First a phone – now a movie camera?

The Canadian movie Happy Slapping was shot solely by five actors holding an Apple iPhone 4 in their hands and pointing the HD camera app at one another.

The film, which follows five “happy slapping” teens recording on their camera phones physical assaults on unsuspecting strangers, bowed this week at the Montreal World Film Festival.

Montreal writer/director Christos Sourligas insists his film is the first feature-length movie to be entirely shot using iPhone 4 cameras.

“It took a few days for the actors to get comfortable shooting with the [iPhone] cameras. After a while, it wasn’t a tool, it was part of their bodies,” Sourligas told Playback Daily.

How did his actors end up doubling as cinematographers?

Veteran DOP Luc Montpellier was initially on board to lense Happy Slapping, mostly at night and out-of-doors.

One day during rehearsals, however, while watching Sourligas block the actors, Montpellier thrust iPhone 4 handsets into the hands of the five main actors and asked them to capture specific angles.

After three days of experimenting with the iPhones, Montpellier reported back to Sourligas: the film needed to be shot entirely by the actors.

“[Montpellier] told me ‘I don’t need the glory to say I shot the first film on an iPhone. The kids should do it,” Sourligas said, recalling his conversation with the DOP.

What’s more, the actors shooting the movie aimed to be more visceral and more in keeping with the POV, hyper-realism shooting style of genre classics like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity.

“Luc said it would be fake if [Montpellier] shot the film. It would be too fluid, too real,” Sourligas remembers.

The director ended up trusting his DOP, to dramatic effect.

“Even if the film is a bit grainy, because we don’t have the proper light, if an actor is jittery because they’re nervous, that’s fine, because that’s what’s happening,” the director insisted.

That said, packed audiences for the first public screenings at the Montreal World Film Festival were gripped by more than lighting or a jittery camera.

Sourligas recalls emotional tremors running through the Montreal audiences, and even a few collective gasps, due to the film’s slow-building tension from occasional happy-slapping to assaults on unwitting victims.

The director insists his “bullying film” was inspired by personal experience.

“I grew up in a working class area of Montreal, where the culture was eat-or-be-eaten. It wasn’t just in the streets or at school, it was at at home,” Sourligas remembers.

The filmmaker insists he was even bullied and bullied others himself in a past life as a Montreal TV program distributor.

“I worked in a toxic environment for 12 years, so I made the film in part to get over that experience,” Sourligas said.

The five main teen characters in Happy Slapping, three boys and two girls, set out for thrill-seeking kicks one night in a bid to become famous on YouTube.

Before long, however, the teen mayhem degenerates into terror as the five misfits turn their anger and aggression on one another.

“There’s a lot to think about, and later people walked out of the theatres and immediately had conversations,” Sourligas said of the audience reaction.

After Montreal, Happy Slapping will have a life on the festival circuit – Sundance and Berlin asked for DVD copies of the film to view – before a possible theatrical, pay-per-view and online download release.