40 Acres Director R.T. Thorne Talks Future, Famine and Family
Good luck keeping up with R.T. Thorne.
The writer/director is rushing between sound mixing and colour correcting suites, putting the finishing touches on his debut feature 40 Acres, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in early September.
“It's insanely exciting,” says Thorne on the phone between editing sessions. “I've been going to TIFF for 20 odd years. I remember in my younger days my Auntie Gwen, who is no longer with us, used to come up from Michigan and stay with my mom. She’d say, ‘Let's go to the film festival.’ I remember being introduced to a lot of different types of cinema, and it’s such an incredible thing to have been going to this festival as a film lover and now have the chance to actually present my film.”
Thorne is best known for directing and executive producing the acclaimed CBC program The Porter, a Canadian television juggernaut that won 12 Canadian Screen Awards, all the more impressive considering it ran for a single season. He also created the Afrofuturistic teen sci-fi show Utopia Falls and directed various episodes of shows such as Degrassi: Next Class, Blindspot and The Lake.
He was doing all of that while also working on bringing 40 Acres to the big screen, a six-year journey that stands as a testament to Thorne’s tenacity and belief in the story he wanted to tell.
Set in a famine-decimated future, the film focuses on the Freemans, a Black and Indigenous blended farm family led by Hailey (Danielle Deadwyler) and Galen (Michael Greyeyes). Hailey, a military veteran and isolationist, will do anything to protect her family and their land, but tensions rise when her teenage son Emanuel (Kataem O’Connor) makes a connection with a neighbouring farm community.
“It's a story about trust, who can you trust, and how can you trust again. It's a story of generational trauma and how long that lasts, and where does it stop with the next generation,” explains Thorne.
When Thorne first started writing the script he was reacting to Donald Trump’s election and unceasing reports of police murdering black people. Although those things were occurring in the US, his sense of despair extended beyond borders.
“That time really made me question where the world was going, and at that time I did not have my son. My son is now with us. But we were thinking about having a child, and I started thinking, ‘Can I protect my children? Do I know how to provide for them?’ And then came the pandemic,” he says with a dry laugh.
“Covid was brutal, I think over six million people died, but how lucky we were that it wasn’t more lethal, because if it were more brutal people wouldn’t have food because the food chain would stop. So pile all those things on top of each other, I’m writing notes, coming up with stuff, it wasn’t hard to sustain the momentum over the years.”
Thorne got the filmmaking bug while attending Toronto Metropolitan University (formerly Ryerson), but it was his first job at MuchMusic that provided a crash course in filmmaking.
“A friend of mine got an internship at MuchMusic,” he says. “And I was like, oh, you gotta get me in there because that was where we could watch music videos.”
“I was a tape runner, and when the day wrapped, I would hang out in their huge music video library and pull tapes. I'd pull all of the videos that a certain director had done — David Fincher, Spike Jones, Hype Williams. I'd watch all their videos and I would try to analyze them. Why are they choosing this shot? Why does their lighting look so much better than other videos? I'd sort of try to draw little lighting maps, imagine where they put lights to light shots. There really was an education in that.”
He then started to hang out with the MuchMusic editors, learning how to cut together shots, and with a school chum he made the leap into directing his own music videos.
If there is a through line that connects Thorne’s work from music videos to Utopia Falls to The Porter and, finally 40 Acres, it’s the need for community.
“It’s the idea that we are all in this together,” he says. “Whether or not we all get along, whether or not we all think the same, we're all in this together and we need each other as much as we cause each other strife and problems.”
Thorne credits his mother as the person who most helped shape him, and 40 Acres is, in many ways, a homage to her.
“She gave me the understanding of how to move through the world and be myself, and also by watching her move through the world. She is very tough, very strict, and so a lot of those aspects of my mother actually worked themselves into the character of Hailey in the film.”
Thorne refers to 40 Acres as a mother-son story, and it was while writing the movie he realized there was an absence of films celebrating that relationship.
“That's a very predominant relationship in the black community; a mother raising a son. There's obviously many reasons for that, I can bore you with them, but it was very interesting to me when I started looking for black mother-son stories, I could not find a lot. Yes, there were the stories of the grieving mother who’s got a kid on the wrong side of the tracks, or one of them is a drug addict or incarcerated or something,” explains Thorne.
“But this story is about the two of them having different ideas about how to move forward. The mother has gone through a lot of stuff and is trying to prepare her son for what she thinks the world is. It’s the idea of a mother who is that committed, much like my mother. And the son can say, ‘Look, you did a good job. I'm ready for this world. You can relax. You can take your foot off the gas.’”
And with 40 Acres Thorne announces he’s ready to enter the world of filmmaking.
“Directing television is a process that's influenced by so many different voices,” he says. “But a film, that's your film. And if it's your film and it comes from a personal place, there's a wonderful journey that happens. You may resist at times, but then the film starts to tell you what it wants, and you just have to be open enough to listen.”
