Halifax: Just three days after Poor Boy’s Game was in the can, Chaz Thorne went straight to work on his next picture – trading the docklands of Halifax for the rustic splendor of Nova Scotia’s countryside to make the dark comedy Pushing Up Daisies.

The picture went to camera last month with Thorne – whose Poor Boys’ script was directed by Clement Virgo during the summer – taking his first turn in a director’s chair.

The workload has been tiring, he admits, but it’s also ‘a massive learning experience.’

‘I learned a lot from [Poor Boy’s producer] Damon D’Oliveira. He was an awesome mentor.’ says Thorne. ‘On that experience I was able to raise the financing for this project.’

Some of that cash comes from producers John Watson and Pen Densham (Monster, The Outer Limits) who teamed with Thorne’s Halifax-based Standing 8 Productions through their Trilogy Entertainment North outfit in British Columbia. The pair signed on after reading Thorne’s script and, again, there was a quick turnaround. Watson read the script on a Thursday, Densham over the weekend, and by Monday they and Thorne were at work on a deal.

‘It wasn’t much of a sell for them,’ says Thorne, though ‘they’ve never made a feature for a small budget like this before. The schedule absolutely terrified them.’

Trilogy’s Neil Kaplan exec produces with Devesh Chetty of RGM Finance in Singapore. Seville Pictures will distribute in Canada, with world sales handled by Sooner Worldwide.

The picture stars Jay Baruchel of Million Dollar Baby as the inheritor of a funeral home in a small town where, darn the luck, no one is dying. So he and his embalmer sweetheart, played by Rose Byrne (Troy), start knocking off the locals to drum up business. Graham Greene also stars.

Thorne started penning the script about five years ago, working on it alongside Poor Boy’s, though the writing didn’t come easy.

‘Dark comedy is the hardest genre that exists,’ he offers, citing some famous flops. ‘There is a fine line. If you go into broadly comic you shatter the tenor.’ Go too far into drama, and the laughs evaporate, he says.

‘You’re continually watching the tone – every prop, performer, location. You have to have that in your head: ‘Am I going too far to either end of the spectrum?”

Fargo is a great example, he adds, of a recent dark comedy that gets it right.

Thorne plans to stay in the director’s chair, and to keep his pictures attached to his home province. He moved home a few years ago after doing ‘the Toronto thing’ and wants to keep his work rooted in his own East Coast experiences.

Which is not to say, he explains with a laugh, that he ever murdered his neighbors to make a little extra cash.

‘From now on, I just want to tell my own stories in my own way. I won’t rule it out, but I don’t think I’ll write screenplays for other directors,’ he says.