The kitchen and living room bring slacker living to new extremes. The low-ceiling squalor, perfumed with smoke, is adorned with Christmas tree lights, bubble wrap, police tape and computer mouses dangling from the walls. The refrigerator is decorated with fragmented pictures of pinup girls, and the bread in the toaster looks like it’s been there a week. The furniture and greasy, paint-chipped appliances are littered with plastic plates, comics and candy jars. Next to the living room window, a turtle tries vainly to escape the confines of an aquarium.

Welcome to the world of Nothing’s David and Andrew (David Hewlett and Andrew Miller), a pair of outcasts who want to wish the rest of the world away. A calamitous occurrence ensues and they achieve that desire – the world they inhabit becomes an ever-expanding physical void, and at a certain point all the viewer will see is selected body parts against a white background. The producer, Toronto’s 49th Parallel Films, describes the comedic buddy film, budgeted at a reported US$4 million, as ‘Withnail and I in space.’ Director Vincenzo Natali calls it ‘low-end Beckett.’

Natali, Miller and Hewlett hatched the idea for Nothing seven years ago, with Miller and Andrew Lowery ultimately writing the screenplay. Miller and Lowery, a scribing duo who package themselves as The Drews (Boys and Girls and Simon Sez), have a five-picture deal with Miramax and are currently penning a script for Universal Pictures.

On day two of principal photography in Toronto, Natali monitors a sequence in which uber-neurotic Andrew freaks out when a tiny but determined Girl Scout (Elana Shilling) has somehow insinuated herself into the pair’s slovenly abode. He would just as soon see her leave, but, feeling sorry for him, she insists on staying and making him a snack. At the end of the shot, Andrew leaps to his feet and implores her to go. Natali, knowing exactly what he wants, has the actors run through several close-ups and two-shots before pronouncing his satisfaction.

The cast and crew are almost uniformly young, including the bespectacled director himself, who is clad in shorts, T-shirt, and his lucky baseball cap. Many in the crew are coming off foreign productions, and they all seem to agree that this set, with a distinctly Canadian lack of ego, is a happier place to be. Natali has continued to work with most of the same crew since 1997’s Cube, including cinematographer Derek Rogers and gaffer Jeremy Hudspith. Those on board believe in Natali, even if he has yet to prove Cube wasn’t a fluke, and they believe in this project, even if the director himself admits he’s not sure how its complicated visuals will pan out.

Special effects will be accomplished through a mix of CGI, care of C.O.R.E. Digital Pictures’ Bob Munroe, who helped make Cube look far more costly than it was, and physical effects from Paul Jones of Paul Jones Effects. Over lunch, Natali is called to a dressing room where he erupts in hysterical laughter when Jones shows him the synthetic heads of Miller and Hewlett he has created.

The production design team, headed by Jasna Stefanovic (Josie and the Pussycats), has constructed the leads’ shoddy dwelling, interior and exterior – right down to the front-lawn shrubbery – in a studio beside the 49th Parallel offices at The Players Film Company. Philip Mellows, head of Players, long a force in Canadian commercial production, is one of the principals of 49th Parallel, along with producer Steve Hoban and executive producer Noah Segal.

Making concessions

Hoban says that when you’re thinking big on a low budget, certain concessions must be made, and Natali is well aware of that.

‘We are making some judicious cuts to our aspirations, but we are getting the movie we really want to get,’ Hoban says. ‘And, almost without exception, the compromises we’ve made have improved the character through-lines and/or the story itself.’

The overreaching spirit at work on Nothing is also what made the sci-fi flick Cube, Natali’s feature debut shot at the Canadian Film Centre for $1 million, a box-office hit in France (US$6 million) and Japan (US$4 million). In its home country, however, a half-hearted P&A campaign led to a brief theatrical run.

Last year, after four years of development hell, Natali finally got to direct his sophomore feature, Cypher (formerly Company Man), a US$7.5 million espionage thriller starring Jeremy Northam and Lucy Liu, produced by the U.S.’s Pandora Films. (Miramax will distribute.) Following a long post-production cycle on Cypher, Natali is right back at it, dealing with the strain of a Canadian production with, predictably, fewer resources. Financing on Nothing is divided entirely among German distributor Senator International (world sales minus Japan, the U.S. and Canada), Klockworx (Japan) and Alliance Atlantis (Canada). 49th Parallel retains U.S. rights.

Natali does not see Nothing’s modest budget as a step backward.

‘For me, it was just about what’s the most interesting project available for me to make,’ he says outside the studio during a welcome break from the claustrophobic set. ‘And, actually, the financing for Nothing came together almost simultaneously with that for Cypher. One day I would like to make a movie with a larger budget, but the motivating factor here is really the material.’

Based on Cube, Natali realizes his films may be best received overseas and works with that in mind.

‘I’ve developed relationships with the people who distribute my films, so I want very badly for them to make money,’ he says. ‘When we were writing this film, knowing it was a comedy, we wanted to make it less verbal and have a large degree of visual humor. That way it works better cinematically, and we know it will play better in Japan and France. Those are the people who got my films financed.’

-www.49thparallel.com