Bruce McDonald’s ‘The Husband’ offers unique take on teacher-student sex scandal

TORONTO – Canadian director Bruce McDonald says he wasn’t daunted by the age factor in his new film “The Husband,” about a 30-something couple torn apart when the wife sleeps with her 14-year-old student.

“I just looked at it like kind of a love story and a sort of bad patch in a marriage,” he said in an interview.

“I know the whole issue with kids and sex and all that stuff. It’s kind of a touchy subject, I suppose. But I thought: ‘Well, the kid’s 14, he’s old enough and she’s old enough.’”

“It’s basically, they can have sex, but she’s a school teacher,” continued McDonald. “She’s got a profession to uphold, but if they want to have sex, to me that’s sort of OK. But she shouldn’t do that when she’s married and she sure shouldn’t do it when she’s a school teacher. It’s kind of abusing her privileges.

“But the idea of when you’re 13, 14, it’s sort of allowed, you can have sex. That’s what people do, sort of. Not everybody, but it’s not murderous or punishing and so I never got too worried, I guess, because it’s all laid out there.”

Maxwell McCabe-Lokos, whose acting credits include “Lars and the Real Girl” and “The Tracey Fragments,” co-wrote (with Kelly Harms) the drama/dark comedy that opens Friday in Toronto.

He also stars in it as Henry, a Toronto ad agency worker tormented by a growing inner rage and humiliation when wife Alyssa — played by Sarah Allen — is convicted for having sex with a student named Colin (Dylan Authors).

As he visits Alyssa in prison while taking care of their 18-month-old son and working full-time, Henry becomes fixated on Colin and begins to seek him out through social media and in his neighbourhood.

The film, which co-stars August Diehl and Stephen McHattie, debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival in September and went on to win an award for best Canadian feature at the Whistler Film Festival.

“I thought it was important at the beginning of the story to show he loves his wife,” said McDonald, who directed McCabe-Lokos in the 2007 drama “The Tracey Fragments.”

“He loves her a lot. He loved her then, he loves her now. It’s just more difficult to love her now because of what she’s done, but it was important to establish the fact that he loves her. So it’s difficult for him to walk away. It’s difficult for him to say, ‘OK, we’re done. You go your way, I’ll go mine.’

“So that made him more sympathetic, that he still is trying to make this work, trying to hang onto it. … It makes him honourable that he is trying to make it work.”

McDonald, the cowboy hat-wearing director behind “Hard Core Logo” and “Pontypool,” was also attracted to the script’s built-in suspense that builds as Henry’s rage boils over.

“You start to think he’s going to completely do the wrong thing,” he said. “It’s like: ‘Don’t go there, man.’”

McDonald felt Allen was right for the part because she has a charming sense of “innocence to her.”

“You don’t look at her and think that she designed it or premeditated the event,” he said. “It’s just probably she felt bad for this kid or something and she’s a bit playful.”

The film is set after the affair happened, but there is a brief flashback scene in which Alyssa and her student are intimate.

The scene wasn’t originally in the script, but McDonald said it was added to show the thoughts that haunt Henry.

“One of the challenges of the film was, it’s a portrait of this fellow in a bad situation, so part of our job is to sort of bring the inside outside a little bit.”

When it came to shooting the scene with Allen and the then-15-year-old Authors, McDonald said he took a “clear and practical” approach.

“The more concerned you get, the more worried they get, so you try to treat it as, ‘OK, you get in the car, you close the door.’ You treat it like a car scene, sort of.

“Not exactly, but you say, ‘You sit here, you put your hand on her thigh and she’s going to kiss you, probably give you some tongue.’ Once you actually articulate it, once you say it, then people kind of are sort of fine with it. They just want to know, ‘Where is it going, where does it stop?’ And then they’re kind of cool.”

“The Husband” hits theatres in Vancouver and Montreal on March 21.

Follow @VictoriaAhearn on Twitter.