Jason Leaver

People know you from Out With Dad, but I’m interested in what you were doing just before that project.
At the time, at the time I had made a bunch of short films, but my main thing was making corporate videos. It was good money, especially back then, it was really good money. That was about seven years ago.

In 2001, I graduated from Ryerson Film School, though ever since high school I was doing the corporate video thing. That’s how I paid for school, so I actually came out of school with very little debt.

While I was doing the corporate video thing I was making short films as often as I could but I remember being frustrated by that process. You come up with a great idea, but nine times out of ten you wouldn’t make it because everyone you sat in the kitchen with when you came up with the idea would get busy and it would just fizzle out. Or sometimes they wouldn’t fizzle out; you’d make them, and put your own blood, sweat and tears into it to make it, or you’d apply for funding and not get it, and then no one would see it, so it kind of felt like, what’s the point of making a short film if no one’s going to watch it? You might get half your friends to see it if it got into a local festival.

Fast forward, now we’re getting to about 2009ish and I was feeling pretty down. I was in a bit of a depression because, creatively speaking, I had made some cool things that hadn’t really gone anywhere. I was making decent money from the corporate video stuff but I wasn’t creatively fulfilled at all.

But I was worried that, like all these ideas that I had cooked up with my friends, I didn’t want this to burn out.

I knew it was definitely not a short film, that it was a much bigger story than that. There wasn’t a plot, just lots of story ideas, and it felt serial to me. It wasn’t a feature, so it must be television, but then I thought, ‘well, how do I get something on television?’ I’m still very intimidated by the whole industry: you have to go network, you have to dress up, you have to suck up, and I didn’t like what I saw as someone on the periphery.

So I thought, maybe I can make this on my own; there’s the internet now – why don’t I make a series of short films? Then it is serial, and then I can put them online. And I thought, ‘well, other people must have already done this,’ so I started researching, and I found some things, and they were calling it a ‘web series’.

And I thought that it actually looked do-able; it actually seemed easier to do it this way because I’m not dealing with networking and having to go to expensive that I don’t want to go to. That’s not me, and I got the sense that there was such a bs culture to this.

So, this way, I thought that I can find actors, I can find crew – I’ve done this all before. Most of my friends would be on board. I already had the gear from all the corporate video stuff, and this was the year that the Canon T2i came out. The 5D was out of my price range but this one, including the lens, was $1200.

Almost a year to the day that I had the idea, we were in production. We put the casting announcements on [industry job board site] Mandy, and we met our cast. It’s so strange to think I didn’t know these people seven years ago, because they’re now all my best friends and we’re like family. I’m sure you’re familiar with that?

Yes, the longest volunteer commitment ever!
Well, I was very specific with that. The common trend at the time was to say that it was going to be a deferred payment and I never liked that word ‘deferred’ because that usually meant ‘I’m not paying you’ but it was a sugar coated way of saying ‘I’m going to pay you but I’m not going to pay you.’ So I told everyone that we weren’t going to pay them, and even if the production did make money, I’d rather use that money to pay everyone to make more. So that was the promise that everyone signed on for.

We had so much fun making it. Of course, we didn’t make any money; we got maybe $1000 through the Paypal donate button, so then less than a year later, we did it again. But this time, I thought, ‘well, if we’re doing it for free, no one is allowed to take time off their regular job,’ because I figured that that was a cost to them, so we just committed to making the schedule work.

It was really, really hard. Some of the leads actually did end up taking time off work because it was so, so important to them and they actually now have associate producer credits because in my mind they did invest actual money.

For our third season, it was different. We did a whole crowdfunding campaign. I got a lot of advice from Regan Latimer because you guys had done the Indiegogo campaign successfully. She gave me a lot of information about that experience, and her words of advice were quite informative about how we did the campaign. [I learnt] that being on a crowdfunding platform didn’t necessarily improve your chances of success – it was all on you to sell your campaign.

