Regina film industry gets a boost with Cagefighter

REGINA 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.