Dennis Quaid quit smoking, tobacco anyways. We’re sitting in a hotel room at TIFF on Sunday morning, before his new movie At Any Price premieres, and he’s puffing on the vapours from an electric cigarette.
“It works for me,” says Quaid, when I ask whether the e-cig is actually helping him kick a habit he says he just got sick of.
The veteran actor, who has been in the movie business for four decades, is a Hollywood institution. But lately he’s been toiling in studio thrillers like The Day After Tomorrow and G.I. Joe: The Rise of the Cobra. Now he’s starting to shake things up, not only by making the healthier choice personally but also more artistic ones in his career.
In At Any Price, Quaid plays a schemer in the agricultural business, and he delivers one his finest performances. The film is the latest by Ramin Bahrani, an art house director Roger Ebert once called “the director of the decade.”
When Quaid was offered the part, he immediately checked out Bahrani’s films.
“The boy in Chop Shop is about 13, and he’s a non-actor,” Quaid recalls. “He gives this incredible performance. (I said) if you can get a performance out of me like that, that’s what I want to do.”
As much as At Any Price represents a new direction for Quaid, what drew him to the story was that it reminded him of the classics.
“It harkens back to films that I grew up on,” says Quaid, name-dropping Terrence Malick’s Badlands as an example.
“Small stories. It’s something that you don’t find in the business anymore. Movies have mostly gone to big tent poles that the studios are making. This is a film that is about something.”
At Any Price premieres Sunday (September 9), 10 pm, at the Princess of Wales, and also screens Monday (September 10), noon, Ryerson Theatre.
