Talking about film noir in a pistachio-green office

"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.'' Those were going to be my first words to Brian Paisley, just to show him I was hip about noir.

But when I got to his house, his wife directed me along the side of the fence and across some squishy lawn to his cosy little writing hut out in the back yard. Paisley built the place himself, and I admired the pistachio-green walls. By the time we actually sat down to talk, with him balancing like a benign stork on one of those big grey exercise balls, the line had fled my head entirely.

So I was left doing what I always do, asking dumb questions. What I wanted from Paisley was the plain goods, the straight dope, the unvarnished truth. In short, I wanted to know what a big palooka like him had to say about his apparent defection from writing and producing live theatre to working in the fickle, fluctuating film world. After all, they didn't call early movies the flickers for nothing, did they?

Paisley is the guy who founded the theatre department at Northern Lights College in Fort St. John in 1977. He launched Chinook Theatre there, then moved it to Edmonton in 1980. He is also the author of eight stage plays for young people, and overall, he is a pretty upbeat guy.

But you know how it goes. In this business, you gotta soften 'em up before the big whammy. So I asked him how it felt to have the spotlight trained on his film-noir screenplay Lies Like Truth at the Victoria Independent Film and Video Festival recently.

"It's been a long haul," Paisley said, from atop his ball. "Really, the genesis of Lies Like Truth happened 10 years ago." The script's initial title was Trigger, it didn't go anywhere, and he set it aside.

Then, three years ago, Paisley’s script was chosen from hundreds of proposals submitted to the Vancouver Island Drama Initiative, funded by $4.8 million from CHUM Broadcasting to foster film and TV production on Vancouver Island.

"I had moved on to other things by the time Lies Like Truth was picked in the CHUM contest," Paisley, 58, recalls. "So I guess that made it easy for me to give myself over to the process. I might have resisted more if I had just finished writing the script."

Back in the 1980s when I first met Paisley in Edmonton, Alberta, he was the last guy youÌd expect to surrender to anything. As the founder of the Edmonton Fringe Festival, he functioned as a whirling dervish of an impressario from 1982 until 1990. Just watching him work a room tired me out for a week. But now, resettled in Victoria for the past seven years, Paisley seems to be in a new phase.

"I work mostly by myself now and I'm happy with that. I’ve had the crowds,” he says. “Now the anonymity is wonderful."

When I ask Paisley if the lengthy hiatus between script writing and actual film production ever gets him down, his advice is brisk: have lots in the drawer and something on the desk. In other words, work on several projects simultaneously. At the moment, Paisley has two scripts percolating: a family drama and a historical drama, The Irishman, about Thomas D'arcy McGee, the politician-journalist assassinated in Ottawa by the Fenian Brotherhood. He also confesses to having "three novels on the go."

Paisley understands why young writers dream of success as scriptwriters rather than as playwrights. "Film is the Holy Grail," he says, "Money is part of it, though if you are looking for constant flow, it's not the way to go. But film is also the most popular storytelling medium, it Ìs what everyone consumes." Paisley himself is no slouch in this area: he admits he watches at least five movies a week as he gestures to the growing collection of DVDs in his office.

His advice to young wannabes is simple and succinct: "Get the structure right," he says. "In the development process your dialogue is going to be usurped by actors and directors. You'll lose a lot of your clever lines; the thematic stuff will become irrelevant; your characters will change. But if your structure is good, you'll never lose that.”

Paisley says the biggest shift he had to make from stage to screen writing was to "switch from interior voice to exterior visuals." On the stage, characters talk a lot, reveal themselves through words. Not so in film, where the medium demands action and image.

He also urges "ruthless persistence" in the writing process, wherein the writer is constantly asking, "is this absolutely necessary?" The goal is a script as "clear, crisp and succinct as it can be."

"And you gotta love the form," Paisley adds as he walks me to the street. "So watch a lot of movies."

Yeah, okay, I buy that. But you know what? Brian Paisley is still rooted in the theatre, the place that initially shaped him. Take a look at the title of his movie: Lies Like Truth. Think about Shakespeare and go peruse Macbeth. There it is, right in Macbeth's last speech: "I pull in resolution and begin/to doubt the equivocation of the fiend/ that lies like truth."

Paisley is tickled with the pun in the title, pleased that most people will read the word "lies" as a noun rather than a verb. A thespian still lurks beneath the noir shrubbery.