By the final night of a 27-day shoot, the cast and crew of Don McKellar’s latest feature, Childstar, have been to a different location almost every day, faced gripping cold, freezing rain and a winter wind that made shooting on Toronto’s lakeshore almost impossible. But what could be more fitting for a Canadian film about shooting a Hollywood blockbuster in the Great White North?

‘The idea came to me while I was writing another project,’ explains McKellar. ‘I started thinking more self-reflectively about moviemaking and making movies in Canada versus the United States, so it’s a reflection, in a sense, on my career.’ The sophomore director also cowrote and stars in the satirical feature from Toronto’s Rhombus Media.

Childstar is one of three Rhombus-produced features, with total budgets of roughly $17 million, that are to be distributed domestically by Montreal-based TVA Films. The others are The Saddest Music in the World from Guy Maddin and The Far Road, a Canada/Hong Kong coproduction by Francois Girard, which Rhombus has put on hold indefinitely.

The fall 2002 deal was made with the hope that a significant P&A spend would help these three films achieve what other homegrown English-language features have for the most part been unable to achieve: success at the Canadian box office. Despite Telefilm Canada’s efforts to boost revenues at the domestic box office, even Alliance Atlantis’ $7-million Foolproof, backed by a $3-million P&A push, brought in less than $500,000.

So what is the recipe for a commercially successful English-language film in Canada? For McKellar, who along with Girard cowrote Rhombus’ The Red Violin, which brought in $4 million at the Canadian box office and $10 million in the U.S., gunning for a blockbuster is not the way to go.

‘I’ve always felt that the best commercial chance for Canadian films is to make distinct personal films that have a chance to break out sideways,’ says McKellar. ‘I think one of the mistakes over the past couple of years is [that] people are trying to aggressively make commercial films.’

Like many of Childstar’s southern Ontario locations, the Old Mill in Aberfoyle is a little out of the way, keeping traffic on set to a minimum. Those present on Dec. 15 cram into the country inn’s kitchen pantry to watch McKellar and DOP Andre Turpin huddle around a single monitor placed precariously between teacups and a stack of empty pots.

Watching the communication between director and DOP, you would think they had been working together for years, but this is the first time McKellar has teamed up with Turpin. McKellar says they developed a comfortable dialogue throughout the course of the production.

The feature’s star, 13-year-old Toronto actor Mark Rendall (Blizzard, The Interrogation of Michael Crowe), is around the corner in the kitchen preparing to play drunk. Rendall’s character, Taylor Brandon Burns, Hollywood’s most celebrated TV child star and troubled adolescent, has run away from the Toronto set of his latest blockbuster action flick, The First Son, in which he plays the son of the president of the United States. He ends up in a restaurant kitchen after one too many, where his driver, Rich Schiller, an aspiring experimental filmmaker played by McKellar, finds him entertaining a kitchen staff equally intoxicated by the celebrity’s attention.

When McKellar was shopping the Childstar script, he says many investors turned away because the $5-million film depended so heavily on the character of Taylor Brandon Burns and many thought it would be difficult to find a young actor who could pull off the demanding role.

‘I was afraid, because when I first met Mark he was so amazing, charming and sweet that I thought he would have trouble playing this character who is a monster,’ says McKellar, ‘but he is a great actor.’ Given the film-within-a-film motif, Rendall not only had to play the part of a famous Hollywood child actor, but also his TV sitcom character and that of the president’s son.

The film’s large cast includes stars Dave Foley (Kids in the Hall), Eric Stoltz (The Butterfly Effect), Alan Thicke (Growing Pains) and Jennifer Jason Leigh as the child’s mother, but only McKellar, Rendall and Kristin Adams, who plays Rendall’s love interest, are on set to shoot the final scenes. Although the remaining cast and crew are exhausted from a hectic production schedule, the crowded pantry buzzes with laments that shooting must come to an end.

Producer Jennifer Jonas, who has worked closely with McKellar throughout much of his career, says the positive energy on set came from a cast and crew who were there because they wanted to be.

The homegrown feature about making an American movie in Canada with a Hollywood TV star who befriends an aspiring local filmmaker is as layered as it gets, but Jonas says it is definitely not one of those films full of inside jokes only Canadian filmmakers could appreciate.

‘Making features in the Canadian sector is such a rare animal. Most of the ones I’ve ended up working on transcend into this wacky state of grace because by and large everyone here is being paid less than what they make on U.S. or service productions. I like working on shows where people are there by choice, rather than for purely economic reasons,’ she says.

For McKellar, however, the last night of shooting marks the beginning of the next stage of production. With plans to hit the edit suite at Rhombus the following day, he says it’s difficult to have a clear sense of how the production process has gone so far.

‘At this point it’s my last day and I don’t know exactly what I have, which I think is healthy. You have to release your expectations at a certain point in filmmaking and I’m open to that,’ he says. ‘I’ve had panicked nights of regret and of anticipation and then great satisfaction, too, but no real objective reflection on the experience. I’ve barely had time to see rushes.’

Childstar plays on the differences between the Canadian and American film industries ‘to a certain extent, but not so much that it alienates people who aren’t initiated into Canadian film,’ says cowriter Michael Goldbach, who went from Canadian Film Centre student to cowriting with McKellar.

Making Childstar has given McKellar new insight into filmmaking in Canada and how the process has changed since he directed his first feature, Last Night, in 1998.

‘I think the film industry has changed rapidly. I feel it’s in a state of transition and it is hard to say whether it’s for the better or the worse, but it’s certainly extremely fragile, probably more fragile than I can remember in my career,’ he says.

-www.rhombusmedia.com