TORONTO -- The most important ingredient when filming a rock 'n' roll comedy is making sure you have actual rock 'n' rollers in it.

So when Toronto-based writer/director Rob Stefaniuk was getting his mash-up of the vampire and rock genres, Suck, off the ground, he figured he needed some real stars.

"It all started with Iggy [Pop]," he explains on a sunny Yorkville patio just hours before the film's world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.

"We just sent him the script in an email. And he read it and liked it. And once Iggy was in, that's how we got Henry [Rollins]. We just said Iggy was in it, and that was enough to interest Henry in being in it."

One of Suck's producers knew Martin McDowell (who plays a one-eyed vampire hunter named Eddie Van Helsing), and another had previously worked with Moby (who plays "the best f---ing singer from Buffalo") in the film.

"I also knew one of the producers," Jessica Paré (Stardom, Wicker Park, The Trotsky) says, pulling up a chair.

"Alex [Lifeson] and [Kids in the Hall's] Dave Foley I knew from my [music] writing partner John Kastner, so they were game."

Suck casts Stefaniuk as the lead singer in a faltering band, the Winners, whose fortunes change after the bassist, Jennifer (played by Paré), is bitten by a vampire. After that, the group's losing ways start to change -- it appears Jennifer's sexy vampire is catching people's attention as the group's popularity on the Internet soars. The only hitch is that Jennifer seems to enjoy eating some of the people the Winners come across -- including Moby, who plays a meat-loving skinhead-metalhead.

"He was delicious," Paré jokes, referencing a blood soaked scene in which she chows on the singer's arm like it's a drumstick. "Vegans do taste better."

"I always played in bands," Stefaniuk says. "Bands that went nowhere, kind of like the band in this movie. But I wanted to make a music movie. And when I first started writing this film, I was writing stories about getting into my thirties and feeling very old and the vampire metaphor worked so well for some of the things I wanted to talk about."

Stefaniuk, who continues his day job as a musician (he co-wrote some of film's soundtrack no less), also wanted to pay homage to some of the standard vampire clichés.

In a nod to Dracula, the band's roadie ends up as Jennifer's Renfield-like assistant, disposing of her dead victims and munching on the occasional fly.

But the 38-year-old director also wanted to have some fun with the genre and in one scene he captures Paré draining the blood from one of her victims by inserting a straw and literally sucking him dry.

And if it seems somewhat calculated that the blood motif was employed to capitalize on the newly-fashionable vampire craze, Stefaniuk says it's simply a coincidence.

"I wrote this movie five years ago and was told that vampires weren't hot," he shrugs. "Someone even came out and said, 'This movie won't get made.' After a couple of years, vampires got hot and then I had people coming to me saying, 'Vampires are so hot.'

"But I don't think we really fit into that anyways, because it's a comedy. If anything it's a good thing we did it this way because if people are starting to get sick of vampires, we do take the piss out of them a little bit."