Growing up, Michel Kandinsky was born in Warsaw, but was raised in Oklahoma City and Ottawa. He lived in Paris, Toronto and Buenos Aires. As a child, moving around so often made it difficult to have a consistent friend group. Instead, after school he had his television friends. Those flickering images were a comfort blanket. The power of this medium transformed Kandinsky, who was in awe over the power of film and the feelings it can create. He knew even from that young age that he wanted to make movies himself one day and create that same sense of comfort he once felt for others.
Now, an internationally sought-after producer, Kandinsky is living that childhood dream. He has been the driving force of countless successful productions, from 2013’s Hotel Congress, which was selected as one of Canada’s Top Ten Films by The Grid Magazine and was shown at the iconic Toronto International Film Festival, one of the world’s most renowned of its kind, all the way to his latest film La Switch which has made its way to numerous festivals and tells the harrowing story of a war hero returning home from Afghanistan and struggling to get back to his normal life. In the decade that he has been leading the scene, Kandinsky has made extraordinary films that resonated with worldwide audiences.
“I love producing because it provides the ability to wear many different hats during a work day. Needing to experiment with sometimes radical approaches to problem solving. Figuring out how to make a director’s, often very demanding, ideas achievable,” he said.
Kandinsky loves to make films that span across many genres and provide audiences something different than they have ever seen before, and the 2020 comedy horror Ankle Biters perfectly exemplifies this. The movie follows four adorable little girls who plot to murder a hockey player after they mistake an act of lovemaking as an attack on their mom. It stars comedy sensation Colin Mochrie of Whose Line is it Anyway? fame, and was directed by Bennet De Brabandere, who Kandinsky has teamed up with several times before.
“The story is darkly comic but also has a lot of pathos. Ultimately, it’s about how kids often don’t want to accept change in their lives and how far they’ll go to protect the status quo, because that’s all they know. Despite this being a more purely entertaining film with some fun amongst the blood and guts it still has something to say about modern mixed families and how that can go wrong when intentions aren’t communicated properly. It’s like a comedy of misunderstandings but pushed to the extreme. It really does get bloody,” he said.
Working on Ankle Biters was a great learning experience for Kandinsky. There was a good deal of visual effects to amp up the horror aspect, which was a new experience for the producer. On top of this, due to the nature of the story, much of the film depends on the performances of the young girls. Kadinsky hadn’t worked with child actors very much prior to this, and neither had the director, so they had to really accommodate the shooting schedule to their specific needs. Because young children can also be easily distracted, he created a playhouse atmosphere to really get them to be engaged.
“It involved a lot of imagining the world through their eyes in order to anticipate slowdowns. They definitely had first dibs at the food table for anything they wanted. The girls cast in the film are all sisters between the ages of five and nine, some of whom had acted before and some hadn’t. As a family, the more experienced ones helped the younger ones a bit with the discipline of a film shoot, but it was still rather challenging,” he described.
The details Kandinsky put into making the children comfortable was vital to getting the best performance possible out of the stars. Despite taking longer to shoot than initially planned due to re-shoots and a new ending to the film that was not initially in the script, he kept everything within budget. Keeping the parts moving and people motivated to push through some of the late challenging days and re-shoots was a major part of the project’s success in the end, with worldwide distribution and stellar audience reviews, and could not have been possible without Kandinsky.
“It’s great knowing that audiences all over the world have responded to the film. It probably has the widest reach of any production I’ve produced. It has some really unique elements that once discovered make for a fun viewing experience for anyone. The script was good, but I knew it was risky because it had so many tones to get right. It had to be romantic, funny and horrific. Obviously those elements don’t always play nice together, but when they do it’s very satisfying,” he said.
If you haven’t yet, check out Ankle Biters here for a truly memorable cinematic experience.