Allan Moyle takes on action adventure.

BY 2008 mind-transfer travel will be in common use. Rather than fly, busy corporate executives will exchange minds with people and inhabit their bodies. Of course, while minds zoom back and forth across the country, passing each other like cable cars at an alpine ski resort, things can (and do) go wrong. This is the plot hook of the sci-fi action thriller X Change, starring Stephen Baldwin, Kyle MacLachlan, Kim Coates and Pascale Bussieres, shot in Montreal last summer. The film aired on HBO in the United States in January and will be released to video stores across Canada in April.

According to director Allan Moyle ( New Waterford Girl, Pump Up the Volume) creating a world that is only a few years away was a superchallenge in this, his first foray into action adventure. "When you think about the last eight years, clothing-wise, nothing much has changed. But Internet-wise, there have been sea changes," Moyle notes. "So you can easily imagine that eight years from now we could be driving roughly the same car but have this technology whereby you can exchange your mind." To make the world of 2008 believable, Moyle and Montreal's Buzz Image special-effects team devised a scaled-down concept of the near future. "If you look at all the great science-fiction movies of recent years, there's a mixture of low and high tech," Moyle says. "We try to walk that same line in X Change. People have built-in phones in the future, not hand-held ones, but at the same time they eat food on plates and drink out of glasses. Look at a movie like The Matrix. They're wearing the same overcoats that people have been wearing for 40 years, instead of some vinyl Nehru jacket."

Producer Marc S. Grenier considers this $7-million feature to be in a class by itself, even though it has elements of recent films such as Total Recall, DOA and Face/Off. "Many movies have been made about bodies looking for their souls," Grenier says. "The twist in our movie is that it's a soul that's looking for its body. By 2008, there's an invention that changes everything. It's a way of travelling that is offered to the rich and the powerful. Someone goes into a booth, sits on a hard-wired chair, and his or her mind is exchanged with someone else for a day."

In X Change, three actors control the same mind. Kim Coates is a corporate vice president of public affairs in New York. Initially he doesn't want to use Xchange, but must get to San Francisco in a hurry for a press conference. The only way to make it on time is by using Xchange technology. He enters Kyle MacLachlan's body, but soon learns that his own body has been abducted by a terrorist and he can't get back into it. He is forced to leave MacLachlan's body and enter the body of Jeff (played by Stephen Baldwin), a cloned worker who will self destruct in a week. Coates (inside Baldwin) must get back to New York to reclaim his body. Pascale Bussieres plays a journalist who is investigating this mind-hopping technology and helps Baldwin defeat the terrorist, now played by Coates.

How did Moyle, a director known for making small, deeply personal films, become involved in a sci-fi action adventure project, albeit one with a relatively low budget? "When we were looking for a director, we wanted someone who understood Los Angeles," says co-producer Jean Desormeaux. "The conundrum was that we had an action film. So we married Allan, who is good with actors, with an absolutely brilliant director of photography, Pierre Gill [The Art of War], who designed all the action scenes. It was a collaboration made in heaven. Allan rehearsed the actors to death with Pierre Gill to back him up on the action scenes."

Moyle's explanation for taking on X Change was somewhat more poetic. "Basically, a psychic told me that I was entering a period where I should do more and think less and not take myself so seriously. Then this movie came along. It's about shamanistic themes that I'm personally interested in. I wouldn't be surprised if the ability to leave your body has already been developed and is in daily use somewhere, perhaps by shamans in the Amazon jungle. Maybe the technology for this [mind exchanging] concept won't come from the biotech field at all but from the mystical field."

X Change is a more commercial venture than Moyle has undertaken up till now, but the director put his own identifiers on the film. "I put in my little `Moyleisms,' as the critics call them. X Change is a genre movie of a type where, if I really had a stamp, it would hardly be action adventure anymore. X Change is a hybrid, a marriage of indie spirit and action adventure." A scene in which a couple talks about killing while having sex is "pure Moyle," Desormeaux says. Moyle is pleased about how the film turned out, calling it "a rich little movie, much smarter than your average action adventure. In the future we posit that the government hasn't caught up with this technology. The technology is way ahead, and the politicians are scrambling to regulate it, but they have no clue. People are doing things that may or may not be illegal and they are safely concealed behind someone else's identity. Some feel that they can behave recklessly or shamelessly or even illegally and get away with it."

X Change is the first in a series of films Moyle hopes to make in Quebec. He was born in Arvida in 1947, raised in Shawinigan, and attended McGill University for a year, before heading to Los Angeles. "I'm now thinking of spending a couple of years in Quebec," Moyle says. "I'm hoping to bring a big movie here. Now, when I say big, I mean big for me. It's basically a comedy about a woman who's seen the Virgin Mary in her fridge. It's called Lorraine Loses It. I might be able to persuade the producers, who right now plan to set the movie in Wisconsin, to move it to Montreal because I'm extremely enthusiastic about the crews here. Following that, I hope to do a few low-budget movies.

"I have so many possible projects in mind. I'm working on one called How Things Work and another called Air, Water, Food, Sex (and Strange Sex), the five necessities of life. How's that for a title? Of course, now I have to think of a story that's as good as the title. I have a whole lot of ideas, but I haven't written them all out yet." However, it seems once you've developed a taste for action adventure, it's hard to let go. "Action adventure is great fun," says Moyle, "but I could never have done it without the righteous strength of Pierre Gill, who's done these movies before. He storyboarded the action stuff and I'll get the credit for it," he laughs. "Everyone's saying it's my new career. I'm up for that."