No producer straddles Hollywood and Hollywood North on the same scale as Don Carmody. On one hand, Carmody can boast of producing the most commercially successful Canadian film ever, Porky's (along with writer/director Bob Clark), as well as having produced other top Canuck grossers Johnny Mnemonic and Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Meanwhile, he has also played gun-for-hire on numerous Hollywood features that have shot north of the 49th, including Gothika, City by the Sea, Lucky Number Slevin, and, most notably, best-picture Oscar winner Chicago.

His various credits on more than 100 features in a 30-year producing career helps ease the minds of Hollywood brass about shooting in Canada, and by using his influence to incorporate local production and post-production talent into these big U.S. projects, he has helped provide work to hundreds in the domestic film sector.

Carmody has bounced between the U.S. and Canada right from the start. Born in New England 53 years ago, he moved to Montreal with his parents as an infant, and holds dual citizenship. After having received a communications degree from Montreal's Loyola University (now Concordia University) in 1972, the ambitious young man was eager to get his feet wet in the film biz.

In fact, he had dipped a toe in the pool a couple of summers earlier. Having won a summer job at the National Film Board, he set out to Calgary to work on a project with a documentary crew, and through a roundabout way got on the set of an American television pilot shooting there. He was instantly seduced by the glamour of Hollywood production, and in a decision indicative of his later commercial leanings, opted to pursue more mainstream filmmaking.

"So I chucked the film board and headed to Vancouver, where a friend of mine said, 'I can get you on this Robert Altman movie,'" Carmody recalls in the Toronto production office of his latest feature, Silent Hill (aka Centralia).

And so Carmody was hired onto the now-classic Altman anti-western McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Getting an assignment no doubt enviable to many young men at the time, he was assigned as the driver to one of the film's stars, British beauty Julie Christie. "I was only on it for six or seven weeks. I didn't get paid, but that was a great job," he says, laughing.

Today Carmody is not one to rest on his laurels. On the heels of his success producing Resident Evil: Apocalypse (US$64 million in international box office, according to Variety), a sci-fi actioner based on a videogame, he is returning to the well with Silent Hill. The new film is an adaptation of a game by Japanese giant Konami about a woman searching for her daughter in a mysterious and terrifying town.

The film, a copro with France's Davis Films, is directed by France's Christophe Gans (Crying Freeman) from a script by Roger Avary (Pulp Fiction, Crying Freeman). The cast is led by Radha Mitchell, who generated considerable buzz with her two-role turn in Woody Allen's Melinda and Melinda, and who also appeared in Oscar nominee Finding Neverland. Laurie Holden (Fantastic Four), Sean Bean (the Lord of the Rings trilogy) and local actress Deborah Kara Unger (White Noise) also star. Shooting is expected to continue in Toronto and outlying areas until July 22.