over and over and finding all of the little moments that rang true. I didn’t want to rush myself for a festival deadline or anything, which I had done in the past; I took my time and made sure I edited and re-edited until I was happy. My longtime collaborator, Spencer Creaghan, created a score that brought the whole thing together.
What do you want audiences to take away from seeing the film?
I intended to create a short film that feels emotionally bittersweet; the film is sad and anxiety-inducing, but I think it also leaves viewers with a sense of hope in the end.
What other projects are you currently working on?
I recently won a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts to write a feature-length screenplay that continues to follow the protagonist from Ghost, Benjamin, as he confronts new trials and tribulations. I’m working on that script with Mark Clennon from Ghost and my friend Victoria Long.
In my spare time, I am also working on several screenplays, including an epic gay romance feature that explores a tumultuous relationship between a French-Canadian man and a Scottish-Canadian man over the course of a decade, starting when they are 20 and ending when they are 30. My mother is French-Canadian and my father is Scottish-Canadian, and both of those cultures have such a strong sense of identity and long-standing traditions; these juxtapositions have been really interesting to explore and one day I hope to bring this story to the screen.
Where can readers find out more about you?
Readers can follow me on social media @yarrumhm. It’s my name, M. H. Murray, spelled backward.
The film will be screening at the 34th Connecticut LGBTQ Film Festival this June 4th – 13th
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