And last but not least, we take a look at the talented scribes up for Best Screenplay. The list includes Clement Virgo for Love Come Down, Denis Villeneuve for Maelstrom, Gilles Desjardins and Michel Marc Bouchard for Les Muses Orphelines, Frank Borg for My Father’s Angel and Denys Arcand and J. Jacob Potashnik for Stardom. Details below.

*Clement Virgo

Love Come Down

Five years ago, Toronto filmmaker Clement Virgo pocketed a best screenplay Genie nomination for his film Rude; this time around he’s looking for the heavy metal. Virgo’s Love Come Down is up for nine Genies, including the best script award for Virgo, who also directed and produced the film through his company Conquering Lion Pictures.

The story, penned solely by Virgo, is about two step-brothers – one black, one white – in their early 20s, who a decade earlier witnessed their mother murder their father. The two are faced with issues of family, love, drug addiction and the strength of their fraternal bond.

Although the ideas presented in the movie were consistent through the drafts, the screenplay was reportedly reworked by Virgo to better reflect the actors filling the leading roles. The film stars Larenz Tate and Martin Cummins in the roles of brothers Neville and Matthew, respectively, with Deborah Cox, Sarah Polley and Jennifer Dale also featured.

The Film Works’ Eric Jordan, coproducer on the project, says what immediately impressed him about the script was Virgo’s crafting of the characters and the relationships they share. He also liked Virgo’s use of flashbacks to show how the brothers come to grips with the present by dealing with the past.

‘[I liked] the places he took his characters to and the way he blended them together really seamlessly. That’s what I really loved about it and feel we’ve achieved that in the film,’ says Jordan.

Virgo, reportedly working feverishly on his next project, could not be reached for comment. Dustin Dinoff

*Denis Villeneuve

Maelstrom

The idea for a portrait of a hit-and-run artist was swimming around Denis Villeneuve’s brain long before penning the 2001 Genie-nominated script for Maelstrom, a film which also earned him a best director Genie nomination (see p. B-6). From the start, the dark story was a challenge for the Montreal screenwriter/director.

‘At the beginning of the Maelstrom project, I was scared about it, because the main character is not a very nice character. I was saying to myself, ‘Maybe it won’t please [audiences].’ I didn’t know who would be interested to see such a story.’

Pocketing his reservations, Villeneuve went ahead and wrote the script even though he still believed Max Films producer Roger Frappier ‘wouldn’t like it.’ However, when it was completed, Frappier approved. ‘The problem was that he [Frappier] loved it and I did have to do [the project],’ Villeneuve explains.

Villeneuve cautions that his extreme closeness to the film means ‘it’s going to take some time before [he] can think clearly about [the script].’ Even so, wearing the hat of the director has given him a unique perspective on the execution of his screenplay.

‘From my point of view, the script was a little more energetic than the film. There was something a bit more passionate. The film is a little more dark and serious than the script I think. But maybe that’s a quality,’ he muses.

Having also written and directed his first feature, the 1998 Un 32 aout sur terre, Villeneuve points out the major difference between the projects.

‘The first script was a little bit less written and a little bit more improvisation. But the way it was shot was very, very prepared. Maelstrom is the opposite. The script was a lot of writing and very well prepared,’ while the production was more spontaneous, he says.

With the dark nature of the movie, Villeneuve is somewhat surprised by the positive reaction to the film. However, he attributes his success with the script to the fact that he ‘didn’t have any commercial pressure on [his] shoulders.’

Villeneuve, who ‘loves’ writing, would ‘love to find a partner to write [with], and right now [is] working on a script with someone else.’

Whether the new script will turn into a third feature, Villeneuve cannot say. ‘In cinema, you never know if it’s going to work or not,’ he says. Dave Lazar

*Gilles Desjardins, Michel Marc Bouchard

Les Muses Orphelines

Michel Marc Bouchard mourns the words he had to cut. The cuts were made in pursuit of a greater purpose – bringing his play Les Muses Orphelines to the screen. Bouchard, credited as one of two Genie nominated screenwriters on the film, was also the author of the play on which the film was based.

The play itself is about four children abandoned by their parents 20 years earlier. In the play they meet again after a separation of several years, ‘and one has news that their mother will be back the day after the reunion. So they wait.’

It is a play well known to Quebecois and the family dynamics revealed within have evidently struck a chord with audiences.

‘I have received so many comments,’ Bouchard says. ‘After the movie people say, ‘That’s us!’ They recognize themselves in this love-hate relationship with their brothers and sisters. They look so like you but they’re not you, and you fight the rest of your life to be different, but you are so close. That was what the audience was recognizing in themselves.’

