To give his cast and crew an overview of Bonanno: A Godfather’s Story, director Michel Poulette condensed the 300-page script into 30 pages. ‘It’s a very complex story of a contemporary man remembering his past. It starts with the beginning of the century and ends in the sixties. Ten pages were a paragraph,’ he says. ‘We felt the impact over the next few days. In just an hour, everybody had an overview of the story.’

The five-hour miniseries, shot over 80 days, focuses on Joseph Bonanno, said to be the inspiration for Mario Puzo’s Corleone godfather. It has also earned the Quebec-based Poulette a Gemini nod in the category of best direction in a dramatic series.

His last two projects before Bonnano were the 1992 Quebec sensation Louis 19, King of the Airways (which was sold to Hollywood and remade as EDtv) and 1996’s The Haven. Before making the leap to feature films, Poulette was a television director for, among other shows, the Gemini Award-winning Rock & Belles Oreilles, a comedy that ran for three years. He describes the series as a cross between Saturday Night Live and Monty Python.

‘The experiences with Louis 19, The Haven and Urgence [and E.R.-type series] gave me the experience to deal with Bonanno. The only way to do it is to split it into a series of dramatic scenes.’

EDtv is somewhat of a disappointment to Poulette, who says the Ron Howard-directed remake had a much bigger budget but a far simpler story. ‘They had 30 times my budget. For instance, I had four kids in the basement watching TV to show how kids were reacting to Louis. In EDtv they have four schoolrooms with 40 people each. In the original, Louis falls in love with a woman the television company sends to make him fall in love with her. In EDtv, he is in love with his brother’s girlfriend. They lost that critical perspective on the television industry.’

Poulette’s next project is an MOW for CTV starring Christopher Plummer. Called Agent of Influence, and based on a book by Ian Adams, it tracks the true story of John Watkins, a Canadian diplomat posted in Russia during the mid-sixties. Rumored to be a double agent, Watkins was interrogated for days in a hotel room by Canadian security and also by a CIA agent. At some point during the interrogation, Watkins died and the story was covered up for 18 years. A coproduction between Calgary’s Alberta Filmworks and Montreal’s Galafilm, the $4.2-million production will be delivered at the end of February.