‘Whips, handcuffs, leather chaps... yep, everything seems to be in order’ — Robert Cuffley checks his notes for Walk All Over Me

“I’m a reserved, modest Canadian guy who has his sights on three years before things happen,” says Calgarian filmmaker Robert Cuffley. “I’m never like, ‘I’m going to move to L.A.’ I’m happy.”

Just a few hours ago, Cuffley touched down at the Calgary airport after a whirlwind week of parties and screenings at the Toronto International Film Festival. In the back of the Heartland Café in Bridgeland, he has a moment to breath with a latte. The cacophony of cameras and crowds replaced with the screaming of a little girl for a cookie. More interested in their tea than the box office numbers from last week, an elderly couple leaves Cuffley alone. Nobody asks if he’s worked with Diane Keaton or who the fuck he is. Sleep deprived in his home time zone, Cuffley hasn’t had a chance to process it all and he might not get a chance. His S&M crime caper film, Walk All Over Me, has a gala screening as part of the Calgary International Film Festival and, recently, The Weinstein Company purchased the film after the screening in Toronto.

“I don’t know the details,” Cuffley says. “I saw (Weinstein) at a party, though. If I had known he had bought the movie, I would have introduced myself. Honestly, we’re a small Canadian film and it’s not like he’s buying Pearl Harbor. I don’t know what he’s going to do, but even worst-case scenario, it’s very flattering.”

Weinstein is no stranger to controversial films, having picked up movies like Dogma, Pulp Fiction and Fahrenheit 9/11. Walk All Over Me, with Leelee Sobieski and Tricia Helfer as dominatrixes squeezed into latex costumes and corsets, should fit right in. Despite its dalliance in the world of S&M and the prerequisite violence of all indie-crime movies, the film isn’t the lurid exploitation film the description evokes.

“When you read what it’s about and when you actually see it, it’s not that risqué,” says Cuffley. “(Sobieski and Helfer) aren’t nude or anything. I call the film playfully dangerous. There’s nothing Gus Van Sant about it. You know, the S&M world is not that weird. The people are just like me and you. I used a male dominatrix in Winnipeg as a consultant, and you’ve got this expectation of what this person is going to be like. He comes in and he has a daughter, and they had just been to this creek where they floated boats made of Popsicle sticks. He’s just a dad, just like me.”

Most dads, though, don’t command a whip-wielding Helfer in front of a camera. A graduate from the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology and the National Screen Institute in Winnipeg, Cuffley made his way directing music videos, commercials and an episode of Da Vinci’s Inquest. He also won the award for Best Emerging Western Canadian Feature Film Director at the Vancouver International Film Festival back in 2001 for his feature debut, the Genie-nominated family drama Turning Paige. All that was prologue to Walk All Over Me, which proved to be the hardest shoot of his career thus far.

“It scared the crap out of me,” admits Cuffley. “(The film) has car chases, fight scenes — all those things we can’t compete with the Americans on. A Canadian-made Matrix will make you look like the biggest jerk in the world. A four-year-old could tell you don’t have the resources.

“So many people have said to me that this doesn’t look like a Canadian film. They mean it in a congratulatory way and I’m thinking, ‘if that’s a compliment, why is that bad?’ And to be honest, there are a lot of shit Canadian films, but there’s no more piece of shit Canadian films than there are American ones. It’s just here we’re so hard on ourselves. The Toronto press eats filmmakers alive, and the Canadian public doesn’t go see Canadian films. This is what came out of Turning Paige. I want somebody to see Walk All Over Me. I went and got well-known actors, but, believe it or not, the salacious content was a happy accident.”

Cuffley felt the film played well at TIFF and hopes for more of the same during CIFF. This is his home field, after all. The gala status of his film makes the stakes a bit higher. Still, looking ahead, as is his habit, Cuffley isn’t too worried.

“I’m being optimistic,” he says, “but if you build it, they will come. The fact that there are lineups for films nobody has ever heard of from Portugal or whatever going down the block for the festival makes you wonder.”

For now, away from the cameras and red carpets, Cuffley takes the time to breathe. A bed and a box set of HBO’s Entourage await at his home in Bridgeland to help him relax. Exactly the kind of things a modest, reserved Canadian would do.