No one knows movie magic like local filmmaker Gary Yates.

More specifically, no one know movies and magic like local filmmaker Gary Yates, who spent more than a decade working as a bonafide magician before being nipped by the directing bug.

"I find that magic and film aren't that different," says Yates, whose sophomore effort Niagara Motel opens tomorrow in theatres across the country. "The key of magic is misdirection ... and it's the same thing with film. You're always telling the audience where to look and what to believe."

The sleight-of-hand influence is all over Yates's first feature, the Blizzard-winning neo-noir Seven Times Lucky, starring Kevin Pollak as a down-on-his-luck con artist who employs bait-and-switch tactics while working the grift.

But there's also a healthy dose of magic flowing through Niagara Motel, a multi-layered ensemble piece that echoes earlier character studies from Robert Altman (Nashville, Short Cuts) and P.T. Anderson (Magnolia).

"What I've been telling people is that it's just like King Kong, except there's no action and no giant monkey," Yates jokes of Niagara. "But it's still full of desperate people doing desperate things to get what they want."

Based on the Suburban Motel series by Canadian playwright George F. Walker -- and shot on locations in Winnipeg, Selkirk and Steinbach -- Yates's film charts nine disparate characters whose lives converge in alternately funny and tragic ways.

One couple's marriage unravels as the husband tries to find a job; another's is tested by drug addiction and seemingly futile attempts to regain custody of a baby.

And surprisingly, there are a lot of laughs, most coming courtesy of Pollak (this time playing a would-be porn director), and Late Late Show host Craig Ferguson, who plays a perpetually drunk motel janitor.

While Yates has nothing but praise for his cast (which also features ex-Winnipegger Wendy Crewson), he singled Ferguson out for taking on some potentially harmful stunt work -- namely a swim in the murky Red River.

"After he was out, the paramedics had to hose him down with an anti-bacterial spray," Yates recalls, noting the river had to be tinted blue in post-production to stand in for the titular waterway.

"Then we had to take him for a tetanus shot at the Winnipeg Methadone Clinic, which was the only place open on a Saturday night."

Yates says it was Pollak who convinced him to take on the project in the first place, after the director expressed concern about working from material he hadn't written himself.

"(Pollak) said, 'Look, it's very different from anything you've ever done,'" says Yates. "But unless you want to make one movie every five years -- which is what usually happens to independent filmmakers -- then get back behind the camera and do it!"

It appears Pollak had little to be worried about, as Yates is already at work on his third feature, an adaptation of the play High Life -- which features not magic but morphine in the through-line of its plot.

The stage version is about a bank heist that mostly takes place offstage, but Yates promises his version will be more action-packed.

"You can't really get away with that in a movie," he laughs. "Anyway, it's always been the 'Then what?' that's most interesting to me."