Malcolm Sutherland
	Malcolm Sutherland answered our questions about the sunburnt tourists of 'The Tourists' from his office in Montreal. LUMEN ECLIPSE: Was The Tourists inspired by a particular place and time? MALCOLM SUTHERLAND: Yes, in 2003 I was traveling in Europe with my girlfriend and we ended up in a small beach-town that was a trap for German tourists on the Croatian coast. The town was mostly huge resort hotels that were full of large, sunburnt German tourists. In such high density they seemed like the strangest animals I had ever seen, like a crowd of walruses or penguins or something. They all seemed to share some indefinable quality that bound them together. I fell in love with them and couldn’t help from sketching their every gesture in my sketchbook. LUMEN ECLIPSE: Are the characters people you know? MALCOLM SUTHERLAND: No, and not all of them were drawn from actual people, I made several of them up for the film. LUMEN ECLIPSE: How did you make them, The Tourists? MALCOLM SUTHERLAND: Most of the scenes were taken directly from my sketchbook drawings that I had done while in Croatia. I traced the original drawings to do the animation and then composited the film in the computer. Thankfully they didn’t need to move very much, so there wasn’t a huge amount of animation to be done. LUMEN ECLIPSE: Where do you go on vacation? MALCOLM SUTHERLAND: The last vacation I went on was to my aunt’s cabin in the woods in southern Ontario. There wasn’t another soul to be seen for kilometers! LUMEN ECLIPSE: Can you tell us about your background? MALCOLM SUTHERLAND: Sure, the sort version is that I grew up in Calgary, joined the army, quit the army, went to university to study astronomy, quit university, built kitchens for a living and quit after a couple of years, spent a year in a monastery in India, went to art college in Alberta to study printmaking, discovered animation at the Quickdraw Animation Society, quit art college and moved to Montreal when I was invited to direct a film at the National Film Board, and since then I have been living in Montreal for 5 years making films independently and with the NFB. LUMEN ECLIPSE: Is Canada a good place to be an artist? Is Montreal? MALCOLM SUTHERLAND: Yes, absolutely. And particularly in Quebec. I really have the impression that something special is going on here in Montreal, not just in the arts but a lot of areas. I really am seeing a lot of people here who are taking on their lives in a whole new way, being creative in areas which may or may not have something to do with “the arts”. LUMEN ECLIPSE: How would your work be different if you had remained in Calgary, where you grew up? MALCOLM SUTHERLAND: I have no idea! Maybe I would draw more horses. LUMEN ECLIPSE: Would you call yourself a designer, an artist, a filmmaker? Does it matter what you call yourself, and do divisions between art worlds matter to you personally? MALCOLM SUTHERLAND: Officially right now I am a director, that is my job title. So for me that is what I tell people when they ask what I do, but it really doesn’t matter to me what I say, it’s just easier than saying something like “I don’t fit into a category, thank you very much”. That just seems fussy to me. LUMEN ECLIPSE: What kind of 'art world' will you be part of in ten years? MALCOLM SUTHERLAND: I don’t know – maybe some kind of locally focused creative society that has a totally transformed social fabric in comparison to what is around today. Its not to hard to imagine, that just seems like what would happen if we all just got real about our own lives and stopped trying to fix everyone else’s. LUMEN ECLIPSE: Do you work for the television screen? the computer screen? the darkened movie theater? MALCOLM SUTHERLAND: I think what I am really working for is what is in front of me; that’s what I respond to when I am working on something, and then after it goes out into the world and gets shown however it gets shown. My main focus is the experience in front of me as I am making it. So I don’t really have any notion in my mind that it will be shown a certain way. LUMEN ECLIPSE: Do you find more support and better community locally or via media and the internet? MALCOLM SUTHERLAND: A bit of both, on a daily basis I am much more connected to the people in my neighborhood, there is a lot of richness there for me. Although I really enjoy it, I don’t really feel an intense need to connect with people who are doing exactly what I do; “artists” or “filmmakers” I mean. Humans are incredible, you know, I really celebrate the creativity that people bring into their lives no matter what they “do”. LUMEN ECLIPSE: Are there any artists that you are excited by at the moment? MALCOLM SUTHERLAND: Yeah, living people? At the moment I really am inspired by my girlfriend, who is doing some incredible work with flamenco dance. But as far as graphic work goes? I really like the work of Chris Ware, Marc Bell, Crumb, and directors like Genndy Tartakofsky, Michel Gondry, Errol Morris, Chris Hinton.