Montreal: If it’s business as usual this summer for movie producer Don Carmody, then he’s in some Canadian city overseeing the production of a major motion picture. A big part of his job is reassuring other production executives, who are generally quite far away, that all is well, while keeping huge daily expenditures on track, and, occasionally, reading the riot act to cast and crew.

Here’s a summary update of Carmody’s recent productions.

He spent the first half of this year in preproduction and in principal photography on Gothika, a Dark Castle Entertainment supernatural thriller for Warner Bros. Pictures and Columbia Pictures (overseas rights), which filmed on location and in studio in Montreal through July 16.

This month he is off to Toronto to start filming Aug. 11 through to the end of October on Resident Evil: Apocalypse, an Impact/Constantine sequel for distrib Sony Pictures.

And ’02 was not very different.

It began with the completion of Chicago, best picture winner at this year’s Oscars. Carmody has a coproducer credit on the movie, which was shot in Toronto for Miramax Films. Later in the year, he tried something a little different, exec producing Wrong Turn, a New Regency/20th Century Fox teen horror flick, also filmed in Toronto.

In a career that now spans 30 years, Carmody has produced, line produced and exec produced movies all over the world. But if he has a special, professional niche quality, it appears to be as the most trusted man in Hollywood when it comes to filming on location in Canada.

Bringing in highly competitive production dollars to Canada earned Carmody a personal appreciation award from the governments of Canada, Ontario and the City of Toronto, and a scholarship in his name at the Canadian Film Centre.

US$500M in production

Since 1996, it’s estimated Carmody has brought into Canada and subsequently managed, mostly as exec producer, something in the order of US$500 million worth of production.

In the past eight years, those films have also included David Mamet’s The Heist, a WB release shot in Montreal and Boston in 2002; Rob Marshall’s Chicago, shot in Toronto between December 2001 and March 2002; the WB releases Angel Eyes, shot in Toronto in 2000; 3000 Miles to Graceland, filmed in Vancouver and Las Vegas in 2000; The Pledge, shot in Vancouver and Reno, Nevada in 1999; The Whole Nine Yards, starring Bruce Willis and shot in Montreal and Chicago in 1999; and four Miramax Films releases, shot at least in part in Toronto between 1996 and 1998: In Too Deep, Studio 54, Good Will Hunting and The Mighty.

Carmody seems pleased with his new assignment in Toronto, where his wife, Catherine Goudrier, and director Gail Harvey are filming the Canada/U.K. feature Some Things That Stay.

On filming Gothika in Quebec, Carmody says, ‘I come back all the time because I love the place. But I grew up here.’ The main attraction for major motion pictures, however, he says, continues to be the state-of-the-art studios built by Mel ‘Field of Dreams’ Hoppenheim.

In an interview with Playback at Carmody’s office at Mel’s Cite du Cinema, the producer says his primary response to a motion picture idea is based on its commercial feasibility or distribution potential.

‘My personal tastes definitely run to the commercial side as far as what kind of movies I make,’ he says.

‘I can’t tell you how many films have come across the desk and I’ve read them and said, ‘Well, I’m not really interested in doing this,’ and then a couple of years later they’ll come out, somebody else will have made it and I might say, ‘You know, that’s a really cool movie, maybe I should have done it.’ But at the time I either didn’t understand it, or have a taste for it, or whatever. Perhaps it’s just a question of the way the story is told or put together. I tend to see the commercial aspect first in virtually everything I do.

‘On a picture like The Pledge [at the time, Carmody was president of production at Franchise Pictures, which produced the film for WB], I really thought the ending needed to be changed and made more commercial. And I’m sure if it had been changed it would have been more commercial [he laughs]. I think [director] Sean Penn made an amazingly intelligent film. Sean is an actor’s director without question, but is he an audience’s director? I don’t think so.’

And despite a best-in-years performance by Jack Nicholson as a worn-out, retired police chief searching for a serial murderer, Carmody says The Pledge’s relatively poor box-office showing was not because its appeal was limited to an older audience. Rather, he says, it was the result of ‘a very downbeat ending, and downbeat endings are not box office. People like happy endings, in books, movies, in plays.’

Like it or not, Carmody says ‘the paying audiences are still the 16-to 25-year-olds and the attention span is very tight. The MTV generation likes frenetic pacing, and they like frenetic cutting.

‘That’s one of things I was happy about with Chicago as opposed to Moulin Rouge. I actually didn’t care for Moulin Rouge all that much because I didn’t like the pacing or the cutting style. And I was very pleased that Chicago could strike a happy medium between the traditional musical and the Moulin Rouge style of MTV-type musicals. I think that was one of the reasons for [Chicago’s] success. We ended up pleasing a wider range of audiences rather than just kids.’

While many of Carmody’s more recent productions have been thrillers such as City by the Sea, produced for WB in 2001, or edgy comedies such as The Whole Nine Yards for WB, aimed at a generally older demographic, Carmody says he was happy to return to the teen horror genre with the recently released Wrong Turn, exec produced by Carmody and filmed on location in Toronto for New Regency and 20th Century Fox.

‘I hadn’t done a straight-on horror movie for 20 years. It was kind of a throwback to ’70s horror movies, which I kind of admired, and the kinds of movies I had made [including David Cronenberg’s Rabid in 1976 and Richard Marchand’s Jagged Edge in 1985]. And quite frankly, my kids, who are 15 and 17 years old, weren’t particularly interested in some of my more recent films… So I wanted to make a movie that would impress them. This very little picture fit my schedule, and it was kind of fun. I’ve done it and now I’m back to adult movies!’

Filming on Gothika

Gothika, which Carmody is exec producing, is his first collaboration with prominent Hollywood producer Joel Silver and Silver’s Dark Castle Entertainment.

‘Joel is an amazingly talented producer,’ says Carmody. ‘He makes very commercial pictures and is also a genius at promotion. It’s been a very interesting experience.’

In late June, on day 33 of the 46-day shoot, principal unit filming on Gothika was being done late into the night. And while French director Mathieu Kassovitz and the cast, including lead Halle Berry, Robert Downey Jr., Charles Dutton and Penelope Cruz, were resting up for the late-night action, Carmody’s days were filled with a myriad of seemingly urgent phone calls, at least one every three minutes.

Developments had taken a turn towards the very serious, and Carmody and team were obliged to re-charge all the departments on Gothika and get production back on track sans delay after a three-week shutdown in production, caused by an accident and arm injury to Oscar winner Berry.

Berry plays a successful criminal psychologist who awakens as a patient in her own mental asylum, charged with a murder she can’t remember.

Carmody had to deal with significant insurance issues, not to mention ridiculous, potentially ruinous stories in the local consumer press.

The producer stayed cool, but Berry’s accident and the subsequent shutdown obviously constituted a major scare. Ultimately, things turned out fine, and when the picture wrapped principal photography July 16, word on the set was that ‘the footage is fabulous.’

‘Every picture has its challenges and every picture has its good times and bad times. It’s always entertaining. I never regret what I’m doing,’ says Carmody.

-www.doncarmody.com