Gross’ war
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50 Sharp September 2008 SHARPFORMEN.COM
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Paul Gross is sitting in a low-backed director’s chair, the
makeup girl hovering around him like a fairy sprite of
even-toned skin and carefully tousled hair. He sips coffee
from a paper cup, revealing none of the stress you’d expect
under the circumstances.
For weeks now, he’s been working against the clock to
finish the mix for his second feature-length film, the First
World War drama Passchendaele. It’s a big film. In fact,
it’s the biggest film ever made exclusively with Canadian
funding, a 20 million dollar domestic blockbuster that
Gross wrote, produced, directed and stars in. And there’s
a sense—ever so slight—that what happens with this
film could completely alter the paradigm of how films are
made in this country.
But, right now, he’s not thinking about the accolades
or hype. He’s just sipping his coffee, talking to me and
waiting patiently for the moment when he can get back
to the production process he has characterized as “ex-
hausting.” If he’s exhausted, he’s hiding it well. He looks
and acts every bit the national icon that he is.
He balks at the characterization. Being a poster boy
for anything, much less certain notions of Canadian man-
hood and artistic intelligence, is just not something he is
willing to own.
“I’ve never been massively ambitious,” he says. “I’ve
never had any strategic sense about what I was doing
career-wise. If anything, I have intellectual ADD. I just
grab onto things that interest me and do them. The rest is
just collateral.”
Nobody could deny—not even Gross—that his career,
collateral or otherwise, has been blessed, relatively speak-
ing anyway. Success means something very different for
an actor, writer, director, producer who has worked almost
exclusively in Canada. Because—let’s face it—when we’re
talking about Canadian film and television, we’re talking
about success on a completely different scale than we’d
find south of the border.
Gross knows this but he’s comfortable with the
choices he’s made. “I did the L.A. thing,” he says. “It was
a long time ago. I did a feature for Disney, a skiing movie,
‘Top Gun on the slopes!’ It was forgettable.”
“I was also up for a role in the Flintstones movie,” he
adds. “I thought, ‘Can I do this? Do I really want to wind
up being a live action cartoon?’ I suppose if I had done it,
I might have a very different career. We’d be doing this
interview in the penthouse of the Chateau Marmont.”
Ironically, the role that brought him back to Canada—
the one that probably did more for his career than any
other—was one he’d been offered before moving to Los
Angeles. “I’d read it before but I really didn’t want to do tele-
vision then,” he admits. “Sitting in my Hollywood apartment
looking at a stack of dumb Hollywood treatments, I felt
creatively brittle. I just picked up this old script and started
reading it. Soon, I was laughing out loud.” In that instant,
he decided he would move back to Canada and take on the
role of RCMP Constable Benton Fraser in the soon-to-be
cultishly popular series Due South.
For those who somehow missed the storm of that
show’s pre-millennial success, suffice to say it utterly
redefined the model for Canadian television. Created for
CBS and CTV by Paul Haggis (of Crash, Million Dollar
Baby and the soon-to-be-released Bond flick Quantum of
Solace), Due South became the first Canadian-made series
to secure a prime-time slot on a US network and to air
simultaneously in both countries. Although CBS never
seemed completely comfortable with the show, they aired
it from 1994 to 1996.
By then, Due South had found purchasers in the
international market. CTV ran it for three more years,
by which time it had aired on stations worldwide, from
Britain’s BBC Two to Iran’s Channel 3. By 1999, Gross
was well into his collateral ascent, having become the
show’s executive producer, the highest paid performer
in Canadian entertainment history, a four-time Gemini
award-winner (both for acting and for his writing on the
episode “Mountie on the Bounty”), and Canada’s most
recognizable export since the goalie mask.
Post Due South, Gross didn’t use his newfound stature
to shoehorn his way into the Hollywood star-maker
machinery. In fact, he did the polar opposite—he became
an independent filmmaker.
“A couple of times in my career, I made decisions
based on money or that I thought would advance my
career,” he confesses. “I was miserable. I vowed if I could
SHARPFORMEN.COM Sharp September 2008 51
 avoid it, I would never do that again. I suppose I’ve just pursued those
things that I found to be artistically compelling.”
His directorial debut, Men with Brooms, set the tone. He describes
the film as “just a little comedy about curling.” It is a little comedy about
curling, but it was also the highest-grossing box office for an English-
Canadian film in twenty years. And it’s the film that put his production
company Whizbang Films on the map.
