That Beautiful Somewhere is a feature length theatrical motion picture shot entirely in Northern Ontario, Canada in 2005. It was Toronto director Robert Budreau’s first feature length film. When the film made its debut in North Bay, On, one of the shooting locations, Robert Budreau was in town to see it through and gave a Q&A after the feature.

Robert Budreau took night courses at the Vancouver film school while attending law school in the law nineties.
“It was my film school experience that got me interested in Films. I’ve always loved films since I was younger. (My time at film school) was what really showed that it was something I could seriously pursue.”

The film was privately funded. Budreau says they did not get any money through Telefilm, which is a major filming body. Instead they got money through NECO and the NOHFC(Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corperation), two northern based heritage funds. They also got quite a bit of money from private investors in the north. Funding was also generated through television pre-sales to TMN and Movie Central and from tax credits.

That Beautiful Somewhere is a murder mystery film based on the book, Loon, by Bill Plumstead, a teacher at Nipissing University in North Bay.

“I was approached by Bill Plumstead when I was in Toronto. I was doing an OMBC (Ontario Media Development Corperation) calling card film called Dry Whiskey and they were aware of that. They interviewed me in Toronto and they saw a rough cut of that film and, based on that, they ended up hiring me to come and film the project.” said Budreau

Budreau talked about some of the hurdles the group had to overcome in the making of their fist feature film.

“There are different kinds of hurdles. Putting the financing together is obviously a hurdle because I was a co-producer as well.” said Budreau.

The location of the shoot also presented some challenges.

“It was a remote location and we were shooting in November so the weather was really erratic. There was a lot of problems, for example, In Temagami there were no cell phones so we couldn’t communicate with the crew. When equipment would break down it took a long time to get some of it fixed. The weather made continuity really difficult because it would be snowing and then it would be clear. And it was just cold.”

Budreau says right from the get-go they had planned for the film to be a theatrical release.

“We decided to shoot it without a distributor which was a bit risky at the time. We ended up getting our distributor, Equinoxe, after the fact. It was always conceived as a theatrical feature. If it was going to be a TV thing I would have shot it quite differently.”

Equinox is the distributer known for My Big Fat Greek Wedding and The Passion Of The Christ.

Budreau did the the casting for the main leads himself.

“I would look through actors and I decided on certain actors and we made offers.” Says Budreau. “We cast Jane (McGregor) quite early in the process when the film was actually a very different film. It was a summer picture in it’s earlier days. We got her on board relatively early and Gordon (Tootoosis) as well. Roy (Dupuis) actually came on board a bit later. After the script had changed. With those three actors I just contacted their agents and sent them the script. They looked at it and they liked it and basically said they were interested.”

He adds that most of the supporting roles were cast out of North Bay.

“Its funny because there were a lot of scenes that were supposed to be in the first act, which followed Jane McGregor as Catherine’s back story. Theres a lot of northern talent in those scenes. Most of those ended up getting cut for story reasons.” laments Budreau

“Unfortunately there are a lot of actors from North Bay who aren’t in the final copy. They might be on extras on the DVD but for story purposes they ended up getting cut.”

The film is going to be released on DVD at the end of the summer or early fall. It will be on the movie network and Movie Central and its network television debut will follow.

Budreau’s entire filmography can be found on his IMDB page.