Actor Robert Charlebois, left, listens to director Kevin Tierney on the set of the movie French Immersion in St-Cesaire, Que., in 2010.Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press
Until 2006, the undisputed domestic box-office champ among Canadian-made films was a crude, R-rated teen sex comedy set in Florida and called Porky’s. While it was clearly a hit with pubescent males, it could never be called clever, sophisticated or distinctively Canadian.
Then along came Bon Cop, Bad Cop.
The Kevin Tierney-produced action comedy, starring Colm Feore and Patrick Huard, cannily borrowed a tried-and-true Hollywood formula – that of the odd-couple cop flick – and gave it a cheeky Canadian twist. Here, the usual uptight, by-the-books detective – played by Mr. Feore – was a dapper anglo member of the Ontario Provincial Police, while his loose-cannon partner (Mr. Huard) was a sexy, slovenly French-Canadian with the Sûreté du Québec.
Reluctantly teamed to catch a cross-border serial killer, the duo clashed culturally and linguistically to hilarious effect. The bilingual script, co-written by Mr. Tierney, was rife with Canadian in-jokes, from the French cop instructing the English cop on the niceties of swearing in Québécois, to a Don Cherry-style bombastic bigot (Rick Mercer) and a woman shouting “Vive le Québec libre!” at the height of an orgasm.
Released in the summer of 2006, the picture would go on to earn $12.1-million domestically (reputedly more than Porky’s, unless you adjust for inflation) and become a defiantly Canadian success. It took the historic tensions between the two solitudes, the subject of so many strong emotions, and played it for lighthearted satire. And by the end, its two mismatched heroes have overcome their differences – somewhat – and bonded.
In many ways, the movie was emblematic of its producer. Mr. Tierney, who died May 12 of cancer in Montreal at the age of 67, was a lifelong Quebecker who spent much of his career determinedly bridging the franco-anglo gap, both personally and professionally. He was a native English speaker of Irish stock who became flawlessly fluent in French, a man who possessed both a charming gift of the gab and an irrepressible joie de vivre. He made movies that happily mixed artists from the oft-separate French- and English-Canadian film industries and in 2003 became the first anglophone to chair the Cinémathèque Québécoise in its then-40-year history.
“He faced that divide every day,” Bon Cop’s Mr. Feore said. “[Kevin] was very sensitive to francophone culture and how anglos were seen and consequently treated. He straddled that fence beautifully, between the English and French view of things, while never committing to either one. He found the whole thing funny.”
Along with a rich sense of humour, the vociferous, silver-haired Mr. Tierney possessed an insatiable curiosity. He read widely, travelled continuously, was a culinary adventurer – and a fine cook – and, most of all, a passionate consumer and connoisseur of the cinema.
“You couldn’t mention a film to Kevin that he hadn’t seen,” said his long-time friend and filmmaking colleague Barbara Doran. “And he would give you his opinion of it right away!”
Movies were his window, added his daughter, Brigid Tierney. “He loved learning about other people that way and feeling their emotions and connecting. That’s how he processed the world.”
Kevin James Tierney was born in Montreal on Aug. 27, 1950, the second of four children. His parents, William (Bill) and Brigid (Pat) Tierney (née O’Reilly) were Irish-Canadian. In honour of his roots, Kevin would name one of his production companies Ardglasson, after his mother’s home village in County Meath, Ireland, and a later one – Park Ex Pictures – after Park Extension, the working-class Montreal neighbourhood where he grew up.
He was proud of his blue-collar origins and liked to point out that his father drove a beer truck for Molson. But young Kevin had a restless urge to explore the wider world. Soon after receiving a BA from Sir George Williams University in 1971, he headed to Dublin to study theatre. He returned to take an education degree at McGill University in 1974, then set off again – this time with fellow graduate and wife, Terry Smiley – to teach in Chad and Algeria. It was while living in those former colonies of France that he became proficient in French. Later, he would also teach in China.
Back home, he earned a graduate diploma in communications from Concordia University in 1978 and then began making a segue into the film industry. After dabbling in journalism, including a stint as the Montreal stringer for Variety, he became a freelance publicist in 1986, then joined producer Rock Demers’s company, Les Productions La Fête. Another long-time friend, Montreal Gazette columnist Bill Brownstein, fondly recalled hanging with Mr. Tierney at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival, where Mr. Tierney’s job included parading a gigantic inflated whale along Cannes’ Promenade de la Croisette to promote the Demers family comedy The Tadpole and the Whale.
