At 2 o’clock in the morning I am lying awake in my London bed, jet-lagged after flying in from Vancouver. On the tv, Al Pacino is pursuing Robin Williams around a small Alaskan town in “Insomnia.” This sounds like an appropriate film for me so I settle in and, within seconds,find myself gazing at my friend Brian’s back yard, as Pacino scurries past it.Brian lives in Squamish, an hour north of Vancouver but I’m not surprised to be staring at his barbeque and deck. Canada has built an industry on pretending to be the USA. Two recent box-office hits, Capote and Brokeback Mountain made no secret of using Canada instead of the USA. Manitoba doubled for Kansas in “Capote” and Alberta for Wyoming in “Brokeback Mountain. In Spielberg’s “Catch Me If You Can,” Tom Hanks caught Leonardo di Caprio in a Quebec City that was masquerading as a French provincial town.
In his latest role as Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger has been making some hostile noises about “Hollywood North.” He has been trying to lure film production back to his state. Over the last decade about 1500 Hollywood film and television productions used Canada as their location. Only a little knowledge of Canadian geography is needed to see how easily Toronto can double for New York – just don’t shoot the skyline – or Chicago as it did for years in the mountie series “Due South. British Columbia’s spectacular mix of mountains, beaches, forests and a big cosmopolitan city have allowed it to double for numerous hot and cold weather locations. The most famous is probably Vancouver’s Stanley Park and its years of pretending to be mysterious woods, ravines and clearings in “The X Files.”
Ever since Errol Flynn sailed into Vancouver on his yacht only to die of a heart attack back in 1950, the links between sensible Canada and the exuberant California film business have been strong. The main reason is, of course, money. For years a weak Canadian dollar and exorbitantly high union costs and complex work rules back in the States have made Canada a cheaper proposition. Now that the Canadian dollar is stronger, the Canadian Federal Government is topping up subsidies on tax credits in an attempt to keep the Americans coming.
Canada does have its own vibrant film industry. Independent directors like Atom Egoyan (“Where The Truth Lies” “The Sweet Hereafter” and David Cronenberg (“Crash”, “A History of Violence”) are obvious examples whereas not many people think of a mainstream director like Norman Jewison(“The Statement” “Only You” “Moonstruck”) as Canadian. One of the most extraordinarily moving and powerful films of the past five years was Quebecois, Deny Arcand’s “The Barbarian Invasions.” It won the 2003 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Screenplay. One of my top ten favourite films is Don McKellar’s bleakly funny “Last Night” – an account of the last night on earth set in McKellar’s home town of Toronto – playing itself for once.
The list of Canadian actors with a career in Hollywood is long and stretches from Christopher Plummer to Pamela Anderson by way of, among others,William Shatner, Dan Ackroyd, Donald Sutherland, Michael J. Fox, Rick Moranis, Mike Myers, Jim Carrey,and Kim Cattrall.
Meanwhile back in Vancouver, the Americans keep coming. I glimpsed Robin Williams cycling through my neighbourhood just last month. Goldie Hawn still owns a house in town. Actors continue to gather inthe peaceful, oak-panelled Gerard’s Bar in the Sutton Place Hotel on Burrard Street. Despite the rising Canadian dollar, I suspect the Terminator will have his work cut out bringing an end to this thriving industry.
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