About the movie

High Stakes is a feature–length dramedy set in the retail–cannabis world of Vancouver, BC, Canada. It combines elements of stoner comedy, romantic comedy, and screwball comedy with genuine emotional depth.

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High Stakes is explicitly set in Vancouver, one of the few Canadian cities that is known by name the world over. The city is famous for its high–quality Weed; that suits the story. Despite being the third–most–active city for movie–making in North America, Vancouver never plays itself! It’s “a location but not a setting.”

The movie is independently financed, produced, and distributed. The total creative and business control over the project allows greater flexibility. Creatively, the movie represents the unfiltered vision of the creators, uncorrupted by outside pressures. Financially, the project requires both a lower budget and lower recoupment to succeed than productions within the mainstream industry.

This project also serves as a proof of concept for future movies by independent Canadian creators. Information about the movie’s production, financing, and distribution is freely shared to help other creators, in contrast to the industry practice of keeping such information a closely–guarded secret. Future productions by independent creators are welcome to follow this template to make movies independently.

The story

PhD student Titania is in a spot. She’s pushing 30 with a bulldozer and still lives in her parents’ house. When her Dad first got sick last year, she had to pause her university studies to manage his storefront Weed shop. The once-thriving Shop has been losing staff since Dad’s death, and Shardyn and Travis are the only employees left. Titania's mother chose to seek solace with her family in Toronto, leaving Titania alone in the family home.

Titania spends all her time solving other people’s problems — as a distraction from her own. Keeping the Shop alive lets her sublimate her grief at her Dad’s death into keeping his Shop alive, feeling that by doing so she’s somehow keeping him alive. Solving problems for the Shop, its staff, and its picturesque customers lets her feel in control of her life and situation.

Cynical, middle-aged retail veteran Shardyn is having a tough time dealing with the impending death of her regular customer and friend. Travis’s girlfriend Faith, simple and goodhearted, doesn’t seem to realize that they’re in a relationship. And Travis ... easy-going stoner hipster doofus Travis doesn’t have any problems; he just likes smoking Weed, watching movies, and boinking with his girlfriend. The customers, regulars and drop-ins, all have their own issues — and Weed makes you feel like sharing.

Now Titania’s mother wants to sell the Shop. And she’s found a buyer: a Big Tobacco corporation in Toronto that wants to expand into the legal-Weed business. This causes friction between Titania and and her mother.

The tobacco company’s oily executive Mr. Beatty sends newly-hired lawyer Gerald to Vancouver to audit the Shop and finalize the contract. Titania and Gerald are attracted to each other’s intelligence, selflessness, and sarcastic senses of humour.

He is also attracted to her compassion and ethics. That’s a sharp reminder to Gerald, who has made so many compromises in his career that he now works for a Big Tobacco company. He’s lost his heroic mission of using the law to help people — the reason he wanted to become a lawyer in the first place.

Despite their mutual attraction, Titania and Gerald are kept apart by their roles on opposite sides of the business negotiation. Titania can’t help remembering that Gerald is the avatar of the corporation that will destroy Dad’s legacy, and resents him. Gerald feels unworthy of Titania; he can’t help but feel he’s sold out. Nevertheless, Titania experiences the first thaw in the emotions she’s kept carefully frozen, while Gerald begins to admit that his chosen solitary life might be better with other people in it.

Of course this manifests as a love / hate tension (“will they or won’t they?”) between the two of them.

Gerald also comes to know the employees of the Shop. Pessimistic Shardyn reveals the depths of her paranoia in response to Gerald's employee interview. Stoner Travis and naive Faith demonstrate a well-matched couple: they both like to get stoned, watch a movie, and boink. Gerald is at first amused by their misfit nature, but comes to like and appreciate them; they're not a dysfunctional family, they're a functional but unorthodox family. They in turn are charmed by his goofy sense of humour and square-but-game demeanour.

When Gerald does a favour for the Shop, Mr. Beatty suspects that Gerald’s loyalty and commitment to his job are uncertain. Mr. Beatty moves to take personal charge of the deal. He enacts a contingency plan that threatens to destroy the Shop and carves a rift between Titania and Gerald.

Titania faces problems that she can’t solve, crises that she can’t manage. The Shop is gone; her Dad’s legacy is destroyed. Gerald participated in the destruction, so her faith in him is gone as well. Her mother decides to remain with her sister back east, so both her parents have left her life. Faith reveals that she is pregnant and doesn’t know what to do. Titania feels her entire world collapsing around her.

Can the estrangement be healed between Titania and Gerald, and between Titania and her mother? Can the employees’ jobs be saved? Can the evil Mr. Beatty be thwarted? Can Titania comes to terms with her Dad’s death and move on with her life?

Well, it’s a comedy, so the answer to (most of) these questions is (probably) yes. How they’re answered is the surprising secret of this movie!

The project

We live in a glorious time for movies and television!

The rise of affordable digital video-cameras and non-linear editing (NLE) systems that began in the late 1990s continues with ever-more-capable equipment available every day. Relatively inexpensive LED lighting-instruments and digital audio-recorders permit movies at any level to look and sound good. The economic barrier to movie-making has been greatly reduced; today, anyone with a middle-class income can make a professional-quality movie.

And the rise of Internet distribution allows anyone to bypass the established distribution industry and place their movie before the public. Such venues as YouTube, Vimeo, and Tubi host movies for free. Such services as Disney+, HBO Max, and of course Netflix stream movies for a subscription fee. The Web is replete with smaller distributors, at every level from professional venture to “I have my own website!” Ventures like Gumroad allow creators to control the distribution and sale of their movies for themselves.

It has never been so possible to make your own movie, and it has never been so possible to make your movie available to audiences!

The challenge

Of course, if anybody can make a movie, then everybody will. It has never been so possible to make your movie and to offer it to an audience — but it has never been so hard to attract that audience! In an attention economy, you have to find a way to stand out from the crowd.

Then there is the standard challenge to make a good movie! For High Stakes, this means a funny movie. High Stakes combines elements of stoner comedy, romantic comedy, and screwball comedy.

 

The locations

Financial constraints impose limits on all productions, not just independent and micro-budget ones. You will often read advice to newbie creators to craft a story set in a single location so as to minimize costs.

A one-location shoot can be a good idea for a constrained thriller. The underrated thriller Deterrence trapped its characters in a diner to ratchet up the tension. Many horror movies put people in isolated locations they cannot easily escape. When the single-location movie works, it's enthralling.

On the other hand, it can make your movie look cheap — as if you couldn't afford another location. (And for the independent creator, this may be true!) One of the things that mainstream movies do well is scope. Hollywood movies offer multiple exotic locations to attract their audiences.

High Stakes balances the creative and practical reasons. Much of the story takes place in the single location of the Shop. Staff member are thrust together and forced to interact; customers bring stories into the Shop, inviting immediate interaction with our main characters. The audience accepts the logic that much of the story takes place here. And the colourful head-shop merchandise provides an interesting background to the action. Other, more minor locations include Titania's house, Gerald's hotel room, and work offices.

The movie contrasts those scenes with larger-scale exteriors, including a sequence set at an actual Weed farm and one set at Vancouver's public 4 / 20 Day celebration. Beauty shots of Weed plants growing and colourful Vancouver neo-hippies dancing add big-budget production value for indie-budget costs.

Importantly, the locations for the movie showcase Vancouver itself. A firm sense of place grounds the story in reality, providing a foundation for the humour and pathos of the story.