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The film, due out next year, reflects on the 20th-century, from the jazz to the Internet age. It is broken down decade by decade, into separate character-driven tales focusing on relationships as they unfold in a single hotel room.
Maida and Kreviazuk star in the Sixties story. Maida plays musician Damon Riley, whose life becomes entwined with a hotel maid, Mary (played by Kreviazuk), herself an aspiring singer-songwriter.
"A reclusive musician, drugged out, in a Chelsea Hotel kind of deal, basically gets seduced by one of the maids, who steals his songs. There's a lot of stealing going on," explains Maida. "It's just one of the stories, and they all kind of tie in together. And there's great little twists within the movie. We're gonna write a song for it."
The couple, who recently wrote the film score to the silent film classic, Cleopatra, had the melody ready for the shoot because Kreviazuk is scripted to keep humming it in her scenes. They are completing the still unnamed song and will likely share lead vocals.
There might not be a soundtrack album to "Century Hotel", says director Weaver, because the film is low budget. It was made for a mere $750,000, with the aid of the Ontario Film Development Corporation.
"Certainly I think that the song that Raine and Chantal composed, something will happen with it, because it's a terrific song," he says.
Despite its low budget, the film, co-written by Bridget Newson ("Franklin", "Runaway Christmas"), features a huge cast of prominent Canadian actors, among them Colm Feore ("32 Shorts Films About Glenn Gould", "The Red Violin", "Titus", Steven Speilberg's upcoming "A.I."), Tom McCamus ("The Sweet Hereafter", "Long Day's Journey Into Night"), Mia Kirshner ("Exotica", "Mad City"), Lindy Booth ("Relic Hunter") and Sandrine Holt ("Black Robe").
Maida and Kreviazuk are the only non-professional actors in "Century Hotel", which was Weaver's intention for the two musician roles.
"There's two reasons for that," explains Weaver. "One is, we wanted to have as much authenticity for the role as we could. The other reason was that I wanted there to be music in the film, and I didn't want it to be like one of these films where you see an actor strumming a guitar and you know he only just picked that guitar up a half-hour before that shot was taken", he says, laughing.
"And because the story centres around a song, it was really important to find musicians who were willing to also contribute a song to a film that's very low budget, and Raine was right there. He was completely committed and understood why we wanted to do things that way and the importance of authenticity. He was great."
While Kreviazuk already had an acting agent, Maida says he had never contemplated the craft until he saw a brilliant 24-minute short that Weaver wrote and directed. Entitled "Moon Palace", it screened at the Toronto International Film Festival this year, and most recently at Toronto's Bloor Cinema, as part of OFDC's The Calling Card Program.
"It was really f---in' original," enthuses Maida, who received a videotape copy a few months back.
In "Moon Palace", a lazy, beer-drinking young man, who fancies himself a writer, is hassled by his girlfriend to get a job. She tosses a newspaper want-ad at him, calling for a "writer" in a Chinese restaurant. Not certain if it's a typo for "waiter", he shows up at the establishment, where a Mr. Lee leads him to his dingy backroom work station. Armed with a telescope, headphones and a typewriter, his job is to eavesdrop on dinner conversations and write relevant fortune cookies that will keep the patrons coming back.
"So I'm watching this and I'm thinking, 'Holy shit, this is the most original thing I've seen in years!," Maida recounts. "So I called him. I said, 'Look, David, I wasn't even thinking of acting, but I would love to be in this film because of your short, basically. I haven't seen anything like this in such a long time. It's really inspiring. It's very creative.'
So we met a couple of times and hit it off."
A few adjustments were made to the script once Kreviazuk expressed interest in the maid's role, making the character more musically-inclined to take advantage of her talent as well.
Shot over the course of a month, beginning the first week of October, Weaver says he was impressed with Maida and Kreviazuk's work ethic and their understanding of the characters. They didn't want to play themselves.
"So Chantal plays a maid who is much more geeky and uncertain than Chantal herself is. Chantal is an incredibly self-assured person. But the character she was playing had to be a bit of a mouse, and she was totally able to do that.
"And similarly Raine, who is really, really sweet, had to play a musician who's an ass----. I think he's totally unlike the character in a lot of respects, but I think that anyone in the music, or even in the film, industry has seen enough of that activity that it's not hard to imitate it.
"We had a lot of really great actors in the film, and we wouldn't have cast either Raine or Chantal unless we were really impressed with them and thought that they could do it and maintain that level of quality," Weaver adds. "I think they both have the capability to do stuff in both worlds."