Director Bruce McDonald's The Tracey Fragments is a coming-of-age movie. But John Hughes, this ain’t.

The film opens on the back of a Winnipeg night bus. Our heroine, Tracey (Ellen Page), is at the back. Half naked. And wrapped in a shower curtain. She's a teenage runaway, she's going through a breakdown, and she's trying to find her missing little brother before a blizzard hits. If this is coming of age, it's fair to say the director's got a bleak idea of teenage life.

"In some ways The Tracey Fragments is like this weird fractured horror movie of ordinary life," McDonald says. "It's a dark look at the loneliness of being a teenage kid."

Settled on a couch at a coffee shop in Toronto's Little Italy, always smiling under his signature cowboy hat, McDonald's disposition doesn't suggest a personality obsessed with the dark side. His young daughter stops by for hugs with mom, filmmaker Dany Chiasson. The final touches on Tracey were done a few doors down at the Royal Theatre, and the café staff are so used to having him light up their shop they coo his praises as he fields reporters' questions.

Still, when McDonald picked up Maureen Medved's book The Tracey Fragments, he found himself captivated by its dark side – especially the troubled lead character, 15-year-old Tracey Berkowitz. He says she wasn't the sort of teen girl that has a voice in the media. She wasn't "a pop tart girl."

"[Tracey's] got a dark side. This is the flip side of the pop version of what it's like to be a teenage kid. I liked the fact she was articulate, that she had a lot to say," he says. "Maybe other teenage girls could go 'yeah, I relate to that dark part in my life.' It's good to remind ourselves that there's the light and there's the dark."

As for finding a young actress who could handle the part, McDonald had Halifax's Ellen Page in mind long before Juno made her the darling of film festivals and Oscar buzz lists. Daniel McIvor, who'd worked with McDonald on the CBC series Twitch City, was introduced to Page, then just 15, when she was acting in his film, Marion Bridge.

"I remember him [McIvor] saying 'Bruce, there's this girl I just worked with. She's from Halifax, she's really terrific,'" explains McDonald. "And I thought, great. She'd be perfect for Tracey."

Page, though, wasn’t as sure.

She needed to experience her own coming of age before she'd be ready to tackle Tracey’s traumatic adolescence of abuse and life on the street.

"I was 15 or 16 and I just felt like the sexual content, the young girl's mind disintegrating, it was a little too overwhelming for me at the time," Page says over the phone from her home in Halifax.

She passed on the part, but the actress, now 20, prayed she'd get a chance to work with McDonald at some point. Her voice, almost perpetually deadpan, gets giddy with fangirl-ishness when she starts running down her favourite McDonald movies.

"Hard Core Logo, I really love," she says. Right now, she's working her way through some Twitch City DVDs he gave her. In her short career, she's already worked with several of the show's stars – Don McKellar, Molly Parker and Callum Keith Rennie.

"Everybody’s in it," she says. "It's so funny watching them all."

Even passersby want to be in one of McDonald's films. During the interview, an actress spotted McDonald in the coffee shop window. She left a headshot with the barista. Lucky for Page, no other actress swooped in before she was mature enough to take on Tracey. By the time Page turned 18, the script had bounced back her way and she nabbed the part.

Getting into Tracey's chaotic head was often traumatic. "I think you do have to be careful for your mind and your body. When I was shooting Tracey there were days where you start losing it a bit," Page recalls.
Whenever she found herself going too deep, Page says she'd surround herself with happy nostalgia – "those security blanket things" that helped her remember a life outside of what’s happening on set. Music, she says, also helped her focus on the character.

"I listen to music a lot when I work. I make a different playlist for each character that I play. And Tracey's was, actually, really great," she says.

McDonald, it turned out, agreed.

"I think music is a great communicator, and it's actually the first way Ellen and I first kind of connected," says McDonald. Page passed a copy of her Tracey mix on to him. The two would listen to it while travelling between locations.

"We connected on musical references, we didn’t talk much about the script at first or each other's approach to things," says McDonald. "It was 'oh, what are you listening to?'"

Page's Tracey Fragments mix included some Tom Waits, some Cat Power, some Sigur Ross. "And Patti Smith's 'Break it Up,'" she says taking a deep breath, "which is one of my favourite songs."

When McDonald found out Page was a Patti Smith fan, he was blown away. Horses was his favourite record when he was Page's age and he says he considers Smith's persona as a "courageous, smart, poet rock star" as a role model for Tracey's character.  

"This instant club was formed. And that gave us a great common ground," he says. "We could always come back to our mutual love of Patti Smith."

Page, who more-or-less carries the film, needed to trust her director's vision more than usual on Tracey. The film is told by literally fragmenting the picture into several screens. It has the effect of looking at something between a De Stijl painting and a comic book, and it's never been done so comprehensively in a film before.

"We thought we'd be as brave as Tracey," says McDonald. "The more we can put ourselves in the world of this 15-year-old girl having a crisis, the better."

"We've been really surprised by people's emotional response to it," he adds. "People have been really moved by her story, and feeling like you've really captured this state of being, this crazy time in a person's life where the input and the output is so extreme. A portrait of what it is to be 15."

The Tracey Fragments opens in select cities Nov. 2.

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