HE knows the route to the podium about as well as he knows the route home, but seven-time Gemini winner Jerry Ciccoritti is not taking his nomination for best direction in a dramatic program or miniseries in stride.

Ciccoritti, who took home the best director trophy last year for the miniseries Trudeau, is nominated for his work on The Many Trials of One Jane Doe, which has five nominations in total, including best drama, screenplay for Karen Walton and best actress for Wendy Crewson.

The Toronto-based helmer also directed Chasing Cain II: Face, also nominated as best MOW as well as in four other categories, including best screenplay for Andrew Rai Berzins, lead actor for Peter Outerbridge and lead actress for Alberta Watson. Ciccoritti coproduced Cain with Indian Grove’s Bernie Zukerman and Muse Entertainment’s Michael Prupas.

‘Every [nomination] is still a thrill,’ Ciccoritti says responding to the oft-asked question ‘Are you bored of the Geminis yet?’

Jane Doe’s odds of taking home hardware are good. Aside from the fact that the director is a perennial winner, the movie stars three-time Gemini recipient Crewson and is the kind of story Gemini juries are bound to eat up: a real-life case concerning a rape victim and her court battle with the Toronto police force for using her as bait to capture a serial rapist.

In the best direction category, Ciccoritti is up against Sturla Gunnarsson for 100 Days in the Jungle, Michel Poulette for Agent of Influence, Rodney Gibbons for Silent Night and Don McBrearty for The Interrogation of Michael Crowe.

One of the more curious realities for the director is the fact his Gemini tally has had little direct impact on his career in terms of creating opportunities. ‘I can’t say that these things help. I think they should help. They should count for something,’ he says.

Ciccoritti, who has been in the business for 20 years, won his first Gemini in 1994 for his work on an episode of series Catwalk, and won again in 1996 for an episode of Due South.

He has also won as director on MOW Net Worth (1997), series Straight Up (’97 and ’98) and MOW Chasing Cain (2001).

‘I hate to be the guy who keeps the old saw going of comparing us to the States, but if you direct a whole bunch of really quality MOWs for HBO and you get a bunch of Emmys, your phone is ringing off the hook. Everybody wants to work with you. Up here it just doesn’t happen. I don’t know why.’

Not too say that nothing has changed for Ciccoritti. He’s come a long way from his days directing Catwalk (the series that gave young ballerina Neve Campbell her first break). Indeed, it was only a few years ago that Ciccoritti told Playback that he continues shooting TV dramas as a means to keep money coming in while he pursues his real passion, feature film work. Ciccoritti’s feature films include Paris, France, Boy Meets Girl and The Life Before This.

His approach, however, changed last year with Trudeau.

Ciccoritti says he’s rethought his approach to the two mediums, recognizing that there are different audiences for both. This has allowed him to tailor a project to the medium to which it is best suited.

‘I think it’s unfair for a filmmaker to saddle a distributor with a movie that really is not going to have a large audience. It might just go to a couple of film festivals, that kind of thing,’ he says.

‘So the stuff that I’m developing now gets divided into two camps. ‘This is perfect for features. Whatever features demand, this is perfect for that. This other story? Actually, even I wouldn’t pay 10 bucks to see this in the cinema. But I would go out of my way to watch it at home, so I’m going to develop this as a TV movie.’

‘I don’t look at it as one format being better, or cooler than the other. They’re both equal. There are just two different presentational formats.’

He put that learning toward his latest project, Lives of the Saints, which was originally intended to be a feature, but ended up on CTV’s slate. When Ciccoritti, fresh off the success of Trudeau, heard that CTV was looking to spin the Nino Ricci novel into a two-part mini, he made it his mission to take on the project.

The project meant so much to him that he turned down an offer from producer Wayne Grigsby to direct the prequel to Trudeau earlier this year. But now that Lives is in post and Trudeau is still not in preproduction, Ciccoritti says he is ready to talk to Grigsby about the project.

‘[Lives of the Saints] is the most personal thing I’ve ever done,’ says Ciccoritti, who had been interested in adapting the Ricci novel for a decade. ‘It’s a big Italian-Canadian immigrant saga… this is my story; this is me; this is my people. I have a lot of people that I have to honor with this and I really have to bring out the best in me with this. I really threw myself into it. And I really identify with the main character, Vito Innocente, in a huge way.’

So much so, that Ciccoritti has high hopes for the mini when it premiers on CTV later this season. A Gemini next year could be the biggest thrill of all.