Local resident Ryan Ward is a man of many talents, and those talents have earned him a place among other top young filmmakers at the Slamdance Film Festival this weekend.Ward, perhaps best known in Toronto as the star of Evil Dead: the Musical, earned entry into the highly-touted independent festival with his feature film debut, Son of the Sunshine. The movie, which he co-wrote, directed and starred in, follows the life of Sonny, a young man who has to deal with Coprolalia Tourette's syndrome coupled with an unhappy family life. Eventually, Sonny is able to save enough money to have an experimental surgery to rid himself of his symptoms, but the surgery also removes a special ability he had to heal others.
Ward said the inspiration for the movie came when he saw a man suffering from Tourette's syndrome while walking down the Toronto streets. Ward said that something about the man - who could often be spotted and heard by pedestrians in the downtown core - resonated with him.
"I saw him and was feeling a certain way about where my life was going and I realized that a main character with Tourette's was a perfect metaphor for an angry young man struggling to find his place in the world," the actor said.
The film marks a definite departure from his best-known role as Ash in Evil Dead. While he earned a Dora Mavor Moore Award nomination for his work on that production, Ward said he wanted to move away from comedy.
"I've wanted to get out of doing that kind of thing for a while now, to show that there's another side to my coin," he said.
Ward spent years on the script for Son of the Sunshine. He began writing while he was studying fine arts at Ryerson University and partnered up with fellow Ryerson student Matthew Heiti a few years ago to help him along.
"I've been working on it for four or five years now and I started really going for it in about October or November of last year," Ward said. "I finally decided that if I wasn't going to do it now, I was never going to do it. The film's message is something I needed to say when I was still in my 20s and it was still true."
The protagonist, his family and the other characters in the film come off as being unlikeable at first, but Ward said that was the intention all along. He wanted to begin with an anti-hero, only to have the main character redeem himself in the end.
"You wind up learning that the characters aren't bad people, they're just flawed," the actor said. "I wanted to get across the central message of the story - be who you are, as you are and you'll add value to the world."
The use of an anti-hero also served another purpose for the writer/actor/director. Ward, who lives in the College Street and Ossington Avenue area, said he also wanted the movie to hearken back to the late 1970s and early 1980s, a time when smaller, independent films were more prevalent and originality was prized in movies.
"I wanted to remind people of that time in the way I filmed it," he said. "I wanted to make kind of a nostalgia piece so that people my age would see it and say 'yeah, that feels like my childhood.'"
The film's selection into Slamdance came as a bit of a shock. Son of the Sunshine was in very rough stages when Ward sent in some rough cuts of scenes. When he received word that the film had been accepted, it gave those working on it a renewed sense of purpose through a hard deadline. Everyone pulled together to make the film happen - Ward himself performed in Evil Dead while shooting, meaning that he was putting in long hours, burning the candle on both ends.
"I knew it was going to happen; we were all so committed," he said. "Once we heard we got into Slamdance, everyone just said 'okay, let's make this happen.'"
The film was first screened on Monday night, so that the crew could see whether any last-minute changes had to be made. Ward, who flew to Utah for Slamdance on a Wednesday night red-eye, said he did not expect to get a final copy of the film until just before he left for the airport. Once in Utah, the film will be premiered on Saturday, Jan. 18.
"It took a lot of hard work by a lot of people, but I'm proud that I did it," he said.
More information on the film, including theatrical trailers, can be found at www.sonofthesunshine.com