Playback’s Producer of the Year, Denise Robert, has had such a boffo box-office year with action-comedy De père en flic in its native Quebec that Sony Pictures snapped up the rights to adapt the smash hit into English – as Fathers and Guns – for the U.S. and global markets (see story, p. 23). The Oscar winner has produced over 30 award-winning films to date and initiated coproduction treaties between both countries and provinces. This year alone she has one feature in production, Demande à ceux qui restent, and three in post – Oscar et la dame en rose, André Mathieu, le dernier des romantiques and A Short History of Progress – yet she still managed to squeeze in time to candidly share some hot tips about choosing scripts (see story, p. 20) and give us a glimpse of her roots.

It speaks volumes that Denise Robert wore only blue for the first 17 years of her life because it was easier to sort color-coded laundry in a large Quebecois family.

‘There were three girls and five boys,’ laughs Robert over breakfast at the industry hot spot in Montreal, Le Sofitel. ‘And each of us was dressed in one specific color until we left home. I was blue. My older sister was green and my younger sister was pink. One of my brothers was brown, another navy, another grey and the oldest one wore black. The reason I got blue is because my eyes are blue; even my glasses were blue.’

Robert’s late parents both had careers – Dad was a doctor and Mom was a nurse. ‘They got married 19 days after meeting,’ she says, adding she actually grew up in Ottawa.

But the story gets better.

‘We had a swimming pool at home,’ Robert continues deadpan. ‘Mom’s passion was knitting. (She even knitted pajamas.) And one day she decided to have a garden party because we girls were learning water ballet, while the boys went scuba diving. She wanted us to do synchronized swimming and had knitted for the occasion – I had a blue wool knitted swimsuit. I was about 12 years old and jumped in the pool and it came all the way to my knees. Thank goodness I didn’t have breasts yet! We came out of the water and everyone was roaring with laughter. I was humiliated beyond words. I tell you that that was the utmost humiliation I ever felt in my life.’

It becomes readily apparent why this remarkably tenacious Canadian producer made a film called Surviving my Mother (2007).

Robert busted out of blue at the tender age of 17 with the ‘I’ll show them I can do it’ attitude that both set her free and set the stage for a groundbreaking career.

Robert and her business partners at Montreal’s Cinémaginaire have had a banner year with their latest smash hit, Émile Gaudreault’s rousing comedy De père en flic (Fathers and Guns). At press time, the record-breaking actioner was near the $11 million mark at the Quebec box office alone for distributor Alliance Vivafilm, out-muscling all U.S. blockbusters (including Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince) on its own turf. The movie is now 2009’s top-grossing homegrown film in Canada and a shoe-in for the upcoming Golden Reel Award at the 2010 Genies. It is also the top-grossing French-language film ever released in Quebec and Canada.

For the uninitiated, Robert’s production shingle Cinémaginaire was founded in 1988 with partner Daniel Louis. Their films (and a few TV shows) cross genres from fiction to documentaries, and include the critically acclaimed Le confessional (1995), box-office hit Mambo Italiano (2003) and the 2004 foreign-language Oscar winner The Barbarian Invasions (see story, p. 23), to name but a few.

Today, Robert is a red-carpet veteran of the world’s top festivals and a glamour queen when the mood or occasion suits her. And she is living proof that emotional hardships can be spun into opportunities.

‘When you come from an environment which is so controlled, you work very hard to have a life of your own,’ Robert concedes. However, she didn’t head straight into film.

Like many rebellious teenagers, after high school she primarily wanted to get as ‘far away from the parents as possible,’ and headed straight to the south of France to École des Beaux-Arts d’Aix-en-Provence with dreams of becoming a concert pianist.

‘To me, music is the best language in the world,’ she sighs. And although she doesn’t play much anymore, she is quick to note that ‘I still have my piano and it’s my best friend.’

However, her musical sojourn was brief. Robert was still searching for life’s big answers and figured she might find them in the Holy Land. So next stop: living with a kibbutz family in Israel for six months.

‘I wanted to learn Hebrew so I could read the Bible,’ she confesses. ‘I thought the editors must have left something out.’

After six months she returned to Canada because ‘I really ran out of money,’ but she quickly put together enough for a cheap flight to England with a traveling girl buddy, and from there they hitchhiked to India. ‘But that’s when I was disowned,’ Robert adds. ‘They were very strict parents. They wanted a really solid education for me and I chose the arts, so they said ‘You’re on your own,’ and I guess it was the best gift they could give me. That’s when I first said ‘Okay, I’ll show you I can do it on my own.”

Next stop was Stratford, ON, ‘because I wanted to study theater.’ The Stratford Festival’s then-artistic director Jean Gascon ‘became kind of a father figure to me because I’d lost my dad. He took me under his wing.’

Robert finally moved to Montreal and into cinema in 1984 when she got a job at the Société Générale du Cinéma du Québec. There she learned about financing films under Nicole Boisvert (who serendipitously became one of the original Cinémaginaire partners) just four years later when Robert produced her first feature, 1988’s ¿ corps perdu, by her good friend, Swiss director Léa Pool.

‘It was the beginning of HIV at that time, and the guy who was supposed to produce ¿ corps perdu wasn’t ready to do that, so Léa called me,’ she explains. ‘It was right after [Pool’s art-house hits] La femme de l’hôtel and Anne Trister and she said ‘Either this script goes in the garbage, or…’ and I said ‘No, no, no. I’m going to produce it’, and I went to see [the late producer] Robin Spry at Telescene. He welcomed me with open arms and I started producing.’

