Toronto: David Wu did not want to come back to Toronto. It was the spring of 2003 and he was in L.A. when news broke about a mysterious and deadly disease from Asia that was on the loose in the Ontario capital, where he has done a good deal of work since the late ’90s. Rumors and infections were spreading quickly. The same day he was to fly out of LAX, as his wife was trying to talk him out of his business trip, an increasingly panicky CNN reported that another 600 people had taken ill.

He was nervous, but flew back anyway and, as far as he knows, ended up being the only Chinese director in Toronto during the SARS crisis. Who better, he asks now with a laugh, to shoot the MOW?

‘If it’s not me, who else could it be?’ he says, on a break between scenes.

Plague City: SARS in Toronto is the inevitable movie of the week that sprung out of this city’s brief stint as a leper colony, and retells the mostly true story of how the city’s doctors, nurses and officials fought the killer bug and (as often) each other during the first of the two SARS outbreaks.

‘This is a really character-driven story. This is a story about heroes,’ says Wu (Snow Queen, 1-800-MISSING). It is suppertime on set and, in the next room, actors made up like half-dead patients are shuffling past the craft services table, poking suspiciously at the chicken. They look like zombies in hospital gowns. ‘It’s not about a disease or a virus. Otherwise we’d just be watching a two-hour documentary.’

Kari Matchett – who did similar work in 2003’s Betrayed, CBC’s retelling of the Walkerton E. coli tragedy – stars as a nurse along with Ron White and Rick Roberts, as doctors, and Brian Markinson, who plays a local politician.

The $4.3-million show shot last month in Toronto and Hamilton, ON, under producers Jon Slan of Toronto’s Slanted Wheel Entertainment (Friend of the Family), Elaine Scott (Starhunter), Wendy Grean (Adventure Inc.) and Rachel Rafelman (Friend of the Family). It will air on CTV later this year.

‘It’s a thriller,’ says Slan, not a procedural like CSI or The Movie Network/Movie Central’s similarly themed ReGenesis. ‘It’s a scary movie because SARS has horrific elements, plus, there’s a built-in ticking clock in the story as epidemiologists and scientists try to stop the spread of this thing. Because if the dam bursts, millions of people could die.’

Slan pitched the idea to Bill Mustos and Tecca Crosby at CTV during the first outbreak and, after a shot of CTF cash and a green light, handed the writing duties to Colin Friesen (City of Ice) and Pete McCormack (See Grace Fly). It shot over eight days in Hamilton and another three weeks in Toronto.

There was budget pressure, Slan admits, to shoot all of Plague City somewhere cheap such as Manitoba or Vancouver, but the idea didn’t sit well with the producers or with CTV. The city, and in particular its film industry, had been hit so badly by SARS that ‘it made no sense to do this anywhere outside Toronto,’ he says.

At least one of the crew agrees. ‘There’s a certain irony that I’m getting a paycheque for this,’ notes production designer Gordon Barnes, ‘when I lost pay because of the real SARS.’