Regina: Starting to shoot a feature in Saskatchewan at the end of September can be a little risky, but two snow days and one Indian summer later, Terry Gilliam’s Tideland is enjoying a blessed shoot.

Principal photography began in and around Regina on Sept. 27. Things started to look grim when, several weeks in, the feature’s nine-year-old star, Vancouver native Jodelle Ferland (Kingdom Hospital, Wolf Lake) suffered a bug bite that left her lip too swollen to work. Then the area was hit with an incredible snowfall. Two days later, however, Ferland’s lip returned to normal, the snow melted and perfect weather returned.

‘The shoot is going fantastically well. We’re on time, on budget; we’re getting fantastic footage and [Gilliam] is a complete and total delight to work with. We’ve been so lucky,’ says producer Gabriella Martinelli of Toronto’s Capri Films, explaining that she was worried about the feature starting principal photography so late in the year. ‘It was a fluke. We had an Indian summer during the whole time we were shooting exteriors. Had we started even two or three weeks earlier, we would have been completely out of the cycle of good weather.’

By the second week in November, the weather in Regina turned cold, but the shoot had already moved indoors to Regina’s Canada Saskatchewan Production Studios. Martinelli says the facility went to great expense to make sure its sound capabilities met Gilliam’s high standards, improvements she thinks will be a clear asset to future productions that use the studio.

The $20-million film, described by Gilliam as ‘Alice in Wonderland meets Psycho’ at a Toronto International Film Festival press conference in September, is about a young girl who turns to her imagination to deal with a difficult situation.

Tideland is coproduced by Jeremy Thomas of U.K.-based Recorded Picture Company, with whom Martinelli also worked on David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch. Capri is distributing in Canada, with HanWay Films handling international sales.

While Martinelli says the decision to shoot in Saskatchewan was primarily location-driven, her first experience in the province also demonstrated the goodwill of the local population. One of the most difficult sequences to shoot was a train wreck that involved crashing five trains together, as well as hundreds of extras. Shot at night over Oct. 20 and 21, the sequence was so spectacular and realistic that people from the surrounding area thought there had been a real train crash and came running to help. Martinelli had to explain that the people walking around covered in blood were actors.

Tideland, set to wrap Dec. 8, also stars Jeff Bridges, Jennifer Tilly, Janet McTeer and Brendan Fletcher.