High school or the movies? Dad makes a deal

As the Film Club wound down, Gilmour did a buried-treasures program (“Quiz Show,” “The Last Detail”). By then, Jesse was correcting his father over which cinematographer shot “Klute” and casually describing the graininess of early Fassbinder films. He aced his dad’s pop quiz on such matters as French New Wave innovations and which cinematographer Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen had in common.

Then Jesse went back to school. Tutored by his mother, a teacher turned stage actress, Jesse passed his exam for a high school equivalency diploma, later studying literature for a year at the University of Toronto, where his father now teaches.

Both Gilmours emphatically said they would never advise other parents to follow their example when a child is struggling in school. At the time, David Gilmour second-guessed himself and wondered if he was jeopardizing his son’s future for some self-serving need of his own.

“I worried I was making use of him as an example of my own hipness,” Gilmour said. “There was something that flattered my vanity about this decision to let him drop out of school and watch movies.”

It turned out to be the right move for Jesse, who said he probably would have left home if his father had not recognized he needed something other than school.

“If he hadn’t done something like that, he wouldn’t have been my dad. I think that three years we spent together formed me as a person,” said Jesse Gilmour, now 22, working as a restaurant cook in Vancouver and mulling a career as a filmmaker.

“I don’t think you necessarily learn life lessons from films. I think the only life lessons you learn are from knocking yourself around and actually living. But we’d have conversations that sprang out of these films. I did learn from that, things guys need to talk about, heartbreak and drugs and all that. It happened to be movies, but it could have been something else my dad and I did. I think it was more about us spending time together.”

Jesse recently went to Vietnam and wrote a screenplay, which got him accepted to a film school in Prague. But he found himself up against his old dislike of sitting in classrooms and listening to others talk.

He figured he could go the Martin Scorsese route — deep immersion in the art at film school — or the Quentin Tarantino path — learning how to direct movies by watching them, then going out and making them.

He chose the Tarantino course, turning down the film-school offer so he could hit the streets of Toronto and make his movie, armed with everything he learned from his dad in the Film Club.

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