The plan was simple. Construct a 430-metre ramp on a patch of farmland near Morrisburg, Ont. Then use that ramp to launch a rocket-powered Lincoln Continental across a 1.6-kilometre stretch of the St. Lawrence River, where the vehicle would land safe and snug on the other side of the Canada-U.S. border, a bed of freshly planted roses cushioning its fall. The only challenge: There had to be a person behind the wheel of that Lincoln. And that person would need to survive the ramp, the jump, and, of course, the landing.
In 1976, Ken “The Mad Canadian” Carter planned just such a feat, as much a bid to cement his daredevil legacy as it was to prove to the world that Canadians had just as much heart, courage, and never-say-die tenacity (to say nothing of unhinged audacity) as our neighbours to the south. And now, a half-century and a few cultural-sovereignty crises later, actor Jay Baruchel is immortalizing Carter’s 400-km-an-hour journey in director Michael Dowse’s The Stunt Driver, a wild, hilarious, heartbreaking, and surprisingly timely new movie that only a fellow Mad Canadian such as himself could headline.
Baruchel plays Ken Carter, who attempts a jump across the St. Lawrence river in a rocket car in the The Stunt Driver.Philippe Bossé/Mongrel Media/Supplied
“First and foremost, this is just a great entertaining old-school movie. But it is also very much a meditation on the condition of being Canadian. It works on a bunch of different levels and scratches a bunch of different itches. But any Canadian who sees themselves in it, that’s not an accident,” says the Ottawa-born, Montreal-raised, and now Toronto-based actor.
“That’s something we talked about throughout the entire movie, and everything you’re feeling connected to as a Canadian is all deliberate. That is all a bunch of Dowse and I and a bunch of crabby Canadian men of a certain time period getting a lot of stuff out of their system.”
Baruchel is loyal to his Canadian roots, choosing to stay home instead of going to the U.S.
It is a few weeks before The Stunt Driver makes its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, and Baruchel is interrupting his last-gasp-of-summer vacation at his cottage about an hour outside Kingston – a wood-panelled hideaway with mosquitos and spotty Wi-Fi, or about as Canadian a retreat as it gets – to trace the development of what might be the movie that he’s been working his entire career toward.
In the business for more than a quarter-century, starting with roles on such tween-flavoured series as Are You Afraid of the Dark? and Popular Mechanics for Kids, Baruchel spent much of his 20s and 30s keeping one foot in Hollywood, the other at home in Canada.
At a certain point, it might have simply been easier for the actor to migrate south completely like fellow Canadian Seth Rogen, the two actors becoming key players in that now-distant, bygone era when any Judd Apatow-associated comedy (Knocked Up, This Is the End) could dominate the box office and discourse for weeks. Instead, Baruchel kept evolving his roster of collaborators – Clint Eastwood to Ben Stiller to David Cronenberg to a pre-Heated Rivalry Jacob Tierney – while increasingly focusing on what he could do within, and for, the Canadian industry.
“I grew up in Montreal and I also grew up in Oshawa at the arse end of the eighties, and it was a pretty bleak time in Canada. I was a TV and movie addict, but I’d go outside in Oshawa and be like, well, I might as well be on Mars because how do you get into that? From here to there?” Baruchel recalls. “The one thing that would tell me I could do it here was the existence of the National Film Board and the CBC. They have been many things to me, but one of them is a beacon. So if we can play even a tiny role in that, that’s a pretty big source of pride.”
Director Michael Dowse, Seann William Scott and George Laraque filming a scene in Goon.Alliance Films
Just as Carter himself needed to endure countless bone-crunching stunts in Ontario and Quebec before he could convince foreign broadcasters to broadcast his St. Lawrence jump – the show-off always keeping one eye trained at outdoing his American rival, Evel Knievel – Baruchel’s performance in The Stunt Driver is built atop years and years of getting battered and bruised within the Canadian system. And if there is one knock-down, drag-out, homegrown rumble that would eventually lead Baruchel to this new movie, it was his work co-writing and co-starring in the 2011 hockey comedy Goon, where he first connected with Dowse.
