Toronto director Bruce McDonald is in production on a documentary detailing the making of his 2001 drama Picture Claire, which has yet to see release. McDonald hopes the attention garnered by the new film, dubbed Planet Claire, will help kick-start a theatrical release for the original feature, which has sat in limbo ever since its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival last September.

The doc, being assembled by McDonald, who is financing, and editor Jeremy Munce, combines material from Picture Claire with outtakes, deleted scenes and newly shot and recorded commentary from the director.

The new film tells ‘the stories you really want to hear,’ McDonald explains. ‘Every production is anecdote-filled. This one in particular just had some interesting characters. I don’t know what to call it exactly, but it’s very funny. I think [it] will be a bit of a jaw-dropper.’

Picture Claire is one of the most high-profile Canadian productions of recent years. The movie was tagged as a potential breakout with U.S. audiences for McDonald, whose Hard Core Logo (1996) and Highway 61 (1991) were voted the second and 15th best Canadian films of the last 15 years, respectively, in a recent poll of Playback readers. Picture Claire came with other high credentials, having been produced by Robert Lantos and Wendy Grean of Serendipity Point Films and boasting a script by Semi Chellas (The Eleventh Hour), often cited as one of Canada’s hottest rising scribes.

The film falls into the familiar American indie genre of quirky noir thriller, albeit in a Canadian setting. The story concerns a young Montreal woman who comes to Toronto to hook up with her boyfriend but instead becomes inadvertently entangled with a group of crooks from whom she must flee. To cement the international appeal of the film, budgeted at a reported $12 million, the production brought in Hollywood name actors Juliette Lewis, Gina Gershon and Mickey Rourke. Rounding out the principal cast is Genie and Gemini Award-winner Callum Keith Rennie.

Despite all this talent, there seem to have been problems marketing the film from the get-go. The title was changed from Claire’s Hat to Picturing Claire and then finally Picture Claire before the film made its TIFF2001 debut.

Jim Sherry, executive VP and GM of Alliance Atlantis’ motion picture distribution group, which owns worldwide rights, sees that as typical of about 20% of the films that get distributed. (Alliance Atlantis completely funded the film.)

‘Finding the right title for the film was a bit of a challenge, however it ultimately came out to be the right title,’ Sherry says. ‘[Picture Claire] was a large investment, and with those investments goes very meticulous consideration when distributing those films.’

Sherry believes that the chaos of Sept. 11, which fell right in the middle of TIFF2001, made it hard to gauge audience response. Alliance Atlantis has subsequently pushed back the release season of the film several times, and no dates have been announced.

‘We were not confident we came out of the last Toronto film festival with enough heat to launch immediately, and we’re still ascertaining what the best approach is,’ he says.

The film’s Canadian setting might make it a tough sell, at least in the U.S., compounded by the fact that Lewis, in the title role, plays a French Canadian who doesn’t speak much English, and when she does, it is with a Quebecois accent. Sherry doesn’t see this as a drawback, however.

‘The film and the marketing have to find the right audience for the motion picture, and that still is our challenge,’ he says. ‘If we find the right audience, we believe it will work.’

Meanwhile, McDonald says his cast is supportive of Planet Claire.

‘I’ve shown it to Juliette Lewis and she flipped out,’ he says. ‘She thought it was amazing. I’ve sent off a letter to Mickey and Callum and Gina. Callum and Gina were very excited. The whole cast is thinking this is cool, because they get two movies out of one. It’s using all the usual waste of a film production.’

And the premise of the doc?

‘It’s about ‘OK, I’m tempted by money and stars and the big production,’ and what I give away to do that,’ McDonald explains. ‘It’s really about the filmmaker making many little compromises, hoping that it’s for the right reason.’ The ultimate point, he adds, is to let audiences know that ‘there’s something good [in Picture Claire].’

He says both the producer and the distributor have been encouraging, although he’s not sure what they think of the new film.

‘I’ve told them about it and I’ve even shown them some early cuts, and they seemed quite keen,’ he says. ‘My hope is that when we finish it in early September, when they see the final results and maybe play it with an audience, they can decide how these two films will [best be marketed].’

For his part, Sherry says Alliance Atlantis remains focused on marketing the original film.

Although McDonald says the doc would be suitable for theatrical release, he does not rule out the possibility of it ending up packaged with the original on a DVD.

Meanwhile, the director is looking to the winter to shoot his next dramatic feature, Ponty Pool Changes Everything, written by Tony Burgess and Noel S. Baker (Hard Core Logo). The film, which he describes as ‘a really scary horror movie,’ is in development with upstart Toronto prodco 49th Parallel, which specializes in $3- to $4-million movies with edge.

McDonald has also been busy with TV helming gigs on Degrassi: The Next Generation and Queer as Folk.

‘TV’s fun,’ he says. ‘It’s good people and I like to shoot. But I prefer the movies, where it is all on your shoulders, because that’s where the real choices are made. That is when it is yours to f- up or to raise the flag.’