Firth and Cuba Gooding Jr., Titus (he had many scenes with Anthony Hopkins) and The Insider, enjoys mixing up big budget and experimental movies.
  "All that's really different," Feore says, "are the quality of the lunches and the special effects. Everything else boils down to the art of movie-making. You either have it, or you don't."
- Valerie Gregory

ith the possibility of an actors' strike this July, the question on everyone's lips in the Alberta film biz is "is the project pre- or post strike?" Regardless of a work stoppage or not, the studios have been amping up production just in case. According to the Alberta film commission's new president, Paul Raymon, MGM has enough releases in the can until the end of 2002.
  All of this does not bode well for Alberta's film biz, which just came off two of the best years ever. However, filming hasn't shut down entirely and Mythquest, a children's series that originated out of Regina but has re-located to Alberta, is still going strong. Disney's Winterdance, starring Cuba Gooding Jr., James Coburn, and Sisqo in a supporting role, has been shooting in Canmore despite snow woes.
  Johnston County War, a Hallmark mini-series, began production activity mid-March and speculation has it that Tom Skerrit will return to Calgary to star in it. Snowbound, a local film, started shooting in Bragg Creek, just south of the city, in March.
  And, as always, there are rumors of other big-ticket productions, such as Dark Harvest, Varmit, and another Gary Burns (waydowntown) flick, that are considering Calgary as a backdrop for their films. However, like everywhere else in Canada, Alberta is taking it one day at a time and hoping for good news.
- Karen Ashbee

he big news in Nova Scotia this spring is the growing list of actors added to The Shipping News, the highly anticipated project that's been kicking around Hollywood for many years. Joining two-time Oscar winner Kevin Spacey and Academy Award nominee Julianne Moore are perennial Oscar favorite Dame Judi Dench, nominee Cate Blanchett and British actor Rhys Ifans. Blanchett, who was nominated for a best actress Oscar for her leading role in Elizabeth, comes to the Halifax-based production from the New Zealand set of the The Lord of the Rings.
  Also partly filming in Nova Scotia this spring is the submarine thriller K-19: The Widowmaker, starring Hollywood heavyweights Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson. The major news around Halifax in relation to this big-budget feature about a real-life nuclear reactor malfunction aboard the Soviet Union's first ballistic missile submarine, has been the massive effort undertaken to convert a moth-balled Soviet navy submarine into a movie prop. About 30 Halifax Shipyard employees worked throughout the winter on the project. Filming for Widowmaker was to begin in Toronto by mid-March and then move to Halifax for approximately a week. From there it goes to Iceland and Moscow before returning to the east coast for several weeks of on-the-seas filming. Based on a true story, Ford will star as the ship's captain and Neeson as his second in command.
  While much of the buzz around Nova Scotia in recent months has been about these two major productions, smaller projects such as Three Days, a Fox movie-of-the-week, brought Sex and The City star Kristin Davis to the province.   Also working on the month-long project was Tim Meadows of Saturday Night Live and Reed Diamond of Homicide: Life on the Street. With such high-profile productions on the books, Nova Scotia continues to make its mark as one of Canada's primary film locations.
- Vernon Oickle