Bruce McDonald is an award-winning Canadian filmmaker and director based in Toronto and Nick Craine is an acclaimed graphic artist who calls Guelph, Ontario home. McDonald’s fifth film was an adaptation of Michael Turner’s novel, Hard Core Logo, and chronicled a first wave punk rock band’s disastrous reunion tour across Canada. The influential 1996 film was an underground hit; even Quentin Tarantino became smitten with it, securing its U.S. distribution rights. The next year, Craine’s graphic novel adaptation of McDonald’s film was published and, to commemorate its 20th anniversary, House of Anansi has issued an expanded edition of Craine’s Hard Core Logo: Portrait of a Thousand Punks, and the occasion is being marked with book launch events and screenings of the film. I met with Bruce and Nick at Bruce’s Toronto office recently and we discussed how they first met some 25 years ago, the work of comic artist Chester Brown and other underground comic artists, making road movies and graphic novels, Canadian content and hockey, the weird but cool resonance of Hard Core Logo 20 years later, the rise of mockumentaries in a world obsessed with fake news, the Bucky Haight song “Never Done,” and much more. Sponsored by Pizza Trokadero, the Bookshelf, and Planet Bean Coffee.
