When you’re young, French Canadian, and living in Québec, it’s fashionable to travel to France for inspiration.

Claude Gagnon went to Japan.

“Contradiction is something I enjoy,” says the award-winning Montreal filmmaker whose new feature film, “Kamataki,” just earned a record five awards at the 29th Montreal World Film Festival. “When I was growing up in Québec, it was very white and Catholic and everyone was the same. In Japan, everything is different — the geography, the climate, the culture, the philosophy, the religion. This was a nice change for me.”

Japan’s influence on Gagnon is clear in “Kamataki,” the story of a troubled young Canadian who finds redemption in the world of his uncle, a master potter in Japan. The film pocketed awards for Best Director, Most Popular Feature at the festival, the Fipresci International Critic Prize, Most Popular Canadian Prize and the Ecumenical Prize.

“If a guy like me can edit a film with Final Cut Pro, I can tell you that the whole world can edit a movie with Final Cut Pro.”

Gagnon shot “Kamataki” in HD and produced it on a Power Mac G5 — his first experience editing in Final Cut Pro.

Thinking Like an Artist

“Of course we’ve always been on Macs,” Gagnon is quick to add. “I like the computer’s way of thinking. The Apple computer works and thinks like an artist, as opposed to the other system, which has an accountant mind. I don’t have an accountant mind.”

Gagnon confesses: “I really can’t use computers very well. I used to only do basic stuff, like write on the Mac and use the Internet. If a guy like me can edit a film with Final Cut Pro, I can tell you that the whole world can edit a movie with Final Cut Pro. There’s not one person on the planet who cannot do this.”

He decided to try editing “Kamataki” on a new Power Mac G5 because he’d had problems with a dedicated system he had rented to edit his previous film, “Revival Blues.”

Problems with Renting

Gagnon has always preferred to edit his own films, but moving to digital editing proved problematic for an editor who “loved to cut the film in the editing room and to splice the stuff,” he says. “When the technology changed, I had to go digital, so we rented equipment to edit ‘Revival Blues.’

“I was very, very frustrated,” Gagnon says of the experience working with a rented, dedicated editing system. “The equipment we rented didn’t have an artist’s mind. Every 30 minutes it would freeze and I had to restart the computer. Also, I ended up paying as much to rent the machine as I did to buy my own Final Cut Pro and my own G5. So I decided that for the next movie — no matter what — we are going to get our own editing equipment and we are going to do it ourselves.”

Final Cut Pro — “Total Creativity”

Working with his assistant director, Takako Miyahira, Gagnon found editing in Final Cut Pro “a piece of cake.”

“Final Cut Pro is so incredibly clear and obvious, and the options you have are so unlimited,” he says. “To me Final Cut has become total creativity. In the old days, every time we had a crazy flash we’d say, ‘Oh, I wonder if this could happen?’ But you’d never try it because it would take half a day just to try it and another half a day to put it back in place. On the Mac, it takes a couple of minutes to put two shots together. You can try 50 possibilities in such a short period of time. I had eight sound tracks on ‘Kamataki,’ and never, ever, did the computer crash once. It just kept going and going and going.”

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