Reduced advertising budgets may be a blessing in disguise for Canadian commercial directors, with workflow picking up slightly as agencies opt for homegrown talent over expensive imported directors, a move that may benefit the domestic commercial industry in the long run.

‘More and more, Canada is buying Canadian and I think it’s about time to protect our market and our talent,’ says Sylvain Archambault, director and partner at Montreal’s Jet Films, which, with 13 Canadian directors on its roster of 14, is an anomaly in comparison to big Toronto prodcos that tend to rep more imported talent than Canadian. ‘By keeping enough boards for Canadian directors, we are going to retain our talent and develop a real industry,’ he says

Claire (Cash) Cashman, executive producer at The Park City Film Company, which reps six Canadian directors out of 19, says a lot of the Toronto shop’s clients are requesting exclusively Canadian reels because that’s all the budgets can support. ‘A few years ago everyone wanted to use hot international directors and most production houses have them on their rosters,’ she says. ‘But now, especially this year, it seems like budgets can’t even afford to fly people in.’

Canadian directors may be getting more work now because of low budgets, but it was also poor economic conditions that attracted foreign directors to Canada in the first place.

The influx of foreign directors into Canada was partially a response to the economic downturn in the late ’80s to early ’90s, which resulted in a saturated marketplace and meant that big-name, mostly American, directors were taking smaller spots for less money and were willing to come north of the border to find work.

Carlo Trulli of Toronto’s Spy Films says that as a result of this, ‘Canadian directors became second choice for most people,’ a difficult label to overcome. ‘Most [agencies] overlook the fact that there is some serious awesome talent here on the domestic side,’ he says.

The divide between Canadian and imported directors began to take hold in 1991 when Christina Ford opened Imported Artists Film Company in Toronto, offering clients access to star-status, non-resident directors, and most production companies followed suit, making Canadian rosters increasingly less Canadian.

When Imported was born, Ford says she encountered considerable opposition from the local industry, which rightly feared imported talent would take work away from domestic directors. From her perspective, the business was already becoming increasingly international, a point which she says was confirmed when other prodcos followed suit in ’92 and ’93.

‘Although everybody saw it as anti-Canadian, I actually saw it as protecting Canadian investment,’ says Ford. ‘There was nothing to stop a U.S. company from coming up to Canada and producing directly. It was my thinking that [imported directors] were coming anyway and there should be a production house standing accountable to the advertising agency.’

Despite Imported’s continued specialization in non-resident talent, Ford says the Canadian industry definitely needs to do something to keep the next generation of homegrown directors alive and points to improving training as a realistic means of helping Canadian directors survive an overall globalization of the commercial industry.

For the time being, Canadian directors are picking up more boards as budgets shrink, but Ford says she is concerned that they are not getting the type of work that will sustain successful careers. ‘Generally I’ve not seen a lot of fantastic low-budget scripts, which is the difference between making a director or not,’ she says.

Also, whether or not the increased workflow for Canadian directors will be maintained once the economy picks up again remains to be seen.

Park City executive producers Cashman and J.J. Lyons, as well as head of sales Cheryl Munroe, worry agencies will not go with second-choice Canadian directors once they can hire the big names again.

From the agency perspective, international directors are often the safe choice. ‘To take a chance on a Canadian, who is young and has potential, as opposed to someone who has already proven themselves, is a bit risky,’ says Stephen Jurisic, creative director at Toronto agency John Street. However, he also points out that Canadian directors would not be seen as risky if the domestic industry were stronger. ‘If all the production companies got together and made an agreement that a certain amount [of production] has to be Canadian to offer a discount to agencies and clients, you would build the industry,’ he says.

However, Chris Bowell, president at Circle Productions’ Vancouver office, does not think championing local talent is such a smart move. ‘It’s a world marketplace and 70% of our revenue is foreign dollars. We can’t survive just being ‘We Are Canadian,” he says.

But it is the world market that Trulli has in mind when he says encouraging domestic talent has become a vital consideration to the long-term viability of Canada’s commercial industry. He worries that if local talent is not developed, Canada’s commercial industry will gradually become more and more service-oriented, taking business away from Canadian agencies and changing the nature of commercial production.

Trulli, for one, is acutely aware that Canadian directors are getting noticed internationally, with comedic directors Martin Granger of Avion Films and Paul Middleditch of Industry Films recognized at the 2002 Cannes International Advertising Festival.

Building on this, Spy’s mission now, he says, ‘is to take our domestic directors and export them into other markets.’

-www.spyfilms.com

-www.importedartists.com