Few Canadian writers approach their art as a business and even fewer dedicate their talents to long-form, make a living and never move to the States. But ever dry-witted screenwriter Doug Taylor has stayed fiercely loyal to his native Montreal, where he churns out scripts like an assembly line and runs his screenwriting career with the prudence of an entrepreneur.

Just hearing about his current stable of projects makes my head spin, but the frenzy doesn’t seem to flap this scribe, who says having dozens of scripts on the go and working on international copros is the only way to survive as a screenwriter in Canada.

On any given week, his ‘business’ takes him through the country, south of the border and across the Atlantic.

The day after our meeting in mid-January, he’s back in Montreal for a minute before flying off to Sundance for the North American premiere of Splice, which he co-wrote with Vincenzo Natali after the original script had been shelved for 10 years. What he doesn’t know during our 6 p.m. coffee date is that the festival screening will garner the $25 million France/Canada copro, starring Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody, great reviews (hell, the L.A. Times named it one the festival’s eight must-see films out of competition) and a possible big fat distribution deal with Joel Silver and his Dark Castle label. At press time, word was the deal would give the film a summer release on 3,000 screens across the U.S. and a P&A commitment of up to $40 million. And if that’s not exciting enough, it would be the biggest deal inked out of this year’s festival.

From Sundance, Taylor is off to Helsinki to meet with filmmaker AJ Annila, with whom he’s collaborating on the Finnish/Canadian copro Human Animal.

‘How do you balance so many stories and partners and countries?’ I ask. ‘I create compartments… like a business,’ says the former creative consultant for Naked Josh matter-of-factly, as if the answer should be obvious.

It’s been a long day for Taylor when we meet. He’s in Toronto working with another new writing partner, Kate Schlemmer. The pair, working with creative consultant Mark McKinney and producer Ira Levy (Breakthrough Films and Television), are developing a dark comedy series for The Movie Network called Playthings. The show is eight one-hours, which he considers more like an eight-hour film chopped up into pieces, as per TMN’s commercial-free format.

‘It’s about the world’s most unscrupulous, family-run toy company that develops the first pregnant teen doll in an effort to inspire more teens to have more babies so the struggling company can sell more toys,’ he explains with the glint of a proud papa boasting about his kid’s first steps. Taylor, 46, who lives in Montreal’s Notre-Dame-de-Grâce district, doesn’t have kids of his own, but seems connected to the subject.

He’s quick to point out that Splice, which is considered a sci-fi film, is really more about family dysfunction. He draws a parallel to a young couple struggling to raise their first baby, though in this case the couple are genetic scientists and the baby is a hybrid creature turned dangerously destructive monster. (I’m smelling a complex.)

Clad in a long gray coat, dark-rimmed glasses and a fedora when he arrives for our date, Taylor looks every bit the part of a Barton Fink character. I picture him sequestered in a lackluster hotel room with an antique typewriter for days on end, even before he tells me he prefers to work alone, ‘without anyone bothering me.’ This is one of the reasons he chooses long-form over episodic TV, an admittedly much safer and more lucrative bet for writers working in Canada.

While his credits suggest he’s a genre writer (he penned Uwe Boll’s $60 million boffo flop In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale), the Concordia University film grad says, ‘That’s only because the genre stuff is what gets to camera.’ Likewise, his first film, The Carpenter, which he made for less than a $1 million with former roomie and classmate David Wellington, was a horror, or as he puts it, ‘a feminist splatter film.’

Today, Taylor, who names The Conversation as his favorite movie, Twin Peaks as his top TV show, The Clash as his number one band and meat and potatoes as his dish of choice, is head deep in development on at least four features and a couple of major TV projects, most of which are drama or satire pieces that make him feel much more at home. He has also just co-optioned the novel Godblog (Laurie Channer) with Joan Schafer to try his hand at producing.

Agent: Brent Jordan Sherman, The Characters Talent Agency