Putting such a talky play on the big screen meant making some changes to lines and settings – changes mostly made by the film’s cowriter Gilles Desjardins – and hence the cuts that Bouchard mourns so.

‘The challenge of the movie was to make a film with a play. The play is in the same location – in a house – and the movie broke all this kind of thing. Now we see people we just hear about in the play. In the play we have suspense and it goes really well from stage to screen. What I like in the movie was that we went to the town in Quebec [Lac-St.-Jean] where the movie is based, and you could see the landscape, the way they work, the life they live.

‘Too much [of the play’s] story is in the past; for a movie you have to see that. I think it was a really clever and good decision to break [through] the walls of this house and go outside, [but] we still have inside the house.

‘We had to cut many lines [in the film version] because theatre is lyricism. We have a lot of monologues, a lot of speeches in the play that had to be cut in the movie. The cutting is essential. The writer kept the most efficient lines, but I am still mourning the dialogue.’ Fiona MacDonald

*Frank Borg

My Father’s Angel

Angels are literal beings that walk to Earth, says Frank Borg, Genie-nominated scriptwriter for My Father’s Angel. Although the film is literally about the Bosnia conflict carried to Canadian shores, it also concerns earthly angels.

The genesis of the film, described by Borg as ‘watching someone pray in a bathroom and an angel falling from the sky,’ came from an image from director Davor Marjanovic’s painter father.

‘Muslims and Catholics are similar in their belief in angels. We don’t think of them in the abstract, we think they actually exist and go around and do things,’ says Borg. The idea with the angel falling from the sky was of ‘an angel that wasn’t up to the task but his intentions were well meant.’

Ironically, one item dropped from the final script was, regrettably, the angel itself; instead the film ended up confined to a more earthly plane, looking at intolerance.

‘It’s about two different families from Bosnia, one Serbian and one Muslim, and they keep their conflict going in their new country.’

Borg was contacted to cowrite the film by Marjanovic, a Croat from Bosnia who was inspired by all the refugees in Vancouver.

‘I think it’s a conflict that we all have to deal with in different stages – intolerance of people’s views. I was more interested in the idea of carrying grudges and not letting them go. It was really about tolerance and opening our eyes to new ideas.

‘My parents are from Malta and there’s a certain sensibility that I could relate to, especially with the Muslims – the realization that they’re not that different from Catholics. There’s a lot of core similarities so I could relate to that stuff, especially the angels. I know that’s not considered an abstract idea.’

For now, Borg is occupied as a writer, story editor and sometime actor on DaVinci’s Inquest, although he says he does have a ‘play in mind.’

‘I start with an idea and let it dictate to me how it would be told the best. If I think something’s going to be more towards a poetic nature I would lean toward the stage – you have a little more leeway to create that world. If I think something’s got a lot more action to it, I’ll write it as a screenplay.’ Fiona MacDonald

*Denys Arcand, J. Jacob Potashnik

Stardom

The scripting of Stardom was a ‘long, drawn-out affair,’ according to director and cowriter Denys Arcand, in part because his solo effort on the first draft met with a passionately negative response from one of his producers: ‘Robert Lantos hated it, he just hated it.’

And with that, the satiric cautionary tale of celebrity hit the shelf with a thump and fed local dust mites for about a year.

Arcand can’t recall whether the script grind started in 1996 or ’97 – and he says he’s a bit weary of the topic as he’s moved on to new films – but he couldn’t quite shrug off the project. When he decided to give it another go, he looked for help.

‘I’d worked with Jacob Potashnik as a first ad on commercials. In the evenings we talked about film and literature and other things. He’d shown me some short stories and they were very well-written.’ When Arcand resumed work on Stardom, Potashnik came on board.

The pair worked at Potashnik’s Montreal apartment, bashing out scenarios together in the mornings, with Potashnik putting the results into the computer each afternoon. ‘Over a year,’ Arcand recalls, ‘we did three or four versions together. Then when [the film] was greenlit, I wrote a polish alone.’

Stardom (working title 15 Moments) is an ironic look at a young woman’s rise to international celebrity and the sad fragility of star status. Arcand stuck to the premise, introduced in his early script work, that much of the story should be told as if seen through a tv camera following lead character Tina Menzhal (Jessica Pare). ‘I’m still very happy with this angle of covering a whole person’s life through television programming. I’ll stand by that although some people didn’t get it, judging by some of the reviews I read.’

Arcand says he considered adding the notion of the celebrity pre-nup to the story of Tina’s life and dreadful marriage, because the idea of a spouse’s potential payoff value rising with each full year of marriage fits perfectly with the theme of superficial living developed in the film. ‘When I heard about the pre-nup between Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, it made me think I should have done that with Tina. I had notes on pre-nups, but I discarded them.’ Susan Tolusso