Late actors Wright, Chaykin featured at TIFF

Some of the final onscreen work of Maury Chaykin and Tracy Wright will unspool at the Toronto International Film Festival just months after the deaths of the veteran Canadian actors.

Chaykin, the accomplished character actor who died at age 61 in July, steals scenes as an eccentric mobster in Casino Jack, which stars Kevin Spacey as Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff. He also appears briefly in Barney's Version, the screen adaptation of Mordecai Richler's beloved novel.

Wright, meanwhile, stars in the Bruce McDonald-directed rock 'n' roll recovery film Trigger and the sci-fi mindbender You Are Here.

"It's so amazing that [Tracy] has two feature films at TIFF this year," said Toronto filmmaker Ingrid Veninger, who has fond memories of working with Wright.

"I don't quite think that she was given enough credit, you know ... Now people seem to be really acknowledging her and it's sort of frustrating because she's been around and ... she should have been in a feature film at TIFF every single year for the last 15 years."

"I think she's taking all this in wherever she is."

Wright has a long list of screen credits to her name, including a memorable turn in Monkey Warfare, co-starring her husband Don McKellar. She appears in nearly every scene of Trigger, in which she and Canuck actress Molly Parker portray faded rockers still haunted by vanquished addictions.

"She was a phenomenal actor," said Callum Keith Rennie, who co-stars in the film.

'It was uncertain if [Tracy]'d be able to make it out, but she did make it to the screening.... I'm really, really glad that she came. She told me that she had sort of made her peace with the movie.' Daniel Cockburn

Wright also appears in You Are Here, a paranoid puzzler that casts the actress in the decidedly unglamorous role of an archivist who is slowly overtaken by the artifacts she obsessively collects.

The film, by newcomer director Daniel Cockburn, is a shifting, abstract meditation on technology and anxiety. The winding, non-linear plot is meant to challenge the audience, and Cockburn says Wright wasn't initially sure she felt comfortable with it.

"When I first met [Wright], she had read the script and we were just talking about whether she wanted to be in the movie, and she said she liked the script, but she wasn't sure she got it well enough," Cockburn recalled in a telephone interview.

"I tried to assure her: 'Well, don't feel like it's a puzzle you have to solve or a test you have to pass."'

Cockburn remembers Wright for her outspokenness, for her lack of pretence and for her ability to completely inhabit her characters.He was thrilled when Wright agreed to take the role, sure that she was the rare actress with the talent to ground his cerebral feature-length debut.

"I knew that the role of the archivist had to be something that would really carry a heart and some humanity," he said. "And even if it's sort of buried in the cryptic nature of the movie and it's sort of hard to see, I knew if it was there and embodied by the right person it would shine through."

Chaykin celebrated for prolific career

Chaykin had a lengthy and varied acting career, with roles ranging from his role as Major Fambrough in the 1990 epic Dances With Wolves to TV work on CSI, Entourage and Less Than Kind.

His performance in Casino Jack provides some of the film's liveliest moments. Chaykin plays John Gotti associate Anthony (Big Tony) Moscatiello as a genial geriatric with a thinly veiled violent side.

The comic bent he brings to the role will hardly be foreign to those who have shared the screen with him in the past.

Veninger worked alongside Chaykin on On Their Knees, a 2001 comedy directed by Anais Granofsky. She says the veteran performer, playing a motel clerk, would try something different in every take.

"Sometimes he would eat pizza, sometimes he was calculating the rate of the [motel] room and he would like snort and laugh and blow his nose and recalculate, and I actually, during a take, peed my pants," Veninger recalled.

"I had to do everything in my power to not ruin the take because he was always such a genius."

Barney's Version director Richard Lewis scaled Chaykin's involvement down when he became aware of the actor's health problems, but his familiar face can be seen in a key wedding scene early on in the film.

Rennie said that the Trigger shoot, meanwhile, had to be fast-tracked to help Wright complete the role.Cockburn, who began shooting You Are Here in 2008, knew last October, when he brought Wright in for dialogue dubbing, that she wasn't well. He saw her again, in March, as he screened his film for cast and crew.

Wright 'made her peace' with film

And while the 33-year-old director has much riding on the fate of his debut feature as it hits screens in Toronto, it was then that he received the one endorsement he needed the most.

"It was uncertain if she'd be able to make it out, but she did make it to the screening," he said. "She had been not so sure she liked herself in it, and I think it might have been a structural thing."

"I'm really, really glad that she came. She told me that she had sort of made her peace with the movie."

And while his film has already premiered at the Festival del Film Locarno in Switzerland, he feels the response awaiting You Are Here at the Toronto fest will be something else entirely.

"Just for the feeling in the room surrounding Tracy, there's no other city in the world where it's going to feel the way it's going to feel in Toronto," Cockburn said.

"And I don't even know what that's going to be like."

The Toronto International Film Festival runs until Sept. 19.