Call Perfect Pie Barbara Willis Sweete’s debut and the director and partner at Toronto’s Rhombus Media just laughs.

‘I’ve made dozens of films, and still this will be perceived as my first, which is kind of funny,’ she says. ‘It has to do with the difference between movies and TV, but for me there is no difference, ultimately. A lot of people think, ‘Oh, finally you’ve succeeded in getting a feature,’ and actually it was a practical decision.’

It was a practical decision, Sweete explains, because in the increasingly fragmented broadcast market there is simply less money available for the kind of performing arts TV special on which she and her Rhombus partners have built their 24-year-old prodco. In the 1990s, Rhombus started to see feature films as essential to its survival, and subsequently produced or coproduced Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Last Night and The Red Violin. And it hopes the $3.2-million Perfect Pie, which debuted at the recent Toronto festival and will screen in the Canadian Images sidebar at the Vancouver International Film Festival, will continue this impressive track record.

By inter-cutting scenes from three different time periods, Perfect Pie tells the story of Patsy (Wendy Crewson) and Francesca (Barbara Williams), friends torn apart at age 15 due to a terrible accident that leaves Patsy epileptic. Thirty years later, Patsy invites her long-lost friend, who has since become an opera star, to return to the small town of their youth to perform in a fund-raiser for epilepsy.

Perfect Pie was shot over 21 days last September around Toronto. The story is set in the town of Marmara, although the film was actually shot in the rural area of Whitevale, near Markham, with water shots picked up at Shadow Lake. Sweete was happy to inject as much provincial small-town flavor into the film as possible.

‘I really believe that the more specific you are, the more universal [the film] becomes,’ she says, adding that she aimed to evoke ‘the exoticism of rural Ontario and the language.’ The film’s authentic dialect can be credited to the ear of screenwriter Judith Thompson (Lost and Delirious), who grew up in that environment.

Sweete feels serendipity played a strong role in bringing her together with the acclaimed Toronto playwright and her other collaborators. The film’s concept, though, started with music. Just as films about musical performance have been central to Sweete’s career, she wanted to make music central to her first foray into drama.

‘I wrote a one-page synopsis of a shape of a story where there would be two women who met when they were children through music and choir,’ she recalls. ‘For whatever reason they’re driven apart, and then music draws them back together again.’

For years Rhombus had wanted to collaborate with Thompson, who happened to have been a schoolmate of company partner Sheena Macdonald, and whose plays Sweete and her cohorts had attended regularly over the years.

‘I always thought of her writing as very operatic and heightened, and this would be a great way to [incorporate that] in a kind of operatic movie,’ Sweete says.

Coincidentally, Thompson had been holding on to a story idea about two girls who have a falling out but reunite as adults. She had written a monologue entitled Perfect Pie that she performed on TV and which became the basis in the movie for Patsy’s videotaped invitation to Francesca to come home. For years Thompson had wanted to turn the monologue into a full-blown play, and in addition to her screenplay she has done exactly that, creating what Sweete calls the movie’s ‘sister-piece’ for the live stage.

‘They have the same title and main characters, but in the play there are just four actors, whereas in the movie there are a lot more characters,’ Sweete explains. ‘There is also much less dialogue in the movie.’

The director felt good fortune smiling on her again when the production schedule was moved from March to the autumn.

‘I don’t know how it happened, because it wasn’t manipulated on my part, but I was just always picturing the film with golden fields at harvest time and it ended up happening,’ she says.

The production’s next blessing came in the form of the ever-busy Crewson (Suddenly Naked, This Much I Know) and Williams (Love Come Down), who is also a vocalist who has released a CD of her own songs.

‘I felt like that had a beautiful inevitability about it, because for a while we were being pressured to use an American or foreign star, and that didn’t work out,’ the director says. ‘And from the very beginning I was always thinking Wendy and Barbara are the people for these roles, and they ended up being able to do it.’

Firming up the crew presented a cloud with a silver lining. The project’s original cinematographer fell through, but a couple of weeks before principal photography Paul Sarossy became available. Not only had the Toronto cameraman won three Genie Awards for his work with Atom Egoyan, but he also directed the U.K. murder drama Mr. In-Between.

‘He understands filmmaking,’ Sweete says of her DOP. ‘I would tend to get quite elaborate with my shots and he would always figure out a way to simplify them that felt like an improvement. We would just hone in on what the story is and tell it in the fewest number of shots possible.’

Despite feeling confident about the results she and her cast and crew achieved, Sweete can’t help but be anxious about Perfect Pie’s reception at TIFF and VIFF, which will no doubt impact the kind of release the film gets through Odeon Films, which holds Canadian distribution rights. She acknowledges the challenge in marketing the film.

‘If one didn’t use a lot of imagination, it would be very easy to make it sound really boring, but it’s not,’ she says. ‘It’s a very powerful, universal story, but because it’s about two women in their 40s, it’s ‘Oh, it’s not hip.’ It’s really about memory loss, redemption and love. It’s a very dramatic story.’