Silence! Filming Going On!

Daniel Bissonnette, commissioner and director of Montreal’s Cinema and Television Office, knows the city like the back of his hand. “We have such marvellous attractions in this city. This spring, when Brad Pitt came to film here, we were able to re-create Moscow on just one street, and an American city in the adjoining street. Very few cities can match that capability,” he said.

Numerous challenges await Montreal in the years to come, particularly the inter-relationship between the cinema industry and the video games industry. The latter is already well entrenched in the metropolis and will be able to work in collaboration with Hollywood, generating more revenues for Montreal and its artistic talents. “Another challenge is to spread out the projects throughout the year to avoid having low and high seasons where there’s an oversupply or shortfall of technicians”, he said. But will Montreal, who once upon a time fell behind two other production cities - Toronto and Vancouver – remain a city to be ignored? “One year ago, we could not imagine that we would ever reach the production volume of Toronto and Vancouver, but today, it’s happening”, Hans Fraiquin explained, national commissioner of Quebec’s Cinema and Television Office.

And what distinguishes us from these two other Canadian cities is the major volume of local production representing 72% of projects in the pipeline. In Mel’s Studio, local productions for television and cinema account for up to 90% of our work,” Michel Trudel hinted. Trudel is currently in talks with Paramount, Sony and other studios – these are the ones with more money than producers in our city who have to face a broken market where the top heavy series are practically dead and buried.

Fortunately for Quebec and to the displeasure of California’s Governor, Americans cannot ignore satellite studios. “Arnold Schwarzenegger will not succeed in keeping all the filming work in his state because they cannot film everything in Los Angeles. They need other architectural themes. When they need an airport and/or a prison, Montreal is the destination”, Michel Trudel pointed out. (Photo: Studio Mel’s)