Montreal director Michel Poulette is this year’s winner of the Claude Jutra Award for direction of a first feature film for his Louis 19, le roi des ondes. Runners-up Gary Ledbetter (Henry and Verlin) and Mina Shum (Double Happiness) are featured on pages 23 and 24 respectively.

It’s a long time since Michel Poulette sat slumped in a Montreal theater watching reel after reel of bad pornography for his first job in production at Radio-Quebec.

It was 1973, before video was the norm, and the 23-year-old Poulette’s first assignment for the French-language educational tv service was finding stock shots for a debate on pornography. He trudged from theater to theater looking for the right clips.

At the end of the week, a screening of the ones he selected was arranged for the director and a few others. What began as a small gathering blossomed into a screening for 35, after people asked to bring relatives and friends who just happened to be in town for the weekend.

‘The guy in charge of the theater said it would have been more profitable for him to charge the usual fare instead of renting it to me,’ laughs Poulette.

It’s a long way from porno theaters and educational television today as Poulette, now 45, tries to decide between a tux or a favorite black coat with an Indian motif to wear to this year’s Genie Awards. His first feature film, Louis 19, le roi des ondes (Louis 19, King of the Airwaves), is nominated for best motion picture, best achievement in film editing, and best performance by an actor for Martin Drainville, who plays Louis.

A Genie in any category will join the host of awards already allotted Louis 19, including best screenplay and most popular film at the Vancouver International Film Festival. To date, the film has brought in approximately $1.8 million in box office receipts in Quebec alone, setting a two-year sales record for a Canadian film.

Not many pay their dues in this business with spicy assignments like his first, but however pleasurable was his year with Radio-Quebec, it was also a frustrating time for the aspiring director.

‘The younger you are, the more radical you are. You are always thinking you could do a lot better than the people around you are doing. People at 35 seem very old,’ he says.

Frustration is inevitable when you’re climbing the ladder. For Poulette, patience, a commitment to learning from every experience, and a sense of humor have kept him on track. A year looking for stock film at Radio-Quebec trained his eye for shots, and he used that experience as leverage in the boardrooms of advertising agencies to sell himself as a freelance commercial director.

At the beginning, there was only more frustration.

‘I always got the same answer: `Your pitch was very, very good, but you don’t have enough experience.’ ‘

Armed with the motto ‘Misery is Optional,’ he continued to petition the agencies until they knew who he was. ‘You may not get the job right away, but when you come in a second time, you climb the ladder,’ he says.

For Poulette, 1977 marked the turning point in his career, the year in which he used a $15,000 inheritance to finance his first ‘real’ film, Pierre Betwixt Freud and Dracula. The story of Pierre, who creates art by cutting pictures out of magazines and rearranging their heads and bodies, won the Silver Boomerang at the Melbourne Film Festival and the Red Ribbon at the New York Film Festival.

Five years later, in 1982, he received the first of four career Golden Prizes from the Publicite Club de Montreal for one in a series of 13 spots for Radio-Quebec’s fall ad campaign.

Poulette took the hard line to get the assignment for the prize-winning spot, the one in the pile of 13 boards he most wanted to direct. ‘They said, `We’ll give you 11 spots, but we’re having a senior director do the other two.’ I said I wouldn’t do the 11 without the others, it’s been a pleasure meeting you, and I left,’ says Poulette. They gave him the full contract; the one spot also won an Award of Excellence.

You have be true to your standards when you’re on the way up, says Poulette. As a filmmaker today, he trusts that others have standards for their own areas of expertise and he relies on them for input.

‘The same way I’ve spent 20 years crystallizing direction, other people have spent 20 years in other areas like camera work and costume design. I want to use the potential of all these people. This way of thinking doesn’t happen the first time you direct – it’s part of what I’ve learned making commercials.’

Other learning experiences include directing films, Cher monsieur l’aviateur (1983) and Coeur de nylon (1987), plus Rock et belles oreilles, a zany television comedy series popular in Quebec which premiered in 1985.

A director today needs to be a leader who knows how to motivate a team, says Poulette. By gathering input into scenes before the shoot is in motion, you not only make everyone feel part of the film, but you save time, and time in this business is money.

A big-budget Canadian film is almost an oxymoron. Louis 19 was a Canada/France coproduction with a budget of about $3 million and a 30-day shoot. To put a feature together in a month means you need to plan meticulously, making sure the important parts of a day’s filming don’t end up on the editing room floor, says Poulette.

Poulette wanted 32 days to shoot Louis 19, a movie about an average guy who wins a television contest and has his life filmed 24 hours a day for three months. The producers offered 28. They compromised on 30, but that meant some improvising to get the number of shots Poulette wanted.

In the movie, four cameramen take turns following Louis. Before production began in September 1993, Poulette had a camera technician give the four actors – three men and a woman – a crash course on how to use a video camera, and their black-and-white shots are expertly interspersed throughout the film. In the end, about 50% of Louis 19 was shot on one camera, says Poulette.

Looking back on his career, Poulette has a difficult time identifying pitfalls. Riding the success of Louis 19, the pleasures are uppermost in his mind. But even if he wasn’t in the limelight, one suspects Michel Poulette would still be upbeat and charming. Spontaneously funny, Poulette has no idea where he gets the sense of humor that punctuates conversation and propels Louis 19. With a name that translates into ‘a small female chicken,’ one develops an offbeat way of looking at the world, he says.

‘Really I think what I’ve learned over the years is to work as a team with people, and when you’re working with intelligent people and there is a problem, you don’t panic. You do it calmly and you find a lot of better solutions. It’s the kind of thing you realize when you’re 45 years old.’