GCE Exclusive : Interview with Pete Winning and the Pirates’ Mike Donis

With the Toronto International Film Festival coming to a close and movie goers bed ridden with the festival flu, now is the perfect time to curl up and watch something from home. Turn off Netflix and open up YouTube because Pete Winning and the Pirates Season 2 airs tomorrow and its not to be missed. I sat down with debonair co-creator Mike Donis last week to talk about Pete Winning’s biggest season and what goes into creating an award winning web series.

What prompted you to create Pete Winning and the Pirates in the first place?

Pirates and lasers, are awesome, and I like those things, so I figured put them together into one thing that I also love. But seriously, it all started with a short film [The Swashbuckling Adventures of Pete Winning and the Pirates, 2011] that I directed for a contest. I had the film play at the Action On Film Festival 2011, they wanted shorts with action sequences and I wanted to submit because their was a cash prize. I knew that everybody who was submitting had martial arts backgrounds and I wanted to make something that would be different, so that we’d have a chance at winning and it wasn’t just a crappier version of what everyone else made. And because I lived on a boat and because I knew how to do visual effects like lasers and I like sci-fi, we decided to do an old school serial mash up that was the most ridiculous premise we could think of, in order to stand out amongst the crowd, and win the most votes.

You definitely have that Errol Flynn flare about you, are there any other characters or films that inspired you?

Its all the stuff that 8 year old Mike Donis loved. Like Star Wars is obviously a big influence, Indiana Jones movies, Back to the Future, in addition to all the Errol Flynn swashbucklers, Robin Hood, Captain Blood, and films like that.

Did you always envision yourself as Pete Winning then?

That’s funny, because the only reason I was [Pete] in the pilot episode was because I could drive my boat and I was willing to jump into Lake Ontario which was 8°C for a start. So because it was a short for an action sequence I didn’t think there would be any longevity to it, I thought “Sure I’ll just play the part and get it over with”. When we started getting good feedback for the show and made the decision to do more of them and make them into a series we spent a long time figuring out what real actor we would get to play Pete. I never intended to play the part, I didn’t take it seriously, but we were at the Bare Bones Film Festival 2012 and we won Best Actor and Best TV Pilot/Series, and I thought “Okay well that’s kinda cool”. And its obviously just easier to cast myself instead of finding an actor to do all the crazy stuff I want [Pete] to do.

Sounds like a big undertaking, how did you manage to act and direct at the same time?

Well I don’t direct myself entirely in the show, I have for many of the sequences but we have Jason Leaver (Out With Dad, 2010) and Navin Ramaswaren (Chasing Valentine, 2015) who came on board to direct some episodes primarily so that I could focus on acting. I don’t necessarily like directing myself although it has been something I’ve had to learn how to do. And that was the main thing when we were casting all the other characters, we wanted to make sure that they were people that I could really work with and had good chemistry with in the event that I was directing a scene without a director there, I needed to know that I could trust them if I was distracted with trying to do both.

Were characters written with certain actors in mind or did you find everyone through the casting process?

The only one who I knew would play the part was Dani Barker for Carmen in Season One and Ash Catherwood as One Eyed Bill in Season Two. But for instance, the part of the charmer in Season One was originally in my mind as a middle aged Spanish man but we ended up casting this sexy 19 year old Asian dude because he was just too awesome. But everyone else came after the scripts were written, and we started casting, and we were really lucky to find such a stellar group of talent.

Pete Winning and the Pirates has amazing production value, from props, costumes, makeup, sets and locations. How did you come across such rich visuals living in Toronto, was the city itself what provided you with everything you needed?

Yeah we shot it all [in Toronto] and we knew it was going to be super low budget because we were doing everything ourselves, so we designed the universe around things we had access to. We’re on Lake Ontario which when your filming south looks like an ever growing ocean, and because I live on a boat I have a lot of friends who also have boats that were willing to donate them to the show. A lot of the interior locations we’re Toronto Museums and Historial Sites, we got them for trading photography and videography, or I’ve gone in and talked to some of their youth groups, we managed to get a lot of old looking buildings that way. Our Production Designer in Season Two came in with her team and was able to make the rest of the vision come to life. Like we have this huge tent that was built and I was just blown away when I saw it for the first time.

So bartering is still very much alive in the world of filmmaking?

Well as a pirate you have to find ways to make to things happen the way you want.

Could you imagine shooting Pete Winning anywhere else but Toronto?

Well the show is set in Toronto, you can see a flooded CN Tower in the distance, if you look closely, but there’s such a great network of creative’s here, like our whole team was just full of human beings who are not just people who are insanely talented – and I respect the heck out of – but they’re people who because their so passionate they’re really able to get on board with what we were doing and see my vision and be really enthusiastic about that, and we all worked together to make it be something bigger. My home base is Toronto and doing it any where else wouldn’t necessarily – oh, except Austin, Texas! One of our screen writers James Christopher, he’s been pushing for us to go down because they’ve got the ocean there and stuff and he really wants to shoots something, I’m definitely entertained and tickled by that idea, so we’ll see what the future holds for more instalments of the show.

You started with a short, you’ve grown into a web series, each release is bigger then the last, has YouTube been the right medium for you?

DailyMotion  is the one that we’re going to be premiering Season 2 on but the thing that I really like about the online serial format is that you have complete control over the episode length. For instance the show is based off old serials which are 10 – 20 minutes in length, because you can’t release 8 minute episodes on television or in a movie theatre, as of right now, putting them online allows us to change the format and structure however we like, to better find our audience. Its something that the show has benefitted from, but it doesn’t mean that we’re not looking into other avenues as well, I’m really excited at the idea of doing a Pete Winning movie or other formats of story telling property like comic books, oh and were talking about a doing a video game right now!

Action figures?

Oh man I would love action figures!

Between the Pete Winning short and Season One you have dozens of awards and nominations, any advice for budding web series creators?

I don’t consider myself an expert, but I consider myself an explorer and I’m trying to figure stuff out just like a lot of us are in the web series world and I know that I personally have benefitted a lot from having conversations with other people and seeing what their doing and trying. I think its important to do that at this stage in the game for the medium. I wouldn’t call it advice but if I were have a recommendation it would be that, try something, go do it and make sure you love it and come up with a really good plan that you think works and talk to your fellow peers and see what they think. And once its out there and you see what happens, come back and we’ll all sit down over a drink and we’ll talk about how things are going and from there see how to navigate the crazy waters of the internet.

If you could write a new character for the Pete Winning universe and cast anyone who would it be?

I think Jennifer Lawrence would make a fantastic new love interest for Pete Winning and I am more then open about having a discussion with her about it. So Jen if your listening, give me a shout, there is a wrist laser with your name on it.

Pete Winning and the Pirates – Season 2 Trailer by PeteWinningAndThePirates
 
Creating a web series from the ground up is no small task and it takes months and years of long days and sleepless nights to create something of this size and Mike Donis has done it with a smile and a yaar! Almost 100 people have taken part in the show from cast and crew, to friends and family, and even complete strangers, and you read that richness on screen. I cannot wait to see what Donis and his team come up with in the future and I’m really hoping there’s an action figure attached.