It may be second nature for locals to live in a mountain town like Canmore or Banff, but next week moviegoers around the world will get a glimpse into life in the valley with the release of a major romantic comedy filmed last fall.
The Right Kind of Wrong stars Ryan Kwanten of Tru Blood fame and is set for release across North America on Friday (Oct. 11), including at Banff’s Lux Cinema.
Filmed almost entirely in Banff and Canmore last August through October, director Jeremiah Chechik said last week the surrounding mountains and environment are characters in the film, which he called a “love letter” to this part of Alberta.
“We were looking for the most beautiful mountain town that we could find and hands down Canmore and Banff wins,” he said. “I certainly knew everything from Aspen, Sun Valley, Telluride, Jackson Hole, Nelson on the other side of the Rockies and Banff and Canmore in the Bow Valley.
“You guys win the beauty contest.”
The movie is based on the novel Sex and Sunsets by Tim Sandlin, which Chechik came across about 14 years ago. He shared the story with producer Robert Landis and started the development process. Eventually, Megan Martin adapted a script and production began.
Kwanten plays Leo Palamino, a fearless dreamer working in a tourist town as a dishwasher. A failed writer himself, he is made famous when his wife leaves him and starts an instantly successful blog about his shortcomings called Why You Suck that is soon turned into a best-selling book.
In comes Colette, played by Sara Canning, the girl of Leo’s dreams. The catch is, he meets her on her wedding day when she marries the perfect man, Danny Hart, played by Ryan McPartlin. Leo risks everything to show Colette all that is right with the wrong guy.
Catherine O’Hara rounds out the cast of supporting actors, along with a pair of cats and a spirit bear, which proves for Leo that nothing is impossible, a dominant theme throughout the movie.
“Leo is bold, he’s brash, brazen and brilliant. He’s a rolling stone that gathers no moss. He sees the world through boundless eyes, utterly convinced that if he stays true to his convictions, no matter what, he will succeed,” Kwanten wrote in a press release.
Another central theme to the movie is that geography is biography – characters are products of their environment. Sandlin is a long-time resident of Jackson Hole, and the story not only captures that aspect, but delves into the haves and have nots of a tourist town.
“One could argue where one lives and the environment in which one grows up is influenced and determines the way the character manifests and that is certainly true for our story and for our characters,” Chechik said. “There are a lot of class issues in the film that are easy to overlook in a bigger environment, an urban environment. But in a smaller town, the differences are right out in front because the population is so small and generally the wealthy are a small portion of that and the majority are serving that for better or worse.”
He said the story falls within a classic romantic comedy structure, but within it he tries to push the limits of the unexpected with audiences with the quirky characters and storyline. It has screened at the Vancouver and Toronto International Film Festivals, the latter saw a standing ovation from the audience of 3,000.
Bow Valley residents can expect to see plenty of local flavour in the film, minus the obvious continuity that major motion picture lacks in transitioning from scene to scene. One moment, characters are in downtown Canmore and the next, downtown Banff. Canmore’s Elevation Place even has a cameo in the film while under construction, along with a nod to local business Rebound Cycle.
Chechik said the cast and crew fell in love with Canmore in particular.
“We loved it – we all never wanted to leave and all of us fell in love with it, specifically Canmore – we loved Canmore,” he said. “It is a real place. It is not what I would call a tourist destination, it is a real town and we just loved being in that town when we weren’t working at being part of it.
“It was just very inspiring to be there every single day and have that kind of overwhelming, powerful mountain beauty.
“The clarity of it is very great, I know I speak for myself and the cast, it was extremely inspirational.”
