Usually only one person sits at a piano. There are exceptions to that, of course, but if you are training to become a piano impresario, you sit at the keys alone. Once you begin, you cannot stop, and you must allow the music to flow from your brain down to your fingers and back up to your heart. What happens, though, if you are so stifled by anxiety that you cannot reach that fated bench? Trevor Morris’ winning drama, Butterfly on the Wheel, navigates one young man’s journey to go beyond seeing the beauty of the world from the comfort of his own home in order to create the art that is etched deep within him.
Morris’ film centers on Jacen, a young musician crippled by his own OCD. Based partly on his own experiences growing up, Morris infuses his screenplay with flourishes of nervousness for his lead character. We don’t often see a film devoted to such personal anxieties with such emotionally dialed up precision.
“When I was growing up, they didn’t have words like neurodivergency or ADHD or Asperger’s, so, when I was a kid, they just called you different,” Morris says. “I was called “special,” because I could play music. You were made aware that you weren’t normal or that you were made to feel like you don’t belong in the same box as everybody else. It’s kind of a terrible way to grow up. Now mental health as an umbrella term is much more broadly talked about. We’re getting there. On paper, the movie is about a kid with OCD, but really, to me, it’s about someone searching for their authentic voice and getting out of their own way. I wanted to show the personal side of a guy just trying to get out the door, and I think that certainly in the creative world we all have something about us that is unique and different. The more that we are accepting of our differences in other people, our tolerance goes up.”
I mentioned to Morris that I love how his film is set in Toronto, his hometown. Every year when I visit for the Toronto International Film Festival, I try to explore more and more of the city. I feel drawn to it. Jacen’s apartment has huge windows, so we see the world that he wants to visit in almost every frame. It’s like he feels safer seeing it with that protective glass around him, but Morris wanted to create a love letter to the city.
“This is very much a love letter to Toronto, even though I wrote that movie in California,” he says. “Toronto, and I mean this with no hyperbole, is one of the best cities in the world, and I wanted to make my directorial debut in my favorite city. I know every inch of it. The character of Jacen is trying to get out of the door in one piece, so the apartment represents a safe, controlled space. His brother is there and it’s quiet and contained, but it is controlled. As soon as he opens that front door and musters the energy to leave, the world slams in on him. We did a treatment with the sound design, which is very heightened. It’s how he hears the subway or a car or the sound on the street, which I can relate to. I kind of lived through my ears first with my eyes second. It was meant to paint a picture.”
Morris even brings how he feels about his condition into the sound design. I imagine if Jacen feels comfortable in a space or around a group of people, what he hears would be different from when he is feeling overwhelmed. The space where Jacen feels most at peace is a performing arts hall with remarkable symmetry. It’s almost like a beehive.
“It’s very much how I feel when I’m in big, noisy spaces like that,” Morris admits. “As he gets close to school and the hall, it gets easier. Koerner Hall in Toronto is like church to him, like the Sistine chapel. You can hear your own voice in your head. That hall for Toronto is akin to making a movie in New York City and having Carnegie Hall. [It’s] definitely a character, and it represents something for Jacen, which is his desire to play music for other people. That’s a struggle for him, but it is like going to church. When he starts at the piano, he’s facing his own dream–it’s sitting right there in front of him. Koerner Hall is rarely shown in movies, and it doubles for other cities like Berlin. When he walks through, it says Koerner Hall, and I actually put that there. That wasn’t native. I wanted the world to know the name of Koerner Hall on purpose.”
An emotional center for Jacen is his brother, Dylan, played by Michael Provost. Morris worked very diligently to showcase how Jacen had an anchor, and maybe Jacen doesn’t have the right words of appreciation for his sibling but it’s there in the interactions. Like everything in Butterfly, it’s deeply felt. Sometimes you don’t need words.
“There were a whole bunch of scenes with Dylan that got cut only for time,” he says. “Michael Provost gives such a great performance, and his character represents someone that I knew from my past. He was this good-looking, athletic kid. Great hair, great genes. I think gifted is a great word for him, and everything seemed to go his way–we all know someone like that. Everything is difficult for Jacen, but Dylan knows him better than anyone else. There’s a comfort there where he can poke fun at him or call him Rain Man and it doesn’t trigger him. It was meant to be an exercise in comfortable opposites. The speech where Dylan talks to his baby brother was one of those moments where he got to sort of admit, in a way, that he knows that he had it easier. I thought that was very poweful, and Jacen needed someone in his corner.”
Butterfly ends on a triumphant high. When Jacen is able to play in front of a crowd, he receives the ovation his talent deserves. It’s the kind of moment you root for, because, by this point, we have become so latched onto his story and him overcoming his personal struggles that we hope he impresses the girl by the final key stroke.
“That was a big undertaking, for sure,” Morris admits. “The emotional goal was that he goes get to play music, but he does it with the older guys, the veterans. I wanted the older guys to be looking at him and thinking, ‘Damn…the young buck in the group is onto something.’ It’s a validation from your peers for them to acknowledge that you’re crushing it. That’s the catharsis of Jacen’s journey. He takes a little, silent bow and realizes that Sorrel has been watching the entire time and she’s been rooting for him the entire time. Everyone asks me what I think happens to them. We’ll see…”
