Curtis Lobb still soaking in his Canadian Screen Award win
BY SCOTT STEPHENSON
The film BlackBerry didn’t just win big at the 2024 Canadian Screen Awards (CSA) - it won the biggest. With 14 wins, including Best Picture and Best Direction, BlackBerry is now the most awarded film in CSA history.
To hear all about the experience, The Citizen sought out local boy/man of the hour Curt Lobb, whose work on the film netted him the prize for Best Editing in a Feature Film. Lobb was kind enough to start a busy day in his editing suite by answering a few questions about how it feels to collect such a significant stack of statues, and what he plans to do now that he’s accidentally achieved mainstream success.
Matt Johnson and the team at Zapruder Films have been making offbeat, unusual cinema together for a number of years, and cult hits like Operation: Avalanche and The Dirties have certainly found their audience. With BlackBerry, however, they’ve got a bonafide mainstream hit on their hands for the first time. Lobb is taking the sudden widespread appeal in stride. “It’s cool! And crazy! I’ve been surprised and grateful for how it seems to have connected with such a wide range of people. For sure, I did not think that was going to happen. So that was already a big shock. But I also would have never guessed that an award show would say ‘yep - we’re going to give you guys the most. Not just this year, but ever.’”
The awards ceremony was held in Toronto, on the 10th floor of the CBC, which Lobb felt was a great venue for the party. “I had no idea there was that much space in the CBC building! The whole gala was very entertaining, and I thought Mae Martin was really great as a host.” While he’s undeniably psyched to have been awarded for his standout editing, Lobb is even more excited for the well-deserved recognition being given to the rest of the BlackBerry crew. The film came out on top in a wide range of categories, including Best Costume Design, Best Hair, Best Sound Mixing, Best Art Direction, Best Score and Best Cinematography. “There’s been a big team behind Zapruder for years,” he explained. “It’s really cool to see more people being acknowledged for their hard work.”
Lobb was also pleased to see a film directed by French Canadian Pascal Plante nominated alongside BlackBerry in the Best Picture category. Plante and the Zapruder crew became acquainted at a film festival way back in 2013, and Lobb had made sure to check out Plante’s latest movie - Red Rooms. “It’s so good - I would have been very happy if it won. It was awesome. But don’t watch it unless you really want to feel awful. It’s like, the most disturbing. Maybe don’t even mention it in this. No, you should give it a shout-out because it’s awesome - but if you do, say ‘beware’. Because it’s very dark content. Done incredibly well and effectively.” So, beware.
When it came to his own category, Lobb was obviously hoping to win, but could see it going in any number of other directions. “There were a lot of other good movies, and great editors that did a wicked job. It’s an honour, for sure, to be nominated with those people.” One of the great editors on the list of nominees is actually a friend of his - James Vandewater, whose heady editing on Infinity Pool added a distinctly disorienting haze to Brandon Cronenberg’s psychedelic vacation nightmare. “I wondered if he might take it,” Lobb mused.
When his name was eventually called, Lobb rethought his plan to take a minimalist approach to acceptance speeches. “I didn’t write anything, but I had a list of names, and I was just going to say each name and ‘thank you’ but then, when I was up there, I thought it’d be kind of boring or weird to do that, so in the moment I gave them their props and the reasons why I was thanking them. It’s so hard when you do something like that, because you thank some people, and then you just think of all the people right outside that line. It’s like inviting people to your wedding.” Looking back at a video of his impromptu comments, he’s happy with how things went. “I think I come across as happy and grateful. Or I hope I do, because that’s how I felt.”
There may be way more awards under BlackBerry’s belt than there were a couple of weeks ago, but Lobb’s not ready to admit success so easily. “I think because we’re so used to being the underdogs at something like that… and we’re still the underdogs in our heads. We’re still saying ‘Do we even belong here?’”
Lobb’s not interested in chasing the chimera of widespread appeal - this one film may have resonated with a wide swath of the population, but don’t count on Zapruder Films to change the off-kilter approach to comedy it’s developed over the years. “The goal is to do something that, if us filmmakers went and saw it, we’d say ‘oh, there’s something to this that maybe only this blend of people could have made. Like, they made something special to them - maybe not everyone would like it, but some people would love it.”
It seems that Lobb’s current project fits that bill perfectly - he’s editing the feature film version of Johnson and Jay McCarrol’s surreal ambush of a comedy show Nirvanna the Band the Show. “It’s one of those things that’s also very bizarre, if you ask me, and I wouldn’t blame anyone if they watched the opening scene of the movie and were like ‘this is not for me at all,’ and they stopped watching…. But maybe audiences will surprise us again, and rally around it.”