‘The Stunt Driver’ Helmer Michael Dowse on Working With Jay Baruchel, Building a Ramp and a Rocket Car: ‘It Wasn’t for the Faint of Heart’

Michael Dowse’s “The Stunt Driver,” starring Jay Baruchel as ’70s daredevil Ken Carter, who tried to jump a mile across the St. Lawrence River in a rocket car, roars into its Toronto Intl. Film Festival world premiere offering warm-but-never-fuzzy retro visions of stunts and cross-border tension that resonate in the present moment. Dowse has premiered five features in Toronto, notably “Goon” (starring Baruchel) and “The F Word,” which screened in 2013, right around the time he encountered Carter’s story. His intro was Bob Fortier’s 1981 National Film Board of Canada documentary “The Devil at Your Heels,” which follows Carter’s prep for the jump. It is, to this day, a cult fave in Australia. “They don’t understand why there aren’t streets named after Ken Carter,” Dowse tells Variety. Popular on Variety “The story has everything — Shakespearean backstabbing and driven by a central character,” he says. “I love the spectacle and how nuts the whole idea was. You can see the stakes in the scale of the ramp and the size of the car. And then you fall in love with the character of Ken. “He’s riddled with idiosyncrasies. He’s jumping a river, but can’t swim. He’s a stunt driver but doesn’t have a license. The man spent his entire life jumping things and breaking every bone in his body. He’s no coward but he was legit worried about the jump — and for good reason.” The animosity between Carter and Evel Knievel (played by Ben Foster) was mostly for show but is upped in Dowse’s film for dramatic purposes. “It’s true that Ken wanted to attain Knievel’s level of fame, and he needed to make one last mark,” Dowse says. “Evel is the American guy who has done a big jump and comes in and squashes the polite Canadian’s idea. “Some improvised lines were born because we shot last year when the tariffs were happening. The tension was simmering.” During the five-year wait to get the rights to the NFB doc, Dowse wrote the first script — a “manuscript” of the documentary. “It was a slow process. But we befriended many people who were around Ken. We did our research.” Obtaining the doc rights and building a relationship with its director unlocked creative ideas and practical gifts. ‘The Stunt Man,’ courtesy of Film Cardinal Fortier, who consulted on the script, revealed that he had filmed Carter being hypnotized on live radio to explain why he jumps. The footage wasn’t in the doc and had disappeared, but Dowse’s team found the audio, which inspired the film’s opening, where we learn Carter’s backstory. It’s hard to imagine anyone but Baruchel, whom Canadians have known since his tween roles, inhabiting the character. “I saw ‘Blackberry’ and thought, Jay is 38 — the same age as Ken [at the time of the jump] — and he’s from the area, he can do it,” Dowse says. “We decided to make this film at home with Jay and build a cast around him. “The irony is that we didn’t do a single stunt because we had the archive footage. We also popped behind the documentary, almost like going behind the scenes of making a documentary.” More wonders appeared during location scouting. “We found a doctor who had a winery, and he also had a runway right by the big river,” Dowse says. “He’s also a pilot who flies his planes to his fishing lodge, so there was a hangar that became the garage and the radio station.” The rocket car designed by Dick Keller (Ed Helms) was built from scratch by production designer Jean-André Carrière. “He studied the footage because there’s no schematic drawing of this car,” Dowse says. The ramp was another thing. “We had to start early to get it done in time to shoot, before we lost it to the weather. It wasn’t for the faint of heart. When you’re sitting on top of that thing you built, you pray that it works because your entire career is 60 feet up.” Independent Film Company is releasing “The Stunt Driver” in the U.S. on Sept. 25. Montreal Media releases on the same day in Canada.