Paul Jay

Award winning documentary by director Paul Jay, High Road Productions / J films

Q&A with director, Paul Jay

Q: Your last film, Never-Endum-Referendum, dealt with a serious topic - nationalism and personal identity in Quebec.Why go from there to a film about professional wrestling?

Jay: I guess I could make the obvious joke (about the similarities between the two topics), but in fact, there are parallels.
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Jay: As a Canadian filmmaker, I'm always on the lookout for a story about one of our own who plays on the world stage.
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Jay: I have a lot of respect for mass taste.
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Jay: I wanted to know more about what buttons wrestling was pushing.Barthes book titled Mythologies, is insightful.He said " The virtue of wrestling is that it is a spectacle of excess.
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Jay: It's a long discussion, but in short, people told us they were fed up with hypocrisy.They felt that good guys lie, cheat and steal - they just hide it.They pointed mostly to politicians to make their point.They liked a hero who at least came out and said what he wanted - to win at any cost.
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Jay: Bret had wrestled for his father in Calgary in the early 1980's.
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Jay: The question that always intrigued me as we were filming goes like this: in a world where good and evil does not exist (in the simplistic terms we have known in the past, or in some abstract pure form), does it mean that there is no right and wrong?
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Jay: There is a line where this documentary crosses over into drama.It's not a piece of journalism.We didn't investigate Bret's whole life to see if he is a worthy hero or not.In our film, like in a drama, he represents the yearning for the positive hero.
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Jay: It is a real story, and we had to tell it as it happened.

I went to a presentation on June 14 by Paul Jay, of the CBC Newsworld program counterSpin.

Paul Jay, Director, Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows

Directed by High Road's Paul Jay, Hitman Hart, which won a CSC Best Documentary Award for Hutton last spring, was up for four Gemini Awards this month. (Hutton pays tribute to the NFB in this month's President's Report.)

Through her partnership with Paul Jay at High Road Productions she built up an impressive body of shooting work and a few awards along the way. She has won a Gemini and three CSC Awards, plus the honour and gratification of being director of photography for several hit TV documentaries and series.

She has carried the same professional and meticulous work behind the camera to her work with the CSC. She has always been dedicated to the success of the Society, partly because one of her friends and heroes was the late Fritz Spiess csc, one of the Society's founders and a lifelong pillar of support and counsel.

Paul JayPaul JayDirector and Producer of HITMAN HART : wrestling with shadows

Paul Jay has been in the film biz for over 19 years , and is currently the president of High Road Productions.His credits include the critically acclaimed Never-Endum Referendum , ( CTV , SRC ) , Face Off , ( CBC Newsworld debate show ) Albanian Journey , End of an Era ( TVOntario , CBC Witness ) , The Birth of Language , ( TVOntario and Discovery U.S. ) and Here's to the Cowboy ( CBC , Disney , London Weekend , Central TV ).

A past chair of the Canadian Independent Film Caucus , the main organization of documentary filmmakers in Canada , Jay is the founding chair of Hot Docs , Canada's national documentary film festival.

Jay is currently working on several dramatic projects , including Salome's Last Dance the story of Maude Allan and the most notorious libel case of the century ( based on the acclaimed book Wild's Last Stand by Phillip Hoare ) and Promise the true wartime experiences of a young Jewish girl - forced to live a tragic lie , in order to keep a sacred vow ( based on the book by Maria Horn ).
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Jay is also the Executive Producer of CBC Newsworld's counterSpin.

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