¿ corps perdu also marked the first time she worked with seasoned production manager (and current partner) Daniel Louis. ‘Telescene was going through some financial difficulty so I was left to my own means,’ she says. That meant looking outside Quebec for partners, a move that spawned the official coproduction treaty between Canada and Switzerland.

And as beginner’s luck would have it, her first film was invited to official competition at the world’s first film festival, Venice. ‘We were in the Lido di Venezia drinking Bellinis [French champagne with fresh peach juice] and I thought ‘My God, this is the easiest job in the world!” Wrong. Her next outing was a nightmare.

Suffice to say that although Robert is not credited as a coproducer, the experience working on Leos Carax’s Les amants du pont-neuf ‘is a really long story, but that was my film school.’

That experience was enough for two of the original Cinémaginaire partners (Boisvert and Michel Houle), who were bought out by Robert and Louis.

These trailblazers went on to produce the comedy-drama Montréal vu par… (1991), the first Quebec/Ontario coproduction. The feature tells six distinct stories by Canada’s then-new wave of directors: Denys Arcand, Atom Egoyan, Jacques Leduc, Patricia Rozema, Michel Brault and Pool.

‘I said, ‘If we do coproductions between countries, why not between provinces?’ So I convinced the Quebec government and SODEC to sign an agreement with the Ontario Film Development Corporation and we did the first copro between Ontario and Quebec,’ she explains.

With a real feel for coproductions under her belt, Robert hooked up next with the legendary British producer Sir David Puttnam, whose long list of international hits then included Midnight Express, The Killing Fields, Chariots of Fire and The Mission. Together they produced Le Confessional, which also clocked in as the first French-language copro between the U.K. and France. It also marked the helming debut for Quebec’s renowned theater director Robert Lepage and provided a blueprint for a copro with four distinct funding agencies (including Telefilm Canada and SODEC).

‘That was so hard to do that I was thankful that it worked,’ she says. ‘I remember after all that stress that we arrived in Cannes [1995] with the film under our arms to open the Director’s Fortnight. And I remember my reaction was that I could not stop crying. I was so overwhelmed with emotion that I just cried and cried and cried. I tell you, from that day on I’ve always worn waterproof mascara,’ she says, laughing heartily.

Fortunately by then, Robert had met her life partner, writer/director Denys Arcand, who is the least likely man alive to care about smudged mascara. He finally wooed her in ’93, although the pair had spent an ‘extraordinary day in Paris’ together after meeting in Cannes when Arcand’s The Decline of the American Empire stormed La Croisette in 1986.

‘Actually, when I met Denys, I was not interested in him romantically,’ confides Robert, who was in the early days of a seven-year marriage to an English-speaking politician. ‘I got married for better and worse, but it got worse all the time, and I kept thinking, ‘When is it going to get better? It’s gotta get better’, but it never did.’

After her divorce, she ‘really didn’t want to go out with anybody in the business; I had my eye on this oncologist. And then one day Denys invites me to dinner at his house and he prepared the most extraordinary meal.’

They have since worked on four features together – Poverty and Other Delights (1996), Stardom (2000), Invasions (2003) and Days of Darkness (2007) – but like many film biz couples, they try to keep their private life apart from their work.

Thirteen years ago they adopted a daughter from China, MingXia (pronounced ming-shaw), which means ‘clarity’ (ming) and ‘rainbow over the sunset’ (xia).

‘I think the arrival of our daughter brought us a better perspective on life,’ says Robert. ‘Our work is our work and it’s important to us, but the wellness of our daughter comes above everything.’

Robert is also convinced that becoming a father played an enormous role in Arcand’s writing and directing, perhaps adding the emotional layer that helped garner them an Oscar for Invasions.

‘His films before that were very cerebral and Barbarian Invasions is very emotional, and his daughter brought that to him,’ says Robert candidly. ‘He was the father of a little baby girl. I think his daughter brought him more equilibrium in his life. She put things in perspective. Before that his life was mostly work.’

Robert says she also has an emotional soft spot for philanthropy, something she learned from her late father.

‘I was very close to my dad, but not my mom,’ she says. ‘My dad had a social streak, he always did. He also had a thesis in theology. He wanted to serve God. So he went into medicine as a way to serve God. But it’s funny, because some of the best memories of my childhood were going with my dad to deliver Christmas baskets to underprivileged families. That to me was Christmas. Seeing the places of these families who would welcome us in their homes; it didn’t feel like charity. It’s like they were the extended family of my dad. My God it was beautiful to see how touched they were.’

As such, each of Robert’s Quebec film premiers has a certain number of tickets reserved for fundraising for La Fondation de la pédiatrie sociale, which she co-founded with Dr. Gilles Julien for kids from underprivileged families after she produced Les voleurs d’enfance (Thieves of Innocence), the 2005 film which ‘holds the most special place in my heart’ of all her pictures.

‘This film opened my eyes to a lot of social issues here in Quebec and the rights of kids,’ she explains. ‘Sixty-five thousand kids in Quebec are now in the hands of the state, and you know sometimes how dysfunctional ‘the state’ can be. From there I started doing a lot of work with underprivileged children.’ But that’s another story. *