TORONTO-Jonathan Caouette has a grin on his face so big it's hard to believe he could have looked any happier when his groundbreaking documentary, Tarnation, stunned audiences at Sundance. Or when indie icons Gus Van Sant and John Cameron Mitchell signed on as the movie's godparents.

It's the 2004 Toronto International Film Festival. We're on the third floor of the Hotel InterContinental. Practically every room is playing host to a filmmaker or actor hyping their festival entry to someone with a TV camera, tape recorder, or note pad. And Caouette was walking through the hall to an interview room to tell his story to the Georgia Straight when he spotted one of his childhood heroes, indie filmmaker John Waters. "This has all been just mind-blowing," Caouette says.

"He's been a hero of mine since I was 12 years old, when at the inappropriate age of 12 I saw…"-he stops and corrects himself-"or the appropriate age of 12, I don't know, I saw Pink Flamingos. And that was where my love for underground film started."

So what did he say to Waters?

"I couldn't say anything; I was like, 'Uh, uh.'?" He stammers and demonstrates. "I'm a bit of a starstruck fucker, I suppose." Caouette says that when he finally managed to get his mouth working again he managed to say, "Please come see my movie." His grin shifts into an even higher gear. "He said he's been hearing all about it."

Caouette paces the room as he explains why seeing Waters has significance that goes beyond simply meeting a hero. "Ironically enough, I was in the Big Brothers and Big Sisters program in Houston and I had a mentor by the name of Jeff Millar who was a film critic. He used to take me to films all the time, and I had checked out this book from the library called Trash Trio that John Waters wrote which had two screenplays that he had done and one unproduced screenplay called Flamingos Forever-which is the would-be sequel to Pink Flamingos. And I was like 15 or 16 at the time. And I asked Jeff to help me out, if he could be my producer, and he actually ended up giving me seedling money for a bunch of Super 8 footage to do this sequel to Pink Flamingos that I didn't have permission for.

"I actually wrote John a letter when I was 15-like a cry out for help, basically-saying, 'Please, let me do this. I don't really want to do this; this is just a fun thing, but I'd love to get your permission. I know this great drag-queen boy that kind of looks like Divine and my grandmother could play Edith Massey, and blah, blah, blah, blah.'?"

Caouette still has the letter Waters wrote in reply. "He said, 'You should make a film of your own one day. My lawyers will never go for it.' I was, like, 15; what did I know? I was very sad and depressed after that, but I got over it and I ended up making my own film, and here it is."

The story behind Tarnation's journey to the big screen is almost as impressive as the movie itself, with its intensely intimate portrait of his dysfunctional childhood and his mother's mental illness. (It opens in Vancouver on Friday [March 4].) First off, it sets a record for a low-budget debut that may be unbeatable. Thanks to the magic of digital technology, some budding directors aren't even having to max out their credit cards to make their debuts. Caouette claims that the total cost of his film was $218.32. Even in U.S. dollars, that's pretty cheap. The reason he was able to create what might be the world's first no-budget movie is that he had 160 hours of home movies to work with.

Caouette says he has been in love with films for as long as he can remember. As a child, he'd go to movies with his grandfather, bring a tape recorder, come home, and draw up the storyboards. Arguably, he started filming Tarnation when he borrowed a neighbour's video camera at age 11.

It's clear from watching the home movies-and homemade movies-that make up Tarnation that Caouette always wanted to be a star, but he never could have dreamed of achieving stardom like this.

A few years ago, he started working on a short fictional film that incorporated some of his home movies in flashback sequences. He used a clip as an audition tape for John Cameron Mitchell's movie Short Bus. Caouette didn't land a part, but Mitchell encouraged him to finish the film. Then his mother, Renee, almost died from an accidental lithium overdose and, after spending a few months nursing her in Houston, Caouette brought her back to New York. Renee moved in with Caouette and his boyfriend around the same time another friend encouraged him to expand his movie so it could be shown in New York's MIX Festival for lesbian and gay experimental film and video. The catch was it had to be full-length-and it had to be ready in four weeks.

So he took sick leave from his job as a doorman and started augmenting his film with new footage of his life-and his mother's-and added more of a narrative voice. The fictionalized version-he'd started with a 97-page screenplay-was replaced by real-life footage, photos, audiotapes, old answering-machine messages, new interviews, and a score using his favourite pop music. Despite the change from fiction to nonfiction, the heart of the story never changed for Caouette. "It stems from almost a little window of an activist point of view, just telling my mother's story and how she was pretty much a victim of the Texas mental-health system."

Caouette delivered a two-and-a-half-hour rough cut the day of the deadline, and MIX festival director Stephen Winter was so impressed he offered to become Caouette's producer. Then Mitchell signed on to executive-produce and sent a tape to director Gus Van Sant, who also agreed to exec-produce. The new team helped Caouette get a two-hour cut to Sundance just in time for that deadline.

Sundance wanted the film, but Caouette was told to get it down to 90 minutes. His producers helped fund clearances for most of the music and TV clips that Caouette had used. Those clearances suddenly raised his film's budget by about $400,000-to about $400,000.

"The movie has literally gone from my desktop computer to a 35-millimetre print with a worldwide release in less than a year. And it has been a freaking trip, I have to tell you." And the trip isn't over. Caouette has plotted a new movie that weaves together clips from three cheesy Hollywood films from the 1970s, and David Lynch's producer has offered to help fund it.

"Everything about this film, the way it's come about, is so much magic with coincidental, almost supernatural, things going on. I almost wonder if I have a microchip in my brain that is just helping me live some sort of fantasy. It's really almost too good to be true sometimes." Caouette grins again and practically bounces out of the room, and it's hard not to wonder which of his personal heroes he's going to meet next. -