The Opening Credit
Liz Levine has spent her career inside the machinery of Canadian storytelling.
She’s worked as a journalist, author, development executive, producer, and former Senior Producer & VP Television at Shaftesbury—one of Canada’s most influential production companies. Her credits span publishing, film and television, including jPod, Two Sentence Horror Stories, Hudson and Rex, Ruby and the Well, Story of a Girl and most recently, a feature film starring Christopher Walken.
But long before I understood any of that, I met her in a way that stuck with me. It was a cold, rainy November in East Vancouver. I was taking acting classes at a small acting studio just off the docks. Everyone in the room seemed to know who Liz was except me. At some point, I leaned over to another actor and asked who she was.
He didn’t hesitate. “That’s Liz Levine,” he said. “She’s someone you want on your side.” I didn’t fully understand what that meant at the time but I do now.
Because over the years, I’ve come to understand that Liz is one of those rare people whose influence is measured less in visibility and more in impact. She has helped shape the careers of some of Canada’s most recognizable talent.
This July 25–26, Liz will be in Regina for The Story Intensive: a small, mentorship-driven weekend focused on story, voice, authenticity, and the realities of finding your authentic voice. It is built not around theory, but access. Time in the room with real conversations, and the kind of honest guidance that doesn’t often travel outside industry circles.
Before she arrived, I sat down (on a zoom call) with her. Not just to talk about careers or credits, but to understand something more fundamental:
What actually makes a story, and a storyteller, matter?
ACT I: Why This Story?
The question behind every great project.
There are people in this industry who can talk about story, and then there are people who understand it. Over the course of our conversation, I found myself less interested in Liz’s titles or career milestones and more interested in how she actually thinks about the work. Why? Because beneath the resume there’s a consistent thread in everything she says: authenticity.
Not as branding, or as performance but as an inherent truth. What makes a story land, what makes a voice matter, and what separates something forgettable from something undeniable.
As our conversation moved deeper into craft — regional identity, audience, artistic integrity, and the tension between art and commerce — it became clear this wasn’t theoretical, it was lived experience. The kind earned through years of development rooms, production meetings, rewrites, pitches, failures, greenlights, and hard conversations.
This is where Liz is at her strongest, not simply describing the industry, but understanding what survives inside it. And for creatives trying to find their voice — or trust it — that difference matters.
ACT II: The Craft
Authenticity, audience, and the search for what matters.
Why does authenticity actually matter — and when did it unlock something for you?
Authenticity matters because audiences — and collaborators, and financiers, and anyone in a room with you — can feel the difference between someone performing and someone present. They can’t always name it. But they feel it.
For me the moment was personal. I wrote a piece about my sister for The Walrus — a true story, one I had been carrying for a long time. When it was published, something shifted. The story I had been telling myself for twenty years — the one I hadn’t been sure anyone would believe — turned out to be true. My voice was valid.
What I didn’t expect was what happened next. People I barely knew reached out. Strangers. The act of telling the truth — not a polished version of it, the actual truth — bonded people to me in a way that nothing I had produced or achieved ever had.
That’s what authenticity actually does. It’s not a brand value. It’s not a technique. It’s the thing that makes other people feel less alone. And when people feel less alone, they trust you. They follow you. They say yes to you.
I’ve watched it happen with filmmakers I’ve worked with too. The pitch that lands is almost never the most polished one. It’s the one where the person in the room finally stops explaining their project and starts telling you why it matters to them. That’s the moment everything changes.
Canada has distinct regional voices. How does a Prairie filmmaker own that without being limited by it?
Northrop Frye had this theory about the Canadian identity he called the garrison mentality — the idea that we have always felt isolated from the cultural centres of the world, huddled against a landscape that doesn’t care about us, perennially convinced that whatever real life is, it must be happening somewhere else. He was talking about all of Canada, but honestly, I think he was really talking about the Prairies.
I’m going to be honest — I’ve never been to Saskatchewan before. This is my first time. And I’ve been thinking about that. About what it means to come from a place that the rest of the country drives through. That feeds us all — forty percent of Canada’s cultivated farmland is in Saskatchewan — and that most people experience through a window at highway speed. The land of living skies. The great divide between the mountains and everywhere else.