Whizbang has gone on to helm several stellar productions, among them
H2O and The Trojan Horse—two ferociously astute Canadian-based political
thrillers, which aired on CBC—and most recently Passchendaele.
Gross is particularly concerned with the defining character of the First
World War. “It was the world’s first total war: it turned everything on its
head; it started five empires; it nearly obliterated the monarchies; science,
medicine and technology were utterly transformed; and religious orthodoxy
was punted so far down the field it’s only just started to resurface.”
“And I think it was of particular importance for Canadians,” he says.
“What it means to be Canadian was to a large extent defined in that war.
When it began, we were still in the shadow of England. But after Vimy, we
were an independent army. We had the Canadian Corps and our own gener-
als. We were good warriors and we were good at war. We’re not so comfort-
able with that idea now but it helped give us our sense as a people.”
Suddenly, the makeup artist is on us again, this time brandishing a
complicated metal instrument.
“We’re almost ready to start the photo shoot. Would you mind if I use
this to curl back your eyelashes?” she asks. “It will open up your eyes for
the camera.”
“Whatever you like,” he says. “Anything you can do to make me look
more beautiful for the camera.”
The stylists usher him into wardrobe and shuffle him through a vari-
ety outfits. In front of the camera he is patient and funny, debonair even.
But he’s not a camera whore. It’s part of the job and he suffers it

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without complaint.
Finally, Gross is stuffed into his last outfit, a stiff wool-grey affair that
looks like the kind of thing Erich von Stroheim would have worn in Grand
Illusion. It’s fair to say he does not look comfortable. “I feel like an Austrian
cavalier,” he quips. The stylists shoo him in front of the lens, all the while
cajoling him that he looks great. For the first time, he looks nonplussed.
“So you just want me to stand here and pretend like this is something
I’d actually wear?”
Gross and I are stepping out into the street, on our way to Technicolor,
where he has invited me to sit in on the mix.
His car is parked just outside the building, in a spot clearly designated
“No parking.” He grabs the yellow slip off the windshield and hops in.
Pulling away from the curb, he jams the ticket into a wad of identical
yellow slips he has balled-up in a slot under the radio. It’s evident just
how little he is willing to sweat the small stuff right now.
Born in 1959, the eldest son of art historian Renie Gross and tank com-
mander Bob Gross, he spent his early years flitting around the globe
from army base to army base. In his seminal political thriller H2O,
Gross plants this admission on his protagonist, Tom McLaughlin. “As a
teenager, I was a bit of a handful.” Gross won’t deny that he had parallel
leanings. But acting gave him an outlet for his exuberance, and before
long he was set on a course towards a life in theatre.
In the middle of his third year at the University of Alberta’s drama
program, he dropped out to pursue a professional career. That was 1980.
The same year he wrote his first play, scribbling dialogue on napkins dur-
ing slow shifts at his waiting job. The Deer and the Antelope Play garnered
him two awards. Six years later, he was comfortably ensconced at the
prestigious Stratford Festival, playwright-in-residence under artistic
director John Neville.
All the while he was acting, stalking the planks anywhere he could
get a decent role. He met his wife of 20 years, actress Martha Burns,
while performing in Walsh at The National Arts Centre in Ottawa.
Burns played an Indian princess and Gross played—in a strange twist of
foreshadowing—a Mountie.
“You know,” he offers, “there was a time when doing anything but
theatre would have seemed absurd to me.”
Gross tapped into that intimacy with the theatre when he took the
role of Jeffrey Tennant in the critically acclaimed series Slings & Arrows.
Playing the psychologically unstable, uniquely gifted Artistic Director of
the fictional New Burbage Theatre Festival, he was able to dramatically
and satirically explore the many virtues and failings of theatrical life.
As we weave through the clutch of Toronto’s midday traffic, I ask him if
he found the transition from stage to screen an easy one. “No. I really didn’t,”
he confesses. “In theatre, there’s a lift that you need to put in to project a per-
formance outside of yourself. With the screen stuff the energy is in reverse.
For a performance to work you have to pull the camera into you.”
“There’s an old adage that the camera never lies. I don’t think that’s
true,” he says. “I think cameras lie and I think you can lie to them. But
I do think that a camera will always sense labour. If you’re sweating it,
that’s when you have to back off. Trying to find that level of performa-
tive honesty, that connection to whatever it is that you’re photographing,

52 Sharp September 2008 SHARPFORMEN.COM SHARPFORMEN.COM Sharp September 2008 53


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that’s the hard part.”
