Keeper producer Chris Ferguson comes to Whistler Film Festival with renewed fervour for analogue cinema experience
Vancouver visionary behind innovative thrillers like Longlegs and The Monkey is also helping to revive the Park Theatre as a hub for a new generation of cinemagoers
Chris Ferguson (left); Tatiana Maslany in Keeper.
The Whistler Film Festival presents a master class with Osgood Perkins and Chris Ferguson at the Fairmont Chateau Whistler at 1 pm on December 6; and screens Keeper at 5:15 pm on December 6 at the Rainbow Theatre, with Perkins and Ferguson in attendance for a Q&A hosted by George Stroumboulopoulos
CHRIS FERGUSON IS on location with his new project The Young People when Stir reaches the producer by Zoom. More accurately: he’s huddled in his vehicle outside a car wash somewhere in Coquitlam.
“Making the movie is the most and the least fun part of it,” he quips.
In a couple weeks (on December 6) the Oddfellows Pictures producer will be running a master class at the Whistler Film Festival with his frequent creative and now business partner, writer-director Osgood Perkins, where they’ll present their latest innovative thriller, Keeper.
The duo’s success was quick and staggering. Starring an unrecognizable and deeply unsettling Nic Cage, Longlegs emerged in 2024 as an instant classic. The buzz carried over into The Monkey in early 2025.
With Keeper under his belt, The Young People on the horizon, and recently released Dangerous Animals (directed by Sean Byrne) generating yet more commotion, Ferguson’s 20-something-year career, all of it based in Vancouver, continues to reach ever-dizzier heights.
“We’re halfway through production right now,” he says of The Young People. “I can’t say a ton about it, ’cause everything is under wraps, but it’s been going really well. I think we’re capturing some of the most interesting performances that we’ve ever done. I mean, it’s a movie that somehow contains both Nicole Kidman and Johnny Knoxville.”
He laughs: “Pretty wild. Pretty wild.”
No less wild is a life arc that seems to imply a very clear destiny for the 41-year-old.
“Me and my friends just started making movies with our friend’s camcorder, and I have earlier memories of doing that than I do of going to movies,” he says. “I started out producing. I mean, we didn’t call it producing back then, we all did everything, we were all acting and directing and organizing and doing the whole thing. But I think my first production was in Grade 4.”
The habit followed him though his years at Kitsilano and Prince of Wales secondary schools. Ferguson only took it really seriously after a brief detour into philosophy at Langara, where it didn’t take a Wittgenstein to figure out a clear path for the future.
“I enjoyed it,” he says. “But that’s even less of a career possibility than film.” His amateur filmmaking pal Zach Lipovsky also took the plunge, emerging as the codirector (with Adam Stein) of Final Destination Bloodlines before being tapped to write the new Gremlins reboot.
Ferguson shrugs. “I’d say it’s worked out pretty well.”
Behind all this is a commitment to Vancouver as a filmmaking hub for friends like Perkins and Mike Flanagan (Doctor Sleep), although Ferguson’s latest venture is on the exhibition side of the business. After being approached by the Rio Theatre’s Corinne Lea, it was Ferguson who mustered the investors to acquire the Park Theatre on Cambie Street, reaching out to industry pals like Lipovsky and Oscar-winner (for Anora) Sean Baker.
Among other things, Ferguson says he was convinced of the 84-year-old theatre’s viability, thanks to 70mm screenings of One Battle After Another and The Brutalist.
“It sort of became the theatre for those kinds of events and became special in that way,” he offers. “As a giant multiplex monopoly, Cineplex is not able to make those kind of theatres special the way they need to be. We’re upgrading the screen, we’re upgrading the whole setup. There was an opportunity to do a refresh and make it a better film-watching experience than a lot of the other theatres in Vancouver. It just made sense.”
The Park Theatre
As for the indefatigable Lea and her team, who will assume management, Ferguson is blunt: “Their approach to the whole thing is the only reason I said yes. I know their taste and I think they’re the perfect blend of commerciality and building something unique. They don’t want to be so obscure that they don’t get an audience, but they will give you something you can’t get anywhere else. And they put in so much elbow grease. Nobody outworks [programmer] Rachel Fox, that’s for sure.”
The world is swimming in content these days, it feels like too much, so it would behoove a sensitive producer to consider the fate of their own product. There seems to be a concurrent pushback against the endless incursions of digital convenience into our lives. Naturally, Ferguson champions the community experience that produced generation after generation of movie buffs.
“I think it’d be naive to think we’re just going to bounce back and be a theatrical-driven business again,” he says, “but I do think there’s a smaller but much more devoted theatrical audience than there was even five years ago. I think the Letterboxd-ification of consumption has made that experience more like going to church. It has become a little bit more hallowed, and I think people are reinvesting into the theatrical experience. We experienced that with Longlegs. Everyone went to see that movie and then they went again that same weekend. It was a group experience that you don’t have without that theatrical exhibition centrepiece.”
It’s worth mentioning here that a galvanizing moment for Chris Ferguson was seeing Beyond the Black Rainbow at the Whistler Film Festival in 2010. Panos Cosmatos’s towering debut “made me understand that you could make actually cool movies in Vancouver with your friends”, he says. “There were movies from Vancouver that I liked, but that was like: ‘Oh, we can do something here that just drips with aesthetic and style and an auteurist vision’—all of that. I attribute that to everything I did since then.”
Auteurist vision? Among the titles in Ferguson’s resumé are Seán Devlin’s painstakingly personal feature When the Storm Fades (2018) and the exceptional neo-noir Sweet Virginia (2017), which made haunting use of Hope as its location. Both deserved more attention.
As for Keeper—scripted by Dangerous Animals’ Nick Lepard and mostly shot in B.C.—it puts a new spin on cabin-in-the-woods horror, centring on a woman (Tatiana Maslany) who escapes the city with her doctor boyfriend, only to find herself plagued by frightening visions.
Next on the docket is an equally idiosyncratic project. The Backrooms is the feature debut of 20-year-old filmmaker Kane Parsons, who is among the pioneers of online phenomenon creepypasta. Along with analogue horror, this emerging subgenre identifies the sense of dislocation felt by kids who grew up inside the suffocating corporate monoculture of the 2000s.
Ferguson is producing the film for A24 and he offers a characteristically thoughtful take on the appeal to a new generation of viewers.
“I think it’s something that feels wholly original that can be discovered. It doesn’t feel like the algorithm police have engineered something for you to want. It’s something for the audience to go find and explore. I think about the experience as a kid of going to Videomatica and finding something there and feeling like ‘I discovered this and it’s unique.’ I think that kids are finding that online in movies with things like Skinamarink, for sure.”
Put it on that big, beautiful marquee on Cambie Street: Fuck the algorithm police! 
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