00:00When my co-writer Adnan Khan and I were writing the movie, at some point during the end of the
00:04first draft, we realized that we'd written a weird Toronto Brown version of Good Will Hunting.
00:10Not exactly that, but of course there's no genius at the center of the movie,
00:14but Good Will Hunting is really about a character who's from a specific part of Boston
00:18and how he's kind of colliding with and interacting with another part of the city,
00:22in that case Harvard. And we realized there's so many parallels between Shook and that movie.
00:27Our protagonist, Ashish, is from Scarborough, which is obviously part of the city of Toronto.
00:32But to be honest, if you grow up there and you're trying to make it as an artist from there,
00:36the city might as well be a million miles away, right? That distance, even though it's
00:39geographically close, can feel really vast when you're growing up in the end.
00:43So that felt really similar to what Matt Damon's character is going through in Good Will Hunting,
00:48but also he meets a girl that's moving away and it's kind of that bittersweetness of that
00:53relationship. So there were a lot of interesting parallels with that movie, even though the films
00:58are very, very different, but what we really loved was the way that film celebrated Boston
01:03and we felt like we wanted to do something similar with Toronto.
01:06Shook is very Toronto-specific, but I don't think that that was necessarily like a calculated
01:11choice. It just felt naturally like what we wanted to write when we were writing the script.
01:16It felt honest, it felt real, it felt like something that many of us experience but don't
01:21really ever get to see on screen about ourselves. This is a city that often plays other cities in
01:28movies and even when we do get specifically Toronto films, particularly Toronto films by
01:33people of colour who are maybe from the suburbs, they're not often about the little things we
01:38experience in the city or parts of growing up. They're often about these really heavy,
01:43sort of like traumatic stories about diaspora or immigration and those are great too, but
01:48I felt like it was time that we shared an experience that was really kind of specific
01:53but universal and the little things that make this city so special, like the buses, the TTC,
01:59or the way we kind of all collide with each other downtown and then head back out towards our
02:04homes, it just felt natural. It wasn't like a calculated thing, but now I'm really glad that
02:10we did it because it seems to really be resonating with people and I don't know that it would have
02:14done that if we would have dialed it back to kind of make it more diffuse for a general audience,
02:19if that makes sense.
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