Canada’s indie rock supergroup, Broken Social Scene are in the middle of a very busy year. Their latest album, Forgiveness Rock Record, hit stores last week to critical acclaim and the band are currently engaged in a massive tour that will pretty much see them on the road until September. But they’re not done there.
Speaking with the Aquarian Weekly (via TwentyFourBit) Broken Social Scene’s Brendan Canning has revealed that the group has their eyes on a small handful of forthcoming film projects. “There’s a few movies we’re working on while we do a month of touring and festivals to promote the record. We’re involved with ‘Daydream Nation,’ ‘It’s Kind Of A Funny Story,’ and ‘This Movie Is Broken,’ which mixes Broken Social Scene live concert footage with a plot line that’s half fiction thrown in,” Canning said.
“It’s Kind Of A Funny Story” is the latest from the team of Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden (“Half Nelson,” “Sugar”) and it will mark the second time the group has been tapped by the directors. For their breakout “Half Nelson,” they utilized songs from all across the band’s discography including tracks from Feel Good Lost, You Forgot It In People as well as songs from pre-BSS group KC Accidental. As for the film, it once again finds Fleck and Boden taking another look at the trials of adolescence as the story tracks a 16-year-old boy who checks himself into a mental ward, only to find himself stuck in the adult unit. The film is based off the book by Ned Vizzini and stars Zach Galifianakis, Viola Davis, Emma Roberts, Lauren Graham, Zoe Kravitz and Keir Gilchrist. Needless to say, it’s one of our most anticipated films of the year.
As for “Daydream Nation” its a low-budget indie starring Kat Dennings and Josh Lucas and follows “a disaffected high school senior who finds herself deposited along with her widowed father in a desolate Canadian hamlet where boredom leads her into an affair with a teacher and into a more promising romance with a druggie teen.”
Finally, “This Movie Is Broken,” a film we’ve talked about at length, is a crowd-sourced docu-drama that utilizes fan shot concert footage (not unlike the Beastie Boys’ “Awesome, I Fuckin’ Shot That”) and also weaves together a narrative about two kids trying to get backstage. We saw the film at SXSW and called it “chaotic, messy and real.”
No word yet on if BSS are writing entire soundtracks or specific pieces but it certainly sounds like more than just okaying some songs to be used on the soundtrack. No word yet on official release dates for any of these films, but “It’s Kind Of A Funny Story” is slated for a 2010 release from Focus Features. As far as we know, “Daydream Nation” is still seeking a distributor and will most likely do the festival rounds this fall. With SXSW already under its belt we would imagine “This Movie Is Broken” will continue the festival circuit until a distributor signs on.
Broken Social Scene members Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning were also instrumental in co-writing the score to Edgar Wright’s “Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World” with producer Nigel Godrich (Radiohead, Beck) and other musicians that haven’t been named yet. And incidentally, Wright just tweeted that Montreal turntablist, Kid Koala will likely join the expansive list of musicians on the ‘Scott Pilgrim’ soundtrack which includes folks like Beck, BSS, Metric, Dan The Automator, Cornelius and many, many more. [Ed. Saw BSS in Brooklyn this weekend and Galifinakis, Fleck and Boden were all there]