Director/producer/writer: Charles Wilkinson dop/producer: Tobias Schliessler – Producer/pm: Armand Leo – Diary by: Mary Maddever

1988: After Quarantine (1987), b.c.-based Charles Wilkinson’s second auteur film (he also did My Kind of Town), he decides to do a film with more depth.

Looking around for something with realistic jeopardy, he thinks about what would engage him most. As the father of several children, his worst fear is something happening to one of his clan. This leads to a draft about a young boy who has a life-threatening blood disorder, possibly caused by toxins in the environment.

Everyone likes the premise, nobody much likes the draft. Bill Gray (then at Telefilm Canada in Vancouver) positively hates everything about it. Wilkinson says, at that stage, Gray’s was possibly the right response.

1991: Wilkinson takes some time off Max to direct Blood Clan in Edmonton. In the meantime, he has developed some action/thriller projects; none of them go anywhere.

Wife Tina and others urge him back to Max. Among the faithful are his friend, dop Tobias Schliessler, who joins the Max forces and begins promoting the project. Schliessler comes on board as a producer.

February 1992: Wilkinson does another draft. Everyone likes it. Story editor Alison Drysdale begins working with Wilkinson towards the final draft.

August 1992: Wayne Sterloff of British Columbia Film is the first to commit financially to the project.

September 1992: Sidetracked yet again, Wilkinson directs Atlantis’ Destiny Ridge series pilot. Then it’s back to Max and his best draft yet, which he sends to his literary agent in l.a. asking that it be given to one of the writers in his stable for a rewrite. The l.a. writer assigned the task calls Wilkinson, puzzled. He’d love the work, he says, and could use the money, but he can’t see anything that needs fixing.

The agent sends the draft around, and Wilkinson is immediately hired to join the writing team on a tv movie for cbs, Children of the Dark. Despite the delay, the cbs sojourn gives Max a lot more credibility with potential investors.

Dan Lyon of Astral Film reads the script and likes it, and together with Irv Ivers commits to the project. Wilkinson says Astral couldn’t have been more supportive: ‘Their attitude was, `Let’s just make the picture.’ ‘

October 1992: Wilkinson sends the Max script to R.H. Thomson, who reads it, likes it, and says yes to the male lead. Things are clicking. Wilkinson has always seen Thomson in the role of the father who believes total commitment and the power of love can restore his son’s health.

December 1992: A big Christmas bonus from John Taylor of Telefilm in Vancouver: ‘Let’s do it, this is the one,’ he says.

That ‘shocked the hell out of me,’ says Wilkinson. The budget shoots up to $1.35 million. Finally, it’s a done deal: $100,000 in deferrals, post facility deferrals, $175,000 from Astral, $150,000 from Norstar, 49% from Telefilm, and the rest from B.C. Film. ‘There was lots of pain involved in the whole thing,’ says Wilkinson. ‘Suffice it to say, by the time I got to the floor, I’d been through the wringer. My hair was considerably grayer, but what the hell, if it was easy, everybody would do it, right?’

April 1993: A year earlier, Tom Lightburn (former head of the Vancouver International Film Festival), a big fan of the project (‘He thought it was about yuppie angst,’ says Wilkinson), had hooked Wilkinson up with international distributor Goldcrest, which somewhere along the way was replaced by Norstar International for foreign, but nevertheless helped a lot with the development. At their urging, Wilkinson got involved with a u.s. casting company, and that led to Denise Crosby being cast as the mother.

May 1993: After auditioning every kid under 10 within a 1,000-mile radius, Wilkinson finally caves in to popular demand and casts his own three-year-old son, Fabio, as the junior lead. Says Wilkinson: ‘Movie making is a weird environment for kids; I didn’t want to push him into it at all.’

Armand Leo, who had worked with r.h. as production manager on The Lotus Eaters, comes on board as the film’s third producer.

Wilkinson says deciding to share the authority is the best production decision he’s ever made. Schliessler is the creative force, people- and favors-collector, while Leo is the business guy who keeps an eye on the purse.

June 1993: Production begins. The location is North America’s second largest ranch, located in Merritt, b.c. The shoot is to last 24 days.