So is that why you went with a PayPal button on your own fundraising page?
Absolutely. I copied the model that Indiegogo and Kickstarter had established – here’s a perk, here’s a button to press – and part of this came about after I researched how to use PayPal and the ‘buy now’ buttons.

And it worked. There were also other blessings that came with doing it that way. There was no ending; being a typical Canadian, I hate asking for things so I was super passive aggressive with it and also, it had to fit in with my lifestyle. I couldn’t take a month off to do a campaign. So I thought, ‘how do I passively aggressively do this? Alright, we’ll just mention to fans that it’s an option,’ and at the end of every episode, I had a title card that said ‘to support OWD go to outwithdad.com/contribute’ and that’s where I put that page. To this day, it continues to change and evolve, because now it’s a Patreon thing but it’s always been there; right back to the first episode five years ago, it still has the same URL.

I really liked that the way that you used Facebook’s Closed Groups features. Do you have a strategy in place for implementing all of the things that you could do with various apps and platforms, or do you just try it?
When it came to things like Closed Groups on Facebook, I wanted to have a way to embed videos on our website that you couldn’t press play on unless you were a supporter because I wanted that to be a perk. At that time you could embed Facebook videos, and if I wasn’t logged in as me, and I had the privacy set in such a way that you could see the privacy embed, you’d get a message saying that you couldn’t play it.

And this really worked. We created a whole community of fans. This group still exists – I’m not a part of it any more, but people are still posting articles.

So I would post the episodes and the promise of it was that you would get to see the episode early. Sometimes I would be behind schedule for posting, so the episode wouldn’t be quite done, but I’d just post it anyway.

And the feedback would just come in. I realised that I had a focus group all of a sudden: dedicated people who wanted it to be good.

The reason I started doing this thing [with the closed Facebook group] is because I wanted the world to see that there are people who can see this scene and people who can’t, so become a Patreon. I simply started to upload 30 second versions of episodes to YouTube saying ‘it’s available now’, and when they got there, audience members would be mad about it, but they’d do it, or they’d say they would just wait until it comes to YouTube.

The fans are obviously very vocal and very passionate with their feedback. To what extent do you let the fans affect your writing of the show?
It is still my story 100%. The audience’s influence is more about the clarity to which I am telling the story. Going back to the first season, early feedback on the character of Vanessa was that she was such a bitch – people didn’t like her. And I saw that as a story problem because I knew why Rose was in love with her and I knew that if I asked everyone to stick around long enough they’d finally get why she and Rose have this connection. But this was a brand new show and I didn’t have a loyal audience yet, and I didn’t feel like I could just depend on people to stick around until episode whatever. So I thought, ‘I have to demonstrate now what the attraction is – why they have this thing.’

Whenever the audience has influenced the story, it has been like, ‘ah, they’re helping me tell the story better.’ That being said, I have taken stories right from the audience.

We have the infamous PFLAG episodes. Our characters come to their first PFLAG meeting. That whole story’s autobiographical because I went to one and I was very nervous, but I was welcomed with open arms, especially as I was going in the context of, ‘hi, I’m a straight filmmaker.’

You weren’t going incognito, like a pretend parent?
No, I had to be honest, and I always didn’t want to intrude into other people’s safe space. But the chapter president was the one who reached out to me to invite me to come, and his introduction was so gracious. He understood me and everyone got me, and what I did take away from it were my feelings and my nerves, and how welcoming everyone was.

But then the stories I wanted the audience to hear were stories I didn’t feel like I should be writing – someone who has lived these experiences, they should be the ones writing it themselves.

So I appealed to the audience and said, ‘no spoilers, but we have a thing coming up where we’ll be hearing stories, so please submit them to me and I’ll copy and paste it into the script.’ And that’s pretty much what I did. I Toronto-sised it a little bit to make it more local.

