Michael Dowse gets ‘The Stunt Driver’ off the ground
The filmmaker behind hits FUBAR and Goon reunites with actor Jay Baruchel to tell the story of Ken Carter, the Canadian daredevil who dreamed of jumping the St. Lawrence River in a Lincoln Continental.
Ask a filmmaker what it’s like to make a movie and they’ll tell you, no matter how much they prepare, it’s a leap of faith. Kinda like trying to jump a rocket car over the St. Lawrence River.
Take, for example, writer-director Michael Dowse.
Dowse’s latest film, The Stunt Driver, casts Jay Baruchel as real-life Canadian daredevil Ken Carter, who, in 1976, started planning a jump across the St. Lawrence River (about 1.6 km, or one mile) in a rocket-powered Lincoln Continental using a 90-foot (27-metre) ramp.
Dowse based his dramedy on director Robert Fortier’s 1981 National Film Board documentary The Devil at Your Heels, which follows Carter as he navigates a series of obstacles, including his own self-doubt, before attempting the jump.
The Stunt Driver is, at turns, hilarious and tragic. It’s also the perfect showcase for what Dowse does so well — find the humour and vulnerability in men facing their fears. Whether it’s the stoners in his breakout mockumentary FUBAR (2002), a DJ losing his hearing in It’s All Gone Pete Tong (2004) or an insecure hockey enforcer in Goon (2011), the filmmaker exposes the cracks in men’s souls.
We caught up with Dowse on the line from his Montreal home, where he talked about needing to tell Ken Carter’s story, his admiration for pal Jay Baruchel, and trying not to take no for an answer.
What did you know about Ken Carter and the jump before starting the project?
Weirdly enough, my gateway to Ken Carter was as a teenager. One of his jumps is on a weird VHS collection called Faces of Death, which we traded and dubbed…. I completely forgot about it until 12 years ago when a friend of mine recommended that I watch the NFB documentary. The first thing that grabs you is what Ken’s doing is just insane. The scale and the spectacle of it. When you see that 90-foot monolithic ramp on the shores of the St. Lawrence Seaway and then you see this two-ton yellow rocket car with wings, it just looks impossible. You're immediately pulled into that story.
Ken is such a fascinating character, both confident and terrified by the idea of the jump.
Ken was the guy I fell in love with when I watched that doc. I loved his optimism. I loved his passion. He was a real believer. I saw a lot of myself in Ken, and any filmmaker does in terms of every film that you try to make. It feels like you're trying to run a car off a 90-foot ramp. And everybody has their own version of a 90-foot ramp in their life, which makes Ken's story universal.
Jay Baruchel is wonderful as Ken. What is it about Jay that made you want to cast him?
Jay's an old friend. We’ve worked together on and off for 20 years. First and foremost, he's just a fantastic person, which is a huge thing for me in terms of collaborating with anybody.
I had watched Blackberry and he's fantastic in that. People know Jay as a comic actor, but what they forget is that he's a really good dramatic actor. And it dawned on me that Jay is the same age as Ken. It hit me like a brick because Jay was always, in my mind, in his late 20s, but time flies.
I put my stake in the ground that he would be my guy and luckily he said yes. Then we built the whole movie around him.
It's been almost 25 years since FUBAR…
What, has it been 25 years! My god.
Yes. And you’ve seen the Canadian media industry evolve and change. What’s the landscape like for you today to get a movie made?
It’s always hard, it never gets easier. None of my films have made hundreds of millions of dollars. Nobody's writing me a blank cheque, but I think there are more people in the marketplace. It's continually shifting. There was a time before COVID where there were streamer wars, and it was a lot easier to make movies because people were flooding the marketplace and they were buying.
We're very fortunate in Canada with the CMF, Telefilm and the SODEC. And we have an incredible tax-credit system that you can use to make films.
I feel incredibly fortunate that I've been able to bridge working a little bit in the States and being able to come home and make films as well. But it never gets easier. It’s a matter of being determined and trying to not take no for an answer.
The last four films you made — Stuber, Coffee & Kareem, 8-Bit Christmas and Trap House — were as director only. You also wrote The Stunt Driver. How did it feel to get back to being the writer and director?
Great. You have to have a point of view when you’re making a film. And this film is different because it's just me and my wife producing. I came away thinking I'm going to be much nicer to independent producers from now on because it's stressful [laughs].
What are you working on at the moment?
Jay and I have a series in development at the CBC. We’re co-writing and he'll star in it. And right now I'm shooting the remake of Meatballs with Crave at the camp that my kids actually went to. That's a lot of fun. And then I'm writing a horror film.
You are busy!
You have to have a bunch of lines in the water, a bunch of stuff going on. You’ve got to keep tons of plates spinning.
