For Michael Dowse, the filmmaker behind The Stunt Driver, there's a meta aspect to his journey with the Canadian sports comedy. The film, examining the dogged pursuit of a seemingly impossible dream, was in effect just t...
For Michael Dowse , the filmmaker behind The Stunt Driver , there's a meta aspect to his journey with the Canadian sports comedy.
The film, examining the dogged pursuit of a seemingly impossible dream, was in effect just that for him - a "white whale" that he chased for 12 years. And now, he's harpooned it: The film premieres at the Royal Alexandra Theatre, as part of the Toronto Film Festival , tonight.
Beautifully shot on 16mm and 35mm film, at multiple aspect ratios, The Stunt Driver is inspired by The Devil at Your Heels , the 1981 documentary on Carter from Robert Fortier, and makes Fortier a central character, using the making of the doc as a central structural device in telling the story.
This was in part a practical decision: Knowing he wouldn't have the budget to practically capture all of Carter's athletic exploits, Dowse resolved to build the film around doc footage and other archival material. The final product speaks to the amazing results that can come in art, when adapting to constraints.
Ahead of their premiere, Dowse and Baruchel spoke with Deadline about a film that will make you all in love with Carter - a piece that is as sweetly heartfelt as it is funny. They also talk Montreal Canadiens fandom and cast standout Joe Cobden, while hinting at a new sitcom they're developing together as a starring vehicle for Baruchel, and the Second World War fighter pilot epic that he's dying to make.
DEADLINE: Michael, you've called The Stunt Driver your "white whale." What first grabbed you about Ken Carter's story?
MICHAEL DOWSE: I was drawn by the spectacle of it all, the period and the character. I fell in love with Ken - with his hope, with his sense of humor. He was a dreamer. So it was really the character that cemented it, and what he had to go through. Then, when I started digging into it, I just thought this would be a really interesting film, if I can somehow incorporate Bob Fortier and the different aspect ratios. It just got me really excited. But yeah, it was mostly Ken that drove me to it, just because there's so much you could do with a character like that.
DEADLINE: What were the first steps you went through when you sat down to write?
DOWSE: Well, I think the first step was, you sort of write down the documentary verbatim. You follow the structure of the documentary, and what you discover is that it can't be the same thing when you adapt it to a feature film. You have to combine things. Like, there's three different car tests. There's so many different attempts in the actual real story that we tried to combine it. Really, you had to consolidate a lot of things to make the story flow, and once you started thinking about the necessities of your budget and what you had to do, it really did lead to the invention of, "Let's use Bob Fortier as more of a character. Let's use these three different aspect ratios. Let's play around with this, and let's really bob and weave in and around the footage." So, a long process, but it definitely is a thing where you have to collapse a lot of characters and events into more of a streamlined story that'll be more palatable for a feature film.
DEADLINE: Can you expand a bit on arriving at your basic visual approach - framing the film around the making of The Devil at Your Heels , and moving between different aspect ratios?
DOWSE: It comes from necessity. The first time we got a breakdown of the script, it was an insanely expensive movie that we would never be able to make. So the first step was like, well, we have to use the stunt footage. We have to use a lot of that footage and we have to bob and weave around this stuff because we can never launch our own rocket car off a 90-foot ramp as they do in the [doc]. So that was the first step. And then when you really start to dig into what that means, you start to play around with, what happens if you jump from 16 to 2:39, and what does that access give you when you jump out to an anamorphic world that's your reality behind the doc footage?
So I got excited by the idea of flipping the world of a documentary. Normally, the documentary is the truth, but because Ken was such a showman and had such a great relationship with Bob and was so aware of the camera, I got really interested in terms of what we could do behind the documentary in our 2:39 aspect ratio. And then obviously, having Jay as an actor, it just opens that world up completely in terms of where you can go.
DEADLINE: Jay, how familiar were you with Ken Carter's story when Michael approached you?
JAY BARUCHEL: Anything I know about Ken is a function of being friends with Dowse. We've known each other for over 20 years, and way back at some point when we were trying to build our first movie together, Goon , I think we'd had these conversations about, if you could do anything in the world, what would it be? He mentioned making a feature of Devil at Your Heels back then, and then of course I fell in love with that movie, Ken himself, everything he represents. So when Mike was like, "I wrote a script finally, and enough time has passed that I think you're old and fat enough…" [ Laughs ]
BARUCHEL: "You're old enough to do this now, maybe…" Because never in a million years did it once occur to me that I would ever play Ken Carter. In all the times I watched that movie and talked about the movie with friends, I never once imagined myself in him. And so when Dowse pitched it to me, I wish I had a better term than "left field." It was lovely and unexpected. And then I read his incredible script. I called or texted him at page 40 or 50. I was just like, "I love it. It's an amazing script. I have to do it." I just knew that the other 50 to 90 pages would also be good. And they were.
Reporting synthesized and verified under Nexvoro.tech editorial guidelines. Full primary records referenced via Deadline Hollywood.
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