Called to Film

The Calling, by previously mysterious author Inger Ash Wolfe, will pick up filming in Ontario this week. The production features a cast that seems destined to get the film a lot of attention. From Filmoria:

Two powerhouse best actress winners have signed on to play mother and daughter in the Jason Stone directed thriller titled The Calling. Based on the Canadian set, best-seller from author Inger Ash Wolfe, the film stars Susan Sarandon as police inspector Hazel Micallef, along with fellow best actress winner Ellen Burstyn as her mother Emily. Filling out the cast are Donald Sutherland, Gil Bellows, Topher Grace, and Christopher Heyedahl. The official description of the film is below:

“Despite a bad back, a reliance on painkillers and the occasional drink to take the edge off, Detective Inspector Hazel Micallef (Sarandon) leads a tranquil existence sharing a home with her elderly mother, Emily (Burstyn), in Fort Dundas, Ontario. It is the epitome of a quaint and quiet town, but all of that is suddenly upended. As the interim commanding officer of an understaffed police force, Micallef, out on a routine call, discovers the grisly body of an elderly woman. The murder is shocking in its brutality.   

As Micallef and her investigative team, including seasoned detective Ray Greene (Bellows) and new arrival to Fort Dundas, Ben Wingate (Grace), learn of more victims in rural towns across the country, they realize they are tracking a serial killer driven by a higher calling. Dealing with small town bureaucracy while galvanizing her troops, she enlists the help of Father Price (Sutherland) in her fearless pursuit of a religious madman they’ve come to know only as Simon (Heyerdahl).”

When the book was originally released in 2008, the true identity of the author was not revealed, something that produced a fair amount of controversy at the time. The identity of the author came out last summer when Canadian author Michael Redhill (Martin Sloane, Consolation) stood up and took credit. Writing in The Globe and Mail, Redhill said:

We are already so many things by the time we reach the middle of life that it is possible to see that really anything can happen, and that, by extension, anything is doable. I decided I'd write The Calling as someone else. Another writer entirely, a fictional one who would be played by me.

But how does such a fictional alter-ego take shape?

To figure out who could write such a woman, I started with Hazel. I came to imagine her writer as someone who was a little like her, but also a little like me. I gave her the name Inger Ash Wolfe after my maternal grandmother, whose maiden name was Wolfinger.

It turned out that Inger was marvellously proficient. The first novel quickly begat a second – The Taken – and then it was clear that there'd be more. I can take up to a decade to write a novel, but Inger wrote three good ones in five years. I was rather amazed. She was more widely read than I, and she was earning more money than I did. She was going to have her own life and her own fate and I was very pleased.

You can see Ali Karim’s 2008 interview with Inger Ash Wolfe here. January Magazine’s review of The Calling is here.