Director Erik Canuel, centre, reacts to an on-set explosion effect while shooting the film Bon Cop, Bad Cop, alongside the film’s stars Patrick Huard, left, and Colm Feore.Dominique Chartrand
Érik Canuel, who died in Montreal on June 15 at the age of 63, was one of the top movie directors in Quebec, perhaps best known for his successful 2006 film Bon Cop, Bad Cop, starring Colm Feore, Patrick Huard and others.
“I think we still hold the box-office record for Quebec and Canada,” Mr. Huard said of the film, which brought in more than $12.5-million worldwide. Mr. Huard came up with the idea for the movie, wrote the script and insisted on Mr. Canuel to direct it.
The producers worried that Mr. Canuel had only worked on low-budget films and Bon Cop, Bad Cop was going to be made with a much larger budget.
“I told them he’s done miracles with small budgets, think of what he can do with a project that is so much more ambitious,” Mr. Huard said. “Érik also had the sensitivity and the sense of humour to make things work.”
Bon Cop, Bad Cop was a bilingual comedy about two detectives – a francophone and an anglophone – forced to work together. Mr. Canuel was accustomed to working in both French and English. Along with his Quebec-produced films he worked with American networks, directed an early episode of the CTV series Transplant and worked on projects with stars as diverse as David Bowie and Christopher Plummer.
Érik Canuel was born in Montreal on Jan. 21, 1961, the son of two actors: Yvan Canuel and Lucille Papineau. He was familiar with the world of theatre and film from an early age.
“We shared a passion for the craft from childhood onward, since we worked in theatre with our father, and then together in cinema,” his brother Nicolas told La Presse. “At a very young age, he was drawing comics, he already had an eye for framing. His cinematographic language developed very early on. He knew how to make the camera speak. He was always reading books about the technical aspects of cinema and its directors.”
Mr. Canuel made his first short film when he was 20 and worked as a production assistant in advertising films. He decided to hone his skills and studied film production at Concordia University in Montreal.
He started producing music videos for Quebec singers and bands and worked on episodes of the television series The Hunger in the late 1990s, a British-Canadian production, as well as an American made-for-TV movie, and he won a Genie for his short documentary Hemingway: A Portrait in 1999.
Mr. Canuel directed his first feature film, La Loi du Cochon, in 2001. “I’m a big fan of the Coen brothers and I found something of them in this dark universe,” he told Odile Tremblay of Le Devoir. “The script revolves around two women, whereas usually, this type of film tells mostly guys’ stories.”
Writer, actor and director Mr. Huard was impressed by that film and went on to collaborate with Mr. Canuel on three productions, including Nez Rouge (2003) and Bon Cop, Bad Cop.
In Bon Cop, Bad Cop, a body is discovered atop a billboard on the provincial border, with its heart in Quebec and its bottom in Ontario, as one character quips. These unusual circumstances lead to the unlikely pairing of Colm Feore’s character, an uptight anglophone police officer and Mr. Huard’s cool Québécois cop. The dialogue goes back and forth between English and French. An explanation of French-Canadian swear words with their basis in blasphemy is just one comedic highlight.
Mr. Huard said he got the idea for the film after getting laughs telling linguistic jokes at the Genie Awards, and was surprised when the anglophones in the audience laughed as much as the francophones.
At one stage in the film, there is a planned explosion of a car while the two detectives are talking. Mr. Canuel set up three cameras to shoot it. While an American production might be able to afford multiple explosions, there was only one spare car in the Bon Cop, Bad Cop budget.
“I had just come off a Spider-Man thing in the U.S. where we had 100 vehicles explode but in Canada, we could afford one and we could only afford to blow it up once,” Mr. Feore said.
“When we finally shot it and Patrick and I were doing our three- or four-page scene, suddenly the thing explodes on Érik’s cue so we just responded, no acting required, and I don’t know if he did this deliberately or not but we carried on and the cameras were still rolling and it exploded again,” said Mr. Feore from his home in Stratford, Ont. “We carried on with the scene because nobody said ‘cut’ which is what you do as an actor. So, at the end of that there are photographs of the three of us embracing with flames in the background and Érik was as pleased as a five-year-old whose paper rocket had blown up on the launch pad exactly as planned and everything had gone according to his direction.”
There were other action shots in the film, including one where Mr. Huard’s character has to jump from a car to a boat in Montreal’s Old Port. It was tricky and dangerous. Mr. Canuel lay on the mattress where Mr. Huard was to land, operating the camera himself.
“In Canada we’re always trying to play it safe. This wasn’t the case with Érik. We did stunts that no one would let us do today,” Mr. Huard said.
Mr. Canuel’s collaborators were impressed by how he took on many different types of projects.
“I produced three films with Érik as the director,” Quebec producer Claude Veillet said. Those films were La loi du Cochon, Nez Rouge and Le Survenant.
“Érik loved exploring different genres,” Mr. Veillet said. “My impression is he was an eternal teenager and he had difficulty with authority.”
He may have had a difficulty with authority but when he was in charge, people found him easy to work with.
“Érik was such a friendly guy, he knew everyone by their name and he really cared about people,” said Brian Baker, former executive director of the Directors Guild of Canada, who worked as lighting director on many of Mr. Canuel’s TV series in Quebec as well as advertising shoots. “I worked with a lot of directors, but this guy had such imagination. He was a real artist and if he had problems with producers, over things like money, he stuck to his guns. He didn’t let people push him around.”
He was truly at home working in both languages, a trait shared by many Quebec directors.
“It’s our reality in Canada that if you want to work you have to do it in French and English,” said Tristan Dubois, the Quebec representative of the Directors Guild of Canada. “Érik was a great director and a great storyteller and when you are good at telling stories, language doesn’t matter anymore. And Érik knew the language of the camera, a deep knowledge of where you put the camera. Along with that he was always reading and researching.”
It impressed his colleagues that Mr. Canuel was not a pushover and would fight for the things he wanted on the films and TV series he was working on.
“It’s very tough to be what Érik was. If you have too much of an ego you won’t work. Too soft, a yes man or too polite, you’ll end up as the technical director. Érik had this capacity of saying no, I want my editor and my director of photography. Some producers said no to his demands and Érik stood up and left and when he was at the door they changed their mind and said yes.”
One of the more unusual projects he worked on was with Christopher Plummer.
“After Bon Cop came out and was the success that it was, I got a call from Christopher Plummer who said, ‘This Érik Canuel fellow, what do you think? I’m looking for somebody to film my Barrymore,’” Mr. Feore recalled.
Barrymore began as a stage play that premiered at the Stratford Festival in 1996, then it had another run at the Winter Garden Theatre in Toronto, and it was not easy to adapt the stage play into a film.
“Érik was the perfect kind of outsider for that job,” Mr. Feore said.
Mr. Canuel was still in demand as a director, but he had to turn down work because of illness. He was diagnosed with multiple myeloma seven years ago and died of complications related to secondary plasma cell leukemia. He leaves his partner, Julie Castan; and children, Elodie, L’ami.e and Justine; brother, Nicolas; mother, Lucille; and extended family.
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Editor’s note: This article has been updated to clarify that Érik Canuel directed an early episode of the CTV series Transplant.