Mike Downie’s labour of love was also his toughest assignment.
As the director and producer of the superb four-hour-plus documentary “The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal” that premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival on Thursday, Downie has done an admirable job of chronicling the history and cementing the legacy of the extraordinary rock band. Since forming in Kingston, Ont., in 1984, the group has sold more than 12 million albums in Canada, another three million in the rest of the world, and filled bars, theatres, arenas and stadiums coast to coast as a must-see live act for the majority of their existence.
It’s an even more impressive feat considering that, along with telling the story of the band, Mike also had to relive the cancer diagnosis and Oct. 17, 2017 passing of his younger brother, singer Gord Downie.
“It wasn’t uncommon for me to have a good cry,” admitted Mike.
“Just watching some footage or maybe reading something, you’d just never know what was going to set you off.”
Mike conducted more than 60 interviews for the docuseries, which premieres on Prime Video on Sept. 20. Besides the surviving band members — guitarists Rob Baker and Paul Langlois, bass player Gord Sinclair and drummer Johnny Fay — Downie spoke with family, friends, managers, crew and celebrity peers ranging from Blackie & the Rodeo Kings’ Tom Wilson, who helped the band land early gigs, to actor-comedians Dan Aykroyd, Bruce McCulloch, Jay Baruchel and Will Arnett, to Midnight Oil singer/politician Peter Garrett and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Downie, an award-winning documentarian (“The Hockey Nomad,” “The Secret Path,” “Finding the Secret Path”), said there were also high expectations for the project.
“I would meet so many people that knew about (the doc series) and they’d say, ‘Oh, this is going to be so great,’” he recalled. “And I’m in the middle of it, thinking, ‘Well … I think what you mean is, this better be great.’ Because there’s no guarantee that when you set out to do these things that you’re going to be able to pull it off. It was pretty loaded.”
But Downie got through it by leaning on his close-knit film crew.
“It was certainly the most fulfilling experience and rewarding experience I’ve ever had in making a film.”
Downie said one of the challenges of the docuseries — divided into segments titled after Hip songs “Looking for a Place to Happen,” “On the Verge,” “It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken” and “Grace, Too” — was deciding which themes and tales to convey.
“There were just so many roads to go down,” Downie said. “We focused on stories that told you something about the band that you didn’t know; that maybe had an impact on who they were and the way they were.
“There were larger themes that we definitely wanted to explore: why did this band mean so much to so many Canadians? And why did they resonate so deeply with so many Canadians?
“On the flip side of that, why did so many Canadians see or hear something in this band that made them think that this is — or is representative of — the Canadian experience, whatever that is?
“So that was kind of the overall meta theme that helped us pick which stories to pursue. I wanted it to add up to something, not just be a telling of the band’s history and all the highs and the lows, although that’s a big part of it.
“But I did want to try and answer: why did they matter?
“And I was really thinking about a new generation of fans on the other side of the world who probably don’t know anything about (the Tragically Hip.) Can they watch these four hours and come away saying, ‘I think I get a little bit about (Canada) and I certainly get this band of five small-town guys’?”
Downie is not kidding about the global implications of this docuseries: Amazon Prime is airing it in more than 240 territories.
“It’s going to go everywhere,” Downie said.
So how did he separate his role as director from the grieving brother?
“When it came down to it, starting with interviews with the band members and the inner circle, it was just to make sure that they knew that I could hear anything about Gord,” Mike said. “We were brothers. We lived in the same room for the first 20 years of our lives. I knew a lot of the back story. And honestly, I grew up, from late high school, with the other members of the band. There’s a lot of trust there.
“I also wanted to establish that we could talk about anything. They’re not going to say anything that I’m going to go, ‘Oh, wait a minute, let me defend my brother.’ It was more, ‘We can talk about anything. I can hear anything. I’m not going to be upset.’
“I know Gord would, at times, be difficult. He was very driven. I got the chance to work with Gordie a number of times on a documentary, including the first one I ever did, which is not very good, and a bunch of music videos, so I knew the territory quite well. It was mostly just establishing trust with everybody and them knowing that they were going to be heard.”
Downie said that a gathering of surviving band members at Kingston Collegiate and Vocational Institute, the high school where the band members met, was also crucial, as was the timing.
“When we did the first interviews with the band members and a few of their high school friends in our old high school, KCVI, we needed to do a ‘hurry up’ with that first round of interviews, because the school was vacant, but it had been sold to Queen’s (University).
“We were able to get in there and have the run of it, and it was a really important three-day shoot. That was in October 2021, more or less four years from the day that Gordie died.
“I felt it was the right amount of time. It was still recent enough that it was of heavy heart, but there had also been enough time to have some clarity and just ruminate on some of these experiences that they had as individuals and as a band.
“There hadn’t been a lot of opportunity for the band to discuss their experiences and this gave them that.
“I’m not a therapist, but I was definitely trying to create a space of, ‘Let’s just talk about it.’ Let’s talk about what it was like … let’s talk about what was good about it … and what was tough or bad about it.
“It really started with those first interviews. I think everybody was just ready to tell their side of the story.”
While Downie is very proud — and a little nervous — about dispatching “The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal” into the world, he said it’s difficult “to get super excited about the reception” due to the loss of his brother.
“The impact of the documentary, I think in many ways, has to do with the tragedy of Gord dying at the age of 53 when he had a lot more that he wanted to do, “Downie said. “I can assure you of that.”
