This year’s nominees for the Claude Jutra Award, which recognizes first-time feature film directors, have brought to screen a range of stories including self-discovery, a kidnapping, the end of the world, a heist gone bad, a sexual power struggle, an escape from a bizarre maze and a lustful thriller.

Two contenders, Don McKellar (Last Night) and Joel Wyner (Pale Saints), are also nominated for best direction.

Here Playback talks to the Jutra nominees about how they made their films and their upcoming projects.

*Jack Blum – Babyface

‘You make a film and it’s like a drug and you just have to make another,’ says Jack Blum, director of Babyface (Stable Films), which screened in the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. ‘I long to do it again and have a little more time to prepare from a directing point of view and not worry so much about all of the other aspects.’

He believes the near $1-million film, about a 13-year-old girl who gets drawn into a relationship with her mother’s boyfriend, has ‘almost a hyper-documentary style.’

‘We were going for an ultra-realism, which took inspiration from two sources,’ Blum explains. ‘One was the social realism of British cinema in the ’60s and the other was the very still camera work and composition of the Asian cinema. It’s really an extreme, harsh project.’

Blum is currently writing a wwii espionage thriller for British producer Neal Weisman.

Babyface was released theatrically by Alliance Releasing in August. Dustin Dinoff

*Amnon Buchbinder – The Fishing Trip

First-time director Amnon Buchbinder used his resources wisely in directing and coproducing The Fishing Trip (Resounding Productions).

As a screenwriting teacher at York University in Toronto, Buchbinder didn’t have the time to write a screenplay of his own and in March 1996 enlisted one of his students, Michelle Lovretta, to pen The Fishing Trip.

Through hard work and tenacity, Buchbinder was able to use the $500,000 in grants that he received in 1995 from the Canada Council of the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for his film Catchfire – a five-year effort that he had to abandon due to insufficient funding. The film also received $5,000 worth of assistance from the National Film Board’s Ontario Centre.

In developing his directorial style, Buchbinder says he looks to the screenplays. ‘I think it depends on the story I’m telling,’ he says. ‘What interests me are stories with emotional intensity. I’m not interested in cultivating a specific style.’

The Fishing Trip is the story of 21-year-old Kirsti who is faced with moving on from a troubled past, but before she can properly do this, she decides to confront the source of her problems from her younger days – her family, specifically, a sexually abusive father. After getting a lead from her mother, Kirsti and two other young women travel to a hunting cabin to find her father and half brother, all the while wondering what she will do once she finds them.

Buchbinder is currently evaluating some of the screenplays he has written as his next project.

The Fishing Trip hit the screens through Mongrel Media in Toronto last month and Ottawa this month. It will be released in Winnipeg and Montreal in January and Western Canada in February. Dustin Dinoff

*Raul Sanchez Inglis – The Falling

vancouver-based Raul Sanchez Inglis, who marks his directorial debut with The Falling (Sodona Entertainment), is perhaps better known as cowriter of David Cronenberg’s Crash (Alliance) and Air Bud (Keystone/Disney).

Shot over 24 days in Vancouver in late ’97, The Falling was privately financed, with some money from Telefilm Canada.

The story, penned by Inglis, is of lust, obsession and a strange love triangle in which the same story is told from three different characters’ points of view.

‘My [directing] style is more eclectic,’ Inglis says, citing the work of Akira Kurosawa and many of the American-made thriller genre films as inspiration for The Falling.

Inglis is currently looking for a new feature project to direct. He says he has written many scripts and is not completely adverse to skipping town to make a new film, although ‘I’d love to stay in Canada – if I can get the money to do so.’

Currently Inglis is working on the Mainframe cg series War Planets (Shadowraiders in Canada).

Sodona is currently in negotiations for international and domestic distribution. Dustin Dinoff

*Don McKellar – Last Night

It’s been a stellar year for Canada’s Golden Boy Don McKellar.

To kick off the year, his six-episode cbc series Twitch City hit the airwaves to critical acclaim and he’s set to start shooting seven more episodes of the quirky sitcom for the public broadcaster in January.

Then there was Cannes, where his directorial debut Last Night, part of the Collection 2000 film series, won the Prix de la Jeunesse.

In the fall, Rhombus Media’s The Red Violin, which he cowrote with director Francois Girard, was selected to open both the Toronto and Venice film festivals, while his directorial debut Last Night opened Toronto’s Perspective Canada series.

Odeon Films released Last Night in October and Red Violin in November. Lions Gate will be releasing Red Violin in the u.s. in spring 1999.

Now, the Genies.

McKellar is up for five awards: best direction and best screenplay for Last Night, best screenplay (with Girard) for The Red Violin, best live-action short drama for Elimination Dance (along with Bruce McDonald, Michael Ondaatje and Sandy Kaplansky), and the Claude Jutra Award.

