A feature film shot partly in Squamish about a man with the unpredictable ability to see two minutes into the future has just been announced in the Whistler Film Festival lineup this December.
The 85-minute film, Patterson’s Wager, was written, directed, produced, edited and entirely self-funded by award-winning Vancouver filmmaker Corbin Saleken; it is his first feature film.
He says Patterson’s Wager is a film he’d want to see and one he hopes others might, too.
“You never really know whether you’re going to be able to translate what you want to do, but my overriding element was that I knew I would like this movie,” he says.
“To me, though, the hardest thing was just deciding to do it.”
The decision wasn’t made overnight, Saleken explains; at first, he put out feelers to gauge the feasibility. The big push began after Fred Ewanuick, an actor who has starred in Corner Gas and Dan for Mayor, read the script and said yes.
“That was essentially the moment when I gave myself the green light.”
The shooting took only 12 days, and although his meticulous, pre-production planning led to things going incredibly smoothly and efficiently, it wasn’t without challenges, the biggest of which was filming inside a casino.
“It’s hard to get into a casino as a big-budget filmmaker, but as a low-budget filmmaker, there’s just no way… and because the film is about a guy who has the unpredictable ability to see two minutes into the future, the logical extension to that is you’re going to go to a casino. I couldn’t write it any other way… it wouldn’t make any sense.”
He tried, without success, to access the bigger casinos near Vancouver (“I had to hound them just to get a rejection,” he says). Then someone suggested Chances in Squamish.
“I called them and they said, yeah, it’s possible… I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “The casino here was just so amazing; they were so accommodating, it was just incredible.” Some of the casino workers, he says, even gave their time to appear as extras in the film.
Making a feature film is the dream of every film school graduate, he says, and 80 per cent of his crew on Patterson’s Wager were Simon Fraser University students and graduates.
“They were working with highly trained, professional actors and crews, so I think everybody got something out of working on it.”
So far, the film, which Saleken describes as thoughtful, heart-felt, funny and “very West Coast B.C.,” has been featured at several North American film festivals including Winnipeg Real to Reel, where it won Best Independent Feature Narrative; the Big Island Film Festival in Hawaii, where it won Best Foreign Feature; and the Oregon Independent Film Festival, where Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress awards were won by Chelah Horsdal and Michelle Creber respectively for their Patterson’s Wager performances.
Getting into festivals is much easier said than done, he explains, but the Whistler Film Festival is probably the pinnacle of them all. “I’ve gone to smaller festivals, which are fun… but Whistler is a big thing, so it’s kind of fun that people are going to be able to experience it on that scale,” he says. “And I’m thrilled that a lot of the cast and crew can go up, and that my friends and family can see it.”
The 15th annual Whistler Film Festival takes place from Dec. 2 to 6. For details about tickets and feature films, visit www.whistlerfilmfestival.com.
