In October Gale, Academy Award nominee Patricia Clarkson plays Helen, a recently widowed woman who decides to spend some time in the isolated lake cabin where she and her husband spend some of their happiest times. As soon as she arrives, several unexpected problems present themselves: first, a stranger (Scott Speedman) with a gunshot wound is washed ashore and asks for Helen’s help, then a massive storm begins to form and threatens to complicate things even more...not to mention there is a man (Tim Roth) trying to finish the job on the wounded stranger.

If at first the premise suggests we’re about to watch a stereotypical thriller, the realization that it’s directed and written by Ruba Nadda, should put any worries to rest. Once again, the Canadian filmmaker proves she is a master at subverting genre conventions by having them be executed by beautifully realized characters with personalities and backstories. Teaming up once more with the extraordinary Clarkson, October Gale proves to be an adult drama the likes of which we rarely see onscreen.

We had the opportunity to talk to the director who shared stories about shooting in extreme weather, working with Clarkson and why she was surprised at how men reacted to the film.

A few years ago I talked to Patricia Clarkson and she told me you were writing her a “delicious part” where she’d get to romance a much younger guy…

(Laughs)

….and what I liked the most about October Gale is that even though it might seem like she’ll be a “damsel in distress” she ends up actually saving the guy.

Yes, I mean if you’re gonna write a movie for Patricia she can’t be a damsel in distress, she has to be the person who saves herself so to speak.

I know that you don’t like calling your film a thriller…

I know, that’s more of a distributor thing, they wanna be able to sell a movie, but for me when I wrote it and I think of Patricia, we always thought this was a movie about grief, about this woman going through a very debilitating loss and then this thing happens to her and there’s this question of whether she wants to survive, and if she does, she has to survive by her own hand. In this day and age we have to sell a movie, but for me it was a story about grief.

Also, unlike thrillers made by male directors, Helen is multidimensional, she can be a heroine and she can also deal with her emotional issues. How was writing that part?

It was fun actually, it was hard too, first of all because I know Patricia, so I knew that whatever I wrote she could pull it off. Things like handling a gun, or driving a boat (laughs) no matter what I wrote for her, I knew she would pull it off. She was amazing, you’d think she was such a petite person, but the things she could do would blow me away. Although there was a point during the shoot, where she looked and me and went “I’m going to kill you” (laughs). I told her it was an independent movie so this had to look real, and Tim would have to punch her in the face, so she said, “fine, punch me!” She’s that kind of actor, she’s game.

Apologies for going back to this label thing, but I have this fantasy about you and Patricia doing a movie in every genre! Cairo Time was a travel romance, October Gale is a thriller, is a musical next?

Well, you’re gonna be happy with this, I’m developing a series for HBO that stars Patricia.

Yeah, that sounds like a dream.

For a director and a writer, she’s so talented, she’s such a good actor, I really don’t know how she does it, I’m constantly amazed by her, and she makes everything look so easy. She makes a filmmaker look better, with an actor like that you wanna hold on to her, you wanna keep her happy.

So how did Scott and Tim come into the equation?

I wanted Tim Roth so badly, I’ve been a huge fan of him, he’s of Patricia’s elk, he’s an “actor”, there’s something so commanding about him. This character had to be played by someone who could really command it, as a director I love actors you can’t really pin down and what Tim’s character goes through requires so much subtlety. So with him I sent him the script and he read it and wanted to do it, I couldn’t believe it.

Scott is Canadian, so he’s worked with my mentor, Atom Egoyan, so I saw him in Last Resort and thought he was very good, so I went to Atom and asked him to hook me up (laughs) and he did. You need to get to the actors you want however you can.

You shot Inescapable in South Africa, Cairo Time in the Egyptian desert and October Gale in a lake. How do you keep getting yourself involved in these extreme locations?

I have to tell you I don’t know, I thought shooting in the desert and in a lake would be so easy. I was an idiot (laughs) we had the coldest winter ever last year, spring wouldn’t come, the water was frozen! It was so cold, it’s amazing how it doesn’t look like that onscreen, but that was one of the problems we had, we knew that in Patricia had been in that lake longer than a minute she would’ve gone into hypothermia. Two days before Tim showed up we got a huge rainstorm, lots of wind, it was nail-biting. I have this weird thing with weather (laughs) when the time came for us to do the scene with Tim the ice and the snow had all gone away.

You kinda get that feeling in the movie, the extreme weather adds a texture to it that CGI would’ve never done.

Thanks for reminding me of that, when you’re doing an independent movie we don’t have a lot of money for CGI so the only way we can make a storm in the movie, is to actually shoot in a storm. Scott and Patricia were game, so every time we saw a storm coming or thunder and fog and we were inside, we’d drop everything and go shoot a scene outside. It was scary but it looked gorgeous.

I read somewhere that when you showed the movie in Toronto, men would come up to you at the end and ask you to tell them what would happen to these characters after the movie ended.

I thought that was hilarious, this happened in Cairo Time too, I love endings that are a bit more open, where there’s no clear resolution and I think women like that too. So I love when men come and ask me what’s going to happen, they said “you’re the writer, you know what’s next”. As a filmmaker you want your movie to live after people have seen it. Many times I’ve gone seen a movie and I forget about it the second after I leave the theater, and so for me, I want my movies to stay with an audience.

Which is pretty bold, cause audiences nowadays seem to prefer when their movies are digested for them.

It drives me crazy, because I want people to have a conversation at the end of the movie. I don’t want to spell it out for them. I know it’s hard to do, but I’m a filmmaker, I want my movies to stay with them.

October Gale will be released in theaters on March 6.