I took the stories and I cast accordingly to fit the stories that were submitted. I remember being quite nervous publishing those episodes for a lot of reasons. It was a very different tone, it was our longest episode yet. And the plot did not progress at all, which goes against everything there is to say about storytelling.

Especially serialised storytelling.
Yes, absolutely. I actually split it into two; in the first episode, barely a word was said between the main characters, so there wasn’t even character development. And yet, the feedback was that it was the greatest episode we’d ever made.

That’s really informed me a lot about the medium. For so many people that watch YouTube and vloggers, well, those are people that sit in front of the camera talking for extended periods of time. So that’s what I was doing – I was giving people snippets and it was just monologue after monologue. Some of them were four page monologues.

In the first take, I didn’t even put the camera on them; I put the camera on the rest of the cast who was reacting to them. We filmed their reaction shots first, and in their copies of the script, the dialogue was all whited out, so it was their first time hearing these stories when the camera was rolling. I really wanted their reactions to be authentic and I think they really appreciated that.

I deleted the text from their script but not the spacing so they still had an understanding of the duration of the pages.

Leading on from the PFLAG episodes, do you feel any sense of responsibility, either while you’re writing it or retrospectively after they go out?
So I do feel responsibility, and I did before I started too, especially because, as a cis male who identifies as straight, I was very, very worried that it was inappropriate of me to even tell this story because I didn’t want to be appropriating.

I feel almost an obligation or a duty to continue to make these shows, and I’m very happy because I love making the shows. It’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me. Since I posted the trailer, the story has changed for the next project that I want to do. I just realised, why am I even talking about sexuality? I want to live in a world where everyone’s sexual orientation is…

A non-issue?
Yes! So I’m taking it a step further. One of the cast of characters I haven’t defined – I haven’t even defined their gender yet, and I was like, ‘why do I even have to define that? Why am I getting hung up on that?’ One of my mandates when I started making OWD for my career was that I wanted to depict my idealised world, a world where sexual orientation is a non-conversation starter.

I know that you partnered with an online network in France with OWD, but the show has largely been free of commercial or any kind of branded or sponsored integration. Is that something that you’ve ever looked into doing?
I’ve desperately tried to do that, but only because of money. OWD is still not paying my bills. The fact that it’s not sponsored speaks more to the fact that I’m not in that whole world of networking and bs-ing. I’ve tried to, and when I do talk to brand people or marketing people they give me all their knowledge and I realise that they’re telling me false promises.

I remember that I got flown out to the Banff Media Festival to do a pitch and I won the competition, and I remember having these three people on stage, American Idol-style, and the judges were executives of a marketing company who all said they would absolutely want to work with me. I never heard from them again, not from the lack of me trying. I was brushed aside, I think, because I was so small, and I think at the time their understanding of numbers and metrics was more from a tv world; for example, “How many views did you get last night?” Well [the concept of last night] doesn’t translate on the web; when it’s up there, it’s up there for a while.

What I’m also told is that when you look at the viewership on our channel, it’s better than the average Canadian tv show. So, I’m like, ‘great, how much?’ I can say, ‘here’s a show that’s 100% funded by the fans, it has changed people’s lives for the better; do you want to be the brand that saves their show or gives it a boost?’ If a brand were to come on board, that brand would be a hero to the very people whose identity is shaped by it. It may not be a million of those people, but I’ve got to believe that these pairs of eyeballs that I’m talking about versus those other pairs of eyeballs – there’s got to be more value.

Unfortunately, I don’t know how to describe that on paper. That’s not my language. I’ve partnered with producers who were going to get me a brand, and it never happened.

At least from a career perspective, do you have an end game for how OWD fits in to what you want to do?
It’s interesting that you should ask me that, because I’m realising now that I haven’t really been asking myself that until recently. I regret that I haven’t asked that question of myself: one of the questions I’m always asked is, if you could’ve done one thing differently, what would it be, and my answer is that I wish I could have understood what OWD was to me in the context of my career. A terrible answer is that it was just something I wanted to do, a message I had to tell for the sake of art and, you know, it was an expensive hobby. I do wish I had the context of how this was going to enable my career.

