Originally published as a limited-edition zine, which opened with the following introductory passage:
"I wonder sometimes if our attempts to capture time are like trying to hold mercury in our hands. The impulse is understandable - it's so beautiful, so fluid. If you could just get a hold of it, you would see your life reflected back at you. But it's too slippery to ever grasp. And - this, I think, is important - if you spend too long trying to hold it, you will only poison yourself. I feel a piercing sense of melancholy when I watch Therapy Dogs, Ethan Eng's astonishing debut feature. Shot while he was a student at Cawthra Park Secondary School, the film is more poem than narrative, a cinematic ode to the pain and beauty of the teenage years. I can feel each moment disappearing before my eyes even as the camera attempts to preserve them. It's a pang of something that's not quite sadness. In my conversation with Ethan, I inarticulately describe it as the feeling of being stabbed. I don't mean that in a bad way. What I mean is, it strikes me in my core so acutely I can't ignore it. It's both painful and enlivening. Maybe we can never fully capture a transient moment, but there's such beauty in the attempt, in spite (or because?) of its futility."
ETHAN: I watched it about a year ago at a screening, and I was expecting it to be a bit of a trainwreck, but surprisingly, I did not find myself bored by the film. There is an energy in it that is sealed forever, like soda. It's always in there. It doesn't matter how cynical or bored I get in years going past Therapy Dogs - I can watch it and that will still be there.
ETHAN: Well, because it was my first film, so it's obvious that it would be somewhat, like, a piece of shit. And of course I think some parts could be done differently. You can spend years thinking about how to improve something. But I was expecting to want to stab my eyes, and instead I didn't mind it. I enjoyed it.
ETHAN: I didn't come up with it, Justin [Morrice] did. He's definitely more of the 'vibe guy'. I didn't have a title in mind for the movie, but when Justin said it, it sounded right. I didn't want to admit it to him, but it did feel like, as soon as he said it, that was the name of the movie. There is a reason why, though. It isn't just a vibe. I think you can attribute that title to the relationship Ethan and Justin have in the film, and that the things they're doing are not just reckless activities. They have some kind of spiritual purpose when you're young like that. It is a kind of therapy.
ETHAN: No. I didn't want to watch my footage. It was too difficult; it was too imposing. I didn't want to look at high school again after having gone through the whole funeral process of graduating. They make such a show out of moving on from it, and then to see those high school memories in crystal-clear detail again is kind of uncomfortable.
I just ignored it until I had to put everything together, which is not what you're supposed to do. But it's not like I could've reshot prom or anything anyway. And that's why I spent a lot of time editing 'Tyler's Movie', because those weren't my own memories. That was a good thing to procrastinate with.
ETHAN: It was great, because I wasn't personally attached to the footage. I spent months just scouring YouTube, finding different video clips from Cawthra that year. I feel a bit of a personal connection to all those people in 'Tyler's Movie', just because I spent so much time editing their faces. And, you know, you can find their LinkedIn profiles, and they have kids now. It was such an adventure, and there's so much history that you can find online. People just put up random cell phone videos and they're there forever. They might as well have been etched in stone.
ETHAN: It's from this Korean film from '97 called Bad Movie. The subject matter is a little similar, and you can't tell what's real and what's fake. In that movie, the teenagers are homeless, and they're doing all this crazy shit, and the director's also a bit of a delinquent, so that's what made me be like, "Okay, I need to just rip this off." It ended up actually helping a lot, because the movie is just a bunch of smaller scenes, and it's hard to edit scene-to-scene. You need to have something to break it up so the audience can understand they're in a new geographical space, or a new period of time. The superimposed titles are more like diary entries, or descriptive of the activity they're doing, like 'Kyle's Party' or 'Abandoned Adventures'. I guess the full title cards are more like inner thoughts, like 'FUCK U JAYDEN'.
ETHAN: [laughs] Well, I wanted to get in touch with everyone for Reunion, and the movie is really nothing without Jayden, 'cause he's such a star. I was tipped off on a rumour that he hangs out at this sauna in our local suburb, so I got lucky with that footage. But yeah, he's a real piece of work. I mean, I even invited him to the premieres that happened in Toronto, and he didn't care to make it out. And he broke my gun. He still owes me a gun.
