Montreal: Aska Film producer Claude Gagnon had plans to shoot two features this summer, in June and September. That’s not the ways things turned out, of course, and both films, Gilles Carle’s Pudding Chomeur and The Amateurs, an official Japan/Canada coproduction from director Masato Harada, began principal photography Sept. 5.

A Chariots of Fire kind of story about overcoming and personal growth, The Amateur dramatizes events in the life of American rowing champion Tiff Wood, who was shut out at the 1980 Olympics because of the Carter administration boycott.

Japan’s Shochiku, a major producer/distributor/exhibitor, is coproducing the $3.5 million film.

Gagnon (The Pianist, Kenny) lived in Japan throughout the ’70s and says he has consistently attracted Japanese dollars despite the less than glorious North American experience for many big and small Asian companies.

A talented visual artist, director Harada is an old friend of producer Yuri Yoshimura-Gagnon.

Leading players in The Amateur are Colin Ferguson, Leslie Hope, Ken Welsh in the role of coach Harry Parker, Helen Shaver and Claude Genest.

Craft credits go to dop Sylvain Brault, production designer Patricia Christie (Because Why) and Vera Miller of Elite Casting.

Shooting goes through to late October, mainly in the Magog region in Southern Quebec.

As for Pudding Chomeur, it’s billed as ‘an amused, hyper real look at the human condition’ and is set among the colorful working and street people of an east-end Montreal neighborhood.

The huge cast includes Robert Gravel, Francois Leveille and Chloe Ste-Marie. Alain Gagnon is the line producer, Pierre Letarte is the dop, Raymond Dupuis is the production designer, and casting is by Productions Plein Lune.

Investors in the $2.6 million production include Telefilm Canada, $1.2 million; Astral Films, which has advanced $300,000 against Canadian and foreign rights; sodec-Quebec; the Quebec and federal tax credit programs; and deferrals from Aska.

A highly original artist with a deep affection for everyday people, Carle shot his first feature, La Vie heureuse de Leopold Z, in 1965.

Pudding Chomeur shoots from Sept. 5 for 30 days and is Carle’s 27th film.

Lilies on the screen

Lilies is the latest in a limited line of Quebec/Ontario feature film coproductions following Montreal vu par, La Florida and Love and Human Remains.

Based on Les Feluettes, a successful international stage play from Michel-Marc Bouchard, Lilies is a dramatic meditation on love set against the dark humor of a prison story, circa 1952. The storyline includes a hostage-taking by the inmates and the retelling of a story from 40 years earlier when a terrible incident led two friends in opposite directions, to the priesthood and to prison.

The 25-day shoot goes from Sept. 11 to Oct. 13 and is being directed by John Greyson on a budget of $2.2 million. Producers are Arnie Gelbart of Montreal’s Galafilm and Anna Stratton and Robin Cass of Toronto’s Triptych Media.

Stratton, a longtime friend of Gelbart, saw the play and acquired the rights.

The film is being shot in English with a cast that includes Marcel Sabourin, Aubert Pallascio, Jason Cadieux, Remy Girard, Matthew Ferguson, Tony Award winner Brent Carver and Danny Gilmore, a young Quebec actor Gelbart says is headed for stardom.

Craft credits go to production designer Sandy Kybartas, art director Marie-Carole De Beaumont, costume designer Linda Muir, dop Daniel Jobin and editor Andre Corriveau. Bouchard wrote the screenplay in collaboration with Linda Gaboriau.

Investors include the Ontario Film Development Corporation, sodec-Quebec, Telefilm Canada, an advance from Alliance Releasing, and both the Quebec and federal tax programs.

‘Because it’s an important Quebec play and the playwright (Bouchard) wrote the script, we were able to get sodec,’ says Gelbart. ‘They probably thought it was a way to reach an international audience.’

Moi et l’autre

Remember the good times that used to be? Well, that’s the premise behind the return of Moi et l’autre, a teleroman from Avanti Cine Video starring Dominique Michel and Denise Filiatrault, the two original stars from the top-rated series of the same name broadcast on Radio-Canada from 1966 to 1972.

Avanti producer Jean Bissonnette says the peace-and-love era series was audacious for the times, featuring two independent-minded women who liked men.

Some 25 years later, Bissonnette says the ladies haven’t changed – the yin-and-yang match of the manipulative and naive – but the subject matter has evolved.

