Paul Gross spends his morning in a conference room at the Westin, entertaining journalists with a Venti Starbucks in hand, while a publicist and makeup artist stand guard. There’s no way Gross will be mistaken for any of the barristers milling around in the hallway for a real estate conference—he’s way too blessed with that good-looking star quality. Even at 49 years old, with black hair matching his coolly tailored jacket, Gross cuts a convincing Superman figure.
Observations about his Hollywood handsomeness seem shallow and ill-timed given the subject matter of Gross’s new World War I film Passchendaele, already deemed an epic in a country that is not used to making a big deal about its stories, but he is so darn animated and relaxed. Surprising, considering Gross is, after all, Passchendaele‘s writer, director, co-producer and star.
In many ways, Gross is on a mission, too—Halifax is the third stop on his eight-city Canadian tour to promote the $20-million film (a piss in the special effects pot, by Hollywood standards). The stories behind our country’s most expensive film—a doomed romance that takes place during the horrific battle at Passchendaele—as they are retold in hotel conference rooms like the Westin, are becoming mini-legends, too.
Gross’s grandfather fought in WWI. He was wounded three times. Years later, when Gross looked at his discharge papers, he discovered his grandfather was shot 15 times. “These guys weren’t much for boasting or crowing or exaggerating. Like many, he came home and didn’t want to talk, or didn’t have the vocabulary to talk about it. It’s not that he wasn’t educated—but in a way, the words hadn’t been invented yet. How do you talk about something so cataclysmic?”
When Gross was 16, his grandfather began opening up, and once, when fishing in southern Alberta, he recalled killing a young German machine guard, for no particular reason. Gross, as character Michael Dunne, reinterprets that brutal moment as Passchendaele‘s opening scene.
He says the addition of Canadian Forces soldiers as extras on the set also kept the film from “floating away into meaninglessness,” as many of them went on to face fire fights in Kandahar, where the film screened last week.
Soldiers make great extras, as most “extras don’t know which end of the rifle the bullet comes out of, which these guys do. They staged their own fights, they don’t like standing around, and they move heavy equipment.” The Forces were also equipped to deal with “no acting required” conditions of sub-zero rain and thigh-high mud.
“I remember looking at the monitor, running from the shell crater, to make sure the take was OK, and I see all this stuff going on in the background…looking at the monitor, seeing these extraordinary hand-to-hand fights going on,” laughs Gross. “People beating each other over the head with shovels. They’re staging their own fights and clobbering each other. I remember going back to the shell crater and passing two guys, and overhearing one of them saying, ‘No, right in the nose! Hit me right in the fucking nose! The blood will be good.'”
Given his film’s content and military connection, Gross is now asked about his political views: he has no party allegiance; the federal election is “spectacularly dreary;” John McCain is “crazed” and Sarah Palin is both “spectacular” and “so fucking stupid.” Don’t mistake him for a political filmmaker, or a Canadian storyteller, though, even if he played a mountie on the TV show Due South and directed the curling comedy, Men With Brooms.
“I don’t have any strategic, overarching mission. This is just something I felt compelled to do. That’s usually the only thing that grips me—I don’t know how it works, really. It worms its way under your skin.” Gross jokes: “So I don’t think I’ll move on the Franklin Expedition…the Halifax Explosion mercifully has been done, so I don’t have to do that.” He goes serious: “I wish we did have a bit more interest in our filmmakers to, once in awhile, take a look at these subjects. But I think historical stuff is kinda tricky. I think it’s a bad idea to wander in to make a film just because you think it would be neat to portray a segment of history. You have to have your own personal interest and curiosity.”
This article appears in Oct 16-22, 2008.
