By Bethany Horne, Copy Editor

Calling them stars is a bit of a stretch. Last summer, if you had run into one of them at a party, a rock show, or a gallery opening in Halifax, you might have been dazzled by their good looks, but not by their celebrity.

But all that may change. By agreeing to be in Laura Dawe‘s first feature film, Light is the Day, Tim Mitchell, Corey Hinchey and Erika Ellsworth became actors, and tonight they sashay up an Atlantic Film Fest (AFF) red carpet to their very own movie premiere.

Halifame, at least, seems inevitable.

Due to the last-minute nature of the frantic, AFF deadline-driven editing process, the actors haven’t even seen the result of all their hard work. But they say there’s no way the movie will be able to compare to the experience they had filming it.

“Watching it is going to be the poop in the toilet,” Ellsworth says, near the end of a long conversation I had with all three actors the weekend before the premiere. “I feel like I’m still digesting.”

The three laugh, and perhaps to clarify what his cast member means, Hinchey explains:

“Doing it was so valuable. It was really the experience that was so much of it. And I hope that conveys somehow. I hope people can look for that.”

In the film, Mitchell’s character, Charlie, owns a house in the country. Hinchey plays Michael, Charlie’s childhood friend, and Ellsworth plays Painter, Michael’s girlfriend. The couple leave the city — which is falling apart as food prices skyrocket in the wake of peak oil — to join Charlie, and the three set out to make it through the winter on their own. As the world crumbles outside their bubble, their mini-tribe doesn’t fare much better.

Michael, in particular, has a rough time (not to give too much away). Hinchey says his cast members got to play “very likeable characters,” while he had to put in “really long days of playing an asshole.”

As well as having to play arguably the most challenging role, Hinchey helped edit the movie’s sound.

“None of the lines started at silence. So I spent a good three, really long, days going through and trying to equalize the dialogue.” He doesn’t know how it turned out.

“I’m really nervous about that. Not only am i nervous about my performance, I’m really nervous about the sound.”

This crossover between actors and crew was out of necessity. Mitchell says there were many times when Dawe would look at him in desperation and say “Tim, we are not going to be able to make this movie.” It was all hands on deck to make this  indie film possible, and is the reason why all three actors say the making of *Light is the Day* is a story as worthy of the big screen as the film itself.

“We were having 20-hour days. This was the hardest I had ever worked in my entire life. This was like two full time jobs: no sleep, no pay. Worse than slave labour,” says Mitchell, tongue in cheek.

Hinchey jumps in: “On the other extreme, actors get paid very well and they do very little. In an independent film, it works out to be so much more work. It makes you crazy for a while. It’s so mentally taxing. It’s so good to go through that.”

The small cast and crew weren’t the only ones who put their hearts into this movie.

Thanks in large part to Dawe’s fierce self-advocacy, a significant percentage of the Halifax arts community ended up contributing in some way to the project, as well. Bands donated songs, hordes descended on her fundraising parties, and people chipped in skills, props or money when they heard of the need. As a co-worker last year to both Mitchell and Dawe (whose Gazette salaries helped pay their rent while they gallivanted off to Pictou), I sent Dawe a small amount if money to put towards an emergency truck rental.

Before this movie, Hinchey had some experience acting in theatre productions, and Mitchell says he had been in some musicals in high school, but Ellsworth says, “I’d never acted before in my life. I was never even aware of my outer self.”

She says she just met Dawe at a party one night and confessed how sad she was to realize she was never going to be in the fairy tales she used to dream of as a kid.

“And she said, ‘Hey I’m making a movie — want to audition?’ So I guess it was a form of that. Fairy tale, reality. Fantasy.”

She feels like she changes as a person during the making of the film, and is only now returning to her “real self.”

Hinchey, who joined the cast to add a film experience to his theatre-based acting resume, had almost the opposite experience.

“I was always a pretty timid, quiet person, and I had to do some stuff (as Michael) that was really pretty intense. So I learned how to connect more with myself so that I didn’t take that feeling with me,” he says. “If I had to do a really intense scene, I learned how to leave that behind and connect with that essence or that core of who I am, which I feel that I’m better at in general now.”

Mitchell says making the movie changed him in two ways: first, it made him think he might not mind being an actor again, and secondly, through a fluke, it helped him get over a five-year dependence on anti-depressants.

“We were going out (to the shoot) and I didn’t get my prescription filled … and we were going out for a week. I didn’t know any doctors out there. We went out, and we did the shoot, and I basically just stopped taking them, cold turkey.”

“On the last day,  I remember telling Corey in the car on the ride home, ‘Dude, I think I’m just going to stop taking them.'”

That was a year ago, and he hasn’t turned back.

“Just from this movie trip, I was like, ‘This crutch is gone. I’m a new person!’ … It was probably before the first shoot. There was a lot of drinking on that shoot. I was drunk the whole time.”

Hinchey hopes people watch this movie differently than they normally would. He uses a theatre metaphor to explain:

“If you watch a performance, and the performance is of somebody flying, but they’re wearing a rope, you have to go the step yourself and use your imagination, and pretend that the rope isn’t there, so that you can really enjoy it. Our imagination goes so much beyond CGI.”

“The movie and our acting is 50 per cent of the movie. The other 50 is the audience, and it’s their observation and their ability to use their own imaginations.”

“You have to do your best to crop out the harness. And I really hope that people do that when they see this. For their own experience and for their own pleasure, that they actually work a little bit,” Hinchey says. “The audience is fully capable of this.”

“I see movies sometimes too, and I look for little things like that − inconsistencies, or weird things − but this movie’s going to have a lot of that. When you look at the size of the crew, compared to a movie you hold highly in your mind −”

Mitchell chimes in: “Like Aliens.”

“− There’s so much money. Why can’t we just express ourselves, and have a story, and act it out?”

If you can’t catch the movie today, Sept. 24, at 9:25 p.m. at Park Lane, there will be another Halifax showing announced on the Facebook group. DVDs of Light is the Day will also be available at Video Difference, eventually.