Adrian Langley watches intently as gunfire lights up the corner of bank and Gloucester. As the salvo dies down, Langley steps away from his camera and calls it a wrap.
The Ottawa-based director has just finished another high-adrenaline scene from his newest film A Violent State. The movie is Langley’s third film to be shot, produced, and set in the Ottawa-area. But it is his first to bring the fight into the street.
“It was easier than we thought it would be to co-ordinate,” he says. “and harder than we thought it would be to shoot.”
Langley says the film takes a dark, edgy step into the Canadian crime drama genre – a place he says Canadian filmmakers have yet to fully explore.
“There’s been quite a few people, both in Toronto and Los Angeles, who have become very interested in what we are doing,” Langley says.
Representatives from Cinemavault and Vivendi have told Langley they are looking forward to seeing a raw cut of A Violent State, which should be ready mid-April.
It’s quite the accomplishment, says A Violent State producer Sean Parker.
“We pretty much have no budget and are funding this thing ourselves,” he says. “Most film projects that get going in Canada are all done by grant system and waiting around expecting somebody to give you money for a project
But Langley says he enjoys the freedom of low-budget productions. That allows him to explore what he calls the "visceral duality" of good and evil. It's something he says has been present since his first film Dealer, a gritty day-in-the-life depiction of a drug dealer.
"We're living in this society where people are assumed to be the good guy or bad guy. There's no ambiguity,"
Langley says he strives to capture that ambiguity in his work. Often, audience’s first impressions of a character won’t survive to the closing act. And, with A Violent State, Langley says he has been focusing on these dark themes more than his past films.
The film is being produced with the help of the Ottawa Gatineau Film and Television Development Corporation, which helps cut through the red tape of shutting down a street or using a public building for filming.
Its general manager, Roch Brunette, says Langley and his crew are part of an Ottawa filmmaking community that has been thriving over the past three or four years.
“They are quite talented and professionals, I can tell,” he says, “eventually you’ll want to hang out with these people, they’re going to be stars.”
In the meantime, Brunette says their low-budget, high-quality productions are beginning to bring Ottawa’s film scene closer to the established industries of Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.
And unlike many movies filmed in Ottawa, A Violent State doesn’t attempt to hide the city. Scenes include places on Lisgar, Queen and O’Connor streets. Langley says anyone who knows Ottawa will recognize everything from the Delta Hotel, to the ByWard Market.
“I think the subject matter and the quality of the film is something that people don’t really put Ottawa together with,” says Langley, “so I think it’s going to be fun for them to see Ottawa in that way.”
That said, Langley stresses he isn’t on a crusade to put Ottawa on the map.