“I’ve had to develop an easier relationship with the camera because I
spend more time around it,” he adds. “And when you’re acting in some-
thing that you’re also directing…I just don’t have the amount of time
to sit around fretting about what I’m doing as an actor. The less I think
about it the better I am.”
“What was it Groucho Marx said? ‘Ninety percent of acting is sincer-
ity. If you can fake that you’ve got it made.’”
For the uninitiated, a mixing studio would best be described as a com-
bination Cineplex theatre and a NASA control centre. A large screen
dominates the front of the room. On it, a two-minute battle sequence is
being played forwards, then backwards, then forwards again in a ceaseless
seesawing of explosive debris and mind-numbing sound. Minutes after
his return, Gross has slipped effortlessly into full-bore post-production
mode.
There’s a debate among the gathered sound professionals about how
many frames should pass between the last timpani strike and the first ar-
tillery blast. He gives it a quick listen and has them nudge it. Once again
the room fills with the din of nail-biting drama. When the sequence ends
he says, “Yeah, that works.”
He spends the next several minutes debriefing his team on the
progress made during his absence. After addressing a few more issues,
he asks, “do you guys have enough to keep busy for a while if I skip out
for a bite?” Then he turns to me and, raising his eyebrows, says “Are you
hungry? It’s fish and chips today.”
54 Sharp September 2008 SHARPFORMEN.COM
As we eat, he tells me more about Passchendaele, the project that’s been
percolating in his imagination for well over a decade. His version of the
story, the one he has memorialized in film, was cobbled together from
wartime diaries, regimental records, his own fabulations and accounts
from his grandfather. “The opening scene is a story my grandfather told
me,” he explains. “The rest I built up around something I found in the
regimental history, a story about a company that was sent to relieve a
battalion.”
“The company was about 69 men and the battalion was around 600.
The battalion thought that they were being relieved by another battalion.
So, they left, leaving these 69 men to hold the front.”
“And, yes, there’s friendship and romance,” he adds. “There had to be.
The only way to counterbalance the inexplicable and endless brutality of
war is with individual acts of love and self-sacrifice. There’s nothing false
in that.”
As he nears the finish line of this latest greatest triumph, Gross has
become increasingly circumspect. “You know, I said earlier that I wasn’t
ambitious. That’s not entirely true. I’m very ambitious for Passchendaele. It
wasn’t easy getting here and there’s still a long way to go.”
When I ask him what he means by that, he answers without hesita-
tion. “A lot has been made about how big the budget for this film was.
And in real dollars, it is a lot of money. But relative to what we were
trying to do, it was actually a pretty low-budget film.”
Lack of funding is only half of what he’s talking about. Governmen-
tal ambivalence is a constant threat to original stories—not just in the
monetary sense but in the of kind ponderous institutional thinking that
prefers to put its weight behind a Sound of Music reality show, rather than
original dramas like Da Vinci’s City Hall or Gross’ own Trojan
Horse. “I can’t say I’ve ever really understood the governmental attitude,”
he says “There’s very little interest there in developing the cultural sec-
tor. And it’s a huge mistake because the culture sector is a huge money
producer for them.”
“Back when Paul Martin was Minister of Finance we met to discuss
the issue. At one point he just stopped me. ‘You don’t need to convince
me,’ he said. ‘When we put money into what you guys do, it gives the
biggest bang for the government buck. We dump millions to create a few
solid jobs in mining but we get a lot more high-yield jobs every time we
stimulate your industry.’”
The question is—it being such a complex muddle—what we can do?
“I don’t honestly know,” admits Gross. “Quebec has done a good job.
There’s a perfect example of where the government will to invest in a
national narrative has resulted in a cultural boom. They completely revi-
talized their cultural sector and that’s reflected in the public discourse.”
In the meantime, Gross is resigned to being creative in his funding
strategies, pursuing a campaign he calls My Dinners with Billionaires. “It
would actually make a good documentary,” he jokes. “I could just bring a
little camera along.”
As he heads back to the studio, ready to cobble together more sonic
sturm onto his baby-blockbuster, he leaves me with one last thought.
“A very funny question someone at Telefilm asked was ‘why do we
need a war film?’” he says, shaking his head. “That to me was the perfect
technocratically baffling question. Why would you ever ask that? As if
the first expression of Western culture, The Iliad, isn’t twenty-four long
chapters of the grizzliest hand-to-hand combat. We have done this—
war—pretty much in an unbroken stream for time immemorial. It’s
where we began. And how the hell are we going to figure out where we’re
going, if we don’t know where we came from?”
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