TORONTO — Bruce McDonald likes to shoot his movies in black and white. Apparently that makes him a weirdo.

The veteran Canadian filmmaker says it’s not easy getting the green light to go black and white, but he’s glad he did for his current Nova Scotia-set road movie “Weirdos.”

“It’s always difficult to shoot black and white because the powers that be, or the funders, are often wanting colour because colour is a bit more normal,” McDonald said as he prepared for a premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival this weekend.

“(But) in the independent world, sometimes it does offer you those other kind of freedoms like, ‘Let’s go black and white!’ And it’s not for everybody, but a lot of people are like, ‘Wow, that’s just so beautiful in black and white.'”

In the case of “Weirdos,” the coming-of-age teen tale was shot in colour and later converted to black and white. That means producers have a colour version that could — someday, somewhere — emerge on screen, he admits.

“I’ve told them I won’t be able to look at it because it will physically make me sick,” McDonald says with a chuckle. “So they’ve kept it away, but I’m sure it will show up on Korean television at some point in colour. But who knows?”

Coincidentally, McDonald’s first film was also a road movie shot in black and white — “Roadkill.” He muses on some latent nostalgia that could be bringing him around full circle, but adds that “Weirdos” is a heartfelt tale more directly inspired by Alexander Payne’s black-and-white comic drama “Nebraska.”

“Black and white gives it just a nice elegant frame, especially when you travel back in time as we’re doing with ‘Weirdos’ — we go back to the summer of ’76. Black and white just helps take you there.”

Toronto actor Dylan Authors stars as 15-year-old Kit, a music-obsessed teen living with his dad, played by Allan Hawco, in Antigonish, N.S.

Kit’s determined to hitchhike to Sydney, N.S., to visit his glamorous but unstable mother, played by Molly Parker. His girlfriend Alice, played by Julia Sarah Stone, eagerly tags along.

Authors was born in 1996, and says he relied on McDonald to fill him in on the finer points of what it was like to be a kid in the ’70s. Shooting in rural Nova Scotia was a similar eye-opener, admits the 20-year-old city kid.

“To drive up through Cape Breton, to look to your left to see a whale’s tail and then five minutes down the road you see a moose and a bear on the right side of the road is like, ‘OK. Well, we’re definitely not in Toronto right now,'” says Authors, who also appeared in McDonald’s film “The Husband.”

The script comes from frequent McDonald collaborator and veteran playwright Daniel MacIvor, while the budget came in at a precise $846,228.71, McDonald revealed at a pre-festival press conference that detailed the Canadian slate.

“People often ask me why I make films outside the gate of Hollywood,” he told the crowd.

“I guess the simplest answer is my draw to independent films is freedom. The freedom to do things that we want to, the freedom to tell stories about the land that we stand on, the freedom to tell stories about the people and places in our dreams and our memories.”

The Toronto International Film Festival runs through Sept. 18.

Cassandra Szklarski, The Canadian Press