Amerique project budget reflects new focus on box office reality

Montreal: One of the noteworthy changes on the horizon for Canadian feature film production is sharply reduced budgets, in line with what some industry sources say is the real revenue potential of our films.

Rising to the challenge are Amerique Film producer Martin Paul-Hus and director Isabelle Poissant, whose first feature, A la memoire de mon ami, is being shot on Super 16 on a budget of $500,000. Principal photography begins March 14 and goes through to May 7 on location in Quebec. The action then moves to Tarnovo, Bulgaria April 9-30.

Paul-Hus says the strong script allowed him to sign two of our most credible actors, Pierre Chagnon (Le Sorcier) and Denis Bouchard (Scoop, Rene Levesque). Chantale Monfils also stars.

In this film, Chagnon’s character travels to Europe following the death of his wife. Intent on searching out her mysterious past, he meets a remarkable character, played by Bouchard, whose memory has vanished.

Paul-Hus, 36, who would have liked a couple hundred thousand more for the film, says without the co-operation of the actors and crew through deferrals, there simply wouldn’t have been a shoot.

He says the film is part of an emerging trend at Telefilm Canada and sodec – with the backing of distributors such as Alliance Vivafilm and Malofilm Distribution – aimed at exploring lower budget features.

‘They have no choice,’ says Paul-Hus. ‘The cost of features has to come down. You can’t keep producing $3 million movies and then turn around and report a box office of $10,000.’

The film was initially pitched to director Lea Pool. Later, veteran director/dop Georges Dufaux expressed interest based on a budget of $1.5 million, but that deal was turned down by both Telefilm and sogic.

Craft credits go to dop Yvon Gekoff, art director Andre-Line Beauparlant and line producer Victor Sandrasagra, Amerique Film’s vice-president.

Amerique Film has four features in development and recently wrapped a low-budget mow called Le desordre magique de tous les jours, a love story from first-time director Benedicte Deschamps.

Investors in A la memoire de mon ami include Telefilm, sogic, the Quebec tax credit and an advance from Malofilm Distribution.

Breaking records

Talk about a hot property and Canadian tv entertainment that handily wastes the competition and you’re talking La Petite Vie.

Earlier last month, according to Sondages BBM, 3.7 million tuned in to Radio-Canada to watch the zany Avanti Cine Video sitcom. A week later, almost two-thirds of the province’s French-speaking population, 3.96 million, watched. It’s an all-time high for Quebec tv, the benchmark being 3.6 million for the Cite-Amerique series Les Filles de Caleb. The second top-rated show on Quebec tv this winter is Productions sda’s Scoop with a network audience average of 2.7 million.

Avanti producer Luc Wiseman says La Petite Vie has a higher audience share than the Super Bowl, and is produced on a remarkable budget of $105,000 per half-hour episode.

Scripted by the sitcom’s leading player, Claude Meunier of Ding et Dong, le film fame, each episode of La Petite Vie is shot twice in the same evening, live-to-tape, in front of a Studio F audience at Tele-Metropole.

Pierre Seguin is directing this season’s 13 original episodes, with a talent lineup that includes Serge Theriault, Marc Messier, Diane Lavalle, Marc Labreche, Remy Girard and Guylaine Tremblay.

Wiseman says a Swiss producer with broadcast intentions has adapted a pilot, and that prominent script consultant Paul Wayne is part of a seemingly impossible effort to adapt the series for English audiences.

Avanti Cine Video produces Quebec’s top game show, Normand Brathwaite’s Piment vert, broadcast on Tele-Metropole; Detecteurs de mensonge, a Television Quatre Saisons game show hosted by Marc-Andre Coallier; an educational tv game show for preteens called As tu vu ca?, broadcast on Radio-Quebec; as well as specials on comics Stephane Rousseau and Pierre Verville.

Heroux in the pilot’s seat

Production began March 5 and goes for 19 days on a two-hour search-and-rescue action series pilot called May Day! May Day!.

Produced by Claude Heroux (Le Sorcier, The First Circle) of Communications Claude Heroux International and France’s Cipango, the $2.3 million pilot is being shot on 16mm on location in Quebec City, the Montreal region, and in and around the Canadian Armed Forces base at Trenton, Ont.

cchi says the intention is to film 13 hours in 1995 while Heroux negotiates with an English-language Canadian tv network. France 3 is the French broadcaster.

The cosmopolitan talent lineup includes Bruno Volkovitch and Carl Marotte (Lance et compte) as rival search-and-rescue technicians, Montreal actors Macha Grenon (Scoop) and Marc Hollan, German actor Jochen Nickel and French actress Cecile Auclair.

The director, Jean-Louis Daniel, and cinematographer, Norbert Marsaing-Sentes, hail from France. Francois Lamontagne is the production designer, Diane Arcand is the pm and the shoot is crewed by the stcvq, Quebec’s freelance film technicians union.

Four for the road

Montreal’s Blackwatch Films is developing a four-film package worth an estimated $10 million for production in 1995, says president William Mariani.

Mariani and partner/vice-president Kevin Woodhouse recently wrapped their first feature, Obstruction Of Justice, a police suspense story starring talented Toronto actress Sara Botsford (e.n.g.), Martin Newfeld (Highlander III) and Richard Zeman. Ron Hulme (Black Pearls) directed.

Shot for $1.2 million, Mariani says 265 individuals invested between $1,600 and $8,000 in the film, which has absolutely no public funding.

Commenting on the financing, Mariani says: ‘Because the guarantee is so high, brokers are starving for this kind of product. We went out and got as much ‘in kind’ (services) as was possible, including legal and accounting. We sold them on helping us as much as they could; now they can gouge us for the four-film package.’

Obstruction of Justice, distributed internationally by Peter Emerson’s Oasis Pictures, Toronto, is a suspense story about a cop whose integrity is compromised when his wife is brutally murdered.

Craft credits on the 17-day shoot go to dop Yvon Gekoff, art director Christine Williston and associate producer Yves Ma. Screenwriters are Jeff Leblanc of Montreal and John Richards of Los Angeles.

Mariani says the three-year-old Blackwatch plans to shoot two films back-to-back starting in October – Panic, a horror thriller, and Blueblood, an ‘anthology’ horror.

FIFA ’95 wraps

Highlights at this year’s 13th edition of Festival International du Film sur l’Art/International Festival of Films on Art included a well-deserved homage to Quebec art film documentarian Jacques Giraldeau, director, producer and collaborator on some 140 films in the past 40 years. fifa premiered Giraldeau’s latest film, Blanc de memoire, a portrait of a ‘lost’ painter set over several decades.

More than 135 films and videos from 22 countries were screened at FIFA ’95, including 44 works from 17 countries in the official competition section.

Canadian films screened at the festival included The Lust of His Eye: Visions of James Wilson Morrice, scripted and directed by cbc veteran Adrienne Clarkson; Barbara Willis Sweete’s The Planets starring skaters Isabelle and Paul Duchesnay and Brian Orser; and Francois Girard’s Souvenirs d’Othello: Entretiens avec Suzanne Cloutier, a retracing of Cloutier’s role in the production of the Orson Wells classic, Othello.