Bruce McDonald is a Canadian film and television director, writer and producer. He is known for his award-winning cult films Roadkill and Hard Core Logo. He was part of a loosely-affiliated group of filmmakers to emerge from Toronto known as the Toronto New Wave.
Early life
McDonald was born in Kingston, Ontario, and later graduated from the film program at Ryerson University. His first movie was The Plunge Murderer, followed by a feature-length zombie flick, Our Glorious Dead, made with his grandfather's Super 8 camera and shot on location at his Rexdale high school, North Albion Collegiate.
Career
In 1991, for his film Highway 61, he won Best Director at the highly regarded San Sebastián International Film Festival. Roadkill won most Outstanding Canadian Film at the Toronto International Film Festival and McDonald earned some notoriety and media attention when he quipped, while accepting his $25,000 prize from TIFF for Roadkill, that he planned to spend the money on "a big chunk of hash".
Since the late 1990s, McDonald has directed dozens of film and television productions; he completed shooting The Tracey Fragments in Toronto, which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival. While shooting the scenes took him only two weeks, he spent nine months in post-production. He then directed the horror filmPontypool, which was selected as one of the best Canadian films of 2008 by the Toronto International Film Festival and was released in March 2009. Since then, he has directed episodes of many television series, including Lonesome Dove, Twitch City, , Instant Star, Queer as Folk, ReGenesis, This Is Wonderland and Cracked. In 2009, McDonald directed three short films for the cross-platform project City Sonic. McDonald, along with six other directors, shot 20 short films about Toronto musicians and the places where their musical lives were transformed. McDonald directed films starring Die Mannequin, the Cancer Bats and Geddy Lee of Rush. His 2010 filmTrigger was the first film ever screened at Toronto's new TIFF Bell Lightbox. This Movie Is Broken, a concert film on Broken Social Scene was released on June 25, 2010. In 2011, he produced the documentary television seriesYonge Street: Toronto Rock & Roll Stories, focusing on the history of the Yonge Streetmusic scene in Toronto in the 1960s, for Bravo. In 2014, he directed the horror thriller Hellions starring Chloe Rose, which premiered at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival and later screened at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival. His most recent film, Weirdos, was released in 2016. Since 2017, McDonald has been a director for the British-Canadian teenage anthology series Creeped Out. He directs the Canadian-set episodes, whilst Steve Hughes directs the British-set episodes. During the latter part of 2017, McDonald has been filming 'Dreamland' in Belgium and Luxembourg, with Juliette Lewis and Henry Rollins leading the cast. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6706616/?ref_=nv_sr_4
Personal life
He currently resides in Toronto with his wife, cinematographer and filmmaker Dany Chiasson, and their daughter.
