Chandler Levack on her new movie, Mile End Kicks, and her love-hate relationship with Toronto

Before she took the festival circuit by storm in 2022 with her debut feature film, I Like Movies, Chandler Levack was knee-deep in the Canadian music scene, directing videos for Pup and writing rock reviews for Spin, NOW and Toronto Life. Her new film, Mile End Kicks, merges the worlds of music and movies in a messy rom-com that follows protagonist Grace (Barbie Ferreira), a music writer from Toronto who gets initiated into the burgeoning indie scene of circa-2011 Montreal. The film premieres at TIFF on September 4. Here, Levack talks about festival foibles, ripping off her favourite movie and how a film about leaving Toronto is really a loving tribute to the city that raised her.

Are you excited for the TIFF craziness again? The city does such a 180, and I love it so much. It always to me feels like the greatest combination of back to school and Christmas.

Last time you premiered at TIFF, it was your debut. How are you expecting the festival to be different this time around after the success of I Like Movies? To use a metaphor that feels applicable to the film, it felt like with I Like Movies, I was some indie band that made a record on my laptop on Garage Band and then it accidentally got 9.0 on Pitchfork and blew up, you know? And I wasn’t expecting that, so it was incredibly exciting and rewarding to have all of our screenings sell out and to go on such a successful festival run. But now it’s like being the Strokes after they’ve released Is This It? and they come back with Room on Fire. You’re like, “Are people still going to like this?" I honestly feel kind of needy!

Well, hopefully the reception is as good as the Strokes’ second album! Any memorable after-party stories you can share from your last TIFF? I got invited to the A24 party, and I was really excited to go. It was at the Ace Hotel, and I fell down the big staircase in front of everyone. It was the kind of fall where people say, “Ooh, that looked really bad. Are you okay?.” One of those people was Andrew Scott, the hot priest from Fleabag. Luckily he was very kind. He was like, “Let’s get you a drink.” That felt like a great metaphor for my entry into Hollywood.

The festival guide compares Mile End Kicks to Almost Famous. How do you feel about that? Anyone who knows me knows that Almost Famous is the most foundational piece of art in my entire life. I saw it when I was 15, and it made me want to be a rock critic to the point where I dropped out of university when I was 20 to write for Spin. I think every part of my life is using that film as some kind of touchstone. Cameron Crowe is my directing hero. So that’s a very nice and probably apt comparison because I’m definitely ripping it off—or it’s a loving homage.

So you’ve made a Burlington movie and now a Montreal movie. When is the Toronto movie coming? I mean, I feel like this is a Toronto movie. It’s like the quintessential Canadian coming-of-age experience—someone from Toronto moving to Montreal thinking it’s going to change their life and solve all their problems. And then invariably they realize they have to take themselves with them. I think that’s a real experience for a lot of young people in their twenties. It’s crazy to me that this movie hasn’t already been made!

You get some pretty good digs in at Toronto in the movie. Are those from the heart? I think there’s a certain level of loving irony about it. I was born in Toronto. I’ve lived in Toronto pretty much my entire life. And I think that everyone has a complicated relationship with the place that they’re from. But there’s a shot where Barbie Ferreira is flipping off the CN Tower from a Megabus—I’ll admit that was really fun to film. It was actually really hard to get: we had to drive in a loop on the highway over and over again because we kept missing it.

Mile End Kicks is a celebration of a specific moment in Canadian music history when all of these indie artists were coming out of Montreal. What interests you about that time? I was in first year at the University of Toronto when Arcade Fire’s Funeral came out, and it was like every single band that I listened to that year was from Montreal, like the Dears or Stars or the Unicorns. It also coincided with me being like, “Okay, if you love the movie Almost Famous so much, you’d better start writing some rock criticism.” So I was also writing for Now magazine when I was 18. The movie chronicles that period, which was like the birth of a new moment in Montreal, when Grimes and Mac DeMarco and Tops, who wrote original songs for the movie, were playing these tiny shows and loft parties. To be there on the ground floor, I felt like I was at the centre of the universe.

What kind of music were you listening to when you were working on the film?  I always create an obsessive playlist when I’m making a movie. I feel like it’s a great language to share with collaborators. I made a list of songs that I wanted to be in the film, so a lot of the songs that are in the movie were actually written into the script. I made playlists for the actors that feel like they were in the headspace of the characters, and I made vibes playlist to play on set. At wrap, I gave all of my collaborators vinyl records of Montreal albums that I thought embodied them to thank them for working on the movie. I feel like music was such an important way into this movie.

And what was it like choosing a band to make the music for the film? Tops are my favourite band in the entire world. I’d always harboured this secret fantasy that I could ask them to write the music. It was a big ask because they’d never really written songs for a fictional rock band before, but it ended up being such a fun experience working with them. I had ideas for the lyrics and the song titles, and maybe a playlist of different songs that I wanted the songs to feel like, then they would come back with the draft, then they recorded it with the real actors singing on it. We did these band practice days with them where the actors learned their parts. Isaiah Lehtinen, who plays Jesse, didn’t know how to play bass, and Devon Bostick, who plays Archie, had never played guitar before. So they really learned how to play their instruments to the point where they all could actually play the songs live.

Related: Views from filmmaker Chandler Levack’s Japanese retreat 

I know he wasn’t actually a 17-year-old when he played one in I Like Movies, but it was still really sweet to see Isaiah Lehtinen looking so grown-up in Mile End Kicks. What was it like working together again? I love Isaiah, and I don’t want to ever make something without him. It would just feel wrong.

In the movie, Grace moves to Montreal to write a book about Jagged Little Pill. How much do you love Alanis Morissette? With all my heart and soul.

I was happy to hear her music in the film. Yeah, getting those songs to be in the movie was really important to me. Like, it’s a movie about Alanis, you have to hear Alanis in the film! I wrote her a letter asking her for permission and also to see if she would give us a cheaper rate. She was so generous and kind: she gave us permission for the songs and also cut us an incredibly lovely deal. The same with Joanna Newsom—I wrote her a letter too. And Peaches.

Before feature films, you made some great music videos for Pup. Is there any overlap between making music videos and making a movie about music? I think so, especially all the performance elements. There are many live performances in the film, and I think having all that experience filming bands on stage was really good for knowing how to shoot a performance—to make it feel really charged and fun and somehow capture the feeling of being at a show.

Had you shot in Sneaky Dees before? I never had, but that was so cool. We worked with the original Wavelength projectionist. He recreated the visuals that were really at a Wavelength show in 2010 when I used to go to review them at Sneaky Dees. It was really emotional to capture that experience. It was an honour and such a coup to get to memorialize those things that I think are a lot of young peoples’ deep memories that haven’t appeared in a film before, like Sneaky’s and Bar le Ritz in Montreal.

I know you’re working on another movie right now. Anything you can share about that? It’s a film with Netflix called Roommates. It has a really exciting cast and a script written by two brilliant SNL writers, Ceara O’Sullivan and Jimmy Fowlie. It was a really fun summer making that in New Jersey.

Is there anything we didn’t touch on that you want to mention? I would just add that Mile End Kicks is a movie about being frustrated with Toronto but realizing that you have to go back, which is something I’ve definitely felt. But I want Toronto audiences to know that it’s still a loving tribute to the Six!

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.