Passchendaele The Movie

New Paul/Passchendaele Article

2008-08-27T20:40:04Z

“Everyone would love for this movie to have the kind of effect that Gallipoli had, but I’m not sure that’s a repeatable event.”

And yet Gross, who grew up as a self-described army brat and played with his share of G.I. Joes as a kid (“everyone does”) admits that he was overwhelmed by the stories of heroism and sheer endurance that he encountered during his research.

“I don’t know how they fought this thing. I got a little glimpse of it standing in a battlefield in a mud crater while we were shooting. I was thinking that I couldn’t have lasted twenty minutes in a place like that.”

“This film has had an odd, ambling evolutionary process,” says Gross via telephone from his home on the edges of the Forest Hill Village, where he lives with wife and fellow actor Martha Burns, who appears in the film Blindness, also showing at the festival this year.

“There were points where I thought we wouldn’t get it together,” he says.

I feel it’s a testament to everyone who worked on it for so long,” he says of the buzz around his film. “People have been involved with this film for years. For them to have that kind of platform is the most satisfying thing.” But he does have a new project lined up, and from the sound of it, it may be even more ambitious.

“I’m starting to get things organized towards doing a television show,” says Gross. And it hardly sounds like Due South II. “It’s a thirteen part thing about Jerusalem. We’re going to bring peace to the Middle East inside of thirteen hours.”

http://www.postcitymagazines.com/2008-09/story_200809_PaulGross.php

article

2008-07-07T04:05:33Z

Into The Trench

Small Icon Post

2008-06-24T18:08:31Z

Small set of icons at my journal HERE.

Preview:

Passchendaele icons.

2008-06-22T18:21:48Z

I made a bunch of Passchendaele icons, so if you like, you can go and take any of them:

The rest of the icons is at my journal.

Banner, wallpaper

2008-06-21T19:08:36Z

I whipped up some banners and wallpapers a little while ago, and decided to share some of them. Just three, I looked and didn't see anything in the info or posts pertaining to the posting of art, so I hope it's OK that I'm sharing them here.

Alternate:

Nice Article from the G&M 21/06/08

2008-06-21T07:54:50Z

Paul Gross's obsession, our country's horror

[I get the impression that this article was originally written last October on-set, but not published at the time]

TSUU T'INA FIRST NATION, ALTA. -- In a few minutes, the real-life soldiers Paul Gross has cast will take their positions on a mud-soaked, make-believe battlefield and recreate the grisly but victorious Passchendaele campaign that left 15,654 Canadian casualties in the First World War.

At the moment, however, a different drama is playing out - one based in a grim reality. The soldiers march in step and form a circle around Brigadier-General Greg Gillespie, deputy commander of Land Force Western Area, who begins an address to honour Corporal Nathan Hornburg, a Calgary-based soldier killed two days earlier by a mortar attack in Afghanistan.

"There's not much difference between then and now," says Gillespie, who plays Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Currie in the movie, the man who led the Canadian troops at Passchendaele. "Sixteen thousand or one, it still hurts."

Emotion runs as thick as the muck on this native reserve just outside Calgary, which has been transformed into 1917 Belgium, where the Allied Forces were beaten down by the Germans until the Canadian Corps was called into action at Passchendaele.

Passchendaele, the movie, has been a $20-million labour of love for Gross for more than a decade. The Canadian writer, actor and director brings all three talents to the project, which is now in post-production. This week, the Toronto International Film Festival announced that Passchendaele will fill the prestigious opening-night spot at this September's festival. The film is scheduled for release by Alliance Films in time for Remembrance Day.

"All of this is very emotional," Gross said on location last year, gazing over a dead forest of denuded trees planted amid craters of muddy water. "The first time I saw these guys marching down a road in their First World War uniforms, I burst into tears. It's been a long time looking at this, and thinking about it."

The film, at its heart, is a love story amid the horrors of war. The backdrop is a devastating, yet largely overlooked Canadian success overshadowed by this country's triumph at Vimy Ridge.

Gross, 49, who has a habit of taking on roles that are quintessentially Canadian, has played a Mountie (Due South), a fictional prime minister (H{-2}0), an actual prime minister (The Tommy Douglas Story) and a curler (Men With Brooms).

In Passchendaele he portrays Canadian Sergeant Michael Dunne, a character who bears the name of Gross's grandfather, who fought in the First World War. His grandfather was wounded three times, but made it home to regale his family with tales from the battlefield. They were stories that stirred a passion for the subject in Gross, who grew up an army brat, as his father, an officer with Lord Strathcona's Horse (Royal Canadians), moved the family around North America and Europe.

Montreal-born actor Caroline Dhavernas, 30, plays Dunne's love interest, a Canadian nurse of German descent named Sarah Mann, whose father was killed at Vimy Ridge while fighting for the Germans and whose brother enlists to fight for the Allies.

Mounting the production was itself a battle. Producer Niv Fichman of Rhombus Media, who has been on the project for almost as long as Gross has, recalls shopping the project around to international backers.

"People would say, 'Can you make it less Canadian?' or 'Do they have to be Canadian? Can they be American or non-specific nationals from some country that speaks English?' "

They quickly realized it needed to be funded entirely in Canada.

In 2005, Gross approached Ralph Klein, then the Alberta premier, who surprised everyone and pledged $5.5-million providing other investors were found. Telefilm Canada kicked in another $3.5-million and the rest was raised through private investors.

