Canmore native David Doucette, an aspiring filmmaker, has made his feature-length debut with From Beneath.
The film is set in an old house in the country and, made with a small crew and cast, is a character-driven suspense thriller.
“I was born and raised in Canmore, I went to school there,” said Doucette, in an interview with the Outlook. “I’ve wanted to be a filmmaker for a long time. The first time I did it was with a friend of mine – Jamie Temple, he’s actually in the movie – and we did a video for a class project in Grade 7 and from that moment forward any time I could do a project where I could do a movie, I did.”
Doucette chose to pursue filmmaking academically and then professionally.
“After I graduated high school I went to university in Ottawa, then after I graduated there I moved out to Vancouver to work in the industry,” he said. “I didn’t like what I was doing, so I decided to make my own film through a friend I met working on the TV show Smallville.”
It was there, while living with other Canmorites, Doucette began working on From Beneath.
“I was living in a house with some other friends I grew up with in Canmore and I told them my plan and got them to help out. We planned it out for a long time, and then shot the movie when I was done with Smallville.”
Funded independently, largely with his own money, Doucette was able to shoot the film with a digital SLR camera.
“I realized from working on bigger movies there’s a lot of bloat you can cut out to make a project cheaper,” he explained. “Using the unique stuff you have access to and writing that into your script – I knew of an amazing house out in the middle of nowhere, so I wrote it around that – and with a small crew and cast I tried to concentrate on the tension in the scenes, rather than other things that can cost a lot more when shooting a movie.
“I tried to keep it an intimate, character-driven suspense.”
The film stars Jamie Temple, Lauren Watson and Blake Retter.
“Jamie, the lead male actor, he was always interested in doing projects together and he seemed perfect for this role,” said Doucette. “I wrote the movie around him being the central character.
“Jesse Winsloft, who did the score for the movie, did a really amazing job,” he added. “Stuart Bremner, another friend I grew up with, did all the lighting, so like I said I kept it pretty small.
“It was coincidence, a good number of the people involved were from Canmore, they just happened to be living in Vancouver at the time.”
After the film was complete, Doucette took the product to an event in the U.S., where it was picked up for distribution.
“We went to the American Film Market in Santa Monica, where independent filmmakers and distributors get together and buy movies, sell movies and pitch movies, for a week,” he said. “It’s had a limited theatrical release, and we did well with that. It’s going to be released on Oct. 24 on DVD. On Oct. 1 it was released with cable on-demand platforms, and next it’s going to be sold internationally.”
Doucette is already in the early stages of working on the next project, he said.
“We now have to ride this out to see how successful it is, but early buzz is good, and once we have our numbers in, we can go about financing our next project,” he said. “I have been writing the next one and working it out, and as this one gets out there and does its thing, we’ll move on to the next one.”
The decision to make his first feature a horror film came from a number of factors, said Doucette.
“I love horror movies more than any other genre,” he said. “And the most logical, first movie to make was a genre movie, because that’s where most big filmmakers end up starting their careers, to get their name out there.”
To view the trailer for the film, visit www.acortinternational.com
