The West Coast wave an excerpt from dreaming in the rain: how Vancouver became Hollywood North by Northwest

TAKE ONE, June-Sept, 2003

Lynne Stopkewich was born in 1963 into an anglophone family in a francophone enclave in east end Montreal. She was an artsy kid painting, acting, writing, making Super 8 movies. Attending Montreal's Vanier College was a "renaissance" for her. Stopkewich became a politically active, anarchist punk rocker. She also discovered a world of foreign and art films and in 1987, enrolled in UBC's film studies program. "I figured I'd go to Vancouver for two years, write a script, maybe go back to Montreal and shoot it. But once I got here, everything changed. That's when I met the gang."

Born in Sarnia, Ontario, in 1962, Bruce Sweeney had grown up in love with the movies. "From an early age I was a movie nut. I watched the movies on the French channel. I didn't know I was watching Truffaut and Louis Malle and Godard and all these people. I was just watching it in French and, at that point, I thought if I watched the French movies I had a greater chance of seeing some nudity. So that drew me to it initially, but then I realized how many of those images and scenes resonated later." After high school, Sweeney, who'd been drawing and painting forever, enrolled in the Simon Fraser University art program. While at SFIJ, he was increasingly drawn to film, transfixed by the European movies he'd see at the Van East Cinema and the Pacific Cinematheque. Sweeney moved on to UBC. And he switched to film. "Being a visual artist is just too damn solitary. You just have this tendency just to go out of your mind. I thought film would be good because it's social."

Ross Weber learned the magic of cinema growing up in Terrace, a town in central British Columbia. "We used to go to Kelowna for the summer. We had a summer shack on the lake. And my mother, I think it was every Saturday night, she'd take us to the drive-in. I must have been eight or nine, and two movies really affected me-one was Planet of the Apes and the other was Lawrence of Arabia. Halfway through Lawrence of Arabia I remember the northern lights came up above the screen. My mother had put us in our pajamas, right, we'd sit in the car and maybe fall asleep. The movie's running and everybody walked outside and started looking at the northern lights while Lawrence of Arabia was playing on the screen." Weber was taking sciences at UBC when he learned he could study film on campus. 'I didn't even know there was a film program. I'd always been interested in movies and got into the film program."

UBC has produced a long line of film directors. There were the original UBC filmmakers of the 1960s (including Larry Kent and Jack Darcus), this second UBC bunch of Sweeney, Stopkewich and Shum, and those who, while not part of either UBC group, became directors after attending the university (including Daryl Duke, Sturla Gunnarsson and Allan King). Darcus suggests the strong theatre department has had a lot to do with the narrative approach of UBC filmmakers. "When you have a theatre department, and you're hanging around next door to it, you tend to develop a literary outlook as opposed to experimental or documentary or whatever else," Darcus says.