ETHAN: I wish I had put the camera down at all times. I quickly realised that the point of life is to enjoy it, not to document it. But it was like a sacrifice, I guess.It felt very anti-social to have the camera in front of my face at all times - it was an intrusion, and it was alienating, especially at some parties - but eventually it grew on people. I got lucky in that sense. It reached a point where it didn't matter if I was at some fucked-up party, or a promposal, or a school assembly - I always had a camera, and people just didn't mind.
ETHAN: Well, the alienation kind of just helped add to the loneliness I wanted the film to have. You can feel it. You can always tell that I'm there, like a silent voice from the camera's POV. I really liked Benny's Video at the time - it's a Haneke movie from the '90s about this serial killer kid with a video camera. I felt like the Mystery Man from Lost Highway, the pale-faced guy with the camera who's like, "Say your name." So, yeah, I certainly felt like a bit of a freak. But the footage was too good. I already felt, mentally, a year ahead, like I'd already graduated, and I knew that I wouldn't be able to go back to high school and re-create these things later. It would be basically impossible, and maybe ethically wrong. So I was getting away with a certain type of murder with Therapy Dogs [laughs], having made that realisation that some people might have made too late.
ETHAN: It's not like I was a popular person either, so it wasn't that bad. Honestly, me driving the knife in deeper on being an alienated freak person just gave me more liberation. You know, let's not be in the middle ground here - either be a social butterfly or some Joker freak. In Therapy Dogs, you see me dressed as Wolverine with knives in my fingers, running them along the lockers, and punching lockers... We were just so in our own lunatic world while everyone else was, like, preparing for what college they were gonna go to. There was a kind of freedom in that.
I do notice that my movie doesn't always resonate with high school students for that very reason. Seeing this kind of freedom and 'don't care' attitude hits a sensitive spot for people sometimes. My friend's little brother is in high school right now, and he just showed the movie to his friends, and he was like, "It did not vibe." He asked his brother why, and he was like, "Oh, you know, they're all trying really hard to get into university right now." So it seems like they're all just kind of squares. To each their own, but yeah, there were a lot of kids that didn't appreciate what we were doing, and the gesture of it.
ETHAN: I was not like that before, but Justin was. He's like your archetypal Kurt Cobain rebel kid. He would've existed as he was whether the movie was made or not. Early on while we were filming, I felt bad for having all these dangerous ideas, and I was like, "Justin, I don't want you to think that I'm exploiting you," and he was like,"Oh no, I'm the one taking you for a ride." From then on, we both gave it our all. There's definitely a degree of creativity and stepping up to the plate in terms of things we were doing for the movie. But there's also things that we were already doing - things everyone does, like the Fight Club stuff and exploring abandoned buildings.
Strapping Justin onto the roof of a car and doing donuts was something we thought we owed to the audience for the price of admission. The fireworks on the roof of the school, too. There's a bunch of crazy stuff. And, yeah, I'm not that kind of person. It was more about the philosophical idea of being carefree in high school. It was like an exercise in personal development and not being so strung-up all the time. That was the appeal of it for me.
ETHAN: Yeah, definitely. There's that part in Reunion where Kyle is saying, "Do you think we could ever recreate [Therapy Dogs]?" and it's like, obviously not. But that's why I appreciate today how I appreciated what I had when I was younger. Youth is such a special chapter of life - that little double jump you get, or as you said, that mid-air float. It's a real thing, and I wish more young people believed in that, because eventually vour knees start to crack [laughs]. But I think it's possible to still be ambitious as you get older. Obviously, you're more aware of death the older you get, but it's just a mindset thing.You're never as old as you think you are.
ETHAN: Every year I get older right now is like a +1, like earning a point. It should be a positive thing. I'm lucky to be alive, and happy to still be playing the game.
