'The Stunt Driver' TIFF Premiere: Baruchel as Ken Carter — SkimNews
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- "The Stunt Driver" world-premieres at TIFF, with director Michael Dowse — a five-time Toronto alum via "Goon" and "The F Word" — casting Jay Baruchel as '70s daredevil Ken Carter, who attempted to jump a mile across the St. Lawrence River in a rocket car
- Michael Dowse spent five years securing rights to Bob Fortier's 1981 National Film Board documentary "The Devil at Your Heels," which became the project's foundation; Fortier consulted on the script and pointed the team to unreleased audio of Carter being hypnotized on live radio
- Ben Foster plays Evel Knievel in the film, whose rivalry with Carter was largely staged for publicity but amped up for drama; Dowse frames Knievel as "the American guy" who "squashes the polite Canadian's idea"
- Some improvised dialogue emerged because production ran "last year when the tariffs were happening," with Dowse saying cross-border tension was "simmering" on set — and that the film's Canadian-vs-American friction "resonate[s] in the present moment"
- The crew performed zero stunts, leaning entirely on archive footage from the NFB doc, while production designer Jean-André Carrière built Carter's rocket car from scratch (no schematic existed) and the team raced a 60-foot ramp against incoming weather
- Independent Film Company releases the film in the U.S. on Sept. 25, the same day Montreal Media releases it in Canada
Why it matters: The film lands during an active U.S.-Canada tariff fight, and Dowse explicitly says some improvised lines were born from that on-set atmosphere — meaning a TIFF daredevil biopic is doubling as a Canadian-vs-American friction piece for a Sept. 25 release on both sides of the border. Baruchel, a Canadian star known since childhood, takes the lead in a story engineered to dramatize that rivalry.
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