Biography
Bruce McDonald is one of Canada's most inventive and eclectic directors, marrying a love of punk rock immediacy with an interest in formalist techniques. After attending the film program at Toronto's Ryerson University, McDonald began his career with the whimsically strange "Roadkill," which he followed with the road trip comedy "Highway 61." Both films featured actress Valerie Buhagiar, at the time McDonald's girlfriend. The second co-starred and was written by Don McKellar, a fellow Toronto filmmaker who would prove to be one of McDonald's most frequent collaborators. Most notably, the pair co-created "Twitch City," an absurdist sitcom set in downtown Toronto's Kensington neighborhood that starred McKellar as an agoraphobic TV addict. McDonald's other TV work includes several directing credits on the popular teen series "Degrassi: The Next Generation," which brought him several awards from the Directors Guild of Canada. He has developed an interest in experimental film techniques over the years. After the bleak mockumentary "Hard Core Logo," he directed the emotionally and visually complex "The Love Crimes of Gillian Guess," the claustrophobic horror film "Pontypool," and perhaps his best-known work, the visually stunning "The Tracey Fragments," a film about a teenage girl's mental breakdown starring a pre-"Juno" Ellen Page and filmed entirely using split-screen techniques that at times featured over a dozen simultaneous images. Most of these films had original soundtracks by McDonald's favorite band, Broken Social Scene. In 2010, McDonald directed "This Movie Is Broken," a romantic comedy with a Broken Social Scene concert as its centerpiece.
