Hey, Viktor! Started as an inside joke. Now it's nominated for three CSAs

Veteran actor Cody Lightning says the idea for his directorial debut, Hey, Viktor!, had been brewing for a really long time.

Despite having dozens of acting credits to his name, Lightning is  — or at least, was, until recently — best known for his role as Little Victor in the 1998 cult classic Smoke Signals, a movie that came out when he was 11. Lightning — who lives in Edmonton and is a member of the Samson Cree Nation — says that the film sprang from a running inside joke he and his friends had in their 20s.   

"We'd be at a restaurant or a bar or casino or something, and if the service wasn't good or whatever [they'd say I should] go smack the waiter in the face like 'Don't you know who I am? I'm Little Victor!' and like, play up this whole washed-up child actor thing," he says.

The premise behind Hey, Viktor! — in which Lightning plays a fictionalized version of himself — is a 30-something-year-old man, still clinging on to this one shining moment he had as a child. In the film, he tries to re-ignite his moribund career — which currently consists of porn and pro-fracking commercials — by making Smoke Signals 2, and attempts to rope in the rest of the case. 

The joke started to take the shape of a movie about six years ago, at the ImagineNative Film Festival in Toronto. There was an opportunity to pitch short film ideas for funding. Lightning brought forth the idea of Hey, Viktor! as a short — just a few scenes featuring him and the other child actor in the film, Simon Baker, as adults. The pitch didn't win, but it was shortlisted, and the feedback Lightning got led him to believe there was interest in the project. 

"A lot of people in that pitch session said 'This is hilarious, it's such a unique and niche idea. You need to make this a feature or series,'" he says.

Hey, Viktor! is over the top and weird and unapologetically raunchy, and its version of Cody Lightning is, to be blunt, a truly trash human. 

"He's just super manipulative and narcissistic and drunk," says the actual Cody Lightning. He adds that he was going to make his on-screen doppelganger even worse, but his writing partner Samuel Miller pulled him back. 

"He had to be redeemable," says Lightning. "[Initially] I was like 'And then he does this, and then he has, like, four girlfriends!' And Sam was like, 'He has to have some qualities that are good. He just can't be a royal piece of crap and still win.'"

While he is credited as the star, co-writer, and director, Lightning says that Hey, Viktor! was very much a team effort. He leaned heavily on his first assistant director, Karlee Mctavish, director of photography, Liam Mitchell, and Miller, who was also a producer, to keep things running smoothly on the technical side. On camera, he says that a lot of the film's magic comes from the fact he encouraged his castmates to improvise wherever possible.

"I just made sure that our actors knew that our script is just a guideline, that we're going to play with this," he says. "If there's something you want to throw in, cool. If it's not working, chuck it. We're not glued to this… all my actors all write and direct and do their own thing, so working with [people like] that just makes it so much better."

Hey, Viktor! is nominated for three Canadian Screen Awards this year: Lightning and Miller are nominated for Best Screenplay, Lightning is nominated for Best Performance in a Leading Role, Comedy, and co-star Hannah Cheesman is nominated for Best Performance in a Supporting Role, Comedy. Lightning says that, after years of grinding out a career in acting, just being nominated feels like a huge win.

"There's times where you're not getting any work, and it just sucks," he says. "I've had survival jobs and been like 'What do I do next?' And you're reevaluating life and what to do. So to make something and have it be recognized on the platforms that we've had is huge. And then to be nominated at this level, it's the cherry on top. If we don't win just to be nominated to go there, network, see people, know we're on the radar. That's the prize. If we win something, then that's a freaking bonus."

The Canadian Screen Awards air May 31 at 8:00 p.m. (9:00 AT, 9:30 NT) on CBC and CBC Gem.