Spawned from writer/director Clement Virgo’s (Rude, The Planet of Junior Brown) first film Save My Lost Nigga Soul, winner of the Best Canadian Short Film award at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1993, Love Come Down is an urban drama about ‘love in all its forms,’ says Virgo in a soft, intense tone.

The $3 million feature, which was renamed four times – from Tracks to West of Eden to Blunted to Love Come Down – centres on two brothers in their early 20s, one black, one white, each the other’s keeper since their mother murdered their father a decade earlier.

Neville (Larenz Tate) is first introduced when he comes out of drug rehab. He wants to make it as a stand-up comic, but has difficulty finding humour in life. His brother Matthew (Martin Cummins), a quiet ladies’ man and a professional boxer, is determined to whip Neville into shape with brute force.

Throughout the film, which is intercut with flashback scenes, the brothers revisit their past to come to terms with their present.

The film, coproduced by Damon D’Oliveira (Virgo’s partner of seven years) of Conquering Lion Pictures and Eric Jordan of The Film Works, was shot in Toronto from Nov. 8 to Dec. 10.

Locations include the Roxy Blue night club where Neville meets Niko (Deborah Cox), a mansion on the Bridle Path where Niko’s wealthy Jewish parents live, a church, a gym and finally, the old rickety house in downtown Toronto where the boys grew up.

It is at this house that I arrive on the scene. It’s dark, cold and damp and I’m reminded of a rainy day at summer camp where everyone’s piled like sardines inside some stenchy hall for the day. It’s the first day of shooting there, and despite the less than comfortable conditions, morale is high.

Virgo, who claims he doesn’t speak unless asked, finds time between shots to chat with me upstairs in the attic, away from the hullabaloo.

‘I take an organic approach,’ he says after a long pause. ‘I want to allow the film to tell me what it’s going to be.’

He usually plans out every shot in advance, but this time, because he has more confidence in the process and the script, he says he is free to experiment. And because he trusts his cast, he allows for a certain level of improv.

The opening of the film, he explains, tells the story ‘visually … it’s fast. There are lots of cut-ins and a lot of camera movement, but once the film settles in, the shots become more static. The end is similar to the way it starts because the end is actually the beginning.’

To make Virgo’s job easier, he says he always works with the same editor, Susan Maggi (New Waterford Girl, The Assistant, Eclipse). ‘I’m always trying to say less and she understands my style and aesthetic.’

As for the biggest challenge of making Love Come Down, Virgo says ‘money,’ an opinion later expressed by producers Jordan and D’Oliveira.

‘Having done both tv and feature films, I can say that the tv financing system is in much better shape,’ says Jordan. ‘Film financing is going down the tubes and every independent feature shooting in Canada is woefully under-financed.’

(Canadian distribution advances generally run between $150,000 to $300,000, while tv licence fees can be as high as $800,000).

‘The perception is that Canadian producers are flying around spending hard-to-come-by government money when really we’re racking up deferrals waiting for pithy tax credits, hawking everything to stay alive,’ says D’Oliveira.

Both producers agree that $4 million would have been a realistic budget for the film, but because they came up $1 million short, they’ve been forced to reinvest funds, use a highly tapered non-union crew and skimp on locations.

In addition to Tate, Cummins and Cox, who makes her screen debut, the Canadian-American cast includes Sarah Polley (The Sweet Hereafter), Barbara Williams (Inventing the Abbotts), Isaiah Washington (True Crime, Out of Sight), Clark Johnson (Homicide: Life on the Street), Kenneth Welsh (Absolute Power) and Jennifer Dale (Life Before This).

Marsha Chesley handled the casting early on so Virgo could rewrite the script with the actors in mind, says Jordan.

Dylan Macleod (Dance Me Outside) is dop and exec producers are Robert Baruc of Unipix Films, Victor Solnicki of The Film Works, Pierre Rene of France Film and Larenz Tate.

Unipix holds u.s. distribution rights, France Films hold the rights for Canada and utv has the foreign distribution rights.

Additional financing came from Telefilm Canada, TMN Networks and the Harold Greenberg Fund.