Sacha Gervasi makes films about people who did not quite make it and the friends who stayed to watch. His documentary about Anvil is the one that works; the dramas since have been tidier, and most critics have liked them less.
Fi1m perspective
The best shot in Anvil (2008), Gervasi's documentary about the Canadian metal band, is of a man doing nothing. Robb Reiner, the drummer, watches his friend Steve 'Lips' Kudlow talk yet another stranger into caring about a band nobody has heard of, and his face is half love and half exhaustion. Gervasi holds on it. He has an eye for the person at the edge of the frame who is paying for everything, and when he trusts that eye he makes good films.
He came to directing late and sideways. He was a teenage roadie for Anvil in the early 1980s, then a journalist, then a screenwriter in Los Angeles with co-writing credits on The Big Tease (1999) and The Terminal (2004) before he picked up a camera. The documentary came out of that first job. He found his old employers driving vans through the Ontario snow and made 81 minutes about two men who have been losing money together since they were fourteen. We laughed at the festival hall in Transylvania built for thousands and holding a few dozen, and then we stopped laughing and felt ashamed of ourselves, because every disaster on screen was paid for by someone carrying trays. Gervasi plays that trick once, properly, and it is why the film is warm without being soft.
Since then he has made dramas, and they are about the same thing: true stories, real people, a partnership in which one half gets the attention and the other keeps the show on the road. Hitchcock (2012) put Anthony Hopkins under the jowls and Helen Mirren beside him as Alma during the making of Psycho. My Dinner with Hervé (2018), which he wrote as well as directed, grew out of his own 1993 interviews with Hervé Villechaize. Both draw on his old trade or his own life. We have not reviewed them, so we will not judge them at length, but the pattern in the reviews is plain enough: Hervé was found schematic, its emotional lesson arriving on schedule, and November Criminals (2017), adapted from a young-adult novel, got a colder reception than anything else he has made.
The flaw was already there in the documentary. Gervasi shapes his footage towards uplift; in Anvil every setback is placed just before a piece of good news, and he lets the drummer's name and an amplifier that goes to eleven collect a laugh that This Is Spinal Tap (1984) earned first. With real people in a real van the shaping is forgivable, because the faces keep breaking through it. With actors and a script there is nothing to break through, and the shape is all you see.
Steven Zaillian has produced two of his films, so somebody serious believes in him. We would like the next one to be another documentary, with the camera pointed at whoever is standing quietly at the side, and no lesson waiting at the end.
Biography
Sacha Gervasi is a British screenwriter and director. Born in London in 1966, he was educated at Westminster School and King's College London, where he read modern history.
He began his career as a journalist before moving into screenwriting, with credits including the story and screenplay for The Terminal (2004). Gervasi made his directorial debut with the documentary Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2008), which he also wrote and produced. Subsequent directorial work includes Hitchcock (2012), November Criminals (2017) and My Dinner with Hervé (2018).
