Connor Jessup on Creating Art While the World Is Ending

Anne Émond’s Peak Everything is a love story set at the end of the world. The Québécois director’s sixth feature film follows Adam (Patrick Hivon), a solitary man who owns a dog kennel and bears the weight of the world, particularly the climate crisis, heavily. 

To combat this, Adam buys a light therapy lamp and strikes up an unlikely romance with Tina (Piper Perabo), the sunny voice at the other end of the phone from the technical support team for said lamp. When their burgeoning connection is threatened by extreme weather events, the pair embark on a surprisingly profound journey across Canada that helps them make sense of our impending doom.

Canadian actor Connor Jessup enters as Tina’s slightly chaotic colleague who, when a calamity hits their office, joins Tina and Adam in seeking refuge. The actor and filmmaker, who himself just premiered his latest short film Julian and the Wind at Berlin Film Festival, turns a small role into a memorable burst of recklessness that both disrupts and encourages Tina and Adam’s polite, uncertain courting. Mastermind caught up with the actor at Cannes Film Festival, where Peak Everything premiered, to hear about what Jessup stole from Émond for his own directing, and the “novelistic” power of Edward Yang.

Peak Everything is about the end of the world, but also about how we can try to live in that tragedy as joyously as possible. What was it about the film that resonated with you?

CONNOR JESSUP What I love about this movie, but also about Anne as a person, is there’s a mix of deep cynicism and a profound love for people. The end of the world, the reason why we got where we are, is absurd. If it wasn’t so horrifying, it would be comic. This movie takes the massive scale of this issue and sort of disposes of it and focuses on the smallest level, with these unbelievably ordinary people. I found it ridiculous, fun and also affirming, in that we don’t have a choice. We’re hurtling towards something we have no control over, so you may as well fall in love. 

Do you feel like you have your own coping strategies for the apocalypse? 

CJ Well, number one, I’m just hoping that I die before it becomes too bad. I hope we can eke out another 50, 60 years before total collapse. I’m not so sure anymore. A year ago, I felt like maybe, but now it seems less guaranteed. But it’s an interesting question, also, about making art, which is the meta question hanging over the movie. You spend years of your life, time, all this money and all of this commotion to make things while the world burns. It feels ridiculous, but it also feels necessary. What else can we do? The apocalypse is coming anyway, I’d be sad if there were no good movies.

You’re a filmmaker as well. What did you identify with in Anne’s take on the idea of making art as the world ends?

CJ I don’t know. I don’t have an answer to that, really. I talk about this with my friends all the time. You spend all this time trying to finance things, and pick curtains and wardrobe and actors, and then actors fall out, and then you find new actors. It’s this silly parade of stuff that often feels totally divorced from the things that actually matter in the world. And it’s so capital intensive; even cheap movies like this cost a lot of money on a human scale. So I don’t think I have an answer for why, other than that I would be sadder, I guess, and I think other people would too. I don’t really have a strategy or a strong opinion. Maybe someone else is more fluent about it.

Your character leaves such an impression with his chaotic gay energy, which was a nice counter to the central love story. His mismatched costuming really reflects that. How did the costume designer work with you to develop that? 

CJ I took most of my costume home. I still wear it. In the script, it was more outrageous, but then we narrowed in on: if Troye Sivan worked at a call centre. That was the inspiration. That’s about as far as I can go. I think there were more slutty costume options, but there’s only so much I can pull off.

There’s a scene where, right after an earthquake, you shake the car to spook everyone. It felt representative of the way people act on their intrusive thoughts when they don’t know how to make sense of the world.

CJ I think the he’s a character who, while the spirit of the movie is different from him, there’s part of him that is connected to what Anne was trying to get at, which is that he’s someone who refuses to take anything seriously, and he tags along for a moment as they find themselves in these pretty bad situations. It’s like the whole thing’s a game, you know, the video game of the apocalypse, which I think is a coping mechanism that we all empathise with to some degree. The worse things get, the less real it feels. I think there’s a reason why, when empires fall, at the end, everyone’s just drunk and high and laughing.

At one point in the film, Adam (Patrick Hivon) asks his dad, ‘What is the point of life?’ And his dad dismisses him and says something along the lines of, ‘Don’t be an idiot. It’s not even a question; you are alive.’ 

CJ Yeah, we didn’t choose when we were born. We didn’t choose to be born. All you have is the tools in front of you to make. We’re not the first people to live through apocalyptic times. Maybe it’s the most global, but I imagine if you were living in the 30s, it would have felt like the world was coming to an end.

Did you steal anything from Anne that you want to use in your own directing?

CJ Yes, a couple of things. I’m very bad when I’m directing, I forget to look at the script, because things are moving so quickly. But she prints the script out really small and glues it into a notebook that hangs around her neck, so she always has the script around her neck. It’s incredible. So that’s a very boring thing, but the moment I saw it, I was like, that is what I’m going to be doing from now on. 

But more broadly, she’s very calm. Even though we’re moving quickly and we’re always rushed, she feels chill, friendly, welcoming, funny. It’s very easy to lose your humour when you’re making a movie, because it’s so chaotic and so disastrous, usually. And she never lost it. I haven’t seen the movie, but hopefully you feel in the movie.

Lastly, who is your Mastermind? 

CJ I think Edward Yang. Sadly, he died too young. He’d still be making movies. There’s a simultaneously novelistic sense of ambition and scale, like an urge to depict everything, but then also an absolute focus on the mundane and banal details of everyday life; to the point where you can watch a movie about a youth gang in 1960s Taipei, or a middle-class family at the turn of the millennium, and even though you’re totally divorced from the cultural specific, you feel absolutely familiar. He’s one of those filmmakers that makes it look like anyone could do it, which is frustrating.