Regina ticks all the boxes for filmmaker
Project got grant from Creative Sask.; Producer hopes to thank city with event
After picking up the idea in Berlin for a mixed martial arts movie, producer Shayne Putzlocher first considered filming Cagefighter in the United Kingdom and Romania before finally settling on Regina as the best location.
“For this particular movie, the two things we definitely needed was a sound stage and we needed an arena,” he said.
“Brandt arena was the perfect place to go, and same with the actual studio at the (Regina) Sound Stage.”
The other major consideration was the financial logistics.
Regina resident Andrea Hoffman, who is co-producing Cagefighter together with Hugh Patterson, said Putzlocher reached out to her when he first began looking at bringing the film to Canada.
“He phoned me and just said, ‘If you can make this work with Creative Sask. and find the money and find the locations that work within our budget and see if you can put a crew together, I’ll bring it to Saskatchewan and you can produce it with me,” said Hoffman.
In little more than a week, Hoffman said $370,000 in grant funding through Creative Sask. was confirmed, locations scouted and a team put together, and the $2-million project came to Regina.
The film follows a mixed martial arts (MMA) champion who has to climb his way back to the top after losing a heavily promoted match to a wrestling star making his crossover debut in the MMA fighting world.
As a former Regina resident who moved to Calgary after the province’s film tax credit was axed in 2012, Putzlocher said he’s always happy to bring a movie to his home province whenever he can. Even without the tax credit, he said grants from Creative Sask. have allowed him to bring several films into the province over the last few years.
“You can put a film together there,” he said. “I think the production value was the best we could have found anywhere for the budget that we had ... There’s good people there and there’s good facilities there.”
For Hoffman, having a project this size to work on in her home province was an exciting opportunity to see the province’s film industry grow.
“Something that people don’t talk about is the value of developing Saskatchewan production companies. So for us to be able to engage and provide Saskatchewan content and Saskatchewan product, we need to be able to work here and we need to be able to grow,” she said.
“It’s really nice to be able to develop Saskatchewan production companies and be able to stay home and work and develop a culture of film and production and an industry.”
Last month, the movie’s stars descended on the Queen City for filming. The cast includes WWE fighters Jonathan Good, Chuck Liddell and Jay Reso, MMA fighter Alex Montagnani and actress Gina Gershon.
Hoffman said in a larger city, they would not have had access to the types of spaces they had in Regina while staying within their budget. From the Sound Stage to the Brandt Centre to the locker-rooms at Mosaic Stadium, she said everyone was willing to work with them.
“The community just stepped up and let us use spaces that you wouldn’t normally get in another city,” she said.
The movie is now moving into the post-production phase, and Putzlocher said Regina-based company Java Post Productions is handling all of their visual effects.
Putzlocher said post-production will be wrapped up by June 2020 so they can hand the project over to their distributor, and he anticipated the movie will be released sometime in the fall of next year.
Once the movie is released, Hoffman said the crew is hoping to put on some kind of event in Regina as a thank you for being such a great community to work with.
“We’d love to do something really special here and do a big event,” she said.