In total, Last Night has 12 nominations and Red Violin 10.

McKellar’s next film script, which is he attached to direct, is an outrageous adventure flick called Yummy Fur. It’s the only script he’s ever written that hasn’t been produced, and it is now in the hands of New York indie powerhouse Good Machine (Todd Solondz’s Happiness and Ang Lee’s current production, Ride With The Devil). Meg Mathur

*Vincenzo Natali – Cube

Vincenzo Natali’s directorial debut Cube, which he cowrote with Andre Bijelic and Graeme Mason, is a futuristic story about six people trapped in a bizarre maze.

Cube, a Canadian Film Centre Feature Film Project, was produced on a budget of $750,000.

However, Natali says a limited budget and other adversities are what make him tick.

‘What inspires me are my limitations,’ he says. ‘One of the best things about Cube was that I was able to invent a world from the ground up. Finishing [the film] felt like a victory.’

Natali cites the support of Toronto companies including C.O.R.E. Digital Effects for digital effects, Caligari Studios for physical and prosthetic effects, and Jjamb for door effects in the making of the film.

The first-time director finished writing two scripts for Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict this month and has worked on episodes of Cinar’s Space Cases for Nickelodeon and Alliance Atlantis’ Psi Factor, as well as a number of short films, most recently Elevated for Showcase.

He is currently working on a new script with the working title Splice. Still in the earliest of stages on the project, he isn’t sure where Splice will take him.

‘I’ll go wherever they’ll have me,’ he says.

Odeon Films released Cube in Vancouver on Dec. 11 and in Toronto and Montreal in September. Trimark Pictures bought Cube to the U.S. screens in September and the U.K. in October. The film was also released in Japan in October through distributors The Klockworx and Pony Canyon. Dustin Dinoff

*Terry O’Brien – Stolen Hearts

Made on a budget of $250,000, first-time director Terry O’Brien’s Stolen Hearts, which he wrote and coproduced with his partners in Backroads Films Christopher Ball and Bill Marks, is a comedy of errors about the botched kidnapping of the daughter of a well-known self-help instructor. When a detective takes on the case, the would-be kidnappers begin to turn on each other.

O’Brien and Ball used 100,000 feet of stock footage they had collected over two years and saved over $60,000.

Prior to its theatrical release in Toronto in June and Ottawa and Calgary in July through Backroad Films, Stolen Hearts was screened at film festivals in Brazil, Russia, Portugal, Hollywood, Columbia and Bermuda, and was named best Canadian feature film at the Victoria Independent Film Festival). O’Brien is pleased with the attention Stolen Hearts has received and looks forward to doing it all again.

‘We made the film we wanted to make, which is nice,’ he says. ‘I love the process of filmmaking from the beginning until the end.’

Currently O’Brien and his Backroad partners have three projects percolating – a comedy The Last Fling and feature dramas Mystic Nature and Dead Right Then – all penned by O’Brien. Dustin Dinoff

*Joel Wyner – Pale Saints

Genie-nominated director Joel Wyner has made a stylistic mark with his first feature Pale Saints.

‘I wanted it to have a real-life comic strip feel to it,’ Wyner says from his Frequency Films production office in l.a.

In this film about a heist gone wrong, told through a twisted tale of fate and double-crossing, Wyner pays tribute to the 1960s – right down to the costumes, designed by Genie-nominated Tamara Winston, and go-go dancers. He also alters the film speed, using quirky, quick zooms for close-ups and other shots.

‘I love the crash zooms,’ he says, ‘although I can’t say that it’s inherently my style.’

Wyner’s screenplay and the modern setting, however, are more contemporary, making his $1.5-million film a cross between Dr. No and Pulp Fiction.

Although he wrote the script seven years ago, a few years before Quentin Tarantino’s film was released and he says that directorially the film does not resemble Pulp Fiction, he does understand how the content and subject matter would be construed as a ‘Pulp Fiction thing.’

Since shooting Pale Saints, Wyner, who is also an actor (Lonesome Dove, Catwalk, Sirens), wrote the script for Vancouver’s New City Productions’ new family-oriented feature Exhuming Mr. Rice, starring David Bowie.

He’s currently writing the script for a $50-million DreamWorks thriller, Alibi, and will be leaving for England in January to prepare for the May shoot of his next film, A Man of No Consequence, a suspense thriller which he is writing and directing for Capitol Films (u.k.) and Newmarket Capital Group (u.s.). He also costarred last month in the hbo tv movie A Random Encounter with Elizabeth Berkeley.

The ex-pat Canadian says he misses his homeland and that he’s going to try to work in Canada sometime in the future. ‘If I had my way I’d live there full time,’ he says. ‘[But l.a.] is where I’m at right now, only because. . . you go where the buyers are and I have to go where I can create my art.’

Pale Saints was released last month in Toronto by distributor Alliance Releasing. Meg Mathur