The Imperfect Crime

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Winnipeg director Gary Yates is the brains behind a heist flick set in Winnipeg in 1983.

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McIntyre

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Sutherland

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Left to right, Stephen Eric McIntyre, Timothy Olyphant, Joe Anderson, Rossif Sutherland.

TORONTO — One icy weekend in November 2007, a parent dropping off a son or daughter at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet might have felt the urge to take cover upon hearing explosive gunfire rattling the windows of Graham Avenue from the vicinity of The Bay.

Apparently, staging a running gun battle smack in Winnipeg's downtown was as good a way as any for Winnipeg-based filmmaker Gary Yates to announce that his film version of the Lee McDougall play High Life would depart spectacularly from its theatrical incarnation.

The play, about a quartet of morphine addicts scheming to knock over an ATM, took place in a living room and a car in present day. The film, Yates says, spun off in a retro direction because he felt the contemporary scam "wouldn't even be believable as a failure."

"I thought: Why not make it back in the '80s when ATMs were brand new and clunky and the systems weren't straightforward?" he says. "That made the plot more feasible and then it opened up a lot of possibilities thematically."

Coincidentally, Yates was writing his own heist movie about an armoured-car robbery, but was stuck on the characters. His solution was to conjoin both stories. That, in a nutshell, explains all that gunfire on Graham Avenue.

"I moulded the ATM scam to the Brinks truck scam, so it was a happy marriage," Yates says. The film had the added benefit of being set in the same milieu as his 2004 debut feature Seven Times Lucky, which starred Kevin Pollak as a small-time con man.

"I'm very comfortable in the world of the criminal underclass," Yates says.

Because the film is set in 1983, Yates reasoned that it made sense to sell the film's producers and investors on shooting in Winnipeg.

"They didn't know the city and I said: 'Let's put it this way. It's set in 1983 so there may be areas in town you're going to have to update.'"

That environment helped actor Rossif Sutherland, who plays Billy, the quartet's most charismatic member. Sutherland, the son of Donald Sutherland and the half-brother of Kiefer, recalls that in downtown Winnipeg: "I don't remember there being all that much set dressing."

"As an actor, to put yourself in that place and time to make things as real and as honest as possible, all of that feeds it," he says. "No offence to Winnipeg people. I think 1983 is a beautiful year in which to be continuing to live."

The movie's retro vibe extends to the soundtrack, which is heavy on April Wine and Creedence Clearwater Revival, music that was already dated in the era of Culture Club and Duran Duran. The soundtrack underlines characters who are out of sync with the times.

"The early '80s was the start of the whole new Me Generation, faster and quicker and with the drugs, everyone was on cocaine, so with morphine addicts, it's the exact opposite," he says. "In that sense, robbing an ATM isn't just about the heist. It's about these guys trying to conquer the future."

High Life opens at Polo Park Silver City on Friday.

A Bug on the wall

The nominal star of High Life is Timothy Olyphant, best known for playing the sturdy lawman Seth Bullock in the TV series Deadwood.

But once you see the movie, you may find yourself transfixed by a couple of Olyphant's co-stars. The Paris-raised Rossif Sutherland plays Billy, the charming front man of the film's larcenous quartet.

Regina-born Winnipegger Stephen Eric McIntyre plays Bug, a violent psychotic whose relationship with Billy has the reactive screen chemistry of a snake and a mongoose.

McIntyre's casting was especially fortuitous. McIntyre has played minor heavies in the movie The Lookout and in the TV series Falcon Beach. Yates cast him a week before filming was to commence.

"There was one actor I was after who was really busy on a big American TV series," Yates says. "I held out for him until a week before filming and I still didn't have my second lead and everyone was kind of sweating about the character of Bug.

"Steve McIntyre had already been cast in a small role," Yates says. "I was sitting in my office with all the pictures of the characters on the wall and I was sitting there with Michael Marshall, our director of photography, and we both kind of looked up at the same time and saw Steve's face, and he looked at me and said, 'That's our Bug.'"

"So I called Steve in and I said we're going to put you on tape and I'd like you to read for this part and I think secretly, he had been hoping .

In the end, he read that part and he blew me out of the water," Yates says. "He's the crazy psychopathic killer, but what McIntyre brings to it is this vulnerability and innocence at the same time. He took that character to a whole other level and he almost steals the movie."

McIntyre says Yates helped him feel a part of the main cast by putting him up at the same hotel as his co-stars, though he could have stayed in his own home.

"Just because I happen to live in Winnipeg, let's not treat me that way, so I'm not taking a transit bus to work," McIntyre says. "Of course, socially, because I was so comfortable with a lot of different people on the crew, it was very easy then to say let's get that person and get out of the hotel."

While McIntyre and Sutherland played nemeses onscreen, they became fast friends offscreen. That left Sutherland with warmer feelings towards Winnipeg than Los Angeles, where he currently resides.

"L.A. is warm but the people are cold there," Sutherland says. "In the end, it's a bunch of opportunistic people who are going out for the dream and they'll step over each other to get there.

"In many ways in Winnipeg, although it's freezing-cold outside, it's much warmer a place than it is in California," Sutherland says.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition January 14, 2010 E8