Montreal’s movie scene bustling
In almost 25 years as a location manager, Pierre Blondin has helped to transform Montreal and its suburbs into New York, part of Europe, New Jersey and New England cottage country.
Foreign filming in the city has been booming of late, spurred on by tax incentives, varied architecture, an endless appetite for online streaming and the presence of several top studios and visual effects companies specializing in post-production.
Last year, foreign investments in shooting and audiovisual production investments totalled $645 million in the province, including from the 23 foreign productions that filmed in the province, many in Montreal, according to Quebec’s film and TV council.
While few of the productions are actually set in the city, Blondin says it’s been common for decades to “cheat” one location for another, usually for budget or scheduling reasons.
“The cheating is large scale ... but you get away with it, because what matters in a film is the action,” said Blondin, 61.
“If you’re watching a film and looking at the background, it’s because the storyline is very boring.”
While its filming industry isn’t as big as Toronto’s or Vancouver’s, Montreal’s offers a variety of architecture that isn’t found elsewhere, he says.
In particular, the architecture of parts of Old Montreal allows it to pass for parts of Europe, while other sectors of the Old Port and downtown are more reminiscent of New York.
Patricia Durocher, a location manager who works mostly with Quebec or Quebec-Europe coproductions, said she used Montreal and its suburbs in her latest movie to represent a number of U.S. states, including Kansas, Vermont, New Hampshire and New York.
The Hummingbird Project, a story about two entrepreneurs building a fibre-optic line, is set to make its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival this year.
“A lot of production in the past couple of years is representing the States in general, especially suburbs, and the background in Quebec is really, really similar,” she said.
But her biggest challenge, she said, was trying to find interior scenes to represent the Middle Eastern country of Jordan while filming Denis Villeneuve’s 2010 Oscar-nominated drama, Incendies.
In the end, she said, the illusion was achieved through a mixture of imagination and creative work on the part of the art department. And if a match isn’t perfect, there are always visual effects, which can be used to erase a couple of trees or add storeys to buildings.