Last spring, when actresses Chloe Sevigny, Sandra Oh and Olympia Dukakis arrived on location in South Africa to shoot Thom Fitzgerald’s latest feature 3 Needles, their star power didn’t carry much weight in the remote Xhosa village, where most of the locals had never even seen a television, let alone been to a movie theater.

But it was neither fame nor money that attracted the stars to the $2.5-million independent feature produced by Fitzgerald’s Halifax prodco Emotion Pictures. According to producer Bryan Hofbauer, the script, the characters and the chance to work with Fitzgerald were what attracted the female leads.

The film thematically binds three separate stories by focusing on a character in each whose identity is completely altered by a global epidemic. However, Fitzgerald says, ‘after our experiences in South Africa, we were as transformed as the characters in the movie.’

The first story, which has already been partially edited by Susan Shanks, is about three nuns working in a remote African village played by Sevigny, Oh and Dukakis, who was especially eager to work with Fitzgerald again after appearing in his last feature, The Event.

Unfamiliar with the concept of acting, locals from the village, where the first storyline was shot, assumed the three female leads were actually nuns, and thus had great respect for them, Fitzgerald explains from L.A., where he was waiting to meet with actor Scott Speedman (My Life Without Me) to discuss his leading role in the film’s next instalment, to be shot in Montreal late this summer. Speedman stars alongside Sarah Polley, who plays a budding porn starlet.

Working on a film with multiple storylines that don’t need to be shot at the same time has led to a welcome slow production process, says Hofbauer. Principal photography started more than a year ago, and the film is slated for completion in early 2005.

‘It’s nice to have the time to shoot something then go to the editing room and put it together, so we can look at it and see where is the best place to go next,’ he says.

The film will not be ready for the Toronto International Film Festival in the fall, however Hofbauer says he hopes it will premier at Sundance 2005. But for Fitzgerald, taking his time on this project is essential to the film’s narrative.

‘Part of the process of making this film is spending time in each place,’ says Fitzgerald, explaining that the screenplay evolved dramatically during the nearly four months he spent in South Africa. ‘I really only wrote for six months leading up to the production, but I never stopped writing along the way.’

For example, after witnessing a local coming-of-age ceremony in which 18-year-old boys spent days living in the wild clad in white clay that made them appear ghost-like, Fitzgerald decided to write the ritual into the film.

3 Needles is being shot on 35mm film, unlike some of the director’s recent features, such as The Event and The Wild Dogs, which were produced on digital cameras with considerably smaller budgets.

‘I certainly feel a lot of creative doors opening on this project, but our resources are still quite limited,’ says Fitzgerald.

After 20 shooting days in South Africa and another three weeks in Halifax completed, the film is half-finished. The production will shoot for 11 days in Montreal, and while preparations for filming in China are still being negotiated, Hofbauer says they will spend approximately a month in Asia, with two weeks of principal photography planned. The details of the China portion of the story and key cast are currently being negotiated. Throughout the production, preliminary post is being done in-house at Emotion, with final post to be completed by Deluxe Toronto.

Fitzgerald says he hopes the Montreal shoot, planned for late summer, and the fall shoot in China are a bit less dangerous than the shoot in South Africa, which would have gone smoothly except for the production team seemingly being cursed.

Aside from the crew being plagued by African tick bite fever and the occasional mugging at knifepoint on the beach, the real trouble started when the director and producer were swept out to sea by a riptide. Luckily, both were rescued, but the very next day Hofbauer fell into a gorge and broke a rib, contributing to fears that the production was doomed. However, a few days later, Fitzgerald learned that his near-death brush with the mighty sea was literally a blessing in disguise.

According to a medicine doctor in the remote community, the tribal ancestors, who are believed to reside in the sea after death, simply wanted to get a closer look at the western director who had descended on the small village with his crew, 35mm camera and crane in tow. But the fact that he emerged from the sea fairly unscathed indicated to the community, many of whom were either cast in the film or worked as crew, that their ancestors had given the project their stamp of approval.

Distribution deals are currently being negotiated for 3 Needles, which received funding from Telefilm Canada, Astral Media, the Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation, Super Ecran, The Movie Network and Movie Central.