Of the five dramatic features from debut directors in this year’s Perspective Canada, only two are gritty, urban dramas, while the other three are – get this – comedies! To those who said Men with Brooms wouldn’t change anything, TIFF lightheartedly presents Peter O’Brian’s Hollywood North, Anita McGee’s The Bread Maker and Sudz Sutherland’s Love, Sex and Eating the Bones to complement the seriousness of Jacob Tierney’s Twist and Nathaniel Geary’s On the Corner.

What is not always so funny is the long road in getting these films made.

Way back in 1983, O’Brian found a script called Hollywood by Barry Healey. After several revisions, more than a few false starts because of funding woes and 18 years, the project, renamed Hollywood North, went to camera last August with O’Brian, who originally just wanted to produce it, in the director’s chair for the first time.

‘It’s the one film that kept getting away from me as a producer,’ says O’Brian, whose producer credits span The Grey Fox to My American Cousin. ‘I had it 75% financed three times over those almost 20 years, and 100% financed once, but that deal didn’t close. There have been so many disappointments with Hollywood North along the way that I came to the conclusion about three or four years ago that the only way I was going to get the film made was to do it myself.’

Hollywood North is about Canadian tax-shelter films in the 1970s, and O’Brian feels that may be part of the reason it didn’t get made sooner: the industry simply wasn’t ready to see a film poking fun at it.

‘I think enough time has gone by and we’re secure enough that we can laugh at ourselves now a little bit,’ he says.

O’Brian managed to assemble an impressive cast that includes Alan Bates, Matthew Modine, Deborah Kara Unger, Jennifer Tilly, John Neville and Alan Thicke.

The Bread Maker director McGee, from St. John’s, had until now done almost everything in the business except direct a feature. She has produced, written and directed short films, docs and TV drama, and even served as a line producer on the feature The Bingo Robbers.

Her first feature in the director’s chair is about a woman who becomes a celebrity at the baking factory where she works after one of her romance novels gets published. McGee has the distinction of not only being the only Atlantic filmmaker to have a feature accepted into Perspective Canada, she is also the only woman among the first-time helmers. It is also the first time she has directed something she hasn’t written herself. The script is by Sherry White, who also stars.

Logical next step

‘I really wanted to [direct] my first feature, but my scripts didn’t really lend themselves to a low-budget format. They’re quite involved,’ she says. ‘But [directing a feature] seemed the right thing for me to do for my career – the logical next step.’

The film had to be shot with a big interruption because of a funding issue. ‘We had a $100,000 gap we were trying to close for 18 months,’ says McGee. ‘It was difficult, but we hung in there and shot in two phases – half of it with the three leads in phase one, and everything requiring a bigger cast and crew in phase two.’

Love, Sex and Eating the Bones, about a couple trying to take a hold of real love in a world obsessed with the illusion of it, had a couple of obstacles to overcome, says director Sutherland. The biggest was that his film is funny.

‘At the time we started this there weren’t any comedies really happening,’ says Sutherland. ‘The whole regime was out of the auteur school, where basically it’s not about the Canadian audience, but instead selling it to Europe. It was harder than we expected, but we always knew it was going to be hard working in Canada.’

Sutherland, who pays the bills directing on W’s Tell It Like It Is and Life Network’s plastic surgery program Skin Deep, hopes to create awareness of the film and its stars, Hill Harper and Nayokah Afflack, at TIFF. He feels celebrating the actors in Canadian films will pave the road to a star system in English Canada, similar to the successful one in Quebec.

‘A lot of the press for films in Canada is all director-centred and I find no value in that,’ says Sutherland. ‘It’s good for people who like film, but in terms of people who buy tickets, they want to see the actors in the film. We have some great actors.’

Geary made his first feature about something he knows – Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. On the Corner is about two siblings trying to survive on the streets where Geary actually works. His life outside filmmaking is spent working at the Portland Hotel, a government-run housing complex for the mentally ill and substance abusers.

Technically, this is Geary’s third film about the area. The first was the short doc The Community Responds in 1995, followed by the short Keys to Kingdoms in 1998. He says his fascination with the neighborhood began after he returned home from university.

‘I was really shocked and fascinated that this neighborhood could exist in a wealthy and prosperous city like Vancouver,’ he says. ‘I was fascinated by the way people lived. I found it amazing in its desperateness.’

Surprisingly, Geary says it wasn’t as difficult to get On the Corner off the ground as some may think, given its honest and troubling look at Vancouver.

‘I think people really were taken by the script early on,’ says Geary. ‘We got some development money and then we went through Praxis (a Vancouver-based scriptwriting development program). People in Vancouver pay attention to Praxis and what scripts are coming out. That really helped a lot.’

Of all the first features, Twist, by 23-year-old actor-turned-director Jacob Tierney, has the most impressive track record thus far. In addition to making it into TIFF, Tierney’s disturbing spin on Oliver Twist was invited to the International Critics’ Week at the Venice Film Festival, the only North American film to be so honored.

He wrote the first draft of the script when he was just 19, negatively inspired by a music production of Oliver Twist in London.

‘I liked the idea of using Oliver Twist because the material is so familiar to most people,’ he says. ‘It’s almost like a myth or a fable, so it becomes a very tempting thing to toy with.’

Tierney goes on to say that making Twist (which stars Terminator 3’s Nick Stahl, a friend and former roommate of Tierney’s) was no easy task despite the fact that he didn’t have to pay royalties on the classic and popular story.

‘No one wanted to really make this movie,’ he says. ‘I don’t think it was that I was a first-time filmmaker, because people have always seemed okay with that. The script is really dark and heavy and people didn’t think it had a chance of making a lot of money.’ (Twist is distributed in Canada by Christal Films.)

All five directors hope to use TIFF as a chance to talk about follow-up features with interested parties. While Geary and McGee will be looking for a distributor, Sutherland and O’Brian have already buddied with THINKFilm for Canadian distribution rights. All five directors share the personal and professional satisfaction of having gotten a feature in TIFF on their first try.

‘I think it says a lot to the industry if a film gets accepted in Toronto,’ says McGee. ‘I think it’s understating it to say that this is a very big thing for [my] film.’

‘Because the festival is the greatest showcase in the world for Canadian film, and I’ve made a Canadian film about Canadian film, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do if I didn’t make it into the festival,’ says O’Brian. ‘I was overwhelmed by that affirmation.’