Favor bank pays dividends
• Writer/director: Blaine Thurier
• Producer: Oliver Linsley
• Production company: Doghouse Films
• Key cast: Tygh Runyan, Paul Anthony, Marnie Robinson, Sarah Lind, Benjamin Ayres, Hrothgar Mathews
• Distributor: None
• International sales: Doghouse Films
• Budget: $50,000
Last December, during the typical winter production slowdown, Vancouver producer Oliver Linsley and some filmmaking friends were bored. So they decided to make an ultra-low-budget indie just for fun.
‘At that time of the year you can either sit at home and play your Xbox or make a movie,’ explains Linsley.
The result is A Gun to the Head, the story of a reformed criminal who escapes his wife’s dinner party for a quick beer with his cousin/former partner in crime and winds up seduced back into a world of drugs, guns and gangsters.
Writer/director Blaine Thurier (Male Fantasy, Low Self-Esteem Girl), who also happens to be the keyboardist with indie rock band The New Pornographers, says the script is inspired by a real-life gangster he knew years ago.
‘He was this sad, middle-aged guy who always had a pistol and a bullet-proof vest on and had all sorts of violent stories,’ recalls Thurier. ‘He told me, ‘If you ever write about any of this, I will find you and kill you.’ But it was too good to pass up.’
Shot over 16 days, the film cost just $50,000 to make, all of which was cash-flowed by Linsley’s Doghouse Films, which holds world rights.
‘I went to the favor bank,’ he jokes, noting that crew worked for free and actors were paid $50 a day under the Union of B.C. Performers low-budget deal.
Linsley adds that if crew were paid their regular day rate, the budget would ring in at $500,000.
‘But fundamentally I don’t think the film would be that much different if we made it for $1.5 million,’ he says. ‘We would just have more money in our pockets from getting paid.’
The next game plan is to use any domestic sales to recoup Doghouse’s investment and everyone who worked on the project will get a cut of the back end if the film makes money.
Doghouse has another feature in the festival, Machotaildrop, so ‘This is a coming-out party for Doghouse Films,’ he says. ‘We hope to gain some notoriety at TIFF which we can use to build relationships and form partnerships with distributors to take us to the next level.’