Trailer Park Boys: The Movie

By Adam Thomas

Sunday October 1, 2006

A low-rent, happy ending Mike Clattenburg is the creator, co-writer, and director of Trailer Park Boys. If you like the show, don’t worry, they didn’t fuck it up. If you haven’t watched the show, that’s okay. It’s only the most watched show in Canadian history. So just get drunk, get some dope, and go see the Big Dirty.

ONLY: Was it a lot different working on the film than on the series?
Mike Clattenburg: It’s a much longer story and we had to reintroduce the characters, but it’s a feature film, and it had to be different from the series. But at the same time there are whole bunch of fans of the series who don’t want it changed too much. So it was a careful balance to make a feature film and stay true to our roots in the series.
ONLY: It’s good to see the mix between the traditional format and actually existing in a greater beast.
MC: Yeah, we could lock down the camera and allow it to be a cinematic moment and not always be a slave to the documentary format, which can be limiting. But in the film there’s also a lot of handheld so it kind of recalls the show.
ONLY: You guys seem to work pretty collectively. How much is improvised? I mean, you guys have come up with some of the best swears ever.
MC: Like cock-knuckles? Yeah, we usually come up with that stuff on the day of. We’ll start batting things around like “Snoopy The Fuck Dog…” and just keep going with stuff like that.
ONLY: You finally got your own trailer park after jumping around from park to park over the first few seasons.
MC: Originally we shot in a trailer park and the people were wonderful, but the owner of the park, who owns pretty much every park in town, didn’t like the language in the show, and he said, “Forget it. I don’t ever want to see you guys again.” He owns, like, 11 parks. So there was a crossroads in season four where they weren’t going to let us back into the park, so we bought 12 trailers and set up by this abandoned mental hospital in Cole Harbour. Now we’ve got like 50 trailers and it really does look like a real park.
ONLY: So where does it all go from here?
MC: Well, we just shot season seven and it’s a monster. It’s, like, two feature films, and I think that we had more money for this season than we did for the movie. And we have super guest stars like Sebastian Bach…
ONLY: From Skid Row?
MC: Sebastian Bach was fucking on fire. He was such a good actor; man, he blew us all away. But one of my favourite musician cameos has got to be in the movie, and a lot of people miss it… It’s Gord Downie [Tragically Hip] and Alex Lifeson [Rush] playing the two cops that bust them.
ONLY: I missed that.
MC: Well, that’s good.
ONLY: I mean it even took me a second to figure out that it was Hugh Dillon [of The Headstones]; at first I thought it was Corey Hart…
MC: That’s a damn good idea, fuckin’ Corey Hart.