Back to the Blueprint

I have to confess ... I've been in Vancouver all along. A certain brother of mine's surprise birthday party prevented me from openly discussing my left coast activities before now, but the party's been had and the cat's out of the bag, so now I can say publicly that Barbara and I both met the folks at Telefilm here in Vancouver last week. 

We are hoping that our bi-regional coproduction status will provide us the possibility of accessing some Western financing. Because the film is set in the prairies and is told from my prairie-born perspective, there is a distinctive Western Canadian flavour to the whole thing.  So although it will be a majority Quebec production, the film will be visibly identified as a prairie product - giving any Western investor big bang for their buck. We feel we had a good meeting with Bill and Vivianne, and left them with an appetite for the upcoming rewrite of the script.

Also, while we were out here, we had a chance to meet some of the Vancouver girls who had submitted their self-tapes for the role of Elizabeth.  Every single girl who has auditioned has shown us great work - we are so impressed with the calibre of talent right across the country. Again, though, the process is much like peeling an onion ... everything's evolving in conjunction with everything else, constantly showing new shapes and textures, revealing more and more of the core the deeper we go. 

There are still such big questions to ask - and answer - in my final pass of the script, so I've set my sights on an October deadline for the "polish".  As I write this blog, I am mentally preparing myself for some heavy creative soul-searching and intellectual gymnastics.

It's such a beautiful problem to have, frankly - needing to make this practically fully financed script as strong, tight and REAL as I can between now and October... 

But knowing that I'm really going to make this film is giving me a kind of kick in the cajones of my consciousness... For so long, the script was the selling tool - the way to entice perfect strangers to board my fantasy train.  But now it's something else entirely - now it's a blueprint for building an actual film. A film that will exist in the physical world - a film I will want to live with for the rest of my life. Seen that way, there may be a few too many staircases in the wrong places and possibly some unnecessary doors and entire floors on this blueprint. So, in I go...