Because the story is so much larger and more important than the history of one band, Mike Downie knew the magnitude of the job going into The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal. Figuring how best to tell the journey of Canada’s greatest-ever band required some flexibility as he gathered pieces of the puzzle, the project mixing newly-shot interview segments, classic live clips, deep-vault audio and video recordings, and artifacts ranging from early gig posters to hand-scribbled lyric books.
At times, the Ontario-based director—and older brother of late Tragically Hip singer Gord Downie—was overwhelmed, sometimes from the emotional toll the project took, and sometimes with the task of boiling four decades of ground-breaking Canadian history into a single work of art. But speaking on Zoom, Downie says he never lost sight of what he set out to accomplish with The Tragically Hip: No Dress Rehearsal.
“Everything moves around as you do these things, but the one thing that didn’t change was my …