Baie-Saint-Paul: On a little snow-covered road perched on a hill in the north of Baie-Saint-Paul, the Mémoires affectives crew are busy fine-tuning a rather complicated camera technique for an important shot: the return of Alexandre Tourneur to the scene of the accident that robbed him of his memory.

Centre-stage, snugly wrapped in a long burgundy coat, Roy Dupuis, alias Tourneur, stands patient, motionless, long enough for a final camera rehearsal. Neither the earmuffs nor the coat are part of his character’s costume. It’s because it’s absolutely freezing on this overcast Wednesday of winter filming.

“Today’s nothing,” stresses the actor. “Last weekend, with the wind, it was -52ºC on the lake! It’s still amazing!”

The figure varies a degree or two according to who is speaking, but everyone will remember that day filming on the frozen waters of Lake de l’Écluse, in the Grands Jardins park.

“I’ve filmed practically all over the world, but I’ve never seen anything like this. The conditions are really extreme,” says producer Barbara Shrier (The Red Violin) with a smile.

For yes, there’s a good mood on the set. The crew have been blessed. The special camera sent from Toronto holds out. The film too, apart from some perforation which broke off. Nothing that would make director Francis Leclerc regret having chosen to film in January.

“It’s a bit like being on a school skiing trip,” he says in the hotel bar after the day’s filming. Albeit an “extreme” school trip, to use the word that’s on everyone’s lips on the set.

Mémoires affectives, Leclerc’s second film after Une jeune fille à la fenêtre, was initially set in autumn. But delays to the project resulting from early rejections by the Institutions led the director to modify the screenplay. “When we got the green light in October, I didn’t want to wait another year. I really wanted to start filming. And to film in Charlevoix,” adds the filmmaker who hails from Quebec. “It’s good to have a bit of a change of set, to show something different. I wouldn’t have been able to film the apartments on Plateau Mount Royal. I wanted this landscape. But my film won’t be a picture postcard.”

That’s it. The technicians have found the correct speed for the camera. On the little monitor - which is frozen too - the picture goes from clear to blurred then back to sharp. The effect Francis Leclerc is looking for to interpret the dizziness experienced by Alexandre Tourneur, who struggles to bring his lost memories to the surface, following the coma that the accident left him in.

“3, 2, 1 …Action!” shouts the director. The camera advances on the track, pushed by two technicians. “A grey Honda,” says Dupuis/Tourneur. “Are you sure it wasn’t a truck?” replies the detective, played by Rosa Zacharie.

The idea for Mémoires affectives has been germinating for 15 years in the mind of Marcel Beaulieu, who co-wrote Une jeune fille à la fenêtre with Francis Leclerc. “It’s the idea of a man who has lost his memory and who wants to find out who he was, leading him to dig around in places he wouldn’t necessarily have wanted to return to.”

Francis Leclerc immediately thought of Roy Dupuis to play Tourneur, a family man, a vet practising in the country. “I wanted the best actor for the role, that’s all,” he explains. I’ve wanted him to do it for years. I loved him in Being at Home with Claude and Cap Tourmente. I wanted to see him as a forty-year-old, to try to bring him to another place with this.”

Roy Dupuis makes no secret of the reasons for his choice. “I read the script, I met Francis, we talked, and I immediately saw that he had a vision. That’s very important for me. I like how he tells his story. This screenplay is very cinematic. It’s like a 10,000 piece jigsaw,” he explains in his lodge that evening.

Dupuis talks of Alexandre Tourneur as a “pure”, “empty” person at the beginning who, in the course of the story, gradually recovers images of the past that reflect the pain and misery in his head, memories that sometimes he would have preferred to leave forgotten.  “On awakening from the coma he remembers the technicalities of living, but he no longer remembers anyone, he’s not emotionally engaged with anyone, he’s helpless. It’s hard for him, but at the beginning it’s harder on the others.”

Nathalie Coupal plays his wife, Karine Lagueux his daughter. Mémoires affectives – which will be released in the autumn – also stars Robert Lalonde as a non too smart policeman, Maka Kotto as Tourneur’s psychiatrist, and Benoit Gouin as an old friend and former colleague of the amnesiac.

The difficulty of the character, in Roy Dupuis’ eyes, lies in conveying his evolution, his physical, verbal and emotional reconstruction. “I talked with a doctor before filming, but no-one wakes from a coma in the same way. There’s no comparable situation. He’s a complex character.”

Francis Leclerc wanted to interpret this evolution, this progressive “refilling” of the memory in the set design. “It’s not easy for Mario Hervieux the artistic director, because I asked one thing of him: nothing. I wanted an empty hospital room. It was the same with the police station. I said, “We only want to see the essentials.” And the further it goes on, the more it fills up. It’s not obvious. There are only three or four people who really know where I’m going. But I have this world in my head. A film is a matter of confidence. And I’m lucky to have a crew that have confidence in me, and a producer who gives me the freedom to make my film.

Francis Leclerc makes no secret of it: Mémoires affectives is very different from his previous work. “With Steve Asselin I film more with a hand-held camera. I wanted something more organic. You are closer to the bodies, it’s more physical. And you catch the fantasy. With Une jeune fille à la fenêtre, I wanted to take people into the ‘20s. Here I wanted to take them somewhere different.”

One thing hasn’t changed much however: the crew. In the more than 10 years he’s been filming – videoclips, shorts, an adaptation of Robert Lepage’s Seven Branches of the River Ota, and a few adverts best forgotten  – Francis Leclerc is faithful to his people. On Mémoires affectives even his older brother Martin is in the business, making a photographic sketch of the activity on the set. For the record.

Three takes and the shot of the road is in the can. Leclerc is satisfied. But there’s not a moment to lose. For a winter shoot is also a race against the light. And with the weather overcast today, it’s failing faster than normal.

There’s still some pictures to take in the forest with Roy Dupuis and Rosa Zacharie. The clouds are seriously threatening to release their snowflakes. On the narrow track you have to watch out for the equipment. Filming is also a strenuous business, as this scene shows. But no-one seems to be complaining.  “I prefer to be here in the real winter than in a studio pretending to be cold,” sums up Roy Dupuis. “There’s something deep down that enjoys the instinct to survive.”

The shoot, which began on the 22 January in Old Quebec, leaves Malbaie after the weekend. The interiors will be filmed in Montreal. The storm scene, which opens the film, will be recreated on location in Blainville.

“We found a little road similar to this one,” says producer Barbara Shrier, pointing at the hill. “It would have been impossible to film here,” she explains, “because the snow blowers that make the storm take up a lot of  space.”

There are some things that you can’t order tailor-made from Mother Nature.