There are two things Guy Bennett is not worried about.

One is that his directorial debut Punch, about a troubled teen girl who runs afoul of a topless female boxer, looks too much like Girlfight, the indie hit of 2000. ‘I saw [Girlfight] and forgot about it,’ he says on the phone from his B.C. home. ‘This is not a film about female boxing – it’s a film about a father and a daughter and two sisters. Girlfight was Rocky for 15-year-old girls and this is just so utterly different in theme and tone.’

Bennett is equally unconcerned about the impact of all the nudity in the film.

‘It’s a chick flick. Chicks dig it,’ he insists, his West Coast accent mingling with that of his native England. ‘They love the brawl, they love the violence. Is it gratuitous? Sure, it might be. I don’t know…I’m sure I will be attacked for it, but that’s fine. My soul is clean.’

The darkly comic film has been throwing off buzz since its debut at Toronto and is part of the Canadian Images lineup at this year’s VIFF. It stars Michael Riley (Mile Zero) as Sam, a doctor and single dad struggling to have a social life away from his short-fused, possibly psychotic daughter Ariel, played by Bennett’s daughter Sonja. Things get going when the 18-year-old hellion punches his prospective girlfriend (Marcia Laskowski) in the face, bringing down the wrath of the unlucky woman’s sister (Meredith McGeachie), who just happens to box for a living.

Bennett is an accomplished writer – turning out the best-selling book Guy’s Guide to the Flipside in 1989, winning the Best B.C. Columnist award twice in his five years at the Vancouver weekly the Westender, and heading the Praxis Centre for Screenwriters after a stay at the Canadian Film Centre. His first script, Ocean Boy, has been optioned by Hollywood producer Rob Straight (Cyberjack, By The Sword). And yet, hammering out the script for Punch was harder than expected. Work on the project started in 1997.

‘I got very interested in writing about emotional incest, about two people who are meant to be close, a father and a daughter, but they’re too close. And the confrontations about trying to find the right distance from someone you love,’ says Bennett. ‘I made a lot of attempts that didn’t work. I think it was Mafia story at one point, and someone lost their penis – I made about 10 bone-headed attempts.’

After two years he took a draft to Stephen Hegyes of BrightLight Pictures, whom he knew from the Praxis Centre. ‘Looking back it was a pretty bad mess,’ he says. ‘I’m kind of astonished that he optioned it.’

Hegyes brought in story editor John Frizzell (Twitch City, Dance Me Outside), paying for his time with a modest Telefilm Canada grant. ‘John’s probably just about the smartest person in the Canadian film industry,’ Bennett enthuses. ‘He has the gift of giving criticism that is both radical and somehow generous.’

With Frizzell’s help, Ariel was rewritten from ‘angry’ to ‘angry and violent,’ and what had been just an unpleasant dinner scene was reworked as the opening punch-out between daughter and date. As a tribute, Bennett wrote in ‘Frizzell’ as Sam and Ariel’s family name.

He then went back and worked through another 19-or-so drafts. The script was shopped around in L.A. but no one was buying and the project stalled until Bennett met up with producer Christine Haebler at a Vancouver cocktail party. She suggested he apply to Telefilm’s Low Budget Independent Feature Film Assistance Program.

Punch scored $200,000 just as the Hegyes-produced Last Wedding opened last year’s Toronto International Film Festival. Toronto-based THINKFilm snapped up the worldwide rights and, armed with a distribution deal, Hegyes successfully petitioned Telefilm for ‘two to three times’ more money and Greg Middleton (The Five Senses) joined as DOP.

By the time the cameras rolled in May 2002, backers of the $1.2-million project included CHUM Television, Movie Central, Astral, B.C. Film and The Harold Greenberg Fund.

‘The star of the low-budget independent film is the producer, not the director,’ says Bennett, who can’t stop saying good things about Hegyes. ‘He surrounded me with a bunch of geniuses to make up for the things that I didn’t yet know.

‘I’m under no illusions about making the film,’ he adds, ‘We made the film.’