Jason Priestley hit the road for Cas & Dylan, his feature directing debut opening the Whistler Film Festival Wednesday, and found himself in familiar territory.
In fact, the Winnipeg-to-B.C. route he took while making the comedy-drama with Oscar winner Richard Dreyfuss and Orphan Black’s Tatiana Maslany, was the same one he had been on with his dad more than 30 year previously.
“It was horrible but
it was kind of awesome at the same time,” the Vancouver-born Priestley
recalled of the seemingly endless car trip west in 1979 as a
10-year-old. “It was a business trip. My dad was a hatchet man for a
textile company that fired a salesman in Winnipeg and he had to pick up
his company car and drive it back.”
That idea of a relationship evolving over long stretches on the road is an important part of Cas & Dylan,
the story of Cas Pepper, a widowed Winnipeg oncologist played by
Dreyfuss. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, Cas decides to drive alone to
the west coast where he had been happiest with his late wife. Once
there, he plans to end his life.
But rootless
young writer Dylan Morgan (Maslany) needs to get out of town and
brazenly inserts herself into his life. Suddenly Cas has a travelling
companion.
“This movie really
spoke to me for a lot of reasons. Obviously being Canadian and shooting
in Canada in places that I was very familiar with was something that
appealed to me,” said Priestley.
While Cas and Dylan go
west in a beat-up orange Volkswagen bug called Jennifer, Priestley made
the trip in his dad’s 1978 black Monte Carlo “with crushed velour
seats,” staying in rundown motels and eating in diners. Like the film’s
characters, the Priestleys experienced the kind of closeness you can
only get by spending days in a car with someone.
“It was the
longest stretch I had ever spent with my father alone,” said Priestley,
who was in Toronto to direct an episode of the new Global-NBC comedy Working the Engels, starring Andrea Martin.
Shooting scenes with
two characters in a car often creates problems for a director. Not only
is it difficult to be in there working with them, there’s little room
for action. What can the actors do except sit and talk and look out the
windows?
“It’s a huge challenge
to have two people in a car but I had the incredible luck to have
Richard Dreyfuss and Tatiana Maslany in my car, which made my job a real
pleasure every day,” said Priestley. “Those two came to work with the
most creative ideas and situations and wanted nothing more than to play
every day.”
Maslany, who is shooting the second season of Orphan Black in Toronto, said Priestley encouraged improvisation on the set and that helped her feel at ease.
“He’s awesome; he gets
comedy so completely,” she said, adding and Dreyfuss read the script
with Priestley a few times and came up with ideas in the process. “He
allowed us to play and find things to interact with each other and bond
with each other.”
Priestly, 44, first gained attention as Brandon Walsh on Beverly Hills 90210.
He went on to direct several episodes of the teen series, working
steadily from then on in TV, both in front of and behind the camera,
including supernatural series, Haven. The series four finale of Gemini and Canadian Screen Awards-winning Call Me Fitz, starring Priestley as used-car salesman Fitz Fitzpatrick, aired Monday.
Priestley, who plans to be at Whistler to introduce the film, said being at the film fest will also stir childhood memories.
“I’m incredibly
excited about being at the gala. Growing up in Vancouver, I grew up
skiing those mountains before there was a Whistler, before there was a
Blackcomb,” he laughed. “There was this little two-banger chairlift
across the street from the Husky station.”
Onscreen, the gorgeous mountain scenery of Alberta gives way to the west coast. The pair ends up in Tofino, not far from Ucluelet, where Priestly and his family own a beachfront resort.
“So I am incredibly
familiar with that,” added Priestly. “I knew I could make a very
visually powerful film. The story itself I thought was incredibly
timely. The issue of euthanasia is something that is very much in the
consciousness these days and something that is very much in debate.”
It’s certainly debated
by Cas and Dylan, with curmudgeonly Cas determined to end his life on
his terms and free spirit Dylan doing her best to talk him out of it.
“It needs to be
discussed because there are ways to defend both sides of it,” added
Priestley. “Anything I could do as a filmmaker to open that discussion
to people … it is kind of the last taboo.”