News

As Ferris Bueller famously said, “Life moves pretty fast. [If] you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

Those words, uttered by the title character in John Hughes's 1986 teen-slacker classic, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, have taken on renewed and bittersweet resonance for a team of Toronto filmmakers, whose lives began to move pretty fast indeed after Mr. Hughes died last Thursday.

By Friday noon, they had inked a deal with Alliance Films to distribute their recently finished documentary about Mr. Hughes's descent into obscurity from the heights of Hollywood fame in the eighties as the master of the teen film genre.

Moments later, they were on CNN talking about the unsettling turn of fate that has assured their low-budget film – eerily titled Don't You Forget About Me after the popular song from Mr. Hughes's The Breakfast Club – will now be seen by millions around the world.

“We're still in shock,” director Matt Austin, 31, told The Globe and Mail Sunday.

“We still haven't really had a moment to take in what it means.”

Since May, 2006, Mr. Hughes has meant everything to Mr. Austin and producers Kari Hollend, Mike Facciolo and Lenny Panzer, all in their early 30s and admirers of Mr. Hughes. They made it their mission to find out why their hero had disappeared from a genre he had so dominated, making stars of Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson and the geeky Anthony Michael Hall, and leaving a trail of memorable films that continue to connect with angsty teens.

The idea stemmed from an earlier abortive attempt by Mr. Austin and Mr. Panzer to write their own teen movie and revive the Hughes style. “We shared a pitcher of beer and by the end of the pitcher we had no good ideas,” Mr. Austin said. “We realized that maybe the reason no one else can do it is because the guy's a genius. You couldn't copy John Hughes.”

They scrapped the idea, but the question of why Mr. Hughes had stopped making teen films continued to nag at Mr. Austin. “So I called Lenny up and said, ‘Let's not write a movie, let's make a documentary about John Hughes.' ”

They enlisted Ms. Hollend and Mr. Facciolo, and within a couple of days, scored their first coup: a sit-down interview with Breakfast Club star Ally Sheedy in a New York diner. The 47-year-old actor's eagerness to talk about Mr. Hughes offered a hint of things to come; the crew were similarly received by others including Mr. Nelson (The Breakfast Club), Andrew McCarthy (Pretty in Pink), Mia Sara (Ferris Bueller's Day Off), Kelly LeBrock (Weird Science), film critic Roger Ebert and musician Jim Kerr of Simple Minds, the band that performed Don't You Forget About Me.

“Usually people want to sit down and give you five minutes and then get out of there; we shot about 60 minutes with almost all of our interviews,” Mr. Austin said. “I don't think it had anything to do with them wanting to give us great material; I think they just wanted to talk about John” and his inexplicable lack of contact with all of them.

Ms. Ringwald (The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles, Pretty in Pink) declined numerous interview requests, for what Mr. Austin suspects are similarly melancholy reasons: “She was very close with him and I think she didn't want to speak on his behalf.”

Of course, the documentary crew approached Mr. Hughes himself, on the doorstep of his Chicago-area home in June, 2008, but they won't reveal the results before the film's release, the timing of which has not been worked out.

Production wrapped up last November, and with the economy in freefall, a half-dozen distributors large and small, including Alliance, passed on it. That all changed with news that the 59-year-old Mr. Hughes had died from a heart attack while out for a walk in Manhattan, where he was visiting relatives. Traffic to Mr. Austin's blog about the film's progress and to the film's trailer posted on YouTube shot up immediately, and on Friday morning, Alliance called to arrange a meeting at its Toronto offices on King Street East.

“We met [an Alliance official] at noon and we had a handshake deal written on a scrap piece of paper,” Mr. Austin said.

He would not discuss financial details, but said the arrangement will definitely take care of the debts the crew racked up in travelling to New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Texas and the United Kingdom to gather material.

Good as this news is, the filmmakers are not exactly celebrating.

“It's a very uncomfortable feeling and you can't help but feel guilty,” Ms. Hollend said. “You never want to feel like something good has happened to one person as a result of something bad happening to someone else.”

Still, they are gratified that more people than expected will gain an appreciation for Mr. Hughes's contribution to film, maligned as he was by many critics.

“He's getting the recognition that he probably should have had 25 years ago,” Ms. Hollend said, “only it's 25 years too late.”