Last Call: Redemption Factors Heavily In Randall Cole’s Film Real Time
Posted November 11, 2008 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
What would you do if you realized you only had an hour to live?
Atone for past sins? Kiss your loved ones goodbye? Pray?
That’s the sober dilemma at the heart of Real Time, the second feature film from Canadian writer-director Randall Cole.
As the title suggests, Cole’s film plays out in real time, the clock starting when hitman Reuban (Randy Quaid) picks up the man he’s sent to kill, weaselly small-time gambler Andy (Jay Baruchel). Reuban gives Andy, young enough to be the professional killer’s son, an opportunity he hasn’t given his other ‘jobs’ – an hour to make things right before taking that fatal bullet. What he chooses to do with that hour is up to him.
This is Cole’s second feature film and in an interview with CityNews.ca he explains that his transition to adulthood inspired the story, written over three weeks in 2004.
“Going back to my 20s and thinking I would’ve probably been almost as lame as the guy in my movie,” he smiles. “At the point I wrote it I actually had a kid, so it’s kind of obvious what I would do. But I think that was part of the (reason) for writing it, being a parent and understanding the older guy’s point of view suddenly.”
The soft-spoken filmmaker from London, Ont., who previously helmed 19 Months, always knew his film would be character-driven. In fact given that the lion’s share of the action happens in a car between two people, it could’ve been a play.
“I knew we’d have to make this film for a fairly low budget and it seemed like a small, intimate kind of piece, not a Hollywood film, so I really compressed it,” Cole muses. “We were initially talking about doing it really low budget, using unknown actors, for a few hundred thousand. It was written with that in mind.”
Instead Cole employed veteran Quaid and relative newcomer Baruchel, who viewers may recognize from Knocked Up and Tropic Thunder, in the all important lead roles. Choosing them was key to the film’s success, the director notes.
“When you trap two people in a car (in a film), it’s going to be tricky to please people in the usual ways. I can’t just make a lot of noise,” he points out. “I have to count on the chemistry between the actors and the conceit of the story to keep you interested.”
Real Time is now in theatres.
Image: Scene from Real Time, starring Jay Baruchel and Randy Quaid