producer Robert Lantos on set with Gershon and Lewis

Filmed on location around the city, Picture Claire gets its public premiere, appropriately enough, at the Toronto Film Festival. “This film presents a wonderful opportunity to take the underbelly of the city and put it on camera,” says Lantos. “Amazingly, for a location where hundreds and hundreds of movies have been shot, Toronto is very camera-fresh. It rarely if ever plays itself and, when it does, it’s in a very marginal way.”

Locations used include Kensington Market, Little Italy and Union Station, with special attention paid to the city’s unique geometry - “the way all the structures are right on top of each other”, as location manager Gabe Fallus puts it. But the look of the city is also adapted to the overall, post-noir aesthetic of the film.

“Bruce and his DOP, Miroslaw, are so creative with the cinematic style they’re using for the film,” said Lewis during shooting. “And I feel free to bring my ideas to him, like my dance on the moon. I thought, ‘In what movie do we go to cut-aways where a girl is walking on the moon? So, I’d better make this mean something to Claire’. And Bruce is game for allowing me to express myself.”

Ostensibly, says Lewis, summing up both her character and the film as a whole, Claire is coming to Toronto to look for a man. But there’s much more to her than that. “Internally, I feel she is the Little Prince, especially the way she feels more like she belongs on the moon than on Planet Earth. I connected with that feeling of not belonging. The challenge with this role was how to take the audience on an emotional journey while saying very few words. The other challenge was to give Claire a personality beyond the vulnerability. I had to find her strength, her defiances, her wackiness.”