by MATTHEW HAYS

John L'Ecuyer concedes he's doing everything backwards. At least in terms of conventional ways and wisdom. At 37, L'Ecuyer has an impressive track record as a filmmaker and writer. His 1995 feature, Curtis's Charm, a tale of addiction and friendship adapted from the work of Jim Carroll, won him acclaim and awards. His next feature, Confessions of a Rabid Dog, a documentary about recovering addicts, also won him considerable praise.

He then did what all upwardly mobile young Montreal anglo filmmakers did: he took more TV gigs - directing virtually every English-language episodic from Da Vinci's Inquest to Queer as Folk - and got a place in Toronto. Now, L'Ecuyer announces in-between hauls of a cigarette, he's bucking all that and moving back to Montreal.

It may sound like the voice of someone readying themselves for a downward swing in work, a shift into the slow lane. Hardly. L'Ecuyer has just finished wrapping no less than three features. The first, an adaptation of renowned Quebec writer Dany Laferrière's Le Gôut des jeunes filles, is currently in the final stages of post-production, with local producer and distributor Christal Films hoping for a spring Cannes premiere.

Working en français

This is no small thing: not only is L'Ecuyer returning to Montreal, he's also bucking another trend, going from English-language projects to directing his first-ever French-language feature. Over the past decade, it's been precisely the opposite move for Quebec's most prominent French-language directors, from Denys Arcand to Lea Pool to Robert Lepage.

The film's story is autobiographical, based on Laferrière's own experiences. Set in Haiti in "70–'71, it's a coming-of-age tale about the first time he made love to a woman, set amid the backdrop of Haiti's political upheaval. "This is a charming black comedy," L'Ecuyer says, reporting that "working with Dany was amazing - he's phenomenal, a very brilliant man."

L'Ecuyer pauses when asked about the delicacies of working in French, a language he was surrounded by while growing up in Montreal, but a language that was nonetheless not his mother tongue. "When I speak in French in a relaxed setting with a glass of wine, I'm fine. But get me into a situation with a lot of stress, and it's not so easy. Fourteen people are talking to you on a set, in various different dialects, and it's like, 'Wait! Stop! One at a time!' It wasn't a hindrance, I just needed a bit more time to absorb what people were saying."

More complicated was shooting in 35 degree heat in Guadeloupe on a shoestring budget, one L'Ecuyer estimates at about $1.5-million. "We shot with broken equipment, everyone just went with the anarchy of the shoot. So many times it could have fallen apart. We had a generator that didn't always hold up. It was a miracle film, really.

"I had to simply accept the hardships on the shoot. In a sense, I grew to actually appreciate it, because it reminded me of the experience of making Curtis's Charm. My inexperience there made everything more panicky and full of nervous energy. In this instance, because of the conditions, it makes the creativity go further. I got a similar kind of freaked-out feeling; you're finding solutions to problems you can't solve with money because you don't have any. It helped to have such an amazing crew - this was very exciting."

Drawing on John Waters

As well, L'Ecuyer has completed shooting two based-on-a-true-story, movies-of-the-week for CTV. One is titled Choice, recreating the life of abortion crusader Henry Morgentaler. "Really, that man is amazing," says L'Ecuyer. "He's now 80 and he walks faster and thinks faster than I do." And then there's Prom Queen, the movie based on the struggle of a small-town Ontario boy, Marc Hall, to take his boyfriend to his graduation prom at a Catholic school. When school officials just said no, Hall took the fight all the way to the courts, who said the school had no constitutional right to discriminate against him. The decision drew international attention to the case.

And L'Ecuyer's treatment of the subject may cause further eyebrow-raising - forget the standard, maudlin, made-for-TV movie style. L'Ecuyer says Prom Queen goes for camp, borrowing heavily from icon John Waters and starring two Kids in the Hall, Dave Foley and Scott Thompson. "I think it's really great that CTV gave us the freedom to go in this direction," L'Ecuyer says. "It feels more like Showtime or HBO in terms of the approach."

With three features shot in the past year, a book under his belt (the critically lauded collection of short stories, UseOnceandDestroy), and further TV projects in development, L'Ecuyer has come a long way from bottoming out over 15 years ago. Then, the filmmaker was pulling out of heroin addiction, something he's successfully put behind him.

"I'm very lucky on many levels, though I'm still dealing with the residuals. There are remnants of it. It took me a long time to realize that I could return here." Recovery for addicts, commonly practiced, often includes leaving the city where you were in the habit, as an added method of breaking old patterns. L'Ecuyer makes it clear he's pretty tired of anyone bringing up his old heroin habit, seeing as it's old hat. (But a journalist could be forgiven, seeing as he made two movies and wrote a book full of the topic.) L'Ecuyer wants to move on, and rediscovering Montreal is part of the evolution.

"Something about Montreal, when you turn around the corner past an old crumbling red-brick building, and you see the cross of a city skyline or you see some alleyway, there's a beauty here that's like looking at a series of paintings. It's been super important for me to come back. I guess I'll always have some demons bouncing about in my head.

"Toronto's a great city, and I'll always have to keep an apartment there as I get a lot of work there. A lot of my closest friends live there. But you can't make films where you're not happy living. When I go deep into my heart, soul, and emotions, if I do that in Montreal I feel I can dig deeper."

Home groan

Though L'Ecuyer says he's generally had positive dealings with the federal film-funding body Telefilm, he does see the current state of Canada's English-language film culture as being "confused and possibly in real trouble." In contrast to Quebec, where the successes of Les Invasions barbares, La Grande séduction and Mambo Italiano have headlined a banner year, the English-language home-grown film scene appears to be in a malaise. He hasn't even heard of Foolproof, the achingly generic heist movie that Telefilm and Alliance Atlantis put a whack of chips on, betting the bank (and losing). As I describe the film's plot, L'Ecuyer rolls his eyes. "Don't emulate what the Americans are doing," he prescribes. "After Bethune, there shouldn't be any question about it. Let's reinforce what has been successful in Canada. Between "93 and "96 it seemed like there was a strong wave of intriguing films in English Canada. Alliance has bought up all these small companies now and shut them down. We need to do a review of the directors who are working and the producers who are getting money. I think we need to do some IQ testing.

"I became a director because I had something to say, or felt I had something to say," says L'Ecuyer, who says he's also developing a bilingual cop TV series. "I didn't do this to have power or to look cool. The vast majority of the people I meet in the business, it seems they've entered it for the wrong reason. I don't know what it's for, but it's not because they're desperate to tell the story.

"For me, the story is always crucial."

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