Director Biname is just ‘letting it happen’ on the set of Eldorado

Montreal: Eldorado Fluo (working title) chronicles the morality, values and experiences of six characters aged 23 to 33 as the dog days and nights of this Montreal summer give way to autumn.

Filming on the innovative $1.5 million Cite-Amerique feature film started June 29 and goes to Aug. 4, with an additional week in October.

Eldorado is a departure from the highly structured approach to industrialized moviemaking, says director Charles Biname (C’etait le 12 de 12 et Chili avait les blues, Blanche), in that the accent has been placed on the performance of the actors and not the large crews and equipment inventory characteristic of formulaic, agency-financed production.

Of course, preparation for the film included scene descriptions and a shooting log, but Biname says he wants ‘to let it happen, search out the unknown where things are hiding.’

Reminiscent of the filmmaking devices enshrined by late American director/writer John Cassavetes, Eldorado is a ‘story-in-progress,’ with a limited crew, as few as five or six, using two ever-ready 35mm cameras, and a six-player principal cast intelligently prepped over two full months.

Biname and producer Lorraine Richard share screenwriting credits on Eldorado with the actors, James Hyndman, Pascale Montpetit, Robert Brouillette, Macha Limonchik, Isabelle Richer and Pascale Bussieres.

dop Pierre Gill and Biname are operating two new Aaton 35s using Kodak ASA 500 film. No artificial lighting on this roving movie set, ‘and the latitude of the film stock is spectacular,’ says the director.

stcvq craft people include costume designer Michele Hamel, art director Andre Guimond, pm Dominique Houle, stills photographer Pierre Dury, sound recordist Claude La Haye and editor Michel Arcand.

Financing sources include Telefilm Canada, the Quebec tax-credit program, Cite-Amerique and Alliance Vivafilm, the distributor.

Courtroom dramas unfold

The press arrived on the set of Les grands proces ii as director Mark Blandford and crew were filming scenes from the 1971 murder trial of legendary French gangster Jacques Mesrine and his Quebecoise girlfriend.

The cops really hated the less-than-contrite Mesrine, a well-educated rich kid from the suburbs, and eventually gunned him down in his car on a busy street in Paris.

The trial is one of six new one-hour episodes of straightforward courtroom drama produced at a cost of $3.7 million and scheduled to air on the TVA Television Network during the fall sweeps in late October.

‘The main challenge is time – shooting (a one-hour episode) over six days,’ says Blandford. ‘And the second challenge is that because a lot of it takes place in the courtroom, the emphasis is on performance. It’s dialogue-intense and really an actor’s show.’

Blandford (Duplessis, Chasing Rainbows) and codirector Alain Chartrand (Des amis pour la vie, Ding et Dong, le film) had another daunting task, adapting historically dated trial material, cases which lasted weeks and months, and distilling it down to 48 minutes for the enjoyment of contemporary tv audiences.

This year’s cases are: L’Affaire de la petite Aurore (1920), written by Francois Boulay and Dominic Champagne; L’Affaire Beaudry (1926), written by Anne Boyer and Michel D’astous; L’Affaire de la veuve Chapdelaine (1932-36), the story of a woman tried on three occasions for poisoning her husband, written by Jacques Jacob; L’Affaire `Tuxedo Kid’ (1935), written by Dominique Drouin and Bernard Montas; L’Affaire Dion (1963), the trial of the infamous ‘Pont-Rouge monster’ accused of assaulting and then strangling four little boys; and L’Affaire Mesrine (1971), written by Daniel Proulx, a crime reporter and historian with La Presse. Filming goes for seven weeks and ends July 28.

Les grands proces is manna for Union des artistes members, creating 85 leading roles and more than 650 other roles. Stars include Sophie Lorain, Serge Dupire, Michel Dumont, Gilbert Sicotte, Lea Marie Cantin, Yvan Ponton, Roger Leger, Dorothee Berryman, Jean-Louis Millette, Marcel Sabourin, Pierre Rivard, Germain Houde, Jacques Godin and Gildor Roy.

Producers are Vincent Gabriele, president of Sovimage (Triplex, L’Ete en ville), and Pierre Nadeau, president of Productions du Sagittaire. Nadeau is also the host of the series

Les grands proces is sponsored by Ford du Canada in association with the TVA Network and La Presse. Financial support comes from Telefilm Canada and Fonds de television Maclean Hunter.

Meantime, Nadeau is developing a tv quiz based on current affairs and a one-hour documentary on the tribal origins of the Iroquois in association with Conrad Sioui. And if that’s not enough, the busy Nadeau is the also host of two other programs, Radio-Quebec’s Nord-Sud, now in its 11th season, and Les heros du sports, an all-sports talk show on tva and Reseau des sports.

Meanwhile, Blandford and producer Gabriele are prepping a Radio-Canada series on the life and times of Sam Steinberg, patriarch of the famous, fighting supermarket family, and a feature film script with cowriter Sophie Senecal.

Alys set to shoot

She was a very attractive woman, and an internationally recognized cabaret singer by her early 20s, adored at home, in Hollywood and Europe, but at age 23, Alys Robi’s life and achievements were cruelly cut short by a mental disorder.

The singer’s life from childhood, when she sang for pennies on the Plains of Abraham, to age 28, when she was released from hospital following five years of 1950s-style psychiatric treatment, including a lobotomy, is the subject of Alys, mon idole, mon amie, a four-hour $4 million Telefiction miniseries under the direction of Francois Labonte.

Labonte (Bombardier, la miniseries) was named director less than three weeks prior to the start of principal photography July 11 after a ‘serious misunderstanding’ between director Johanne Pregent and veteran stage and tv screenwriter Denise Filitrault and producers Jacques Bonin and Claude Veillet.

Actress Joelle Morin, who has shown a penchant for headstrong characters in Montreal, P.Q. and Scoop, plays Robi at the height of her career, with Isabelle Boulay doing the actual singing.

Support cast includes Roger Leger as Alys’ father, Francois L’Ecuyer as her first lover, Jean-Francois Pichette in the role of Robi’s musical director and subsequent boyfriend, Suzanne Champagne as her closest friend, and Dominique Lemay in the role of music hall performer La Poune.

Martine Allard is pm, Normand Sarrazin is the art director, Philippe Lavalette is the dop, Claude Lalardy will edit, and the original music is by Osvaldo Montez, who composed the music on Bombardier, Telefiction’s Gemeaux-winning miniseries.

The shoot, crewed by the stcvq, wraps in mid-September following a week of cabaret action in Cuba in late August.