The year is 2000 and American Beauty has just taken Oscars for best picture, best actor and best original screenplay. Among the Hollywood elite attending the coveted after-party, one very talented and very Canadian Don McKellar is seen schmoozing in the crowd. Taking a breath at the bar, he meets one very young and very American actor named Haley Joel Osment. McKellar is completely unfazed by the fact that he’s engaged in industry banter with an 11-year-old who should seem completely out of place, alone at a bar so many hours past his bedtime. But this quintessential child star, who came to fame in 1999’s The Sixth Sense, is not out of place nor out of context, which is what strikes McKellar as so fascinating.

‘After talking to him for a while, I started to think what a weird entity he was – a ready-made symbol of my encounters with Hollywood and my feelings about U.S. cinema,’ he recalls, while explaining the inspiration for Childstar, his latest feature, set to make its world premiere as a special presentation at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival.

In fact, Childstar, McKellar’s sophomore effort as director/cowriter/ star, will be screened in what until this year was the Perspective Canada opening slot – otherwise known as the Friday night pre-‘Schmooze’ film. But with TIFF having shed the Perspective Canada program, which McKellar says ‘is probably a good move since last year most of the Canadian filmmakers were trying to get out of it and a lot in the industry felt it was ghettoizing Canadian films,’ he’s thrilled to have his film positioned there.

While the idea for Childstar was inspired by McKellar’s encounter with Osment, the script was actually born when he met newbie screenwriter Michael Goldbach at the Canadian Film Centre a few years later. At the time, Goldbach was a resident and McKellar a guest speaker. After seeing some of the young writer’s work, McKellar, who was busy adapting Blindness (which he is still adapting) by Brazilian author Jose Saramago, basically handed over his idea for Childstar to Goldbach

A dark satire, the film follows the story of unruly 12-year-old Hollywood brat Taylor Brandon Burns, portrayed by Toronto actor Mark Rendall (Blizzard), who manages to get lost while in Canada filming a blockbuster action movie dubbed The First Son. The story is told through the eyes of Rick (McKellar), a local indie-filmmaker-turned-set-driver who ends up in an affair with the boy’s mother, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh. The cast also includes Kid in the Hall Dave Foley, Gil Bellows (Ally McBeal), Peter Paige (Queer as Folk), former Jason Leigh beau Eric Stoltz and Michael Murphy (Magnolia).

‘Part of the appeal of Childstar is that it never falls into that Richie Rich syndrome, where in the end we find out that he’s a sweet kid after all,’ says McKellar of his $4-million project. ‘It’s a very ambitious film with a huge number of locations [in Toronto], a huge ensemble cast and big set pieces.’

The biggest challenge was, of course, money and time. But in addition to these intrinsically Canadian obstacles, ‘there was a lot of skepticism,’ says McKellar, ‘over my getting a kid to play the lead role.’

Not only did McKellar quell those concerns, he managed to put together a cast worthy of American indie nirvana.

Jason Leigh a shoo-in

Jason Leigh, with whom McKellar worked on David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ and who later made a guest appearance on McKellar’s TV series Twitch City, was a shoo-in for the role of the promiscuous stage mom – and a nice reflexive touch, when you think back to her own child-star roots (who can forget Jason Leigh losing her virginity as a teen in Fast Times at Ridgemont High?).

McKellar picked up Stoltz (Pulp Fiction), who plays the child star’s father, after the American actor stated in the National Post that he’d love to be cast in the film. ‘I literally took him up on it when I read the story. It’s amazing how genetically perfect he and Jennifer are for the roles of Taylor’s parents.’

In addition to the film’s cast, McKellar also teamed up for the first time with fellow festival darling and DOP Andre Turpin, whose talent and experience as director on the Jutra Award-winning Un crabe dans la tete gave McKellar the freedom to create the look and feel he wanted.

‘The film is slightly more stylish and it’s shot loosely, although it doesn’t look that way,’ says McKellar. ‘It goes against the current trend of handheld faux doc filmmaking. It has a more formal and poppy look, with bold compositions and mise-en-scenes.’

Childstar was shot entirely in Toronto in the dead of winter earlier this year, with the city occasionally doubling as sunny L.A. – a particularly interesting feat when trying to create a Malibu beach house out of a Toronto mansion on the stormiest day of the year.

That said, the film is as Canadian as its maker, who admits he’s considering taking his career south of the border.

‘I prefer life up here, but in the last little while, with what’s going on with Telefilm, I’ve been thinking about the U.S. for the first time,’ McKellar says, in reference to the agency’s move away from personal, auteur-driven films. ‘Although as long as I can work here, I’m happy to stay, because there’s nowhere else in the world where you have this kind of control and autonomy as a filmmaker – that’s what Telefilm has to preserve.’

Childstar doesn’t, however, look and feel like a ‘Canadian film in the worst way,’ adds McKellar. ‘It’s a consciously perverse response to Telefilm. It’s not locked into any particular genre, it doesn’t have a specific target, and we went into it without prejudging or preselling it, which hopefully means it’ll have a broader appeal.’

While McKellar has worked with most of English Canada’s top talent, he says if he had the choice to work with anyone in Canada he has yet to work with, he’d look directly to Quebec. ‘I’d love to facilitate more English/French collaborations.’

Meantime, Childstar will have its platform release in Toronto starting Oct. 1.

The film is produced by Toronto’s Rhombus Media and distributed by Montreal-based TVA Films.

McKellar is also costarring in Clean, an international copro involving Rhombus, which is set to debut as a TIFF gala and may even be slotted in the same night as Childstar.