Luca juggles love and a mid-life

crisis as two projects gear up

Montreal: Producer Claudio Luca and Productions Tele-Action kick into high gear this month with two feature films set for principal photography, Mort Ransen’s The Glace Bay Miner’s Museum and Louis Saia’s Le Sphynx de la banlieue.

Glace Bay, a $4.5 million Quebec/Nova Scotia/u.k. coproduction, was written by Ransen and Jerry Wexler and is described by Luca as a love story set in the rugged Cape Breton mining community of Glace Bay in the 1940s.

The 35-day shoot starts in Glace Bay, Aug. 2 for 30 days and then moves for five more days to the equally rocky shores of the Firth of Forth in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Canadian film veteran Vic Sarin is the shoot’s cinematographer. Stars include Helena Bonham Carter, Clive Russell and Kate Nelligan. Nicoletta Massone is the costume designer and t.o.-based Bill Fleming is the production designer.

Producers on this majority Canadian project are: Luca (The Boys of St. Vincent) of Tele-Action, Montreal; Christopher Zimmer of Imagex, Halifax; Stephen Clark of Skyline Films, London, Eng.; and Ransen of Ranfilm, Montreal.

Glace Bay is being produced in association with the National Film Board. Financing comes from Telefilm Canada, sogic, the Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation, British Screen, the Quebec tax credit and the recently introduced $3 million annual Nova Scotia production labor rebate program.

Malofilm Distribution will release the film sometime in 1995.

As for Sphynx, it’s about an otherwise normal fortysomething suburbanite whose grip on sanity is loosened as he hits a mid-life crisis.

Marc Messier (Solo, Portion d’eternite) and first-time director Saia, a prominent stage writer (Les Voisins, Broue), wrote the screenplay with the usually debonair Messier featured in the lead role. Serge Theriault (Ding et Dong, le film) and Celine Bonniere (Million Dollar Babies) also star.

Colin Neale, longtime executive producer with the nfb in Montreal, is the executive producer on Sphynx. There’s first-rate craft support on this one – dop Georges Dufaux, production designer Francois Seguin, costume designer Suzanne Harel and pm Nicole Hilareguy.

Budgeted at $2.3 million, Sphynx shoots from Aug. 2 to Sept. 8 and is financed by Telefilm, sogic, the Quebec tax credit, Tele-Action and Cinepix (C/FP Distribution), the distributor.

Luca says he got ‘great co-operation’ from Telefilm, which rejected the script almost two years ago. ‘Saia and Messier spent the past year on a major rewrite of the story and that’s when everything came together,’ says the producer.

Entre 2 et 3

Alliance Vivafilm and Productions Jeux d’Ombres have signed a pact giving Alliance world distribution rights to Entre 2 et 3, the feature film debut of new, and apparently tres hot Quebec director, Andre Turpin.

The film is being shot in Quebec, Paris, Italy, Romania, Croatia and Turkey from July 22 to Sept. 12 and tells the story of Luc, a young man deeply alienated from society. His recently divorced mother has moved to Paris while his girlfriend is working abroad in Turkey. After hearing his girlfriend is pregnant, Luc starts out on a long, strange odyssey to ancient Istanbul.

Luc is played by Andre Charlebois and Dorothee Berryman (Declin de l’empire americain, Scoop) plays the divorced mother. The screenplay is by Turpin, Sylvain Bellamarre and Sophie Leblond, who along with Jeux d’Ombres principals Andrew Noble, Anne-Marie Gelinas and Salvatore Barrera, are graduates of Concordia University’s film studies program.

Alliance vice-president Pierre Brousseau seems especially keen on Turpin, a former Prix Claude-Jutra winner as Quebec’s most promising young filmmaker.

Brousseau says he was on-side as soon as he read the Generation x-motivated script. He then made a quick call to Louis Laverdiere, Quebec operations director at Telefilm Canada, and called the young filmmakers to Vivafilm’s classy offices at Place Ville Marie. ‘I found these people to be completely credible,’ says Brousseau. ‘They represent the future of (Quebec) filmmaking.’

The film is budgeted at $350,000 and has received limited funding from Telefilm, sogic, the National Film Board, Canada Council and various other agencies.

Brousseau hopes to showcase the film in the Director’s Fortnight at the next Cannes Film Festival.

Voir, Montreal’s French-language cultural weekly newspaper, will sponsor the film’s launch.

Alliance International is the exporter. Entre 2 et 3’s Quebec release is slated for February 1995.

Bolt goes before the cameras

L.A.-based Canadian producer Jacqueline Giroux and director George Mendeluk (The Kidnapping of the President, Miami Vice) are in town to shoot Bolt, a mystical, good biker/bad biker road movie which begins principal photography Aug. 3 and goes through to Sept. 4. In 1985, Mendeluk directed two Canadian films, Dalco Productions’ Meatballs iii and the Cinepix feature Loverboy.

Bolt is set somewhere off the beaten track in the hilly Dakotas and is being shot on location in the countryside and villages (St-Jean d’Iberville, Mont St-Hilaire) surrounding Montreal.

The $3 million Bolt Film Production feature is financed with Canadian and French money and has been packaged by executive producer and Montreal entertainment law specialist, Charles Smiley, who did the neat financial job on the $31 million Transfilm arctic adventure movie Agaguk/Shadow of the Wolf.

Bolt’s good biker is played by Richard Grieco (If Looks Could Kill). The evil biker is Toronto-based actor Michael Ironside. Sean Young (Blade Runner) stars as a young native woman. Young was in Montreal earlier this summer to shoot the Savoy Pictures suspense comedy Dr. Jekyll & Mrs. Hyde.

Alain Singher is the art director, Canadian ex-patriot Jerry Marks is the dop, Ginette D’Amico is handling casting duties, and the pm is Martin Dufour (Heritage Minutes). The shoot is crewed by the stcvq, the Quebec freelance film technicians union.

Lauzon takes the prize

Director Jean-Claude Lauzon has won the Prix France-Canada, awarded for excellence in coproduction, for his surreal coming-of-age film Leolo.

The maverick director jumped on a plane for Paris to pick up the prize last month. A day earlier, he had looked death in the face and walked away in one piece when his small single-engine aircraft crashed on takeoff in the woods of Northern Quebec.

The award, worth about $12,000, was presented to Lauzon by French Culture Minister Jacques Toubon and Canadian Heritage Minister Michel Dupuy, who was in Paris for the second edition of Jeux de la Francophonie.

At the Paris ceremony, Lauzon vaunted the creative freedom offered by French producers, adding he has received scores of proposals from the u.s., but, as yet, not a single offer from a Paris-based producer.

Created in 1985, the Prix France-Canada for coproduction is awarded every three or four years. Previous winners are Daniel Petrie for The Bay Boy in 1987, Michel Drach for Sauve-toi Lola starring Carole Laure, and the late Francis Mankiewicz for Les Portes tournantes. Mankiewicz and Drach shared the award in 1990.

Leolo was coproduced by Aimee Danis of Montreal’s Verseau International and Flach Films, Paris.