Having racked up 130-plus movie credits over a 50-year producing career, Don Carmody has long been known as the Don of Hollywood North by studio bean counters who crunched the numbers and chose to save money by shooting in Canada.
Now Carmody, at 75, is ready to leave the stage — or at least Canadian film sets — with a lavish sendoff planned for the 2026 Toronto Film Festival.
“The days of me freezing my ass off at 2 o’clock in the morning on a film set are behind me,” Carmody tells The Hollywood Reporter.
That’s after Hollywood catapulted him to the status of its most bankable producer in Canada, as he brought over $2 billion worth of American production north by, in effect, opening the floodgates to Los Angeles runaway production, starting in the 1980s.
Carmody traces his start shepherding studio films to Canada to his time matching Hollywood production values with lower budgets as a co-producer at Cinepix Film Properties, on genre fare like David Cronenberg’s Shivers (1974) and Rabid (1976) and comedies like Ivan Reitman’s summer camp romp Meatballs.
“They looked good, and people didn’t go, ‘Oh, that’s a weird-looking movie’ or ‘It’s got really bad production values.’ That opened the door for me,” Carmody recalls.
The studios noticed just how much Carmody put onscreen despite tight budgets. “The studios found out how little we were spending on them and asked, ‘How do you do that?’ ” he says.
He also leveraged the low Canadian dollar against the American greenback and took advantage of early tax breaks. The other unseen draw for the major studios in Canada was its creatives and crews, and local actors aligned with ACTRA, the country’s performers union.
“They said, ‘Well, can you do that for us?’ So I started bringing up pictures brought to me by the studios,” Carmody explains. “Canada had a large talent pool and you could count on bringing in fresh faces. And it was important to [Hollywood] producers and directors that they see people that spoke and looked American and were really good actors.”
For helping make Canada Hollywood’s backlot, the studio’s top man up north is cementing his legacy at TIFF by endowing $100,000 to establish the CMPA Don Carmody International Production Mentorship Program, putting another $100,000 into creating the CFC Don Carmody Producer Residency at the late Norman Jewison’s Canadian Film Centre and doing a Sept. 13 keynote at the TIFF market. He also screened a career documentary, The Martini Shot — 50 Years of Hits, Hustle & Hollywood North, on Sept. 9 at the Hot Docs Theatre.
Of course, some Hollywood directors early on likened shooting in Canada to “being sent to Siberia,” while others welcomed how the distance from Hollywood offered more creative freedom.
An early convert was the late Sidney Lumet, who knew Canada from shooting select scenes for his 1977 psychological drama Equus across the U.S. border.
But when Disney’s Touchstone Pictures lost a producer, they flew Carmody to New York City to meet with Lumet and ultimately start a five-picture collaboration that included titles like the erotic thriller Guilty as Sin in 1993 and the 1997 medical satire Critical Care, both of which had Toronto doubling as New York City.
“[Lumet] loved everything up here, except the bagels,” recalls Carmody.
In 1997, Carmody received a call from newly hired Miramax Films head of production Kevin Hyman, who offered him the 1998 Sharon Stone title The Mighty, which shot in Toronto after a tightfisted Harvey Weinstein insisted on a budget that ruled Hollywood out.
“I flew down, met with Harvey and convinced him we could make the picture look good by shooting it up in Canada, and that I would be able to handle Sharon Stone,” who wasn’t happy about heading up north, he recounts.
Don Carmody, courtesy of Rafy
While working on The Mighty, Carmody got another call from Hyman.
Carmody remembers the conversation word for word: “OK, we have another for you. It’s very tricky. These two guys from Boston wrote this script we’d like to make, and they want to make it in Boston,” which was too costly a location, he remembers.
So, with Weinstein promising a greenlight if Good Will Hunting could be done in Canada, Carmody — who spent time in Boston as a young man and could muster a convincing “Southie” accent — greeted a decidedly reluctant Matt Damon and Ben Affleck as they came through airport customs in Toronto to be shown that Canada’s biggest city could double as South Boston.
“I said, OK, what do you want to see first? The duck boats? Or do you want to see the Swan Pond?’ ” Carmody recalls saying to the two stars, a reference to locales in Toronto that could double for popular land and sea tourist sites in Boston. “They couldn’t believe that existed in Toronto.”
As ever, keeping a lid on the movie’s budget proved key for Carmody. “Just because I’m from Boston, that would have meant nothing if we had gone way over budget, or I couldn’t deliver the proper locations on Good Will Hunting,” he says.
An Oscar trophy eventually came Carmody’s way with Rob Marshall’s Chicago in 2002, but only after Weinstein said he would not go over a $40 million budget on the musical drama.
Going forward, Carmody says the attraction of the Canadian talent pool and film tax credits (which he insists need a hike in Ontario) will keep Hollywood studios and streamers shooting in Canada.
If something “amazing” comes his way, he adds, he may get back into producing, but these days Carmody is looking to exploit his original IP with sequels and adaptations, which means mostly talking to lawyers.
And while being a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and other industry guilds, Carmody also works with their Canadian counterparts, including the Canadian Media Producers Association, representing indie producers, along with the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television and the Canadian Film Centre.
“It’s important to support the incoming and up-and-coming producers, because Canada needs its own base of well-trained and smart producers,” he says.
And if he has any advice for young producers, it’s that making movies requires patience — and stamina. Asked about the most fun he ever had making a film, Carmody says: “Probably a sequel. They’re easier,” before adding, “Making a movie is like banging your head against the wall. It feels so good when it stops.”
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