That is not a limitation. That is a specific, irreplaceable point of view.
Toronto thinks it’s New York. Vancouver thinks it’s Seattle. The Prairie doesn’t have that problem — it knows exactly what it is. And that clarity, that groundedness, that understanding of what it means to live in a place that the culture ignores while depending on it completely — that is the material. That’s not something to overcome. That’s something to go toward.
The trap I see Prairie filmmakers fall into is one of two things. Either they apologize for where they come from — they sand off the edges, they try to make something that could have been made anywhere — or they go so local that they forget the universal lives inside the specific, not outside it. W.O. Mitchell didn’t write Who Has Seen the Wind for Saskatchewan. He wrote it from Saskatchewan. That’s the whole difference.
Own the landscape. Own the sky. Own the silence and the distance and the particular loneliness of a place that holds up the country while the country looks elsewhere. That’s not regional. That’s human.
Artistic integrity vs. market realities — false choice or real tension?
Both. Neither. It depends on whether you actually know what you’re making.
Here’s what I mean. The tension between integrity and market is real — but it’s almost never the actual problem. The actual problem is usually that someone went into production without truly understanding what they were making, who it was for, and what it needed to cost to reach that audience. When you’re clear on those things going in, integrity and market stop fighting each other. They’re solving the same problem from different angles.
Film is a team sport. That’s not a platitude — it’s the whole thing. Writers, directors, producers — each of them brings something essential to the question of what this is and who it’s for. The best work I’ve been part of happened when those conversations were honest and early, not defensive and late. Artistic integrity doesn’t mean protecting your vision from other people. It means knowing your vision clearly enough to defend it when it matters and release it when it doesn’t.
And yes — more than one thing can be true at once. This is art and it is a business. It needs to move you and it needs to find an audience. A film that compromises everything to sell is hollow. A film that refuses to consider who it’s speaking to is just expensive therapy. The work lives in the balance — and finding that balance is not a betrayal of the work. It is the work.
What story do you still desperately want to tell?
Too many to count. And I mean that seriously — not as a deflection but as the truest thing I can say about why I’m still in this.
The day the list runs out is the day I’m done. The fact that it keeps growing — that I read something or meet someone or sit in a place I’ve never been before and immediately think that’s a film — that’s the thing that gets me out of bed. Even on the mornings I’m reconsidering everything over breakfast.
I think the creatives who last aren’t the ones who finally get their story made. They’re the ones who can’t stop finding new ones. The hunger doesn’t resolve. It compounds. Every project opens three more doors than it closes.
So no — I won’t give you one title or one logline. What I’ll tell you is that the list is long and it’s getting longer, and as far as I’m concerned that’s the whole point.
ACT III: Clarity
Finding the intersection between your voice and the world.
What stayed with me most after this conversation wasn’t a single answer, it was the consistency. No matter where we went — authenticity, regional voice, artistic integrity, audience expectation — Liz kept returning to the same idea, in different language:
Clarity matters more than anything else. Clarity about what you’re making. Clarity about why you’re making it. Clarity about what you’re willing to stand behind when it leaves your hands and enters the world.
There’s a temptation in creative industries to overcomplicate that. To chase alignment with markets, trends, gatekeepers, timing. And while all of that exists, none of it replaces the foundational requirement: knowing your own voice well enough to trust it.
That’s what makes Liz’s perspective feel less like commentary and more like something closer to practice. Something tested. Something lived, because she isn’t speaking from the outside of the system. She’s spent her career inside it — in writers’ rooms, development meetings, production sets, editorial environments — watching what holds and what falls apart when the work meets reality.
And maybe that’s the real difference: some people talk about story, and Liz has spent decades in it. This is why her time in Saskatchewan this July matters because it is not a lecture, and not a presentation. It’s a rare opportunity to sit in the room with someone who has lived the distance between idea and execution — and still believes the gap is worth crossing.
For storytellers, creators, and people trying to find their voice, that’s the work, and it always has been.