Music: {allcanada} Disney's 'Real Steel' real Canadian

Saturday, October 1, 2011

{allcanada} Disney's 'Real Steel' real Canadian

And the award for the Most Canadian Non-Canadian movie of the year goes to: Disney's Real Steel.

Though it was shot in Michigan, and its star, Hugh Jackman, is Australian, its Canadian Content points rack up as follows:

Its director, Shawn Levy, is from Montreal. Its co-star, Dakota Goyo, is a 12-year-old Toronto kid still attending public school in Hogtown. Leading lady Evangeline Lily (Lost) is from Fort Saskatchewan, Alta. And the bad guy, Kevin Durand (a.k.a. The Blob in X-Men Origins: Wolverine), is from Thunder Bay, Ont.

"It was crazily Canadian," says director Levy. "It wasn't by design, but there was a lot of Canuck bonding going on.

"We would police each other's accents. All of us would be on Hugh if his Australian accent poked out. He'd be on Dakota and Evangeline if they said something that sounded Canadian. And you had Kevin Durand doing some crazy Texan accent. So yeah, a lot of accent policing."

STAR SYSTEM: Marc Forster has directed such A-listers as Halle Berry (who won an Oscar for his Monster's Ball), Daniel Craig (Quantum of Solace), Dustin Hoffman (Stranger than Fiction), Ryan Gosling (Stay) and Johnny Depp (Finding Neverland). Given the personalities involved, has the Swiss filmmaker learned any tricks along the way?

"I think every actor is different," says Forster, whose Machine Gun Preacher stars Gerard Butler and who is currently shooting World War Z with Brad Pitt.

"Johnny Depp has a very different way from working than Gerard. And Daniel is different from Brad or Dustin or Will Ferrell or Kate Winslet. They're all different. Some need more attention, some need less.

"It also depends on where they are at in their career and their personal life. People have said about some actors, 'Oh they're difficult to work with.' And then I'd work with them and it's so easy. I'd be like, 'What are they talking about? They're the easiest person.' Then I'd work with someone who people said are so easy and they're very sort of difficult."

WRITING ON THE WALL: Decades before Dolphin Tale, director Charles Martin Smith was just an actor working for an unknown filmmaker named George Lucas.

The film, 1973's American Graffiti, went onto become a box-office phenomenon, launching the careers of Lucas, Harrison Ford, Ron Howard and Richard Dreyfuss, among others.

In the years since, Lucas has attained a reputation -- especially following the CG-heavy Star Wars prequels -- for being more comfortable with technology than humanity.

But Smith remembers Lucas being incredibly malleable and open to human input.

"George Lucas told us, 'I wrote the script, but you can change any line you want.' And in Graffiti, we would block the scenes too.

"He would say, 'What do you guys want to do?' And I'd be like, 'Well, I guess I can lean against this car.'

"And he'd say, 'OK, that's good.' He let us do what we did."