Garrett VanDusen may have lived up to his teenage nickname, but he hasn’t left his home town behind.
Now working in the film industry in British Columbia, VanDusen was known as Big City during his upbringing in Chatham. Along with his best friend, he started taking buses and trains to events in Detroit or Toronto when he was 13.
“I think all my friends and everybody I grew up with knew that I was built for other environments,” the former Chatham Collegiate Insitute student said. “I loved Chatham, but I knew that there was something bigger for me.”
As he brings a film to the Toronto International Film Festival for the first time, VanDusen said he wants to mentor creatives from Chatham-Kent who may be interested in a career in film.
He said anyone can contact him through his social media accounts – @garrettvandusen or Garrett C VanDusen on Facebook – or his email at [email protected].
“I’m very reachable and I will reach back to anybody that reaches to me,” he said.
VanDusen said he grew up with a young mother and they raised each other. He said he was “lost” as a teenager and none of his friends had mentors or many opportunities.
“I was in and out of juvie jail and the ’90s was a crazy time in Chatham. There was a lot of drugs and a lot of American influence in a lot of ways that misguided a lot of my peers,” he said.
“I think that we as the older people should be inspiring these children to be more because I think Chatham needs to be more. I think we’re losing great quality people and they don’t want to come back because they remember Chatham for what it was.”
The 40-year-old said his advice for young adults to enter the film industry is to “be relentless” and to put themselves in new places.
VanDusen didn’t have a straight path to his current career. He said he never considered working in film when grew up in Chatham.
He started out studying law, security and administration in college and eventually got on a path to becoming a lawyer, including articling at a high-profile Canadian law firm.
But eventually he made a shift in his life and entered the music industry, working for, and traveling the world with, different artists for 10 years.
However, he said his passion for music “was crumbling” and he also went through some personal problems. While this was happening, the BC government was offering large tax incentives for film and television productions.
According to VanDusen, the west coast industry was essentially hiring anyone and he secured jobs as a production assistant, which he hated.
“That job was like the bottom of the bottom where you just wash pylons and pick up garbage and sweep cigarette butts – 18-hour days,” he said of his first 45 days in the industry.
Eventually he saw a job posting on a Facebook group by Jay Gazeley – a production manager who VanDusen now considers his mentor – and took a meeting and was hired on the spot.
The job was for an assistant location manager. While this job also requires long days driving around and knocking on people’s doors, his time in Chatham suited him well for the role.
VanDusen said his grandfather would take him out on rides on weekends on Highway 2, Highway 3, Highway 40 and several back roads in Chatham-Kent.
“We would just admire lakeside properties and people’s houses,” he said. “I think instilled in me to the point when I got older, I actually enjoyed doing that again.”
VanDusen is credited with 50 titles for location management on his IMDb page, including the TV series Bates Motel, Riverdale and Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, as well as “all your mothers’ and grandmothers’ favorite Christmas movies for Hallmark,” he said.
He has since moved into line producer, association producer and executive producer roles. He is the associate producer for When Morning Comes, the debut feature of director Kelly Fyffe-Marshall premiering at TIFF this month.
The two worked together on her short film, Omi, which won an award at the South by Southwest film festival.
He also works with First Nations communities through the Urban Inc production company.
Although he said he has been “very fortunate” to find work in the industry, he said it hasn’t been easy. As a Metis man, he said only a handful of people with hiring power on the west coast are Black, Indigenous or people of colour.
“It is a very white-dominant field and a very male-dominant field. Not a lot of females,” VanDusen said. “I’ve had my ups and downs throughout the industry with people – racism and people trying to hold me back – but I think I’m pretty relentless.”
A reason he has found work, he said, is because he takes his free time to ask others working in film to meet him for coffee. They have told him they wouldn’t know who he was if he hadn’t done this, he said.
Going forward, VanDusen said he has started trying to work closer to Chatham-Kent in Toronto’s film industry. He is also trying to get productions made in the Windsor and Chatham-Kent areas, noting he saw “beautiful homes” fit for Hallmark movies on a recent visit.
“I’ve lived in many places, but I haven’t changed,” he said. “I’ve grown and I’ve prospered and I’ve educated myself, but I am still a Chatham holdout and I just really appreciate everything from that city.”