One problem. Snow. They need it. After consulting the Farmer’s Almanac, they decide to manufacture the white stuff despite objections from investors who think they should wait and let nature take its course. (Nature, it turns out, had its own plans for Merritt that year – no snow.)

Throughout the shoot, the weather is less than stellar. Then, on snow-making day, the sun puts in a spectacular appearance. A silk net is drapped over the set and the considerable action is shot in a tiny closed area. The fake snow and confined set cause a lot of heat, not only for the producers who are sweating about whether they’ll get the shots they need, but for the parka-clad cast.

October 1993: Wilkinson, a private pilot, is flying around looking for snow for a second unit shoot, with no success. B.C. Film’s snow expert, Robin Mounsey, is consulted and divines some in a Smithers ski resort.

Wilkinson books the unopened resort, flies in the crew, and gets his footage there and in a few other areas. They tally up six locations for one snowy scene.

‘We cheated everything, and got totally lucky with it,’ says Wilkinson. In fact, no one who worked on it can remember what was shot where and when. ‘It’s one of my biggest technical thrills, to take all those disparate small pieces of movement and have them walk from one set to another that’s a thousand miles away and have them fit really well,’ he says.

A couple of weeks after the wrap, editor Gary Zubeck assembles a rough cut. Ten weeks of editing follow. Wilkinson, who has a post background, is there for the edit, which is done at his own company’s facility, Apple Pie Pictures. Alison Grace, who went on to do the picture edit on Double Happiness, has her first, first assistant editor gig on Max.

Christmas 1993: The sound package is done by Paul Sharpe Sound. The music is composed by Graeme Coleman, who has been musing over Max since mid-1992.

January 1994: Film finished. Ivers decides to test it out on an audience, using National Research Group, an l.a. organization.

February 1994: First research screening. There are no walk-outs and Max gets applause, but some problems do surface. The bad news is that if Max were a studio pic and needed to make $40 million, they’d be in trouble; the good news is that if they only need to make $4 million or $5 million, they’re looking good.

March 1994: Schliessler and Wilkinson take Max to the major u.s. studios, which leads to offers for a ‘substantial’ theatrical release in the States. They also get some tips on the inadvisability of certain language (‘fuck’) if family viewing is desired.

Although Wilkinson can live with the box office projections, he believes some concerns identified in the test screenings are valid and relatively easy to fix. He recuts certain scenes despite resistance from the investors.

Wilkinson says to cut eight minutes from a finished picture, ‘technically, you’re verging on rocket science,’ and convincing the investors was hard, but it all worked out well in the end.

June 1994: Second test. The expected box office numbers go up and the complaints go down. Fabio as Max steals everyone’s hearts, with the performance of Colleen Rennison, as Max’s sister Sophie, coming a close second. This convinces Astral to put even greater effort into the release.

Wilkinson recuts his reel, adding a lot of Max. His agent sends out the new reel, which pulls in several tv offers.

August 1994: Wilkinson directs an episode of the Highlander tv series and steps lightly into the daily parlance: ‘Let’s just do your average decapitation shotÉ’ (which he assures is very tastefully done). The job pays as much in three weeks as a year directing Max.

He then dashes to the Montreal World Film Festival with Fabio, who is now four.

September 1994: Max screens at the Toronto International Film Festival, then gets a gala screening at the Vancouver International Film Festival, with a cross-Canada theatrical release immediately following. A number of prints and a tv buy are planned. They’re treating it like ‘a real movie.’

Wilkinson says he’s learned from Max that ‘the crew just keeps getting larger.’

‘I used to think all it took was just me, the cameraman and the actors and a few othersÉnow it involves distributors, testers, and your neighbors. It’s a mass media. Other people do know stuff; just because somebody wears a suit and they’re a marketing representative doesn’t mean they’re an evil wanker.’

His next project, an action/adventure road-movie buddy flick for three-year-olds, will involve marketers from the beginning. Already his kids have been a test audience for the script; the response is monitored with laughter being good and glazed-over eyes bad.

Says Wilkinson: ‘Things really worked out well. I’m starting to see the big picture – I’m working on it.’