Music: {allcanada} Baruchel owes it all to Montreal

For actor Jay Baruchel, there has been one constant in his circuitous route to stardom: his hometown, Montreal.

After successful turns in Knocked Up, Tropic Thunder and a stab at big summer movie domination with last year's Sorcerer's Apprentice (sorry, it flopped), the 29-year-old actor has been steadfast about maintaining his Canadian home base.

"Anytime someone put an ultimatum to me saying, 'You can either live in Canada or you can have a career in the States,' I always said, 'I'll live in Canada,' " said Baruchel, who appears in the Montreal-shot Good Neighbours, opening in select Canadian cities Friday and elsewhere in coming weeks.

"I was always willing to walk away from it and I think that's why I've been able to have a career for 10 years ... My way of life is way too important to put on hold to go live down there."

Following a series of high-profile Hollywood roles, Baruchel has balanced himself between Hollywood fare and low-budget, artistically freeing work -- the latter of which he thinks he's achieved in his new thriller, Good Neighbours. The film sees him re-team with director Jacob Tierney and actress Emily Hampshire following last year's high school comedy, The Trotsky.

"For me, Emily and Jacob are two of my best friends and the building where the movie takes place is two stops away from my house, so it was a no-brainer," Baruchel told QMI Agency during an interview at last year's Toronto International Film Festival.

Then he read the script and really started to get excited.

"It's very uncommon to find characters with any semblance of depth let alone as many layers as these characters have," he said. "This is the kind of movie I'd watch and it has the most awkward death scene of any movie this year. I wear that with a badge of pride. Even though I have nothing to do with that scene, I'm in the f---ing movie."

Good Neighbours is based on Chrystine Brouillet's 1982 novel, Chère voisine, about three friends in Quebec City who slowly come undone after a serial killer begins stalking their streets.

The story was tweaked slightly, with the action moving to Montreal's Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood and the setting changed to 1995, during the middle of the referendum campaign.

"I remember going to bed the night of the referendum and wondering if I was going to wake up in a different f---ing country," said Baruchel, who appears next opposite Seann William Scott in the hockey comedy Goon.

Good Neighbours revolves around three Montrealers -- Victor, a meek school teacher played by Baruchel, the acerbic Spencer (Scott Speedman), and a crazy cat lady, Louise (Emily Hampshire). Just like the book, a killer is on the loose. But as the murders begin to mount, comedic undertones start to permeate Tierney's screenplay.

"I dug everything (Tierney) was trying to do and I saw how I could bridge the gap between what people know me for in the States and the kind of work I've always wanted to do.

"Plus Montreal in the winter time is really cruel and mean outside," Baruchel added with a smile. "So you put this horribly polarizing event in Quebec history in the meanest time of year and it's a great place to set a serial killer movie."

With its mixture of politics and black comedy, Baruchel is convinced audiences will either love his latest or hate it. And if they don't like Good Neighbours, he wants them to really despise it.

"The movie summarized would be: Good depends on the context," he said. "Our movie has no road map to it. We don't tell you how to feel about the characters, we don't let you know who the good and bad guys are; we leave that for the audience to decide. So the movie is a love letter to ambiguity in that respect.

"The worse thing that could happen to me is if someone sees the movie and says, 'It was alright.' I want us to belly flop. If people don't dig it, I want them to f---ing hate it."

Director Tierney puts own stamp on thriller genre

Serial killers have invaded pretty much every area of pop culture. But no one has ever thought to let one run amok during one of Canada's most politically tumultuous periods.

So when director Jacob Tierney was adapting Quebec writer Chrystine Brouillet's thriller Chère voisine, he thought, 'Why not set it during the 1995 Quebec referendum?'

"Part of what appealed to me about '95 and the referendum was that the atmosphere in neighbourhoods like (Montreal's) Notre-Dame-de-Grâce was so desolate and so depressing," Tierney said during an interview for his latest movie Good Neighbours.

"Businesses were closing down; people weren't speaking on buses because your language was a declaration of your politics, so it was an atmosphere that I found really interesting."

And after last year's high school comedy, The Trotsky, which starred Jay Baruchel and Emily Hampshire, Tierney was itching to put his own stamp on the thriller genre.

"I love those kinds of movies," he told QMI Agency. "It's a genre I really like, but it's a genre, with a few notable selections like Shallow Grave, that I think has had the humour sucked out of it in the '80s and '90s. I liked the idea of doing a black comedy again. Going back to what Hitchcock would do all the time.

"It allows for a bit more of a malicious fun to take place. I love mean-spirited movies and I wanted this to be mean-spirited fun."