Omerta: le dernier des hommes d’honneur is the third installment of the top-rated SDA Productions crime series and is a sweeping epic saga of one man’s search for honor in a world where old moral codes no longer hold sway.

The 13-hour series is set in Montreal and a fictitious Caribbean island in the 1990s and was shot over 108 days on a budget of $11 million. It premiered on Radio-Canada in January with a network audience of over 1.6 million.

Omerta iii is less an action, gangster whodunit cop show than Omerta i & ii and more ‘an emotional opera about the impossibility of living in two worlds,’ says director George Mihalka (L’Homme Ideal, La Florida, Bullet to Beijing).

Omerta iii is also about screenwriter Luc Dionne’s desire ‘to do the Mafia story he always wanted to do,’ says the director.

Under Mihalka’s direction, Omerta iii skirts much of the conventional, de rigeur static close-ups, establishing shots and ‘chokers’ associated with primetime tv drama. As a result, the series clearly carries the signature of its core creative team of writer Dionne, producer Claude Bonin and Mihalka.

‘The most appealing thing to me is how these people can live such fabulously, honestly schizophrenic lives,’ says Mihalka. He says the lives of gangsters like Nicky Balsamo, the series’ lead played brilliantly by Roman Orzari, are tragically split between genuine human feelings for friends and family and the brutality of the underworld and crime organizations.

The new Omerta is also a story of three generations – the old ‘code of silence’ mob represented by the godfather Scarfo (Dino Tavarone), the sold-out, treacherous, technocratic babyboomer mobster personified by Gino Favara (Ron Lea) and Nicky, a twentysomething character and throwback to earlier times and values.

A thing for new faces

One of the appealing qualities of the show is the believable, often understated performances of new stars such as Orzari, Tony de Santis, as the fierce capo Jimmy Vaccaro, and Genevieve Rochette. The cast includes established talents such as Paolo Noel, Marthe Turgeon, Louis di Bianco, Anna-Maria Giannotti as Nicky’s mother, Michel Cote, and Germain Houde as head of a biker gang.

Mihalka says the search for new faces was deliberate and neither he nor producer Bonin wanted to see their characters showing up elsewhere in unlikely roles.

Orzari has the same kind of expressive eyes and dark features as actor Al Pacino, and according to the director ‘was an absolute miracle.’

Orzari was initially ‘discovered’ in a newspaper story read by the director’s wife, Daniaile Jarry. Casting director Ginette D’Amico did some research and found Orzari, who speaks four languages, in New York where he is also active in legit theater.

Originally from Montreal, where he’s repped by veteran talent agent Jean-Jacques Desjardins, Orzari’s credits include Eugene Garcia’s low-budget, award-winning film Burnt Eden, Francois Bernadi’s The Drive, the La Fete/Showtime crime autobiography Family: The Life and Times of Joe Bonanno, and as guest lead in the New Dominion/upn series Ghost Stories and the Telescene Film Group/Fox Family sitcom Misguided Angels.

De Santis’ performance as the chilling capo Vaccaro is equally brilliant.

Rochette, also in her first starring role, plays Nicky’s love interest and a forceful lawyer.

‘Good acting beats anything,’ says Mihalka. ‘God forbid if I should have to make a decision between good acting and the technically perfect shot, good acting will always win out. I try to create an environment for my actors where technique and technology is secondary. I get goose pimples when I look at great acting, not necessarily because a back light on the beer bottle is just perfect.

‘This cast was never lazy,’ says the director. ‘They always did their homework and always came in with ideas, feelings with interpretations.’

Bonin actually suggested using a primary, single camera for the shoot, an approach Mihalka says made a fundamental difference, putting the emphasis on dramatic direction and giving Omerta iii a definite feature film style.

‘The difference in stock and camera [costs] could be put in front of the lens [above the line] instead of behind the lens,’ says Mihalka, who actually helped define the two-camera technique here with his work on the newsroom drama series Scoop.

Working with a single camera makes the director direct, he says.

The theory is, a busy catch-all, two-camera setup can become a kind of backhanded insurance, making it too easy for the director to be distracted by everything but the performance.

‘With one camera you actually have to read all your scenes the night before,’ says Mihalka.

Using one drama focus forced the director to recall all the film language learned since film school. ‘What is the meaning behind a close-up? What is the meaning in body language? Or a wide shot just in a silhouette [which can be used] to evoke an emotion?’

Once a specific scene’s raison d’etre is understood, the director says it becomes easier to concentrate on the subtlety of the acting and body language. And for dop Daniel Jobin it meant more time to polish that one lit angle rather than worrying about a flat or out-of-position second camera, says Mihalka.

Working with actors

Mihalka led key cast members in three weeks of rehearsals prior to shooting, which may be part of the reason the performers avoid overacting, something he says is a widespread problem across television.

Directors are routinely replaced on episodic serials. Actors come in late for an episode or two and may end up taking their cues from the showrunner, or someone else, or simply ‘directing themselves,’ he says.

