by MATTHEW HAYS

If that old adage about writing what you know about is true, Montreal-born filmmaker Jacob Tierney is breaking the rules. He's made Twist, an affecting, touching and often deeply disturbing film about the lives of a few down-and-out young hustler junkies. And as real as it all feels, Tierney has never been a junkie, nor a hustler, nor a homeless street person. In fact, in person Tierney feels downright straight laced and clean cut, bright-blue-eyed and full of enthusiasm.

The son of local producer Kevin Tierney, Jacob's involvement in film started at a young age, recruited for auditions as a child actor. Being born in a trunk had its payoff: Tierney was soon appearing in a broad range of films, from Terence Davies' The Neon Bible (starring alongside Gena Rowlands and Diana Scarwid) to Bob Hoskins' Rainbow (with Hoskins and Dan Aykroyd) to This Is My Father (with James Caan and Aidan Quinn).

I feel a screenplay coming on

Tierney's itch to act was followed quite naturally be the urge to become a filmmaker himself. And several years ago, as Tierney watched a new production of the musical Oliver! in London's West End, he was struck by how timely the source material, Charles Dickens' novel Oliver Twist, remained.

"I was watching the play at the same time I'd been studying the Industrial Revolution," Tierney recalls. "Then I just started writing."

Several years and more than a few drafts later, Tierney was working to get the project into production. "Getting money is clearly the toughest part of this. It's really hard to get your first film made. It's hard when you're young, but I can hardly blame anyone for that."

What Tierney did find was some good advice from his father. "My dad's a fantastic producer. The best lesson he taught me was to make sure you have a good producer behind you. Besides being enormously creative and supportive, he pointed me in the direction of Victoria Hirst, who's been amazing."

Hirst and Tierney managed to get the film funding bodies on board, various pockets and sources that can be tapped for piecemeal backing. It's a tricky game, Tierney says, but with a solid team invested in a script, they managed to pull off Twist at well under $500,000.

It helps, of course, to have bonded with your roomie from your L.A. days, as Tierney did. And it also helps if that roomie is one of the most rapidly rising young names in Hollywood, Nick Stahl, who starred in the low-budget, highly praised art film In the Bedroom, Larry Clark's brutal Bully and last summer's blockbuster T3. Stahl loved Tierney's script and shooting ideas and agreed to come on board for a fraction of what he'd normally get paid.

A world apart

The resulting Twist is certainly an achievement. While sticking to a stark, realistic feel, Tierney creates a universe that is unusual and singular. The lads (including newcomer Joshua Close as Oliver) get dragged into the brutal underworld of addiction and prostitution, relying on the heavy-handed, protective leadership of the hardened Fagin (native acting vet Gary Farmer). Stahl is Dodge, based on the Artful Dodger, the older hustler whose life on the street finds tragic ends.

The performances, not surprisingly, are superb, with Stahl delivering a devastating turn as a hustler whose life is spinning out of control. Tierney says the task of directing a close friend turned out to be pleasurable. "I was worried at first," he concedes, "but it was actually easy. It was the best-case scenario of what I'd had in mind. It was really fun. Nick and I don't live in the same city anymore so the nice thing was it gave us an excuse to hang out together."

Though many directors, most famously Hitchcock, find the actual act of shooting a film arduous, Tierney reports having the opposite reaction. "I was so happy that I was getting to do it. I wasn't particularly afraid, but that's probably just because I'm stupid. It was exciting. The thing is that it just seemed to go very well and was a pleasure. As an actor, you're often not involved with it beyond your performance and your days on the set. This certainly was a learning experience, in terms of what actually goes into a feature film - just how much is required and how endless it is."

As well as the performances, Tierney is thrilled with the look of the film, something he credits to the film's "wicked" cinematographer, Gerald Packer. "We watched a lot of John Huston films. His use of Widescreen was great, I loved the way his films look. We watched Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together, Fassbinder's The Marriage of Maria Braun and Streetwise. That's a tremendous documentary shot in 35mm, very beautiful and heart wrenching."

Making things purdy

With the broad range of directors Tierney's worked with, it's a natural question concerning his directorial debut: which one had the greatest impact on him? "Terry [Terence Davies] has been a huge influence on me. His visual aesthetic is so huge. His films are gorgeous! If you're going to use a camera, you may as well make it purdy. His movies are just plain great. His manner on the set is wonderful, he's funny and charming.

"But you know what? I learned a lot from a lot of people. You learn from the bad ones too."

So what dirt? Who are the bad ones?

"There's too many to name, believe me. I learned from the great actors, too. I learned from Gena. From just watching her. You do it long enough and after a while you don't know where it's coming from, it's just something you've picked up."

The most intriguing response Tierney's noticed about Twist is that some have seen it as conservative and deeply Catholic. "Catholic countries seem to love it. It was very well received in Ireland, France and Italy. My father said, "See?? I told you - you made a Catholic movie!" I'm just happy the response has been good. Some have suggested that it's a puritanical movie. One of the programmers at the Venice Festival said he'd assumed I was a puritan or super conservative. They viewed it as a very strict and conservative film. It's conservative in terms of storytelling, but I didn't intend it to be conservative otherwise. Some pointed out that people kept their clothes on, but we were shooting in Toronto in the winter, I wasn't going to ask anyone to take their clothes off."

Tierney says that he felt well supported in his experience with the Toronto International Film Festival, which has taken some heat lately for burying the Canadian entries beneath heavy layers of Hollywood fare. "A lot of Canadian filmmakers seem to think the Toronto Festival is like welfare. They expect that the fest is going to magically sell their film to every market in the world. I was really happy with the festival. We ended up selling to U.S., Britain and France. We were lucky and fortunate. People expect a bit too much of the festival, it depends on a lot of different factors."

Tierney's next projects involve an NFB documentary he's producing about several boys' last year in high school, and The Lonely Planet, his second feature, once more from his own script. "It begins with three friends mourning the loss of a dear buddy who's died. Then they go to Greece together backpacking. It sounds depressing, but it's not. It's about them dealing with the loss.

"I'm not making any more movies in Canada in the winter. This time, we're hitting the beach."

Twist opens Friday, May 21

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