Ron Hynes? Or the Man Of A Thousand Songs
(Photo credit: Kent Nason)
Documentary on Ron Hynes. Directed by Bill MacGillivray. Co-produced by Terry Greenlaw and Jordan Canning
Picture Plant, Lunenburg, Nova Scotia
Toronto International Fillm Festival Sept. 13
Atlantic Film Festival Sept. 19, Park Lane 8, 9:20 p.m.
Ron Hynes stares into the camera. His pale blue eyes are friendly. But he does not blink and there is a hint of something unsettled.
At the start of Bill MacGillivray’s 90 minute documentary, The Man Of A Thousand Songs, Hynes says about the film, “I think it’s about Ron’s light side and his dark side.”
“The light side is Ron. The dark side is who he’s got to be every time he shows up on stage, the guy who kind of took over his life.”
In an interview in Halifax on a steamy Friday afternoon as Hurricance Earle shivered the leaves with anticipation outside a Halifax coffee shop, MacGillivray said, “I think Ron is a poet.”
“He knows how to use language to its best advantage. He understands irony. He’s also a master character actor. When he is on stage he is playing a role.”
Photo: Justin Hall
The role is different in different situations, MacGillivray adds. A bar is different from a nightclub which is different from a television studio or a soft-seater. With locations as varied as a CBC television studio —- Ron tailors his performances to his venue, as any artist will do.
But the role is the same. The role is the performer, The Man of A Thousand Songs. And he can be uncomfortably moody.
Ron says to the camera, “I think Ron kind of invented this guy.” Somehow, the guy who got on stage and wrote all these songs began to change into a third guy, impatient, cold, dark.
“Somewhere along the way this guy took over my life. Ron realized if he didn’t get this guy under control, then this guy was gonna kill him.”
It’s a bit of a lurch when Hynes talks about himself in the third person. But this is a story not so much about multiple personalities as it is about a single personality with as many facets as palm-sized crystal.
With consummate skill and the uninhibited co-operation of Hynes himself, MacGillivray illuminates the crystal from within so that the facets project on the screen in a look, a tone, and most especially a song.
Which is the real Ron Hynes? The answer has to be all of them and maybe none of them.
Unlike many well-known Canadian songwriters, Ron does not observe and report, MacGillivray said. Ron takes it all to another level. “He is living the songs he sings.”
The Man of a Thousand Songs is as extraordinary a documentary as Ron Hynes is a poet of lived experience. The film is clean, raw, and holds nothing back. But it could not have been so without the extraordinary willingness of Hynes to tell all, to confront the camera with living, unsanitized reality.
“The thing is you are doing a documentary and you’re trying to raise money,” MacGillivray said. “You have to write a bunch of stuff and you have to send it out, and you write, ‘I would like to do a film on Ron Hynes and this is what it will be like’. So I wrote a probably 12 or 13-page proposal and we sent it out.”
“We’ve done it many times for documentaries, knowing full well that probably that will not be the film. You have to sell something, you have to sell the idea, but it’s pretty hard to say what your film is going to be. If you can, you’re telling, you’re not exploring.”
It’s an edgy way to do things.
“As part of our research we had with Ron, several times, Terry (Greenlaw) and I, the idea was to get pre-interviews, explore topics, see how far he would go, what he would be willing to talk about.”
“Towards the end of that process—we were sitting in a borrowed office in St. John’s with Ron at a table and we were asking questions—I think we were getting on his nerves, actually—he suddenly got up and started pacing back and forth, answering in a not confrontational but very direct kind of way.”
“Terry and I looked at each other and I said, I think we’ve got the basic formula for the film right here. Im gonna put him in black box and we’re going to interrogate him and put him on edge, basically.”
Photo: Kent Nason
“I said to Ron the next day, Ron what do you think? I said there’s no point in doing this unless you are willing to go the distance. And he said, ‘Well, let’s go the distance. I will not baulk at anything. Ask your questions, I will answer them all’.”
In the end, MacGillivray had to include in the finished film, not always the best answers, but those that best tell the story. “What we have chosen to use is what makes the story work, MacGillivray said.
Two other things happened before the film was done. The first was Joel Thomas Hynes, Newfoundland novelist and actor, author and star of an intense down-and-out-of-it ,novel-into-film called Down In The Dirt. Joel is Ron’s nephew. Terry saw a photograph of the two of them in the Globe and Mail.
“They were standing on a corner and they look like two corner boys—the Bad Boys of St. John’s or something. And Terry said, we’ve got to have Joel in this film and see if we can get them in that situation.”
The third element that helped to make the film work was Andrew MacCormack who edited the film. “He’s a young kid and this is the very first long-form documentary he’s done,” said MaGillivray. “And he did an extraordinary job, understanding where we wanted it to go and bringing all sorts of youthful and really playful uses of imagery into the film.”
The choice of Joel as a foil to Ron gives insight and perspective to The Man of a Thousand Songs. “Joel’s second novel is called Right Away Monday,” MacGillivray said. “Both his novels are very, very dark books, both very much along the same line as Ron. They’re very much about himself and exploring himself.”
“Somebody read the second bok and said, ‘Oh my God. Joel’s going to kill himself!’ And Joel flipped through the book and said, ‘Oh my God, it’s a 300,000 page suicide note!’ Joel’s not suicidal,but he has also been an addict, like Ron has been, and at the same time, he’s the one who got Ron into rehabilitation, so they sort of played off each other.”
“As a kid, Joel went to Ron in search of family. Ron took him in and raised him and encouraged him to become an artist and then of course, when he became an artist, that’s when the conflicts started. Then Joel sort of spiraled on his own downward spiral, now since recovered.”
“Joel is a remarkably intense guy, very, very bright.”
All of these elements have been melded into a brilliantly fine film. It was inspired by Ron Hynes’s astonishingly lean and expressively loaded songs. And they fill this film. The artist and the life can not be separated.
William Butler Yeats once asked, “How can you tell the singer from the song?”
As MacGilivray’r and Greenlaw’s film makes clear, you can’t.
How Can You Tell The Singer from the Song? (Photo: Justin Hall)
