Pictured: Guy A. Lepage, Yves Simoneau and Rachid Badouri of L’Appât.

The producers of L’Appât (Bait), a French-language cop comedy to hit screens in Quebec Dec. 17 are trying something new with an old formula: they’ve cast an Arab comic along side a pure laine Francophone one.

Thirty-four year-old Quebec stand-up comic Rachid Badouri is Mohammed Ventura Choukroune, a stylish, multilingual French secret agent forced work with a stunned but well-meaning Quebec municipal police officer named Prudent Poirier, played by Guy A Lepage, the host of one of the province’s most popular shows, Tout le monde en parle (Everybody’s Talking).

“When I came back to Quebec I had a shock because it was so multi-ethnic. We wanted to reflect that in this film,” director Yves Simoneau told Playback Daily in an interview at distributor Alliance Vivafilm’s offices in Montreal. The Emmy-award winning director of Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee (2007) recently returned to Quebec from Los Angeles where he has lived for the past two decades.

The son of Moroccan Berber immigrants, Badouri is infamous on the comedy scene here for his ability to imitate everyone from Haitian cab drivers to Vietnamese restaurant owners and middle-aged Moroccan men (most notably his father). And audiences here love him. Since its debut in 2007 Badouri’s first one-man show, Arrête ton cinéma!, has sold over 230,000 tickets.

Simoneau conceived of the project over a late night dinner with screenwriter William Reymond and Lepage after both men had appeared on TMEP.

“I wanted to represent Montreal as it is,” Lepage told Playback Daily. “In Quebec screenwriters tend to write about their own little universe and this universe tends to be a very white, Francophone Quebec.”

“We wanted someone young of Africian origin. I didn’t want it to be the typical Frenchmen,” says Simoneau.

The comic potential of casting an actor who is the complete opposite of the Quebec cop was also a factor.

“We all know couples who are perfect for each other. But they are boring. We want to kill them. It’s much more interesting when there is a clash,” says Lepage who wrote the Quebec hit Un Gars et un Fils, a comedy about a bickering couple whose format sold around around the world.

L’Appât was initially supposed to be a $7.3 million coproduction with France, but Simoneau, who is coproducing with Josee Vallee (Cirrus Communications) decided to cut the budget and push through with the shoot when they Canadian financing came through last April.

“We got money from SODEC and Telefilm and the French funding was going to take to long, I was afraid the project would die.”

So the filmmakers slashed the budget to $5.4 million and rewrote the script in a matter of weeks.

“I had a moment of doubt where I thought we couldn’t do it. We had to change the narrative and find technical solutions. But we had momentum and an incredible cast,” says Simoneau.

And Badouri, whose character was described as having “pecs of steal,” was perhaps more prepared than most for his first feature film role.

“I had been working out since January. I had put on a bit of weight doing my stand-up show and I had a feeling someone was going to call me for a big project. And then in March I got the call.”