‘I was at a Camera d’Or lunch and someone came up to me and said, `Oh, I loved your last film, The Sweet Hereafter,’ says actor/ writer/director Don McKellar. Don’t make the mistake. McKellar is not Atom Egoyan.

Although he has played something of a doppelganger for Egoyan in such features as The Adjuster and Exotica (for which he won a Genie), and has been mistaken for that other most Canadian director at festivals in Berlin and Cannes, McKellar is striking out on his own as a major new voice in Canadian cinema, ‘out to distance myself,’ he says, from his better-known forbearers.

McKellar is in Toronto as both scribe of Gala opener The Red Violin, directed by Francois Girard, and as the star of his own directorial debut, Last Night, which is inaugurating this year’s Perspective Canada section. Produced by Rhombus Media heads Niv Fichman and Daniel Iron, both films represent the continuously rising tide of commercial Canadian production and McKellar as a highly valued new talent.

Best known internationally for his deadpan performances in Egoyan’s works as well as lead roles in his own scripted films (Bruce McDonald’s Highway 61, Roadkill), McKellar’s extensive acting credits range from film to theater to television.

His writing is wide-ranging, but his incisive style is best reflected in the innovative Thirty-two Short Films About Glenn Gould, also produced by Rhombus. McKellar also wrote and directed a short film, Blue (featuring David Cronenberg), which played to acclaim at numerous film festivals, including Sundance and Berlin.

Even with all this experience, at the age of 35, McKellar would never have made Last Night without the help of executive producers Caroline Benjo, Carole Scotta and Pierre Chevalier. Benjo and Scotta are with French production and distribution company Haut et Court, which provided the initial project idea and brought in seed money from Chevalier at Franco-German tv broadcaster Arte.

As part of a series of 10 films about the turning of the millennium called 2000 Seen By. . ., which includes works from Hal Hartley, Tsai Ming Liang, Alain Berliner, and Walter Salles, McKellar’s film is the wry, uniquely Canadian entry in the collection.

Last Night – the concept

‘Initially, the idea behind the series was to get young directing voices from the next century,’ says McKellar. ‘It ended up not really turning out that way. I was one of the first ones they went with. Hal Hartley’s not exactly a new voice. And, that’s why they didn’t approach Atom. The idea wasn’t to get the big filmmaker from their country, but the next filmmaker.’

As one of the younger directors in the batch, McKellar also took the project to the most extremes.

Last Night shows not only the end of the millennium, but the end of the world. McKellar stars with Sandra Oh (the two also appear together in The Red Violin) as two strangers struggling to find a cab and companionship in the last hours before Armageddon.

‘I loved those kinds of films when I was growing up, like Fail Safe and Dr. Strangelove, Planet of the Apes and Omega Man.’ Those sort of ’70s paranoid, end-of-the-world movies,’ says McKellar. ‘But I always thought that the most interesting part for me was the part before the disaster when they’re introducing the different charactersÉthe people who didn’t have the power to stop the end of the film, who weren’t Bruce Willis, who weren’t presidents, who weren’t generals.’

Financing Last Night

The budgets for the films expanded exponentially when Arte came into the picture offering development financing.

According to executive producer Benjo, budgets bounced up from $400,000 to $2.5 million with the support of Arte. In exchange, the European broadcaster holds foreign sales rights for the series to a number of Northern European territories. Those sales are being handled by Celluloid Dreams. Rhombus International retains rights to Last Night for all other remaining regions.

Initially considered a one-hour production for tv broadcast, McKellar and Rhombus quickly realized it would be more difficult to fund a one-hour tv movie than a full-fledged feature. The theory was that you were supposed to get your national broadcaster to finance your film, says McKellar, which didn’t work as planned.

In his case, the cbc would pick up the financing slack and in return get all the other films in the 2000 series for broadcast. But it’s a next to impossible task in English-speaking territories because they rarely show subtitled films, explains McKellar.

‘And there’s no place for one-hours like that, except maybe pbs, and they wouldn’t have the money anyway. So we had to make a feature just to get it made.’

Rhombus was able to raise the rest of the money (outside of Haut et Court and Arte’s support) based on the project’s new feature-length status, gathering support from the cbc, Telefilm Canada and Canadian distributor Odeon Films, which will handle the Canadian release. Odeon is also distributing The Red Violin.

‘We wanted to retain most of the rights ourselves, because we wanted to sell it off as a feature, completely independent from the other films,’ Rhombus’ Fichman explains. ‘We’ll try wherever possible to coordinate with Celluloid Dreams to have the same distributor handle the other films as well as our film, but we’re interested in it as a standalone. We think it works as a standalone.’

Apparently it has. After the successful Cannes premiere in the Director’s Fortnight section, the Canadian company sold off Last Night to 10 additional territories. Despite ongoing discussions with u.s. distributors, Rhombus is waiting for Toronto to make the much-coveted stateside sale.

Says Rhombus’ Iron: ‘Toronto will be the ideal place to sell the film because [u.s.] distributors will see it with North American audiences.’

Anthony Kaufman is a New York-based freelance journalist.