Jeremy Larter is giving P.E.I. the onscreen love it deserves

If you don't live in Prince Edward Island, you may not have heard of Who's Yer Father?, but in P.E.I., the detective story is a big deal. 

On its opening weekend, Nov. 3 to 5, Who's Yer Father? — the second feature-length film by West Covehead, P.E.I., native Jeremy Larter — was the No. 1 film at the box office in Charlottetown, knocking Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour out of the top spot.

For Larter, it's a highlight in a career that's been defined by his desire to tell stories about his home province. Larter says he wanted to be a filmmaker from the moment he first watched Pulp Fiction while still in his early teens. He did the things you'd expect an aspiring Canadian filmmaker to do: go to Toronto for school, then stick around the city to work in film and TV. Then, in an unexpected twist, he moved back to P.E.I. 

The decision to go back home came, in part, from the realization that he didn't have the kind of careerist instincts it takes to get ahead in Toronto's film and television business.

"I'm terrible at working my way up the ladder," he says. "I resist authority too much and I'm just a pain in the ass… And I just knew that it would be easy for me to start making my own stuff [in P.E.I.]. I knew the people at the film co-op there. I could sense that was going to be my place to tell my own stories."

He started out by making a number of web series, including the award-winning Just Passing Through. The series is about cousins Parnell and Terry Gallant, from the tiny town of Bumblefuck, P.E.I. The duo gets stuck in Toronto on their way out to the oil patch, and wind up crashing indefinitely on the couch of their other cousin, Owen. The show has been compared to Trailer Park Boys, but Larter describes it as "a combination of Goin' Down the Road and Perfect Strangers."

"We applied for $150,000 of funding to make Season 1 of Just Passing Through," he says. "So [co-creator] Geoff [Read] and I, thinking we'd never get a chance to ever make a TV show, decided that we were going to take $150,000 and make seven full TV-length episodes with it — which was an ambitious decision."

It turned out to be the right one. The critically acclaimed series wound up spawning Larter's first feature-length film, Pogey Beach, which started off as a show-within-a-show on Just Passing Through. In the series, Pogey Beach is one of Parnell and Terry's favourite shows: a soap opera set in P.E.I., where the sexy and jobless scam employment insurance in order to spend the summer frolicking on the island's red sand beaches. It was so popular with Just Passing Through's audience that Larter expanded it into a 90-minute feature.

"One of the proudest things I can say about my career up to this point [is that] lots of people now, when they get P.E.I., they say they're going to Pogey Beach," he says.

Who's Yer Father? is a break from the Just Passing Through extended universe. Instead, it tells the story of Prince Edward Island's best — and only — private investigator. 

"I like the idea of being a private investigator in P.E.I.," says Larter. "It was funny to me because how would you do it? Everyone knows everybody else. It's so closely connected. It seemed like kind of an absurd concept."

Larter says that the first draft of the script was essentially just a Maritime riff on the 1945 film noir Detour, but it got fleshed out considerably after he met with P.E.I.'s actual lone P.I.

"I called the only P.E.I. P.I. that was listed in Google," he says. "And he was totally disgruntled. He was just about to quit, because he was tired of his relatives hiring him to spy on other relatives. So after that conversation, I kind of had a very clear idea of like, 'OK, it is as absurd and goofy and funny as I thought it was.'"

The first scene of Who's Yer Father? sees its protagonist, Larry Constable, hiding behind a tractor to spy on a relative at another relative's behest. Unlike his real life counterpart, Constable — played by stand-up comedy veteran Chris Locke — isn't disgruntled at all, even though he has every right to be. His business is on the rocks, and he's sleeping in his office, yet in spite of that, Constable is sure things are about to change. Larter describes him as "one of those eternal optimists, someone who puts on that smiley face, no matter what the circumstances are." 

"I like to think the best part of me is like that," he says. "Like, I'm not always like Larry, but I wish I had that optimism — to plug along, even in the face of everything."

Larter adds that while the smallness of P.E.I. makes it hard to be a private detective, it does have some advantages when you're shooting a movie.

"It's the complete opposite of Toronto," he says. "If you need a location, people will offer you their house. They'll just give you the keys to their bar and walk away, and let you shoot there for a day."

It isn't just small-town friendliness, he thinks. People there want to see their community represented on screen. In a province where the biggest cultural export is still Anne of Green Gables, more than a century after the character was created, getting a modern P.E.I. story in theatres is significant.

"I think it's easy for me to take it for granted how much it means to them, to have a P.E.I. movie and to have something that they feel represents them well," he says. "It's really special."