In the 44 years since Canadian race car driver Gilles Villeneuve’s fatal crash, his daughter Melanie Villeneuve has seen her late father’s story told many times. Often, it’s on the anniversary of the fatal collision, which happened in May 1982 during a qualifying session at the Belgian Grand Prix. The crash ripped the front chassis off the car Villeneuve was driving and ejected him helmetless into the track’s fences. He died soon after. Sometimes, his family sees him honoured on the day of his first major win — the 1978 Montreal Grand Prix, when he became the first Canadian driver to win a Formula One race. But seldom, if ever, have the retellings focused on the years before his illustrious Formula One career, when Gilles was a young man from Berthierville, Que., who parlayed a passion for snowmobile racing into a seat in Formula Atlantic. So when Villeneuve was sent a script in 2018 detailing her father’s early days, she decided to abandon her own ideas— an English miniseries, perhaps — and give her blessing to the filmmakers behind the Canadian French-language feature “Villeneuve: The Rise of a Legend.” “I don’t think there’s another driver — except for him and his brother — that came to be driving open-wheelers through snowmobiles, so I wanted to really focus on that, and they did that,” Villeneuve said a week before the Toronto International Film Festival. The film, directed by Yan Lanouette Turgeon and starring Quebecois actor Rémi Goulet as the titular character, will close TIFF with a world premiere on Sept. 19. A press and industry screening of the film on Sunday began with a note saying the movie was still “a work in progress.” However, it is scheduled to hit Quebec theatres on Nov. 11 with a wider release yet to be announced. For Melanie Villeneuve, who eventually became an executive producer on the film, the movie marks another stage in processing the death of her father. She was nine years old when he died. Brother Jacques, who would later go on to become Canada’s first Formula One world champion, was 11. “My relationship with my dad evolved from extreme drama to, I was very angry. Why? I don’t know, but I was very angry with my dad when I was 16, 17, 18, because he died, not through his own fault, but that’s how a child would react,” she said. “And then in my 20s, I was like taking my distance and I was being a little bit of a teenager, trying to mature.” Now in her fifties, Villeneuve is more understanding, in part because she spent the last few years delving into her dad’s past, beyond the stories her mother, Joann, and race car driver uncle Jacques Villeneuve shared. Through research, including reading books about her father, she feels closer to her dad than she’s ever been. “Of course, there’s still moments of pain, if you would, but I’m transferring it all now to just happy, which is good,” she said. But that process also same with a realization: her family wasn’t really in the driver’s seat, when it came to her dad’s legacy. After his death a Montreal racetrack was renamed after him and his hometown opened a Gilles Villeneuve museum, but he didn’t have a marketing and merchandise empire behind him like Formula One stars do nowadays. Melanie Villeneuve set out to change that with a Gilles merchandise line in 2025 but liked the idea of a bigger entertainment project because it would share her father’s story with a wider audience. She had first met director Daniel Roby in 2014 over breakfast, when he interviewed her and her mother for a documentary he was planning. He returned four years later with the script for “Villeneuve: The Rise of a Legend” instead. Villeneuve was sold on the project soon after reading the script. “It talks about how it wasn’t easy and he had to sacrifice a lot and he was 100 per cent fully obsessed with his art. Because I think for him, driving was almost like an art,” she said. “He was a mechanic, he was an engineer. He loved engine, he loved speed. And he lived for that completely. And I think that that’s how he made it through and that’s why he got himself to Formula One by the sheer force of will.” In some ways, the filmmaking process mirrored that perseverance. There were stops and starts in filming, financing woes, a COVID-19 pandemic and a change of leadership. Roby and the film eventually parted ways. Le Journal de Montreal reported in 2024 that he and the producer had a difference in opinions around how race-oriented the project should be. Lanouette Turgeon stepped up in Roby’s place. Eventually, Villeneuve found herself on set in Valcourt, Que., where snowmobiling scenes were being filmed. “It was, I don’t know, like minus 40 outside and I wasn’t dressed for it at all. I was dressed to be like in town,” Melanie said. “I was in my jeans and my short jacket I was freezing the entire time was.” But she was happy the film was finally taking shape, even if the experience of seeing Goulet dressed as her dad was “bizarre” at times. “Of course, I know that it’s not my dad, but it’s like a mind freak a little bit because it’s almost uncomfortable,” Villeneuve said. “But you have to push through it. And so I’m mostly smiling all the time because I find it weird but beautiful at the same time.” This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 15, 2026. Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press