‘When you’re working with actors for 108 days they create the personalities with you. The create their voice, their look, their hair, their body language. If you meet Romano Orzari, he is not Nicky Balsamo. I mean the way he drinks coffee is different. Every character has a style and attitude that is specific. My job as a director is to make sure this doesn’t get forgotten or mixed up, or in the heat of the moment, you don’t end up improvising in a way where it doesn’t work.’

Directing the preproduction

Bonin, the series producer, says most of the legwork has to be done in the preparation phase, leaving the inevitable ‘unforeseen problems only’ to the shooting phase. ‘Otherwise everything becomes an unforeseen problem,’ he says.

‘The next thing that we did that’s not generally done,’ adds Mihalka, ‘is that the production designer [Francois Lamontagne] was brought in [during pre-preprep] as the fourth member of the creative team before anyone else was hired.’

Many of the department heads (including dop Jobin, line producer Nicole Hilareguy, pm Valerie Allard, costume designer Paul-Andre Guerin and makeup artist Djina Caron) were hired early on a temp basis and were fully up to speed before the first day of shooting.

‘It’s so subtle and it’s all there. It’s authentic,’ says Mihalka.

‘One of the things that Claude and I believe in is that [preproduction] should be directed,’ he says. ‘By the time that whole prep happens with the full crew that’s not the time to discover problems. That’s the time to have answers.’

Creative complicity

Omerta iii was produced for $11,020,000 or $847,000 per episode, with each episode shot over 8.3 days, a production standard in the Quebec market.

Bonin says the investment made in Omerta iii is on the screen, reflected in the high number of scenes with full deployment of extras and evocative shooting locations in Cuba. ‘That was risky business,’ he says. ‘But we took risks and we decided where we’d put the money, and it pays off that way.’

‘When we have real complicity between writer, director and the producer and they’re working together to have the best show and they’re not fighting each other then the money has a better chance of going on the screen,’ says Bonin.

A terrible dichotomy

Mihalka says one of the major challenges on the series was revealing human qualities in his leading characters ‘and not totally clouding the viewer by hero-worshipping gangsters. The constant dichotomy between lies and truth is the crux of the story.’

The tension associated with the central mob characters is created by counterbalancing ‘charming or normal gestures’ with revealing scenes of ruthless and cold-blooded betrayal and murder, says Mihalka.

‘The same people who will give you the shirt off their back will hit you as you sit in your car the next day. It’s always about using [people] and it’s always manipulating.’

The story unfolds

As the story unfolds, Nicky is forced to balance his duties to old-style mobster Jimmy Vaccaro as he moves up in the world meeting higher-ranking, more sophisticated members of the mob including Favara, another murderer and double-dealer played by Lea.

Nicky is forced into exile on a corrupt Caribbean island after a New York gangster is mysteriously murdered in his restaurant. ‘In these kinds of situations the rules of the game say `It’s your restaurant, you are responsible.’ It’s like you killed him,’ says Mihalka.

The move away from Montreal has the godfather’s blessing but separates Nicky even further from the love of his life, Victoria, the character played by Rochette.

The story’s many intrigues include Scarfo’s plans to get rid of his most-likely successor, Vaccaro, Nicky’s ill-considered execution of a corrupt government/military official and a murderous, double-cross gold transaction set up by Nicky’s ‘friend’ Favara and some ex-kgb thugs.

After bribing his way out of jail, Nicky returns to Montreal stone broke and is obliged to ‘live with his one tragic mistakes [the execution],’ says Mihalka.

By this time, the first capo and old godfather are dead and the treacherous Favara has become the new don. A desperate undercover operation by a crooked ex-cop, played by Michel Cote, spells danger for both the increasingly legit Favara and Nicky, who has taken over the capo’s old territory and risen to powerful Mafia status.

‘It’s an end game where all the codes and all the laws of the family start falling by the wayside, and the only one left who will still act in an honorable way is Nicky,’ says the director.

SRC did not balk

‘On this show,’ says Mihalka, ‘we had what I call the perfect balance between being a veteran and not being jaded, people who are still in awe and wonder and try to do the very best they can and yet bring 20 years of experience to the table.’

The director says ‘the cooperation from Radio-Canada was fantastic.’

They did not balk at any point in the casting, he says, when in truth virtually none of the series’ leads are established teleroman stars, and as befits the story itself, are in real life first- and second-generation immigrants. ‘As a matter of fact, [src drama head] Jean Salvy encouraged it,’ says Mihalka.

Michel Cusson composed the original music. Ginette D’Amico cast the series. Peter Measroch is post-supervisor and Francois Gill and Vidal Beique are editing. Lab services are by Sonolab. Supersuite did the film-to-tape transfer and color correction and Modulations and Marcel Pothier headed up the sound team.

Executive producer of Omerta iii is Andre Picard, president and gm of sda (a Coscient Group Company).

As a story of one man’s moral dilemma, there’s the strong possibility Omerta: le dernier des hommes d’honneur will stand on its own in the international market. Motion International is the exporter.