Toronto filmmaker Ruba Nadda set to create HBO show starring Patricia Clarkson

TORONTO – After creating the dreamy “Cairo Time” together five years ago, Toronto director Ruba Nadda and Oscar-nominated actress Patricia Clarkson are back at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival with the tense, lyrical thriller “October Gale” — and that won’t be the end of their partnership.

Now close friends, Nadda says she and Clarkson will team for a new hour-long HBO series called “Elisabeth” on which Nadda will serve as creator, executive producer, writer and director.

And the opportunity only coalesced because Nadda found herself unable to get TV work at home in Canada.

“Making independent films is a monster — it’s just terrible, right? It’s very difficult and I’ve been lucky because I’m a workaholic so every two years I’m back at TIFF, it seems,” the personable Nadda said in an interview Wednesday.

“(But) for whatever reason, I couldn’t get a job as a director in Canada doing episodic TV, so I decided to go down to L.A. and try my hand there. And then started becoming really successful at getting work, and realized pretty quickly — within a month — that maybe I can just create my own show and hire my own friends and me be the boss.”

Within a month, Nadda had sold a show to ABC — but that’s now on the backburner after HBO approached her, enthusiastic both about “Cairo Time” and her talent overall.

Nadda has to remain tight-lipped about the subject matter of “Elisabeth,” but says it’s an idea that’s “totally from (her) heart.”

Her latest film, “October Gale,” casts the fearless Clarkson (whom Nadda calls her “partner in crime”) as a recently widowed doctor who faces the palpable presence of her beloved late husband when she travels up to their secluded cottage on Ontario’s Georgian Bay.

Soon, her mournful trance is interrupted by the appearance of a wounded stranger (Scott Speedman), his potentially unwelcome presence complicated by a raging storm that’s enveloping the region.

As with Nadda’s other films, romantic heat is kept to a meticulous, torturous simmer — not necessarily a quality that would make her a natural fit at envelope-pushing HBO, a factor that Nadda herself noted.

“I remember my agent saying when I told him what my idea was: ‘I don’t know. They’re very sexy. They do sex,’” Nadda recalled. “And I was like, I don’t do sex. I do restraint.

“And (HBO) loved it. On the spot they said yes.”

Nadda will have help from veteran producer Alan Poul, a seven-time Emmy nominee whose resume includes “Six Feet Under” (which also featured Clarkson in a small but eminently memorable role), “The Newsroom” and “My So-Called Life.”

Though it’s not set in stone yet, Nadda expects the show to feature a six-eight episode season and though it’s “almost like an event,” the series would hypothetically return each year.

She’s been optioned to write the pilot and is currently working on outlines for the others.

She’s seven months pregnant, by the way.

“I’m the kind of person — I’m crazy. I put all my eggs in one basket,” said Nadda with a laugh. “I’m like, I gotta write all six episodes.

“It’s HBO,” she added. “It’s so amazing.”

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