I am from Montreal, and of, as they delicately put it in French, a certain age. I therefore remember Alliance when it was four or five people working out of two or three rooms. It is important to keep this starting point in mind when talking about Robert Lantos.

Four or five people; two or three rooms. And not all that long ago, either; a good deal less than a generation. From there, Robert built a company worth, depending on how you count such things, a third of a billion dollars or more.

And he never really meant to.

All he wanted was to make movies. But to do that, he needed cash flow. To get cash flow, he needed ancillary businesses. To get the businesses, he needed capitalÉ well, you see where it goes. Before you knew it, he had an empire.

But it was an empire with a sort of ‘Fitzcaraldo’ feel to it: we will drag a huge boat across the Andes because we want to hear some good opera. In Robert’s case, he dragged Canada into supporting a huge and gleaming entertainment company, because he wanted to tell some good stories on film, and that was the only way he could accomplish it.

What sort of person does this? I have a brief illustration.

Last year Alliance launched Once A Thief, a tv series that my partner, Glenn Davis, and I created with the film director John Woo. The network broadcasting the show was run by a management team – since departed – that had, to put it mildly, abandoned ship on the series, despite wonderful reviews and a large audience. It was up to Alliance to do whatever it could to keep the show in the public mind.

Robert assembled Glenn and I and a host of experts in the Alliance boardroom and laid out an imaginative, in fact a brilliant, publicity campaign. The one small problem was that most of his ideas required violating the time-space continuum; this was August, and his executives would have had to travel backwards to June or so to implement them.

When it was (hesitantly) pointed out to Robert that Alliance did not in fact own a time machine, or at least did not own one that worked, he seemed surprised at first, and then impatient. ‘Of course,’ he snapped, ‘there are certain difficulties. There are always difficulties to overcome.’

And this is what I love about Robert Lantos. There may indeed be certain difficulties to overcome. But whatever they are, from a reluctant network to the laws of physics, they are never impossibilities.

Driven and frequently dissatisfied, he is not always easy to be around. A taste for hockey, good cigars, and obscure (to me, anyway) European art-house films helps. Traveling as much as he does, all time zones tend to compress into one for Robert. If you’re having lunch with him, it’s not a bad idea to arrive late and bring a novel. A good long novel. Perhaps by Tolstoy.

But there is a basic truth about Robert which is much more unusual than it sounds: he knows the good from the bad, and he fights for the good. This is so rare for someone in his line of work that it makes him a legend to the women and men in mine: the writers, directors, producers, and actors.

And this is how I like to picture him, going on and on, making the films he wants to make, against all odds, against the many difficulties that are merely there to be overcome.

William Laurin is writing Alliance Communications’ new series Power Play with partner Glenn Davis.