The team of helmer François Girard and director of photography Alain Dostie doesn't shy away from features that are imposing and arduous in nature, as is evident in the period drama Silk, their long-awaited follow-up to the Genie Award-winning The Red Violin (1998).

Boasting a $26-million budget, various exotic locations and a marquee name in Keira Knightley of the Pirates of the Caribbean films, Silk has all the makings of a potential hit for Toronto producer Niv Fichman of Rhombus Media.

Dostie says he had read Alessandro Baricco's novel of the same name long before there was talk of a movie.

"Only François is crazy enough to actually think about doing a movie like that," says the Quebec-based Dostie, who adds that Girard was developing a number of other projects after The Red Violin, but none panned out.

A Canada/Italy/Japan copro, Silk is a dark love story of an extramarital affair that develops between a 19th century French silkworm smuggler, Herve Joncour, played by Michael Pitt (The Dreamers, Last Days) and a Japanese mistress (Sei Ashina), despite the fact they don't speak the same language. Knightley plays Joncour's suspicious young wife, Helene.

Silk marks the fourth collaboration between Dostie and Girard. "We know each other so well, it's like family," says the DOP.

The film's disparate shooting locations - Sermoneta, a village just outside of Rome, which doubled for the south of France, and Matsumoto, Japan, near the site of the 1998 Nagano Winter Olympics - made the three and a half months of preproduction especially tough.

"There were two production offices, so François was traveling back and forth," says Dostie, who initially made two trips to Italy and Japan to conduct shooting tests before returning to Montreal to prep.

Dostie says he watched at least 15 Japanese films - none he'd ever heard of - to see how they light small Japanese houses.

Filming commenced in wintry Japan on Feb. 25, on a set built entirely in the snow. "I've never seen so much snow in my life," remarks Dostie. "We don't know what snow is in Quebec."

The veteran cinematographer, 63, who never studied film but can't remember ever doing anything else, says he "thought a lot" about how to achieve a different look for Silk. Dostie's credits include the features Perfectly Normal (1990) and Girard's Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993), as well as the mini Nuremberg (2000).

"When we started shooting in Japan, I realized that I didn't have to do anything special - just shoot what was in front of the camera," says the lenser. "I didn't have to think about it as different because it was different."

Japan's grey and brownish winter landscape provided a sharp contrast to Italy.

"[Joncour] and his wife were building a garden in Italy, so it was very green and we did a lot of exteriors," says Dostie.

The cameraman notes it felt more like "a vacation" when the 15-member Canuck crew, including Violin production designer François Séguin, proceeded to springtime Italy in April for the remainder of Silk's 55-day shoot. "It was a lot easier," he adds. A second unit covered scenery and travel shots in Africa and Siberia.