Toronto: Clement Virgo rewinds the tape, and the woman on the bike zips backward, up a sun-washed street thick with trees. ‘Toronto is so beautiful in the summer, you never get to see the city like this,’ he says, watching the scene again. It’s always fall or winter in Toronto movies, he notes, and that’s too bad because everything and everyone comes out looking stale and lifeless.

But not Lie with Me, his new feature, if the rushes are any indication. The scenes from the previous day’s work look as sunny as the Sahara, as green as a rain forest. It’s a good thing his schedule forced him into a summer shoot.

Virgo is partway through the three-week Toronto/Hamilton production, adapted from the way-racy novel by Tamara Faith Berger, his fiancee, that follows the love affair of two pretty young things – played by Lauren Lee Smith, the one on the bike, and Eric Balfour – who are out to rewrite the rules of love and sex.

It’s Virgo’s first film since Love Come Down in 2000, since which he’s done a lot of TV work, including director turns on HBO’s The Wire and The ‘L’ Word for Showtime, which is where he found Smith.

The pic will cost $2.2 million, produced by his company Conquering Lion, to be released by ThinkFilm in 2005. Virgo produces with Damon D’Oliveira and has again teamed with DOP Barry Stone (Rude) and editor Susan Maggi (Rude, Love Come Down). Polly Shannon, Kate Lynch and Kristin Lehman also star.

Virgo and D’Oliveira are also developing a handful of features, and a half-hour dramatic series for CBC based on their 1995 breakthrough Rude. ‘The story always lent itself to TV,’ says D’Oliveira. The company is also working with East Coast writer Chaz Thorne on the feature Poor Boy’s Game, looking to shoot in Halifax in 2005, and with author Douglas Century on an adaptation of his hip-hop memoir Street Kingdom, to be retitled Enter the Cipher.

Both men say they want to make more shows about the inner-city experience in Canada. ‘That’s both of our experience,’ says Virgo. ‘We both immigrated here in the ’60s or ’70s and our entry point to Canada was really urban. I never see that in a films here – that experience of the city.’