West Nipissing works to bring more film crews to town
Christian Gammon-Roy
Tribune
Residents going through downtown Sturgeon Falls over the Labour day long weekend surely noticed the film crews and American flags occupying a portion of King Street. Crews were getting some final shots on Friday and Saturday, September 4 and 5, for the climax of the film Kill or be Killed, a slasher movie starring David Arquette and Alisha Newton which producer Ryan Keller says will be coming out sometime next year. According to the municipality of West Nipissing, filming like this is an economic development opportunity, and is something they are actively pursuing.
“For us it was purely the look and the layout of the downtown of Sturgeon Falls. It’s very timeless, and it’s very cinematic. For what we needed to do for the production, it worked really well,” Keller says about choosing Sturgeon Falls as a location. While the majority of the movie was filmed in North Bay, Keller notes that Sturgeon Falls was better suited to get the exterior shots needed for the climax of the film. On top of the atmosphere, shutting down streets in the downtown core of North Bay is a lot more difficult, and according to his crew, the municipality also helped make things go smoothly in West Nipissing.
“Our locations department will liaise with the municipality about permits, road closures, things like that. It’s rare that it would come all the way up to me unless there’s an issue, but the reports that I got back is that everybody was very happy with their interactions with the municipality,” describes the producer. Keller also notes that local businesses were equally accommodating when it came to finding hotel rooms, letting crews film inside their business, and feeding the team. “On the last day, we bought out a couple hours at Riv’s, and sent out our crew over on kind of an open-tab, and they loved it,” recounts Keller.
