Epic battle

Passchendaele was shot in southern Alberta. (Chris Large/Alliance Films)

Q: I understand that getting Passchendaele made was quite a slog. Canadian filmmakers don’t usually attempt something on this scale, unless it’s an international co-production.

A: There are so many different challenges in trying to do something like this. The first and overriding challenge is to be able to finance it. The system in our country domestically really taps out at about $7 or $8 million, and you can’t do anything with this kind of visual ambition for that [amount]. So we resorted to all sorts of extraordinary methods to try and beef up the budget. At first, we did look at co-productions; but they’re very complex and they tend to have the effect of deforming the story in order to accommodate the demands of the various producers. It was our intention to make this a Canadian story, not to suddenly have a Brit in the lead who had moved from Manchester and enlisted in Calgary. We really wanted to keep it as much our story as we could. That meant we had to find all of the money here, and it took years to do that.

Q: You’ve said Passchendaele was inspired by your grandfather’s experiences in the First World War and the opening scene – in which Dunne bayonets a young German soldier – really occurred. How much of the film came to be based on your grandfather’s memories?

A: The actual story itself, the romance and how that particular plot unfolds, was invented. What I did notice in the end, though, is that while it doesn’t adhere to my grandfather’s story, there’s an awful lot of him in it – lines that he had said and things he’d mentioned that I’d recalled. Like the line that the worst thing about the war was trying to keep your matches dry.

To some extent, he also started to affect how we actually went about the shooting of the film and the protocols for the execution of it that we settled on. When I was looking at how we were going to shoot the battle, I went back to something my grandfather had said. I’d asked him at one point, what did he know about the war – meaning, the big movements of things, the Somme offensive and that kind of stuff. And he said, “My war honestly was about 30 yards either side of me, and the guys inside of that. That’s all I ever knew.” So I decided it should be from the point of view of what a soldier could arguably see on the battlefield, and that way the audience would feel inside it more – it would be more brutal.

Q: One of your characters calls the battlefield “a bowl of stew.” That’s putting it mildly. In the film, it looks absolutely miserable. Shooting it, did you get a real sense of what the Canadian soldiers must have gone through under those conditions?

A: That’s one of the great privileges of doing this job. Every once in a while you get a very visceral sniff of what it would be like to be somebody else or, in this case, what it would be like to be in that environment. It was terrifying. I actually cannot imagine what breed of man could survive that. I know I’d cave in about two minutes. The conditions are so horrific. All of us were whining and complaining, and frozen and miserable, but eventually we were going to get out of there and get warm and have something relatively good to eat. And no one was trying to kill us. I just don’t know how [the soldiers] did it. My respect for them was pretty high going into this, but by the end I was stunned that any of them survived it, on either side.

Michael Dunne (Gross, right) falls for a troubled young nurse (Caroline Dhavernas) in Passchendaele. (Chris Large/Alliance Films)

Q: Your co-stars include Quebec actress Caroline Dhavernas and Joe Dinicol, who, like you, is a Stratford Festival alumnus. Did you have them in mind from the start?

A: No, the casting was a long, drawn-out process. In the case of Joe, I saw an awful lot of younger guys and most of them were just tremendous, but Joe had a particular glow in him; he’s got such a pure spirit. He seemed to be perfect for what I felt David ought to feel like. And with Caroline, we did start with the usual list of Hollywood stars – they’re impossibly difficult to acquire, but you have to begin there. But I had seen some of her work about a year or so before I started to cast, and was just knocked out by her. I had this secondary list, of those actors who weren’t Julia Roberts or Uma Thurman or something, and she headed that list.

Q: The actor that knocked me out was Jim Mezon, who plays Michael Dunne’s nemesis, the devious British major. I’ve seen him act at the Shaw Festival and elsewhere, but I didn’t recognize him until halfway through the film.

A: Jim is such a formidable actor, but he’s been doing theatre primarily. It’s funny, in the film world everyone would go, “Who is this guy? Where has he been?” I’d say, “He’s just been places you haven’t been, that’s all.”

Q: Shooting in Calgary, you also drew heavily on that city’s local acting pool. I enjoyed seeing veteran actors like Brian Jensen and David Lereaney playing significant roles.

A: Well, I’m from Calgary and I know there’s an enormous amount of talent there and in Edmonton. I just thought we’d get as many people locally as we possibly could. That was really fun, having all those guys around in the battlefield scenes. There wasn’t a lot of direction to do, because they all knew what they were doing.

Besides, I didn’t need to direct anyone to act miserable – we were drenched in rain all the time. We had this huge rain truss, about a hundred yards long, and all the water came out of the Elbow [River], which is glacier-fed, so it was sub-zero. So when you’d hear that command on the set, “Rain up,” meaning it would start to rain, everyone would just shudder. We called those “NAR scenes” – No Acting Required.

Q: When you release a film like Passchendaele at this time, I’m sure people are going to think about Canada’s current military involvement in Afghanistan. Was that on your mind while you were shooting the movie?

A: When we started making this, we weren’t even in Afghanistan. I’ve always felt, though, that our reading of our military history has been peculiar. It affects to some extent our public discourse around an event like Afghanistan. I don’t, at the moment, have any particular opinion about [that conflict] one way or the other; it does seem to be troubled for a variety of reasons. But when we view ourselves exclusively as peacekeepers, we ought to understand that, yes, we’re extraordinarily good at that – to some extent, we invented the concept – but that’s relatively recent in our history. We also are warriors, and we were particularly good at it in the First World War and the Second World War.

I don’t know who originally said it, but there’s that great line: How do you know where you’re going if you don’t where it is you come from? I do think the cataclysm that was the First World War had an enormous amount to do with shaping who we are and how we think about ourselves.