TORONTO - Director Philip Martin says the shoot for his art-heist film "The Forger" moved along quickly thanks to the work ethic of veteran stars John Travolta and Christopher Plummer.

"Chris is incredibly fast, you know. He's there, he's super-prepared and his first take is his version of the scene so he doesn't need 10 takes to warm up ... and it's really great because it's Christopher Plummer," Martin said during an interview at last September's Toronto International Film Festival.

"You can actually find yourself moving really fast ... it's this magic happening straightaway. That's old-school training; and John's very similar."

Opening Friday in Toronto, Montreal and on VOD, "The Forger" features Travolta as the titular character — an amateur painter who enlists criminal help to be sprung from prison early so he can see his dying son (Tye Sheridan). He then must orchestrate an art theft to pay off his debt and gets his small-time criminal father (Plummer) to help with the scheme.

Martin was delighted by the rapport that quickly developed between his three leads.

"It was fantastic. When you have a grandfather, a father and a son together you can obviously find people to play those roles but it needs to be believable, it needs to be a credible family group, it needs to have chemistry and a sense that these people share DNA as well as a house," he said.

"As soon as we got the group of them together it felt so right and I loved the sense that (Plummer's character) is sort of a first- or second-generation Irish immigrant and he's still processing that and (Travolta's character) is a troubled son and ... the grandson is trying to negotiate these two people."

To prepare for his role, Travolta took painting lessons and made a replica of the masterpiece his character also produces in the film — Monet's "Woman with a Parasol." At the Toronto festival, the "Saturday Night Fever" star proudly showed off a photo of his creation on his phone, adding that his grandfather and father were talented painters and that his brother is also artistically inclined.

Said the actor of his experience on "The Forger": "I loved having the professional obligation of painting.''

Travolta also found time to dispense advice to Sheridan, whose screen credits also include "The Tree of Life" and "Mud."

"I was constantly asking myself questions about my career and what I wanted to do and when I felt that way I would always go to John," Sheridan said.

The young actor got a kick out of shooting at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts.

"It was super cool," said Sheridan. "I took a tour, before we shot there ... I just remember seeing a couple of pieces that I really, really loved.... But shooting in the museum was awesome because we were doing night shoots and no one was allowed to be in that museum after 9 p.m. except us and they let us just come in and shoot criminals, like, stealing a piece out of their museum and they were OK with it."

Added Travolta of the locale: "That was so great. It's such a beautiful museum. Oh my God is that a beautiful museum."

News from © The Canadian Press, 2015