Maximus Film Productions


	National Post Katrina Onstad Friday, July 05, 2002 A filmmaker with no time to waste Max McGuire has time on the brain. He made his first movie at 18, and now he’s 21. His beat-the-clock spirit isn’t just wunderkind hubris, but something more poignant, because another thing about Max is that he may not live to be 30. Today, he’s made the drive to Toronto from his hometown of Ottawa to Toronto in just under four hours, a time that suggests he drives like a maniac. His buddies in the back seat bet him he wouldn’t make it on time; now they owe him gas money. Max shakes hands with the confidence of the very good looking, and a professionalism that belies his age. Then again, with his spikey hair and baggy pants he also looks like a skateboarder, which he is, though he gave up his daily skate while making a kidnapping movie called Newton’s Law the summer after graduating from high school, in 1999. Malak Tabbaras, president and CEO of Toronto based Iron Communications Inc., a film distribution company that last month picked up the to Max’s movie, speaks in exclamation points anyways, but mention of Max makes him positively giddy. “When I talked to him on the phone, I assumed he was older. Then I met him, this young gentleman who looks a bit like Tom Cruise, and he really works you. He looks you in the eyes! He's got a passion for life. He utilizes his minutes, his seconds, his hours. I fell in love with him, I tell you!" Max's movie looks like a boy's first movie: a heist film about a gang of juvenile delinquents who unwittingly kidnap a CIA agent. Before we meet he apologizes for it: "Don't be too hard on me. I was 18," he says with the wisdom of a 21 year-old. Though the dialogue can be a touch self-conscious, and some of the acting has a community theatre herky-jerklness, Newton's Law Is smarter than any $45,000 first film has a right to be. Max had never held a camera before but it turns out he has a knack for light and colour, and the story which his father co-wrote with his uncle -- gets more labyrinthine, more Intriguing. The 14-day shoot, and two years of tinkering, were Max's film school. Instead of sending their son off to university, his parents said Max could use his $20,000 college fund to make his movie. "Four years of film school is going to carve into my time, and I truly believed it would alter my thinking if I went to film school. I'd think like a film student," he says, with an unflattering emphasis on the last two words. Casually, he adds: "As soon as you realize death is imminent, you're going to live your life, you know? I was like: Why talk about making a movie? Why not just make one?" His voice, as he speaks, is phlegmy, and he coughs frequently, a wet, drowning sound. Max says he's fighting a bad cold, but at the best of times, he sounds congested. Max has cystic fibrosis, an inherited disease that affects the digestive and respiratory systems. "I don't know what it's like to have your lungs," says Max. "I'm told if you were to have my lungs, it's like breathing through a straw. That's what they say in the sappy ads on the radio, anyway." There's no cure, but there's treatment, and Max's childhood hobby was treatment. As a kid, he went to the hospital once or twice a year for "a flushing. They'd flush the bugs out of my lungs." He sometimes made friends with people on his floor at the hospital, but then they would die. "The average wonderful life span of a CF patient Is 30. I don't go to funerals anymore," he says in a flat voice. "My mom is the family delegate." Max lives at home. “I’ll live there forever. I love my family,” he says. His father is a dentist, his mother manages the practice and his sisters are studying makeup design in Toronto. His older sister – the McGuire siblings are aged 20, 21, 22 – has CF too, and she and Max grew close while spending time in hospital wards. He drinks a couple of beers while we talk in a hotel bar. “I never say no to a party. In high school, I had a regime: You come home, take your pills, do your physiotherapy, eat your dinner and go to sleep. But as you get older you want to have a life,” he says. The life he wanted, he realized in his teens, was that of a filmmaker. The McGuire family always watched movies -- he cites, of course, do-it- yourself directors Quentin Tarantino and Steven Soderbergh as Influences -- and Max got his hands on the Indie filmmaking bible Rebel Without a Crew, by director Robert Rodriguez. "Oh, me and my friends passed that thing around forever," says Max reverentially. Rodriguez made his first film, EI Mariachi, on a budget of $7,000 -- money earned, legend has it, by pimping out his body for medical experiments. Max assembled a principal crew of six and struck a deal with ACTRA to hire unpaid actors. Using charm and family contacts, Max secured police cars, music, even the use of a swimming pool for an underwater scene. "I did a bit of reading and a lot of bullshittlng," he says. The credits are filled with McGuire’s: His dad plays the CIA agent/kidnap victim from underneath a big grey beard that took a year to grow and freaked out his dental clients, Max says. Mom did some of the catering. For 14 days, they shot mostly in a warehouse in the small town of Brockville, Ont., because the first rule of indle filmmaking is to keep the location simple; plus, Reservoir Dogs took place in a warehouse, and Max loves Reservoir Dogs. Max's favorite moment during the shoot was when they got to fire bullets into his cousin's van and blow it up 100 meters off Highway 401. "The van's name was Crusty," he tells me. In one month of working on the film, Max lost 10 pounds and became borderline diabetic. Much worse, he says, is that when shooting was finished, he couldn't afford to develop the 16 mm film. The reels sat in a refrigerator until someone mentioned it could go bad. So he sold his camera to print the film, and then received a grant from the Canada Council to finish editing. He couldn't show the finished product to his grandparents -- "Too many F words" -- but he did send it to 20 agents In L.A. "Polite rejections," says Max, until a friend put him In touch with Tabbaras. "This is not an A movie, or a B movie, this is a C movie," says Tabbaras. "But it has all the commercial values: a small explosion, a little bit of sexual content, good looking young actors and a kidnapping! This little film has more juice than a half-million-dollar Canadian film!" Iron Communications Inc. carries about 25 titles ("European, some gay and lesbian, some Spanish," says Tabbaras) that sell mostly overseas, and Tabbaras sees Max's little movie as "perfect for Asia. Africa is a great market for him, although you have to have black actors for that." Newton's Law may never appear on the big screen, but It has a good chance of being picked up for video or satellite TV. Max wants the big screen, and he wants North American distribution, too, so he's working on getting the word out, promoting himself with a press release that plays up both his youth and his CF. He shrugs off the idea that he’s invading his own privacy, maybe even exploiting his illness. “I don’t mind talking about it. It makes other people nervous, not me.” This directness makes Max seem mature for his age, but then sometimes his youth comes out, and it’s jarring, as when he expounding on filmmaking – “Less is more” – then he stops mid-sentence and says: “I’m just talking out of my bum.” Max’s health is good these days. He’s pumping vitamins and drinking water and this week he will work on a script with a friend. Not to long ago, he and his girlfriend broke up ("She taught me a lot about girls," he says wistful/y) so he has been hanging out with his buddies a lot lately. Two nights a week, Max bartends in a hotel nightclub. Ottawa bars are smoke-free now, meaning Max doesn't cough up black bile like he used b What he thinks about when he's serving drinks and cleaning glassware is movies. He watches the people who come in, checking for story possibilities, plotting what happens next. "I want to make my mark," he says. "I'm in a hurry.