Mike White, writer and director of the funny, unsettling, thought- provoking Year of the Dog, talks to the National Post:
In the case of Year of the Dog, the ultimate message revolves around the need for control and structure, but also the need people have to devote themselves to something in order to find happiness.
“You get to a certain age and suddenly your life choices have become your religion in some sense,” he says, “and you invest so much in what makes you happy but then you start prescribing it to everyone else around you. We don’t realize how much we can repress the people around us by just claiming our enthusiasms. But a lot of it just depends on your vantage point, so it can be complicated.”
Keep in mind that Mike White, who was born in 1970, is the son of Mel White, the former ghost writer for Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and other televangelists who became a gay activist in the early 1990s. And once you know that, it is pretty much impossible to watch Year of the Dog — in which a woman (Molly Shannon) loses her pet and tries to fill the dog-shaped hole in her heart by turning to animal-rights activism — without thinking that the film may be a response to all that, on some level. (For his part, Mike White is bisexual and a self-described “imperfect vegan.”)
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