Nothing ever moves fast in the movie business, least of all when it comes to development. But the first couple of months of 1997 seem to have been the turning point for Picture Claire, the new feature distributed by Alliance Atlantis Pictures International starring Juliette Lewis and Gina Gershon.

That’s when the script - which was then called Claire’s Hat - landed on the desk of producer Robert Lantos. The project was already four years old, having been born in the fertile brain of enterprising Canadian director Bruce McDonald, whose first four films - Roadkill (1989), Highway 61 (1991), Dance Me Outside (1994) and Hard Core Logo (1996) - had either won prizes internationally (Highway 61 took a silver at San Sebastián) or attracted the attention of major industry figures, notably Quentin Tarantino, whose Rolling Thunder division of Miramax picked up Hard Core Logo for US distribution.

McDonald had an idea for a film about someone abruptly finding themselves in a place where they knew nothing and nobody, not even the language. “I wondered what it felt like to be suddenly cut loose,” he recalls. He outlined the story to screenwriter Semi Chellas, whom he met at a party: a young woman from Quebec who is lost in Toronto, trying to find someone without knowing where to start. By the time she left the party, Chellas was committed to writing the screenplay that would become Picture Claire. It was a relatively simple deal: McDonald would pay Chellas’ rent until she had finished the first draft.

Meanwhile, McDonald began to shop the script around people he knew in the Toronto film industry. But it was not particularly plain sailing. “This is a deceptively expensive film,” he says. “It uses different locations, shooting at night and it’s an action film. It looks like a small movie on the page, but it’s actually a complex design.”

Then Lantos entered the picture. “It was one of those rare experiences in our business when I read a completely developed and polished screenplay,” says the Hungarian-born producer who can count among his credits some of the major Canadian and international movies of the past decade, including David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter and Felicia’s Journey, and Istvan Szabó’s Sunshine.

In a strange land: right, Juliette Lewis as Claire, for whom Toronto is another planet but who uses her Montreal street smarts to survive. Left, Lewis on location with director Bruce McDonald.

“It’s the story of a girl who is totally out of her element and is being chased by absolutely everyone for reasons she doesn’t understand. In the end, she puts her East End Montreal smarts to work to save herself. Instead of rags to riches, it’s enslavement to emancipation. It has razor-sharp writing and a suspenseful plot.

“I wanted to work with Bruce because I want to work with directors who have a unique and peculiar style of their own,” he adds. “His talent far surpasses the resources which have been made available to him in the past. I wanted to give him the opportunity to do it right on a project we both believed in. And I really wanted to make that script. This is film noir without being film noir. It twists and turns and I love the way it makes use of things specifically Canadian in an original and entertaining way.”