Passchendaele

The Story of Passchendaele.

 By Matthew Hays

 I won’t lie,” says Paul Gross, “making this film was like wrestling with a big, stinky bear.” But then Gross is not in the habit of thinking small–bears or otherwise. The star of TV and film has created feature films, starred in a hit TV series, and prides himself on the several hats he is able to sport–writer, actor, director, co-producer.

And his universe just got a lot bigger. In early September, his labour of love, Passchendaele, opened the Toronto International Film Festival, debuting as one of the most expensive and ambitious film projects in Canadian cultural history.

Gross intentionally went where many in Canada’s film community have not gone: he wrote a big war epic aimed at connecting with a large public audience–in part through patriotism. And while the ambition and scope are large and the characters fictional, the inspiration to make Passchendaele came from a very real and deeply personal place.

You could say it started when he was a teenager. Gross recalls, “I would talk to my grandfather who was a WWI vet. He was a great guy. He never really spoke of his experiences. Which was not uncommon–a lot of men who fought didn’t. He had five daughters and no sons, and in those days you didn’t speak to women about something as unseemly as the horrors of what occurred on the battlefield. I used to pester him endlessly about what happened during the war. He used to shrug these questions aside, and then one day we were fishing, and he let me drive the boat, so that was a big auspicious day. And he just started talking.”

“I was 15 or 16, and I certainly wasn’t thinking about movies at the time, but it had such a profound impact on me. It was as though a door had been opened into adulthood and consequence. Since then I’ve always been very interested in the war. I always felt like I wanted to do something with it. What that was wasn’t clear, but I knew I wanted to do something with it some day.”

Gross says that, while his granddad tweaked his interest in WWI, as his research expanded, there were other elements that struck him about the conflict. What he found was a historical context rich with possibility for storytelling: “I was intrigued by the war as a watershed in history. It really does divide pre-modern and post-modern worlds. It wiped out five empires and gave birth to two new ones; it knocked monarchy out of Europe for good; and it booted religious Orthodoxy way down the field. In terms of science and art, everything changed. It was the world’s first total war. The drain on society’s resources was extraordinary. On so many levels it changed so much–I found that completely compelling.”

Equally compelling to Gross were the personal effects of war, the individual sacrifices and horror shows beyond the politics of the time. “I was struck by the casualties of war, struck by what happens to young men when they go into battle. How is it that they manage to survive more or less intact? How do families survive that? It’s always very eerie to go into small Canadian towns and see the lists of people who’ve died in war. You’ll see eight Armstrongs listed, and six Dunnes. You realize that they’re all coming out of one family. That’s where it all began for me.”

But the actual writing process didn’t begin until 13 years ago. “I was shooting something in London and I wasn’t working a lot so I had a lot of time on my hands. I started to fiddle around with the scenes. Those were the first sketches I got into, the battle scenes. About ten years ago I really got into it. So it was quick–I just jotted it down and that was it!”

Gross laughs at his own line. Truthfully, the writing came slowly, in spurts, whenever he had rare downtime from acting and various other projects he was writing and directing. “I wasn’t working on it all the time because I knew the chances of making it were slim, and I had to be in a certain position before we’d have a chance of financing it. If I had a month free, I’d devote that to Passchendaele. There were probably 70 drafts over the years–whenever I had a free moment, I worked on it.”

Please see print edition for the full article.