Avanti principals Bissonnette, Luc Wiseman and Claude Lesperance are taping each of the 26 half-hour episodes twice live-to-tape in front of a studio audience at Tele-Metropole.

Marie Brissette, Robert Desfonds and Pierre Theoret are directing. Roger Joubert, who starred in the original series, plays a building manager, and the popular Martin Drainville (Louis 19 le roi des ondes) plays the son of the former concierge. Filiatrault wrote the script in association with Michel and Jean-Pierre Plante.

Moi et l’autre is a key component of Radio-Canada’s fall primetime lineup. It will be broadcast Wednesdays at 7:30 p.m.

The fine craft of teen horror

With a well-crafted genre script in hand, director Jimmy Kaufman says he’s having a great time shooting Night of the Demons III, a clever, campy and fast-paced teen horror flick from Flanders Productions and producers Claude Castravelli, Pieter Kroonenberg and Julie Allan.

This story opens one special Halloween night, with a group of kids in a van cruising for a party. They stop for smokes at a neglected little store on a near-deserted, two-lane strip on the outskirts of town. Inadvertently, a blood bath ensues when a nervous redneck of a clerk pulls out a shotgun, the cops walk in, and all hell breaks loose. The kids’ fate is sealed when they head down the road to a strange old place vaguely rumored to be haunted by demons.

Kaufman says it counts when the script is well-crafted and properly motivated. ‘If this script was written without the setup and the kids had arrived directly at the house to party, there’d be no buildup, no setup to get them there. It would all be phony, sort of, `Aw god, let’s go to the house and get demonized.’ But they end up there quite innocently. By the time you get there you really care about them, so the horror stuff becomes more real.’

Craft credits include dop Walter Bal, production designer David Blanchard, mechanical f/x specialist Jacques Godbout, computer effects from DHD Postimage, and Elite, which did the first-rate casting job.

Demons I & II each sold 30,000 units in the home-video market. Republic Pictures has u.s. theatrical and home-video rights on Demons III.

As for Kroonenberg, he’s very active in Montreal, maintains an office in l.a., and plans to shoot six or seven features with cumulative budgets in the $100 million range here in the next 15 to 18 months. He works with Castravelli, and earlier this year teamed with Transfilm topper Claude Leger on the $10 million high-definition Rene Daalder film Habitat.

New projects include Warriors of the Rainbow, a $50 million dramatization of the Greenpeace story, with Christian Duguay (Screamers, Million Dollar Babies) the likely director; Hemoglobin, a $10 million Dan O’Bannon (Alien, Total Recall) and Ron Shusette-scripted gothic horror story; and a reincarnated $4.5 million version of A Man Called Horse, a historical drama feature/tv series pilot set for a late October start.

Cofounder of Montreal’s Filmline in 1981, Kroonenberg says, ‘I’m extremely fond of Quebec crews. They’re the best in the world.’

This season, Kaufman was the director on eight of 22 one-hour episodes of Telescene’s Sirens. Future plans include new shoots with Kroonenberg and Robin Spry, including a feature film project based on The Book of Mame, Duff Brenna’s critically acclaimed 1990 novel.

What’s next

Upcoming stcvq action includes:

– Mother Night, an $8 million Newline Production feature from hot director Keith Gordon. Nick Nolte stars in this Kurt Vonnegut adaptation set for a mid-September startup.

– L’Homme Ideal, a Cinepix feature from director George Mihalka and producers Andre Link and Christian Larouche. It’s set for a Sept. 17 start.

– La Legend des Kruites, a $3.2 million comedy/fantasy feature from screenwriter/ director Daniel Morin of SMAC Films and Productions Bleu Blanc Rouge producer Suzanne Girard, set for a November start with Johnny Morena (The Boys of St. Vincent) in the role of the kid lost in the woods.

– La Vengeance de la femme en noir, a film noir spoof and sequel from director Roger Cantin (Matusalem) and Allegro Films producer Franco Battista.

Quebec film commission director France Nadeau says two major location pictures are headed this way after a memorable summer of mostly domestic and coventure action. Also in the works, the nbc miniseries The Ring, to be directed by Douglas Cramer, and two Shostak/Rossner Productions features announced for October and November: Time Served, a women’s prison drama to be directed by Ralph Thomas, and Sci-Fighters director Peter Svatek.