Festival repeatedly draws independent filmmaker back
By Louis Hobson
Calgary Herald; September 21, 2019
Actor and screenwriter Jonas Chernick has had an almost two-decade love affair with Calgary and, in particular, the Calgary International Film Festival.
In 2001, the festival's second year, Chernick brought Inertia, a film he starred in and wrote from a series of improv sessions with the cast members.
"It was a small festival and a really welcoming one. I loved the festival and I got to love the city. I also found love with a local girl so it was a really memorable year for me. I vowed I would bring all my future films whether I wrote, produced or simply starred in them to Calgary and I have," says Chernick, whose latest collaboration, James vs. His Future Self, will play at the Globe at 7 p.m. on Sept. 24 and again at Eau Claire on Sept. 26 at 5:30 p.m.
Chernick also attended the festival in 2005 with Lucid, which had won the Best Western Canadian Feature Film Award at the Vancouver Film Festival and, in 2012, his comedy My Awkward Sexual Adventure nabbed the Peoples' Choice Award at CIFF.
In 2015, Chernick was back with the double whammy of How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town and Borealis, which he recalls allowed him to do "a bunch of Q & A sessions. It was so much fun and so enlightening. I really like the opportunity to get feedback from festival audiences."
Chernick and his James vs. His Future Self director Jeremy LaLonde, who also collaborated on How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town will be at the 7 p.m. screening of their newest film at the Globe on Sept. 24 and will host a Q & A after the screening.
James vs. His Future Self is a sci-fi comedy about a young scientist obsessed with the idea of time travel. Just as he is on the verge of perfecting time travel, James is visited by his future self in the person of a bearded, dishevelled Daniel Stern who tries to warn him to stop his experiments.
Instead, Jimmy, as the future self calls himself, tries to get James to form a romantic relationship with a fellow scientist (Cleopatra Coleman) and to patch up his relationship with his sister (Tommie-Amber Pirie).
Chernick says the idea, which eventually morphed into James vs. His Future Self, has been percolating for at least a decade.
"It started as this idea that a guy goes to Europe to find himself and literally finds himself. Then I fell in love with time travel movies and I saw how I could use my original idea.
"At one time or another, we all end up saying 'if only I'd known then what I know now, I wouldn't have made so many mistakes.' With James that's not necessarily so. He won't listen to his future self who is so annoyed because he can't make James stop and see the unhappiness he's going to cause for himself and others."
Chernick says the marketing for James vs. His Future Self stresses the science fiction aspect of the comedy because "distributors keep saying romantic comedies will only sell if they have big-name stars in them. They feel the days of the independent romantic comedies are gone so we buried the notion that ours is actually a romantic comedy.
"They did much the same thing with Back to the Future. It's really about Marty trying to get his parents to fall in love but that's not how they sold the movie."
Chernick says he and LaLonde pursued Stern to play Jimmy because he shares certain qualities with Chernick.
"If you look at Daniel's earlier films like Home Alone, City Slickers and especially Diner, he was able to play the lovable nerd. He was always a really physical actor who was a lovable loser and we needed that for James and Jimmy in our film.
"Daniel has gone from that brainiac character to this imposing, hulking beast of a man who can be frightening but who still has a great, warm heart. Plus, we both have blue eyes."
To explain why Stern is taller than Chernick, the future self explains that "the past and the future constantly pull at me, literally stretching me."
James vs. His Future Self will be the opening film for the Edmonton International Film Festival on Sept 26 and will be released in Canada in January.
