Reflecting on the movie he filmed in Greater Sudbury last year, writer/director Steven Kostanski described shooting Deathstalker as trying at times, but satisfying in the end.
“It was a very hard shoot, it was a very ambitious movie with lots of moving parts, and sometimes those parts don’t fit together, but we got through it,” he said.
“I’m very happy with how it turned out. All the challenges with making the movie turned into a very fun adventure, and I think people are really going to have a fun time with it.”
Deathstalker is a reboot of a low-budget swords/sorcery film series from the ’80s which began with its namesake movie in 1983. The movie is premiering at the Cinéfest Sudbury International Film Festival on Sept. 20, with a screening at SilverCity Sudbury at 9 p.m.
Although Kostanski said that some crew members may show up and that he was looking at filming video remarks, he’ll be attending the film’s U.S. premiere in Austin, Texas, that day.
“I’m there in spirit at the very least,” he said.
Sudbury.com connected with Kostanski by phone recently to learn about how the film came together in Greater Sudbury last year. Kostanski was in Bracebridge working night shifts on effects for the movie In A Violent Nature 2, a sequel to a slasher movie filmed in the Sault Ste. Marie in 2022.
In the leadup to filming Deathstalker, a $500,000 grant from the Northern Ontario Heritage Fund Corporation clinched the north as its filming location, Kostanski said, describing the grant as necessary in making the low-budget film a reality.
Still, he wasn’t sold on Greater Sudbury from the start.
“This proposal of going to Northern Ontario I was a little hesitant about, because I didn’t think we really had much of the stuff these movies had cheaply available at the time,” he said, noting that fantasy movies of the ’80s and ’90s were filmed in Europe, where there are castles.
“It’s a budget movie, so the cost of building castles is out of reach,” he said.
But, after a tour of Greater Sudbury to scout for locations with city film officer Clayton Drake, Kostanski said that any hesitation he felt prior was washed away.
Greater Sudbury’s varied landscapes, he said, fit the low-budget production perfectly.
In 1923, author Ernest Hemingway described the region as the “weirdest country I have ever seen” with mining practices of the day having blackened the landscape.
Re-greening efforts which began in the 1970s have since resulted in 10-million trees and counting planted to help restore the environment, but there are still patches of industrial landscapes.
“I didn’t want lush green forest, I wanted everything to feel a little dead and menacing,” Kostanski said of scouting landscapes for Deathstalker.
“This doesn’t mean to say that Sudbury is this menacing, evil location, we just picked specifically rocky locations that seemed a little outer-worldly and less Northern Ontario forest.”
The Coniston Industrial Park and a quarry in Greater Sudbury served as key locations, while space at Northern Ontario Film Studios was used for indoor sets, such as a bar.
“I can’t speak highly enough about that industrial park, I just loved going to that location every day,” Kostanski said. “It had the scope I wanted and like I was making a real epic movie every time we went there.”
Much of the film’s crew came from the Greater Toronto Area, but Kostanski said several Greater Sudburians joined them to fill out the effort; a crew he described as fitting in nicely.
They were familiar with one another having worked together on such local productions as the television series Shoresy, he said, adding, “That’s always nice, when I’m on a project and the crew is familiar with one another."
In keeping with Kostanski’s past work, including such movies as The Void, Psycho Goreman and Frankie Freako, Deathstalker employs practical effects wherever possible, with elaborate costumes used to help portray its various creatures.
“It’s very much a movie made by people who love the genre and love the magic of filmmaking,” he said, adding that it works against the “AI (artificial intelligence) concern that looms over all of us.”
“I hope the fun that we had making the movie was infectious and carries into the audience,” he said.
“I want people to enjoy themselves and I want them to appreciate the hand-crafted quality of the movie. A lot of artists came together to make this film and make the wild visuals that populate it. There are lots of monsters and effects and costumes and props, so it’s a really human-made movie.”
It’s “a lighter adventure movie, but the world it’s set in has a darkness that’s pretty fun,” Kostanski said.
“It’s an ambitious movie we probably could have used a bit more money on, but we made it work, and I think in the end that just makes it true to its low-budget straight-to-video fantasy roots of the ’80s and ’90s. It really is authentically one of those movies, because we were going through the same challenges as those guys were going through,” he said.
“Sudbury was a great city to work in, and I’d do it again. I was really happy with how the experience went.”
Deathstalker isn’t the only local production screening at Cinéfest this year.
Led by actor/director Jason Biggs, Untitled Home Invasion Romance will hit the screen at SilverCity Sudbury at 7 p.m. on Sept. 18.
The Cinéfest website describes Untitled home Invasion Romance (also known as Getaway on imdb.com) as centring around a man named Kevin who “hatches a misguided plan to win back his estranged wife,” which involves a staged break-in so he can swoop in as a hero.
Tyler Clarke covers city hall and political affairs for Sudbury.com.