TORONTO - Movie-goers will be spoiled for choice this holiday weekend, with big-screen offerings including the latest instalment in the "Transformers" series, a new Selena Gomez flick and the Julia Roberts-Tom Hanks vehicle "Larry Crowne." But the big-budget popcorn pleasers don't phase Toronto director Wyeth Clarkson as he prepares for the July 1 release of his brooding, low-budget tale "The Mountie."
"For me it's a lot of fun to sort of go into the lion's den and see if you can put some bums in seats on the biggest weekend of the year," says the affable Clarkson, who shot "The Mountie" in the Yukon for just under a million bucks, a budget he estimates is about "one two-hundredth" of his holiday box office competition.
"Canadians will be able to see something about themselves as opposed to having to see something about another culture."
It's a lofty ideal from the director, whose previous credits include the skateboard drama "Sk8Life" and "deadend.com," about three friends who make a pact to commit suicide.
Amid a Canadian film landscape that has felt decidedly modern in recent years, "The Mountie" is somewhat of a throwback.
The film, shot two years ago, features Montreal actor Andrew Walker as a tormented officer trying to bring order to the lawless Yukon in the 1890s. Co-starring is Montreal actress Jessica Pare, who has since become known for playing Don Draper's fiance on the TV smash "Mad Men."
Clarkson, 38, says he's been drawn to westerns since he was a kid, but always wondered why American sheriffs were depicted onscreen, while Canadian officers were not.
"I watched a lot of Sergio Leone films and I just never saw a Mountie. The only one I would see ... was Dudley Do-Right," says Clarkson, referring to the dim-witted animated character.
"And quite frankly I do a lot of camping .... I know how tough you have to be to live in the land.... so Dudley Do-Right, to me, didn't seem like an honest depiction of who these men had to be."
Clarkson aims to set the record straight with his depiction of grizzled lawman Wade Grayling (Andrew Walker), who encounters near-constant resistance from Yukon locals, including a warning sign in the form of a corpse hanging from a tree.
A TV veteran who has appeared on "CSI: Miami," "CSI: New York" and several episodes of "Sabrina the Teenage Witch," Walker is effusive about his time making "The Mountie" in the spectacular Yukon landscape.
The actor bonded with his history-buff father during the shoot, proposed to his girlfriend and calls the entire experience life changing.
"I really did have an epiphany just being there. We're so overstimulated in our life with living in cities, friends and technology phones and computers," he says.
"(Being there felt like ) just bringing it back in to who you are and what's important to you."
Indeed, the film's landscape is dazzling. Clarkson says he felt budgetary pressure to shoot the film elsewhere but stood his ground, noting that the best North American westerns of the last 20 years have probably all been shot in Canada
"The Yukon, to me, was just a central character in the germination of the idea as well as trying to depict Canada at its most beautiful."
Walker, 32, called his 30-minute hike to set each day "therapeutic," adding that "location was a big aspect to finding the character.
Walker acknowledges that the dark subject matter may be a tough sell for holiday movie-goers, and suggests "The Mountie" could have a second life in schools.
"It's a historical educational movie that I think every Canadian should know about, know where these people came from," he says.
Clarkson agrees.
"I feel I know a lot about American history and American iconography and yet Canada has this rich history and this rich history of iconographic characters that we don't see on our screens and to me that's a real loss, especially for kids who can be so easily influenced to want to learn," he says.
The director reasons that the holiday weekend is a popular one for movie-goers, so if they are going to the theatre anyway, he's happy that his film will be on offer. He plans to spend Canada Day at a Toronto theatre drumming up interest in the film.
Despite his slick Hollywood competition, he remains committed to Canadian stories.
"The rest of the world gets interested in you when you're interested in yourself," says Clarkson.
"For me, it's important as a filmmaker to sort of stir that pot and at least give people access to Canadian stories because I promise you, the rest of the world will fall in line, it's just a matter of us kind of celebrating ourselves a bit, which Canadians are always a little resistant to, for whatever reason."
"The Mountie" opens in Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary on Friday. It expands to Winnipeg, Whitehorse, Grand Prairie, Alta., Abbotsford, B.C., and Kelowna, B.C., on July 8, with more cities to follow.