Montreal: It’s been a more than auspicious first month on the job for Montreal Film Commissioner Daniel Bissonnette. Taking over from Andre Lafond, Bissonnette is overseeing a flurry of U.S. productions, starting with the new Martin Scorsese film The Aviator, a big-budget biopic about eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes.

The film is in preprod at Mel’s Cite du Cinema/Technoparc, where four soundstages have been booked, and at the Alstom Canada rail yards. Leonardo DiCaprio, who starred in Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, plays Hughes and is one of the film’s producers.

The story opens as a young Hughes directs one of Scorsese’s favorite films, Hell’s Angels.

Dante Ferretti is the production designer. Robert Guerra and Claude Pare are the supervising art directors. Scorsese and Miramax Films co-chair Harvey Weinstein are among the exec producers.

Production one-off Aviator Films is a partnership between Miramax, Initial Entertainment Group, Warner Bros., Appian Way and Forward Pass.

The city estimates The Aviator, shooting July 7 to Oct. 8, represents a direct production investment of about $40 million.

Also in prep for a July 7 start, filming through to Aug. 27, is Slow Burn, a thriller starring Ray Liotta and LL Cool J from director Wayne Beach, exec producer Fisher Stevens and producer John Penotti (Famous, In the Bedroom). The production is a Muse Entertainment service shoot for GreeneStreet Films, with Matthew Rowland coproducing and Jacky Lavoie handling PM duties.

Prolific screenwriter David Koepp will direct Secret Window, Secret Garden from a script by Koepp and horrormeister Stephen King, based on King’s novella. Koepp’s long list of screenplay credits includes Hack (2002), Spider-Man (2002), Panic Room (2002) and Snake Eyes, shot in Montreal in ’98 by Brian De Palma.

Secret Window is a thriller/horror tale starring Johnny Depp (From Hell, The Ninth Gate), John Turturro (Two Thousand and None), Timothy Hutton and Ving Rhames.

Gavin Polone is producing for Columbia Pictures/Sony and Pariah Entertainment Group and Ezra Swerdlow is exec producer. The PM is Manon Bougie, who worked on the Paul McGuigan remake Wicker Park (working title), starring Josh Hartnett and shot here last fall for Lakeshore Entertainment and distrib MGM. Secret Window films July 14 to Oct. 3.

Currently shooting are D.J. Caruso’s Taking Lives, installed at the Cine Cite Montreal studios in St-Hubert from May 21 to Aug. 6, and the Mathieu Kassovitz thriller Gothika, starring Halle Berry, Robert Downey Jr. and Penelope Cruz.

Filming on Gothika, a Warner/Columbia Pictures coventure from producers Don Carmody and Joel Silver, had to be postponed when Berry was injured in an on-set accident May 14. However, Carmody says filming resumed June 16 and goes through to July 15.

Taking Lives, from Village Roadshow Productions and Warner, stars Angelina Jolie, Ethan Hawke, Kiefer Sutherland and Gena Rowlands in a story about an FBI agent on the trail of a serial killer. Mark Canton, Bernie Goldmann and Alan Blomquist are producing, with Bruce Berman exec producing. Tom Southwall is the designer. Montreal crew includes associate producer/PM Josette Perrotta and art director Serge Bureau.

According to the STCVQ, other major international shoots gearing up include the $25-million historical feature film drama Nouvelle France, from producer Richard Goudreau of Melenny Productions and director Jean Beaudin, and The Last Sign, from Transfilm producer Claude Leger and director Douglas Law.

There’s also talk of a CBS miniseries, First Family: The Reagans, and a new Jean-Claude Van Damme actioner, After Death.

Bissonnette says Montreal is in the immediate running on ‘at least five or six U.S. film and TV projects, [representing] total budgets of approximately $60 million.’ He says Frederic Bolduc of the Quebec trade bureau in Miami is organizing a visit of five to seven U.S. industry players to Montreal in September.

With few resources, Bissonnette says the commission has been obliged to use promo dollars for local logistics. There’s also a plan to attack the international commercial production market. ‘We could do better in promoting Quebec in New York City,’ he says.

The City of Montreal reports total independent production of $748 million in 2002, including film, TV and commercials, up from $696 million in 2001. The foreign (read U.S.) share was $368 million, while Canadian production came in at $380 million.

Docs, features from Films de l’Isle

The Rogers Documentary Fund is providing a $100,000 grant to Signe Perreault, a one-hour Films de l’Isle arts doc celebrating the life and work of the late choreographer and visual artist Jean-Pierre Perreault.

The $500,000 production is scripted by Andree Martin and will be directed by Tim Southam (The Bay of Love and Sorrows) beginning this fall. The broadcasters are Tele-Quebec and Bravo!.

Films de l’Isle producer Ian Boyd says the screenplay had to be rewritten following Perreault’s death last fall.

With dance pieces so difficult to finance, Boyd is thrilled with ‘the highly competitive’ core financing from Rogers. Signe Perreault will be shot in HD by DOP Nathalie Moliavko-Visotzky and includes some archival elements, but Boyd says the goal is to create ‘a visual poem’ and include interviews and photography of the artist’s paintings and sketches. The doc is being produced in association with Fondation Jean-Pierre Perreault and Universite du Quebec a Montreal.

Dieppe – 913, a one-hour doc written and directed by noted photographer Bertrand Carriere, will shoot this summer with cinematographer Carlos Ferrand. The doc is a portrait of Carriere’s new photographic installation at Dieppe commemorating the historic landing in 1942 which claimed the lives of 913 Canadians.

Specializing in North-South relations, Films de l’Isle’s latest feature is Royal Bonbon, a $1.7-million minority Canada/France coproduction from director Charles Najman. A story about power and corruption shot on location in ravaged Haiti, the film won the Prix Jean Vigo as the best first feature in France in 2002, opened this year’s Vues d’Afrique festival and earned strong reviews following a theatrical release by Louis Dussault of distrib K Films Amerique.

Feature film projects in financing and development include L’Homme qui n’existait pas, a dramatic comedy about a murder among a troupe of retired actors. The screenplay is from Roger Cantin, Ann Burke and Bernard Dubois, with Cantin slated to direct. Boyd says there’s strong interest from distrib Equinoxe Films, with hopes to shoot the $2.5-million film this winter.

Kiss of the Fur Queen is a feature film coproduction with Winnipeg’s Buffalo Gal Pictures, which partnered with Boyd on two previous occasions – the Rodrigue Jean feature Yellowknife (distributed by K Films and Domino Film and Television International) and the Prix Gemeaux-winning doc Gabrielle Roy, by director Lea Pool.

Peter Haynes, Boyd’s partner, is writing the screenplay based on Thomson Highway’s coming-of-age novel about two Native brothers wrestling with family ties, sexuality and acceptance in white society.