When Quebec director Lea Pool faced post-production on The Blue Butterfly, her biggest production to date, she turned to Michel Arcand, the editor on most of her previous features, to cut the piece.

The Montreal-based Arcand’s collaboration with the helmer dates back to Pool’s 1984 debut feature La Femme de l’hotel. Aside from editing other Pool films including Emporte-moi, Arcand’s three-decade career also spans the Canuck films Seraphin, The Gospel of John, Sunshine and The Art of War, as well as Schwarzenegger actioner The 6th Day and the James Bond flick Tomorrow Never Dies. He has won Genies for the Jean-Claude Lauzon films Leolo and Un Zoo la nuit and also owns a pair of Gemeaux awards.

(Arcand’s family name begs the question whether he is related to director Denys – in fact, they have grandparents who were cousins. ‘In Quebec, there aren’t that many Arcands, but probably 50 percent of them are working in media,’ he quips.)

The Blue Butterfly is an English-language copro between Montreal’s Galafilm Productions and the U.K.’s Global Arts. Inspired by true events, it tells the story of 10-year-old Pete Carlton (Marc Donato from White Oleander), who has a brain tumor and a life expectancy of only several more months. His beleaguered mother Teresa (Pascale Bussieres) somehow convinces Pete’s hero, Alan Osborne (William Hurt), an entomologist who hosts a TV show, to help the boy realize his final wish – to catch a fabled Blue Morpho butterfly in the rain forests of Central America.

Perhaps due to its large budget by Canadian standards (a reported $13.8 million) and the fact the crew shot on location in Costa Rica, Arcand says that Pool shot more footage – about 300,000 feet – than she usually does. (This still pales in comparison to the likes of the Bond film, on which the editor had to sift through one million feet’s worth.)

In order to get across a scene’s desired feeling, Pool tends to opt for master shots and long takes.

‘Lea is a very unconventional kind of director in the way that she tries to get the emotion more than anything else,’ Arcand explains. He adds that he and Pool make a good match because, by contrast, he tends to be more cool and analytical. ‘I would be the first spectator of what she did, being very critical. She tends to fall in love with all her material, and I’m more like, ‘Is this sentence needed? What are we trying to say in this scene?”

The FX-heavy action flicks Arcand has cut have required his input earlier in the creative process, whereas more modestly budgeted productions usually can’t afford an editor until it’s time to start cutting. But because his relationship with Pool is so close, she will hand him early drafts of screenplays for his feedback.

Arcand admits to referencing other films when preparing for a new project. But instead of seeking films that are similar on the surface – as in movies that share The Blue Butterfly’s nature theme – he looks at films with comparable characters and relationships. Since miracles play a part in Butterfly, Arcand watched various children’s films that had a magical atmosphere – encompassing everything from Disney animation to European fare.

Butterfly features actors with varying levels of experience: Oscar winner Hurt, Quebec veteran Bussieres, and relative newcomer Donato. One might expect it would be more challenging to edit the boy’s performance, but Arcand says that, in fact, the opposite was true.

‘You always think of what’s being said, more than [worrying about] the actors,’ he says. ‘William Hurt is a very difficult actor for an editor, because he doesn’t relate to written text. He grabs the text, puts it in his head, and then tries to deliver it, and every take is in some way different. You have to sometimes work around what he does in order to get what you think – or the director thinks – is good for the film.’

Post-production on the film stretched from January 2003 until year’s end, progressing on and off as some of the U.K. funding fell through and the entire project had to be refinanced. While sound editing was done in the U.K., Arcand performed the offline picture edit at his usual haunt – Montreal’s Splice Postproduction.

Special effects, including the CG titular butterfly and Pete’s nightmare sequences, were handled at Montreal’s Media Principia. Digital VFX supervisor Gunnar Hansen would frequently drop by Arcand’s editing suite to monitor the progress of the FX shots. The FX capabilities of Arcand’s Avid system enabled him and assistant Louis-Martin Paradis to hand their cut to the FX shop with a clear indication of what the FX should look like.

But for one particular sequence, Arcand and Paradis had to rely more heavily on the folks at Media Principia. In the scene, Alan and Pete, chasing after their prey, fall into a pit and hang on for dear life.

‘There were a lot of blue screens and we didn’t know what a lot of things would look like,’ Arcand recalls. ‘It’s very hard in those moments to anticipate what other people [in the post process] are going to do, and we never saw the final result until everything was done.’

Arcand cut the film on an older v7 Avid Media Composer. By comparison, he is currently working on a v11 Media Composer for the international copro White on White, directed by Tomorrow Never Dies helmer and Ottawa native Roger Spottiswoode. The film tracks the further misadventures of the sociopath title character from The Talented Mr. Ripley, this time with Barry Pepper in the lead. Arcand says he is impressed with v11’s compression method and the resultant image quality on his monitor.

Arcand hooked up with Spottiswoode through his life partner, editor Dominique Fortin, one of four editors on the 1995 Hiroshima miniseries Spottiswoode codirected. When Spottiswoode offered Fortin the Bond film, she negotiated to have Arcand work with her and they shared credit.

The Blue Butterfly opened in Montreal Feb. 20 and is slated for a March 5 release in Toronto and Vancouver, with rights shared by Odeon Films and Film Tonic.

-www.thebluebutterfly.com