For Playback‘s annual TIFF-focused fall issue (see below), reporter Etan Vlessing talked to Quebec director Denis Villeneuve about the challenges of shooting his festival-bound features Prisoners and Enemy. To read the full feature accompanying this story, see pg. 14-15 of the digital issue.

Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy has Jake Gyllenhaal seeking out his exact look-alike after spotting him in a movie.

The irony is the Quebec director used creative doubles in the last year to simultaneously make that thriller and the Hugh Jackman-starrer Prisoners for Alcon Entertainment and Warner Bros.

Villeneuve, his brand rising after the Oscar-nominated Incendies, shot Prisoners in Georgia after lensing  Enemy, also an English-language movie, in Toronto in summer 2012.

“I was making two films at the same time, which was physically impossible. The only way to do it was to have a double,” he tells Playback ahead of the Toronto International Film Festival, where Enemy and Prisoners will debut.

Unable to be in two places at one time to shoot and post the movies, Villeneuve relied on creative stand-ins to get both jobs done.

For example, Villeneuve had just finished shooting Incendies when he partnered with Niv Fichman of Rhombus Media to make Enemy. But having no time to do the screen adaptation of the 2002 José Saramago novel The Double, on which Enemy was based, Villeneuve and Fichman hired Javier Gullón, a young Spanish screenwriter, to pen the screenplay.

“As I was finishing the post production on Incendies and then travelling around the world for a year, Javier was writing Enemy. It was a collaborative process,” Villeneuve, who gave Gullón his first feedback and notes, recalls.

Prisoners

Then, in the fall of 2012, as he was on location in Atlanta shooting Prisoners, Villeneuve had Toronto-based editor Matthew Hannam oversee post-production.

“He (Hannam) was one of the main inputs of creativity in the film,” the director says.

Enemy, a Canada-Spain coproduction, also relied on Spanish talent to complete the sound mixing and design.

“I had the chance to work with strong artists from Spain. It was a real pleasure to work with them,” Villeneuve says.

Although similar in regard to the complexity of execution, the Quebec director insists his recent back-to-back film shoots were very different projects.

Enemy, for example, was Villeneuve’s first experience shooting in the English language, and with an American actor.

“To make a small budget movie with a small crew involving very few actors, with two apartments and one car, it was very small and basic and there was something controlled about it,” he says of shooting the thriller at the Cinespace studio on Kipling Avenue in Toronto.

Shooting Prisoners, an abduction drama that also stars Jake Gyllenhaal, was a far bigger project.

And yet no bigger a challenge, thanks to a creatively satisfying shoot, Villeneuve recalls.

“I had the chance to work with producers that are filmmaker-friendly. They are people that support me and protect me so far in a super way,” he insists.

Villeneuve knows not all Hollywood shoots come off so well.

But Prisoners did.

“My Hollywood experience so far is very much in the old-fashioned way, in that people were there to make cinema. It was more about art than business,” he adds.

Prisoners premieres Sept. 6 with a 9 p.m. gala screening at the Elgin, and also screens Sept. 7 at 12 p.m. and Sept. 13 at 2:30 p.m.

Enemy has its premiere on Sept. 8 at 6 p.m. and an additional screening on Sept. 9 at 10:30 p.m.

This story appears in the Fall 2013 issue of Playback.