Has that changed since, now that you’re so many more years ahead?
Only very recently. OWD is a runaway success, almost by any measure. In the Canadian industry, now that I’m going to networking event parties, whenever I introduce myself, everyone knows my name. I get the impression that everyone’s impression of me is that I must be getting phonecalls all the time for work. And I’m not.

But I’m also not putting myself out there to say, ‘I welcome these phonecalls.’ So that’s a mistake on my part that I’m also realising that, if this is a calling card, then why isn’t anyone calling? I’ve been so audience focused that I’ve forgotten about my own career, and that is a mistake that I am now trying to remedy.

By the same token, I do have this fantastic IP, so why don’t I have a two pronged approach where I should be investing in it in that sense as well. So I am working with people to try and sell it as an intellectual property.

When you first started getting into making stuff, were you a writer or were you more visual?
When I was a little kid and I played Lego, it was always very story driven and it was always very cinematic, and I would often be playing with one eye closed, you know, like the lens, so I would have ships fly by. I was very much directing at an early age, but I didn’t realise what I was doing as writing because I have a learning disability. I’m not dyslexic, but suffice to say whatever filter it is that translates the symbols on the page through the eyes into meaning in my brain, there’s a fuzzy filter.

So growing up, I just assumed that of all the careers I wasn’t going to have, I wasn’t going to be a writer because I can’t write. But I knew I wanted to be a director – I don’t know if I used the term ‘storyteller’ back then, but that’s what I was getting at. And so I would write the movies I made in high school with my High 8 camera but it was never put on paper; it was all in my head.

It honestly wasn’t until OWD that I started calling myself a writer. I took Writing for Film at film school but I always had it in my mind that I would partner with a writer, and I would be the director. That seemed very cool; my idol, Steven Spielberg, although he’s a writer, rarely is he the credited writer. And I thought, ‘great, I’ll have someone who’ll do the writing and I’ll do my punch-ups,’ – because I knew that Spielberg did that, and I just wanted to be Spielberg; I was like, ‘it’s perfect – the industry was made for me!’

So along comes OWD. I knew it was such an important story. I knew it had to have a proper writer, and also, because of the subject matter and me worrying that I would be appropriating – it would not be appropriate for me to write this. That being said, I was like, ‘I’m going to research the hell out of this,’ so I researched everything from the feelings of coming out as a young girl to the feelings of the young girl coming out from the parents’ perspective, which at that time… well, that story is still rarely told.

So I just started writing scenes, as an exercise, and then I would write another scene, then another scene, without a game plan or an arc and, all of a sudden, I realised I had sixty pages. And I had more ideas. And then I had eighty pages. And I was like, ‘is this any good?’

And then I remember learning about the Joseph Campbell Hero’s Journey thing. And I found a table on the internet of the hero’s journey with Luke Skywalker, and then Neo from The Matrix. So I copy-pasted that into Excel, and made a new column for Rose’s journey and I plugged in all of my scenes, and I realised that, although I had few holes, I had a complete plot now.

That script ended up being season 2 and 3 because it started after Rose came out. So then I went back and wrote Season 1. And somewhere along the line, the Writers Guild of Canada gave me an award for Best Screenplay. So I was on stage with Wendy Crewson, who I adore, and I’m surrounded by all these amazing people, and the first words that came out of my mouth were, ‘I guess I’m a writer now.’ It took me all these years to come to that conclusion, and now when people ask if I’m a writer or a director, I’m not sure what I consider myself first because I love writing now. The fact that I suck at spelling is inconsequential. You can work on that later.

When I’m talking to young creators, the message I want those creators to take home is that, even if you don’t think you can, you probably can – just try. This is a long winded story of how I got to where I am, but my greatest accomplishment is that I can say that I’m a writer, and I can say that with confidence.