ETHAN: That's a bit of a reversal of real things from when me and Justin were growing up. Autobiographically speaking, someone else would have jumped off that water tower. The whole point of me making this movie with Justin was to reverse that decision, and have Justin live on. But part of the reason Ethan dies is this morbid fascination with death itself, and his obsession with the kid at the memorial, who he kind ofjust ends up becoming. If you spend too long looking into the abyss, you'll just fall into it, and that's what happens with him. You can't spend your whole life collecting time like grains of sand. That's no way to live. And nostalgia has that curse to it. After I filmed Therapy Dogs, I didn't have a camera on me for many years, because I wanted to appreciate life with my own eyes.
ETHAN: Yeah, all about the twenties. It confronts a lot of ideas about growing older. If I were to sum it up: we don't have to grow up so fast. I think a lot of us do that to ourselves. Everyone thinks they're moving at the speed of a bullet train. The film is about how time warps and dilates, and how that affects us. It's an evolution of Therapy Dogs - in that movie, they go from the suburbs to the city, so this one will be in Toronto. It's not going to be a direct sequel, but it's me trying to make a feature film again while still kind of not knowing how to make a feature film. So it's just, like, a bunch of crazy shit put together with a story to it. That's what I can say about it for now.
ETHAN: It's crazy, because in the DVD for the Nirvanna the Band the Show webseries, there's a menu video that plays this song about growing old ['I'm Past My Prime' from Lil Abner]. Even then, in 2007, they were aware that they were far too old to be playing these characters [laughs].
The fact that, 20 years later, they're still doing it... there's a lot of self-awareness in it. I think they have the right message with the movie. It's not something I totally understood when we were filming it, because so much was changing all the time and there wasn't really ever a screenplay, but I think Matt [Johnson] understands the key to youth. It's something he never seems to have lost, and I always looked up to him for that.
When I was first making Therapy Dogs, I thought I was going to be making a movie about how I was old now and everything was past me. But as soon as I met Matt, he showed me that everything was in front of me. I still try to remind myself of that. I think that was the greatest thing Matt ever did for me.
ETHAN: Oh, sure.
ETHAN: McKenzie, yeah.
ETHAN: I think the girls were scared of me, and vice versa. I mean, I had a camera on me [laughs]. They probably wondered what I was going to use that shit for. I remember one of the notes for Therapy Dogs was like, "Oh, you should do some episodes with girls at the school," but it was like, I'm not the mastermind here. It's not like I walk into school and get addressed as Mr. Director. I don't have that rapport with everyone. I'm Ethan when I walk in.
I have footage where the girls just kind of look at the camera, and then their eyes dart to me off-camera suspiciously, and all of a sudden they stop talking. It was just too cringe to include. And it might as well be implied by the film anyway, that Ethan is not really... I mean, he's barely even friends with the guys at the school. He's really just friends with Justin.
ETHAN: Of course. I recently did a music video for Joji ['Past Won't Leave My Bed'] and that thing was all about the mythic twenties, hitchhiking everywhere, freedom, having the world in the palm of your hand. I believe it.
ETHAN: It's the antidote, yes.
ETHAN: Yeah. The other side of travelling is you realise that everywhere is pretty much the same in terms of your experience of happiness and joy. When I think about happiness, I don't think about crazy shit that you see in movies. I think about doing fun stuff with my friends, having a nice day hanging out at gas stations or whatever. That's how I made that Joji video, and that's no different from the kind of fun I would have walking around my own neighbourhood. But it's nice to travel. If I didn't, I'd probably still have that old mindset.
ETHAN: No, not at all. I'm chilling here. What I learned with Therapy Dogs is that once you make something that's interesting and that's yourself, people will come to you. I think Los Angeles is devoid of identity and specificity, and they are desperate to find people to bring into their chasm, but you should just stay put where you are. Let them come to you.
I think about Alan Moore, and how he's just lived in Northampton his entire life. Maybe I can be the Alan Moore of Mississauga. Just, you know, turn into Gandalf here and have all sorts of lore. That's kind of the aspiration.
Interviewed on January 9th, 2026.