Paul Almond: talks about his marriage to Genevieve Bujold, the creation of telefilm Canada and the beginnings of feature filmmaking in Canada

TAKE ONE, Sept-Dec, 2003 by Wyndham Wise

What about the launch?

Isabel was the first film in Canada to be made with a major American distributor, so everyone was kind of nervous. Now it's well-respected, travelling around in retrospectives and playing on television. But then it was: "What's this?" No one could understand it. It was slaughtered by a Canadian critic who saw an early screening.

Who was that?

I remember, but I don't want to mention his name. But I knew we could not open the film in Canada. So I took it down to New York with Genevieve, where it got wonderful reviews. It was incredible. She was on the cover of Time. It was called one of the best films of the year. It got great reviews from everybody. So then we opened it at the Towne Cinema in Toronto. There were queues around the block, and the Canadian critics had to backpedal because it had got the stamp of approval in America.

I understand that your next film, Act of the Heart, was the first film to be financed by Telefilm Canada, which in those days was called the Canadian Film Development Corporation (CFDC)?

Immediately after Isabel I wanted to do another picture and I wrote Act of the Heart. It was much easier, after the reception for Isabel. I had received a nomination from the Directors Guild of America as Best Director of the year, so it wasn't hard to set up Act of the Heart. But, of course, nobody actually went to see Isabel. There's a difference between box-office success, like the films of Ivan Reitman, and Isabel, which was prestigious but made very little money. Paramount Pictures had never made a film that didn't make any money and only got great reviews, so the people there weren't all that interested anymore. So we decided to take Act of the Heart to Universal Pictures because it wanted to do a picture with Genevieve. I don't think anyone bothered to read the script. It would have really freaked them out. But we got the deal with Universal and we were ready to move ahead when Michael Spencer [the first executive director of Telefilm] called me and asked if the CFDC could do my film. I had to say no because we didn't need his money. But he thought it would be good if the CFDC was involved with a film that had a big distributor attached to it. He really wanted to do it as their first film. So eventually I said okay.

It is so different today, of course. Now you have to beg and plead. I could tell you some stories about trying to get some of my other films made by Telefilm. But with Act of the Heart, Michael begged me to get involved. So I said yes. I had only a handshake deal with Universal, so they flew in Joel Katz--who was now with Universal--two days before Christmas to meet with our lawyer, Donald Johnston--who is now the secretary general of the OECD in Paris--and they sat down to work out the details of the deal over Christmas in Montreal. We were due to begin shooting in January [1969] but now that Universal was backing the film, IATSE, which was the union in America, said we had to have their people on the shoot. I said no. I wanted the same people I had on Isabel. IATSE threatened to strike. Michael was terrified that there would be trouble and said we had better do what they said. I said no way. I was firm and said we are starting the shoot at a skating rink on Monday, January 10. I would be there, so would Genevieve and Jean Boffety, a cameraman who had come over from France to shoot it, and also Peter Carter. The crew turned up and we went ahead without the union. We shot all over the city. We shot in St. Joseph's Oratory with a massed choir of 400 voices. We had a huge number of extras for that scene. We didn't pay them of course; they just wanted to hear Genevieve sing. We had Donald Sutherland, who was unknown at the time. He had just completed M*A*S*H, but it hadn't been released yet. I had known him from my time in England where I had given him a small part in a play that I directed in London. I had done the first Tennessee Williams play on British television, The Rose Tattoo, in 1963 or 1964, and he had a small part in that. Now he works all the time, but you have to meet his price because he really only works for money. I wrote The Dance Goes On for him, but he wanted a million dollars. I asked him to do it for me, but he said no.