“When you go to war alongside someone, which was what it was like making Goon, you grow strong as you’re in the trenches with them, and it just galvanizes the relationship,” recalls Dowse who, like Baruchel, has found a way to work both in Hollywood (Stuber, last year’s Trap House) and at home (FUBAR, The F Word). “We worked again for a few episodes of the show Man Seeking Woman, but it wasn’t until I saw BlackBerry that I thought, maybe Jay can play Ken. He’s older now, he intimately knows that lower Notre-Dame-de-Grâce world where Ken was from. And Jay just put this film on his back. He knew the responsibility this was, and he rose to the challenge.”
For Baruchel, Carter offered a juicy role, certainly – a dreamer who loves the thrill of the road despite not having a driver’s license, a husband who adores his wife (played by Laurence Leboeuf) yet can’t find it in himself to stop giving her nightmares every time he steps behind the wheel. And in his performance, Baruchel nails all those knotty contradictions with tragedy and electricity. But the character of Carter is also emblematic of a sliver of the Canadian psyche, in direct dialogue with Baruchel’s work in BlackBerry as the stymied engineer Mike Lazaridis.
Jay Baruchel as Mike Lazaridis and Glenn Howerton as Jim Balsillie in BlackBerry.IFC Films/Elevation Pictures
“As different as the Lazaridis and Carter characters are, they’re both patriots with small-man chips on their shoulders. They have windmills in common, and they’re mine as well,” says Baruchel. “The fact that Ken is as direct and on his sleeve with his patriotism, that’s me, man. Look, you don’t have to wave a flag, but to pretend and aspire to do that somewhere else for another flag – to replace your flag – I have contempt, I’ll be honest, for those people. And I have a great deal of respect for people who are proud to be here, and long before it was financially or culturally or politically expedient or convenient. It’s got a currency to it now, but what about when that wasn’t sexy?”
While Carter perhaps wasn’t as sexy a figure back in 1976 as his rival Knievel (who is played in Dowse’s film with a sly blend of charm and smarm by the American actor Ben Foster), the showman was savvy enough to garner the attention of a National Film Board crew led by documentarian Robert Fortier, who trailed Carter around for years. And it was Fortier’s resulting 1981 documentary, The Devil at Your Heels, that years ago turned Dowse onto Carter’s somewhat forgotten role in Canadian history. So much so that The Stunt Driver’s narrative is built around the struggle of making the NFB doc itself, with Fortier played by veteran Canadian character actor Joe Cobden.
“It’s funny when you think about it, because life imitated art in a lot of ways on this,” says Dowse. “And it’s a similar sort of quixotic relationship a director has with a film that Ken has with his big jump. It’s for all the glory, just like a film lives on past you. You want to have an impact, you want to have a name. All that stuff that Ken is trying to do drives a lot of filmmakers, as well.”
Depending on the success of The Stunt Driver, Dowse and Baruchel might be able to get another collective shot or two at seeing their work live past them. Currently, they’re developing a reboot of Dowse’s 2009 Showcase sitcom The Foundation, as well as a feature-length comedy about, in Dowse’s words, “a doomsday cult that is actually right.” (Tentative title: Cult De Sac.)
But for now, Baruchel feels as if The Stunt Driver – and so many other projects being produced within the Canadian system – is offering him an answer to those cultural frustrations he wrestled with as a kid in Southern Ontario, when he felt as if he were light years away from anything exciting.
“I’m encouraged every year by the kind of vitality of the movies and TV shows that we’re creating,” the actor says.
“Does that kid in Oshawa now see himself more reflected onscreen? I think that he does. The biggest TV show on the planet last year was a Canadian show that actually took place in Canada! We live in a country where we have agreed that it’s important for all of us as a country to make these things and to provide resources to make them. What a special, crazy, cool thing.”
The Stunt Driver screens at TIFF Sept. 11 and 12 (tiff.net), before opening across the country Sept. 25.
