Time waits for Louis Bélanger’s The Timekeeper
By Brendan Kelly, The Gazette, August 20, 2009
Louis Bélanger and Trevor Ferguson on the set of The Timekeeper.
Photograph by: Seville Pictures
MONTREAL—When we first met 10 years ago, Louis Bélanger was already talking about how much he dug the novels of Montreal author Trevor Ferguson. That was just around the time of the release of Bélanger’s first feature, the twisted, award-winning drama Post Mortem, which was one of the buzz items at the World Film Festival that year.
It’s rare to hear franco Québécois filmmakers going on about how much they like an English Canadian author, which happily underlined how different Bélanger has always been from most of his filmmaking colleagues here.
Now, a decade later, his adaptation of Ferguson’s The Timekeeper is set to hit screens, opening here on Friday. In a recent phone conversation, it was clear that Bélanger’s enthusiasm for Ferguson’s oeuvre has not dampened over the years.
“His books are like the work of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or John Irving,” said Bélanger, who is best known for the 2003 hit Gaz Bar Blues. “His novels are set in a realistic context, but then all of a sudden he brings in an element of fantasy. You leave reality. It’s like Onyx John (Ferguson’s second novel): There’s a guy in Park Extension who discovers the secret of the philosopher’s stone.”
Ferguson—who was born in Ontario but raised in Montreal—also wrote two crime novels under the pen name John Farrow: the bestsellers City of Ice and Ice Lake. A few years back, some British producers approached Bélanger to adapt City of Ice for the big screen, but that project fell apart when Bélanger said he wanted to make it with his pal Robert Morin, the maverick Montreal writer-director. Bélanger and Morin then went back to the offices of their producer, La Coop Vidéo de Montréal, and Bélanger said, “Too bad, but in any case, the most cinematographic novel of Trevor’s is The Timekeeper.”
Producer Réal Chabot from the Coop overheard this conversation, and two days later he called Bélanger to say he’d acquired the rights to The Timekeeper.
“City of Ice is a real thriller, but The Timekeeper is really a philosophical film,” Bélanger said. “It’s about good vs. evil. What was difficult was reducing the novel to make it into a film without diminishing Trevor’s imagination.”
Inspired by Ferguson’s own experiences laying railroad track in the Northwest Territories in the early 1960s, The Timekeeper is the story of 18-year-old Martin Bishop (Craig Olejnik from The Listener) who, following the death of his father, heads way up north to work as a timekeeper with a railway gang. The team has to lay down 52 miles of track in 52 days and they’re working at a furious pace, under the tyrannical, downright psychopathic rule of Fisk (the terrific Stephen McHattie).
The work crew is made up of a motley group of misfits, criminals and loony-tunes, and several have been banished to live as what Fisk contemptuously calls “garbage eaters”—stranded in the forest, reduced to scrounging for food at the local dump alongside the bears. An almost unrecognizable Roy Dupuis plays one of these “garbage eaters.”
Before filming, Ferguson took Bélanger up to the Northwest Territories to show him the site of the camp where he toiled four decades back, but it was logistically impossible to film up there. Instead, the cast and crew headed to Port Cartier on Quebec’s North Shore, a place with almost the same landscape as the Northwest Territories, according to Bélanger.
Bélanger has made a couple of TV movies in English, but this is his first major theatrical feature in English.
“There are people who think I did a film in English to be more commercial,” Bélanger said. “But it would’ve been easier to do another franco film like Gaz Bar Blues. I just didn’t want to do the same thing. And this project had to be in English.”
The Timekeeper is actually old news for Bélanger. It was shot two years ago, but sat on the shelf for months as a result of the financial problems facing its distributor, Christal Films. It only finally secured distribution when Seville Pictures snapped up rights to a slew of Christal titles. Bélanger is already on to his next project, the French-language flick Demande à ceux qui restent, which he began shooting in the Kamouraska region on Monday. Based on an original screenplay by Bélanger and actor-writer Alexis Martin, the dark drama stars Martin, François Papineau, Janine Sutto and Clémence DesRochers.
Bélanger is also penning a feature with Ferguson, a bilingual project titled River Burns.
The Timekeeper opens on Friday, August 21, 2009.