By the 1990s, Mr. Tierney had moved into producing, beginning with an A&E documentary on former prime minister Pierre Trudeau. He subsequently produced the Armistead Maupin miniseries More Tales of the City (1998) and the TV movies Bonanno: A Godfather’s Story (1999), Varian’s War: The Forgotten Hero (2001), starring William Hurt, and One Dead Indian (2006), a drama about the killing of First Nations activist Dudley George, among others.
It was Mr. Huard who came up with the idea for Bon Cop, Bad Cop and Mr. Tierney often said he couldn’t believe no one had thought of it before. Nonetheless, it met with resistance. “At the time, a lot of people were skeptical about making a bilingual film,” Mr. Brownstein said. “They didn’t think it could work.”
Part of the film’s success was due to the chemistry between Mr. Huard and Mr. Feore. The two actors clicked instantly on set and Mr. Feore credits Mr. Tierney with having the genius to team them up. “He knew Patrick well and he was looking for a complement to this rock’n’roll, devil-may-care, tattooed, badass Québécois,” Mr. Feore said, laughing. “Well, you couldn’t ask for anyone more diametrically opposed to that than me and the career I had built in the classical theatre. I’m sure Kevin found the whole idea of pairing us just cosmically ridiculous.”
For an action picture, it was shot on a shoestring. “We didn’t have anything like the resources of even a modest American film,” said Mr. Feore, who has acted in Hollywood blockbusters such as Pearl Harbour and Thor. “But Kevin was very clever in making what money we had look like a whole lot more, by being efficient and managing it very well.” It was the kind of shoot where, when a car blew up on cue, director Érik Canuel and his crew were over the moon – if it had gone wrong, there was no backup vehicle.
Mr. Tierney and his colleagues had no idea they were making a hit movie that would go on to win the Genie Award for best picture in 2007. They did, however, have a lot of fun doing it. “Every single day on the set was an absolute joy,” Mr. Feore said. “And we laughed our asses off.” It would be the start of a fruitful relationship. “For a while, if it hadn’t been for Kevin I wouldn’t have worked at all,” Mr. Feore joked. “I was all Tierneys, all the time.”
That included working with Jacob, Mr. Tierney’s son, who had started out in the industry as a child actor, and was by then making his mark as a director. Kevin Tierney executive-produced Jacob’s first feature, Twist, and produced the subsequent ones The Trotsky and Good Neighbors. He was a hands-off producer, Jacob said. “My father never wanted to take control. He just wanted to help us make the best thing we could make.” That help sometimes took the form of money, sometimes of leftover film stock from another production. “He was tremendously supportive and proud of me, so he was happy to assist me in any way he could.”
In 2009, when Jacob’s inspired teen comedy The Trotsky, starring Jay Baruchel, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, Kevin received the Canadian Film and Television Production Association’s Producer of the Year Award. He used the $10,000 prize to launch a scholarship for Concordia students, named in honour of his parents.
In 2011, Kevin tried his hand at directing with French Immersion, a pet project that he also co-wrote, co-produced and appeared in. A farcical comedy about a gaggle of English speakers dropped into a small Quebec town where everyone is a francophone named Tremblay, it was made in the same blithe, bilingual spirit as Bon Cop. Stephen Cole, reviewing it in The Globe and Mail, praised it as being “funny in both official languages.”
Directing wasn’t for him, though. “He was a very strong personality on many fronts, but he didn’t have the ego for it,” Mr. Brownstein said wryly.
He was happier as a catalyst and a commentator. He loved whipping up a delicious feast, then inviting friends to his table, there to hold forth with his opinions. He found the perfect outlet for his opinions in 2016, when he became a guest culture columnist for the Montreal Gazette. His column found him weighing in on everything from the Harvey Weinstein scandal to the joys of Montreal street food, his writing always laced with colourful anecdotes.
During the last three years of his life, Mr. Tierney was quietly battling prostate cancer that had metastasized. Undaunted by the diagnosis, he had taken a trip to Cuba with his wife, Terry, and Ms. Doran just two weeks before his death.
Mr. Tierney died at the Centre Hospitalier de l’Université de Montréal, surrounded by his family. He leaves his wife, Terry; son, Jacob; daughter, Brigid; sisters, Heather and Patricia (Patsy); and a large extended family. He was predeceased by his older brother, Gary.
Jacob Tierney said his father was also his best friend. Brigid Tierney, who is the manager of youth and community initiatives at TIFF, said their dad didn’t dispense paternal advice so much as teach by doing, showing his kids the passion with which he embraced work and life. “He always really believed in the projects he was working on, even if they were fun and light,” she said. “He believed film can really make a change and get people to think or feel something they’d never thought or felt before.”