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.”