Max Films and producer Roger Frappier are on a mission of renewal. The award-winning producer says the way to bring Canadian cinema to the world is to ensure young directors and writers are given an opportunity to build a movie oeuvre.

Frappier’s Montreal house has delivered five films from first-time directors in the past three and a half years: Pierre Gang’s Sous-sol, the anthology Cosmos, Manon Briand’s 2 Secondes, Denis Villeneuve’s Un 32 Aout sur terre and Jean-Philippe Duval’s Matroni et moi. Two more films from first-timers are in the works for 2000, Sebastien Rose’s ‘very contemporary’ Comment ma mere accouche de moi durant sa menopause and Hughes Dufour’s English-track Three Yellow Pills.

Frappier says Rose’s screenplay looks at today’s relationships in the way Declin de l’empire americaine captured life in the ’80s. Micheline Lanctot will be cast in one of the principal roles.

Max Films is also developing Denis Chouinard’s L’Ange de goudron (Tar Angel), a $4-million coproduction with Costa-Gavras’ Paris house KG Productions and producer Michele Ray-Gavras. Chouinard’s (Clandestin) ‘dramatic political road movie’ mixes immigrant (Algerian) realities with father-son discovery themes. The film requires a winter backdrop and is ready to go, but because anticipated fall funding did not materialize, the shoot’s start date has been pushed back.

Frappier characterizes Chouinard’s project as ‘something that is completely new in our cinematographic vision.’

Two Max Films features are in editing, Gabriel Pelletier’s romantic comedy La Vie apres l’amour, starring Sylvie Leonard and Michel Cote and slated for a wide release this summer by distrib Alliance Atlantis Vivafilm, and Denis Villeneuve’s second movie Maelstrom, shot for $3.4 million this fall and set for a fall 2000 release by aav.

Likes U.K.’s thinking

Frappier is the ’99 recipient of the Prix Albert-Tessier, the Quebec government award for career achievement and is the only producer to win three best motion picture Genie Awards and to have produced three Golden Reel winners.

He says pinched budgets and movie-making by committee is taking a toll on this country’s film industry.

On the French side, the producer would like to see Radio-Canada invest in serious films, beyond a licence fee. ‘They have decided they will invest only in films with commercial potential so they can get the films [away] from tva,’ says Frappier. ‘Radio-Canada has a responsibility and they are not playing their role at the moment. We will fight that and do anything we can to change their mind.’

Frappier agrees feature film funding should not be restricted to ‘a closed club, like the distributors are a closed club.’ But if there must be openings in the system for new talent, a good business model would be found in the u.k.

With heaps of new lottery money for movies, he says the u.k. is investing in a reduced number of producers, and production combinations and filmmakers with real track records of building an industry. ‘They’re right and this is something we can apply here.

‘Financing in this country,’ says Frappier, ‘is becoming so complex…and takes so long that it jeopardizes our capacity to do films.’

Our best directors

The producer says the pervasive Canadian practice of pinching movie budgets – invoked as a way to make one or two films more each year – won’t bring the desired results.

‘We won’t improve our cinematography by reducing the number of shooting days, or the number of extras or speaking roles. The Canadian system of financing, when viewed from the outside, is a failure. Inside the country it appears to be working,’ he says.

For Frappier, national cinemas are known through the talent of their best directors. In Canada, he says – with exceptions such as Denys Arcand and Atom Egoyan – there isn’t the continuity needed to establish international reputations.

‘Because Atom was able to make nearly one film a year, he grabbed the attention of [foreign] distributors, and suddenly his five or six films became more accessible and we could make more money with him. He’s been able to carry on. We don’t know Danish cinema, we know Lars Von Trier. We don’t know Spanish cinema, we know Pedro Almodovar, and we have to do the same here because that is the only way Canadian cinema can survive in this world. To build an oeuvre, that is the way to work,’ says the producer.

Right out of the market

Frappier worries support criteria for films ‘is becoming so incredibly Canadian in the worst way, so incredibly politically correct in the worst way, that I think for the rest of the world we are placing ourselves, with no help from anyone else, right out of the market.’

At festivals like Cannes and Berlin, Frappier says Canadian cinema is being stamped with a badge of caution, a lack of daring that is reducing our cinematography to ‘middle of the road’ status.

There are so many people and institutions – from distributors to broadcasters to funding agencies like Telefilm Canada and sodec – with leveraged opinions on movie scripts that ‘it becomes everybody’s story, it is nobody’s story,’ he says.

Frappier compares current cinema to a hockey team which has loads of talent, but is tied down by overly cautious coaching and managers.

‘We’re not seeing films at the level of the talent because there’s too much interference, too many sources of financing and it takes too much time to put it all together.

‘I think with all these new criteria movies like Once Were Warriors are not possible in Canada. I even think things like Les Bons debarras aren’t possible now because it’s not politically correct. This is really becoming scary,’ says Frappier, adding:

‘Let’s assume everybody has given their opinion and there’s some new money. Can we at least, say for five years, come back to this creative triangle [the collaboration of director, screenwriter and producer] and give them the time and the liberty to build our cinema the way they think it should be built.’

Frappier is a former drama studio producer with the National Film Board. His filmography includes three best motion picture Genies – Denys Arcand’s The Decline of the American Empire (1986), Jean-Claude Lauzon’s Un zoo, la nuit (1987) and Arcand’s Jesus de Montreal (1989) – and three Golden Reel awards for the country’s top-grossing movie for the two Arcand films and Alain Chartrand’s mad comedy Ding et Dong, le film (1990).