MRH:   One aspect that really impressed me about the film is that in many cases you can’t really tell what is a digital insertion because it’s done very cleanly.

There’s one shot where you open on the Lower Bay platform and there’s a digital clock in the top corner, and the camera moves downward to the characters. The clock looks completely natural in the shot, and I though you designed a prop, stuck it to one of the columns, and moved the camera down, but it’s all digital, and it was quite flawless.

There are a lot of little moments like that in the film, and I think that it also helps the film’s look which is a great fusion of the production designer’s concept of a late-seventies look with parts of the subways and tunnels and platforms showing their age.

MD:     Sometimes you have a few lucky accidents. The Montreal train that I had access to is such an old-looking train, and the grimy old tunnels made it all fit together, so people from Toronto will recognize the Lower Bay Station, but for most people watching the movie, they have no idea where this is. If they’ve never been to Montreal, they’ll just think ‘Oh, that’s the Montreal subway system.’ They have no idea where this is, so it creates this mystery subway system which doesn’t exist but seems that it could exist. I was kind of lucky on that because it was quite an ambitious thing to try.

MRH:   And for the Montreal tunnel, I think you mentioned that it’s called the Wellington Tunnel?

MD:     Right.

MRH:   And that was in use at one point in time, or it was a part of a transportation network tat was abandoned?

MD:     Actually, it’s not a subway tunnel, it was an old express lane for downtown car traffic that was closed off, and now it’s just an empty tunnel that’s used a lot for movies.

I had went on the set of another filmmaker friend (Karim Hussain) who was shooting a short there, and as I was walking around, I sort of told myself, ‘Hey, this could double for a subway tunnel,’ and that just stuck, and 2-3 years later, when I’d written End of the Line and I was looking for locations, I remembered the Wellington Tunnel.

I went back there and said, ‘Yeah, if we add lights and a few things here and there and digital effects, this could work,’ and I think for most people, I don’t think anyone who has seen the movie was ever even remotely suspicious that it wasn’t a subway. It never comes into the equation… I’m very proud of that because that was not something that was necessarily easy to do.

MRH:   I think it works very well, because the basic form and structure of the tunnel itself is very similar to the ones in the Toronto system, so you can actually cut back and forth.

After End of the Line played at the Toronto International Film Festival, was there a great deal of interest from distributors, and was it comforting to know that there were interested parties willing to pick up the film for theatrical and/or home video distribution?

MD:     If you notice, we’re actually two years from the time the film premiered in Toronto to its current premiere on DVD, so in answer to your question, it’s been a very, very rough ride.

At Toronto, there was a lot of interest from a lot of different companies, but here’s the problem (and this is a very huge subject, especially between indie filmmakers):  a lot of people will want your movie, but with the kind of deals they’re offering you, you won’t ever see a dime back.

That is the biggest hurdle: it’s not actually making the film, but being able to afterwards get a bit of money back That’s why it’s been taking so long for the film to be released. It’s not because there was any lack of interest; I could have sold the film even before it played at Toronto, and just the fact that it entered Toronto, I had fifty people calling me and lining up wanting to acquire the film, but from previous experiences, I knew to not fall prey to a lot of smoke blowing.

The last two years have been spent basically learning the ropes on how to sell the film and make a few dollars by selling it to specific countries. It’s very far from filmmaking, but unfortunately when you end up being the producer of the film, it’s something you have to do.

To get back to a point I was mentioning where there’s a lot of camaraderie between filmmakers, I’ve been in contact with at least 15-20 different indie filmmakers from different countries, and we’ve just been exchanging stories and tips, like ‘bad eggs’ and deals not to do because we’ve all been in the same boat. For me, whenever I meet another indie filmmaker, it’s more like a brother in arms – it’s us against them - them being the distributors and the sales agents, etc.

A lot of first-time filmmakers will get caught because they think, ‘Company X wants the movie, we’ve hit the big time!’ but then a year later they realize even though X has released their film everywhere, they haven’t made a penny because X boosted all the expenses and this and that. With the kind of deal they have, they had no control over a lot of these things and basically ended up with no money.

It’s a true situation, because a lot of young filmmakers get blinded by big studio names, and they think ‘Oh, wow, this is my Blair Witch moment,’ but what they don’t realize is that the Blair Witches are the very specific lottery winners where there’s money on the table for the filmmakers, and nowadays that’s a very rare occurrence. It still happens once or twice or three times a year for certain indie films, but usually now what happens is that there’s no up-front money, and it’s a never-ending battle to actually get some money back.

For people who are in the business for a long time and already have sales and distribution contacts, most of their films are already pre-sold. I don’t know if you’ve heard of all these Sci-Fi Channel horror films that get made. A lot of them are shot in Montreal, and I know a lot of people who worked on them. The way they’re set up is that Sci-Fi Channel pays a certain amount, and then tax credits pay another amount, and that’s it; that’s what the movie is made with. It would not be made if there was any risk at all; no one put a mortgage on their house for these movies, and the filmmaker in most of these cases is just a hired hand; it’s not his film, and the inherent way they’re made is not conducive to a lot of quality.