Gross even approached General Rick Hillier, Canada's Chief of the Defence Staff, who backed a project that depicts a battle of great national pride, but one that is not well known to most Canadians.

"Instead of money, I'll give you soldiers," he told Gross.

Most Canadian films cost $7-million to $8-million, making this, at $20-million, one of the priciest homegrown productions ever tackled. In the United States, a war epic of this stature - with battlefield scenes and bombed-out villages - wouldn't even be contemplated for less than $80-million, according to Gross.

"I love it," Gross says of the movie. "It's ours. And everyone and everything in it is."

The producers hope Passchendaele does for Canada what Peter Weir's 1981 film, Gallipoli, did for Australia. It recounted the story of Australian and New Zealand forces, which in the First World War were sent on a failed bid to take on the Turks in the Gallipoli peninsula.

"That film was done totally in Australia at a time when nobody had even heard of Australian cinema," Fichman says. "Not only did it break out Australian cinema, it broke out Australia to the world."

The Passchendaele campaign, so named for a village in Flanders, but more properly called the Third Battle of Ypres, began in July, 1917, and lasted until November of that year.

Rainfall, the heaviest in 30 years, combined with incessant shelling, destroyed an elaborate drainage system throughout the low-lying marshland. The battlefield on the Western Front became an almost impassable quagmire.

Wooden planks, known as duckboards, were placed on waterlogged ground to help soldiers get around. So treacherous were the conditions that soldiers were ordered to ignore drowning men, since the certain death of one was preferable to the near-certain death of two. It would take half a dozen or more to remove one wounded soldier from the field. The dead were left to be collected later, if ever.

"Good God, did we really send men to fight in that?" said one senior officer, after visiting the battlefield in 1917. He then collapsed, weeping.

His words, and the cruelty of Passchendaele, hit hard for those on the movie set who walked the slick duckboards, being careful not to slip into waist-deep pools of mud, and then watched the cameras roll as soldiers and horses struggled through the muck under a torrent of man-made rain.

Ninety years ago, British, Australian and New Zealand forces banged away in these conditions for months, suffering horrific losses. British commander Sir Douglas Haig turned to Currie for help. He protested the assignment, but cobbled together a strategy that 100,000 Canadian soldiers, from a nascent nation of just eight million people, followed with tenacity and guts once they joined the battle in late October.

Historians still debate the merits of the campaign sometimes called a "synonym for military failure." So many were slaughtered (more than a quarter of a million casualties among the Allies and slightly fewer Germans) in the war of attrition for a speck of land the Germans would later reclaim as the British realized it had little strategic value.

But nine Canadians would go on to be awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest military honour in the British Empire, more than were awarded in Vimy, which was a shorter, less bloody, yet more clearly victorious campaign.

In Legacy of Valour, Daniel G. Dancocks wrote that Passchendaele was "an achievement of awesome proportions, without equal in Canadian military annals" as the Canadians succeeded "when all others failed."

That too is what appealed to Gross in making this film.

"Passchendaele stands as the most grim, and in awful, awful, awful conditions," he says. "The implacable brutality in the First War seems captured in that. But we won it. We did. It seemed to be more fitting somehow."

The Globe and Mail

2008-06-19T01:37:39Z

And just another article about Passchendaele opening at TIFF.

Canadian Press Article with PG Quotes

2008-06-18T05:33:51Z

Gross's grandfather, Michael Dunne, an Alberta veteran of the First World War, was the inspiration for much of the movie. He fought in the famous battle, alongside 50,000 other Canadian soldiers, in the fields of Ypres, Belgium, in 1917.

The heart-wrenching war stories his reticent grandfather finally told his family - some as he laying dying in hospital - haunted Gross, and he dreamed of making "Passchendaele" for much of his life.

"The inspiration for doing it at all was my grandfather, and it was something I'd wanted to do for years," said the 49-year-old Gross. "My real interest in the war began with him, because he served there, and some elements of the story were his - pretty much everything except for the main romantic plot line. Almost everything was drawn from his diaries, and narrative accounts from various soldiers."

While the film is as much a sweeping romance as it is a historical account of the Ypres battles, Gross said, he hopes young Canadians will become interested in Canada's role in both world wars as a result of the movie.

"That was one of the big secondary pushes of it, to have this whole educational component that ran alongside the film," he said.

"If you can get youth excited by a film, then they won't feel that great distance between themselves and history, and it will bring it closer. Their interest will actually be genuine."

The response from test audiences so far has been "exceptional," Gross said. A final cut of the film is expected by the end of July.

Piers Handling, director and CEO of the festival, said he was honoured to have the film open this year's event.

"It is rare that Canadians get to experience their own histories via the moving image, particularly on the big screen," he said in a news release, calling the film "personal and passionate, as significant to both Canadian film and Canadian history."

The 33nd annual Toronto International Film Festival runs from Sept. 4 to 13.

Premiere News!

2008-06-17T15:37:59Z

"Passchendaele" To Open 2008 Toronto International Film Festival

Canadian filmmaker Paul Gross' "Passchendaele" will open the 33rd Toronto International Film Festival with its world premiere on September 4, 2008.

ETA: CBC article.

Way to go, Paul. I'm definitely going, come hell or high water. See you there!

Paperback

2008-06-04T21:30:27Z

You can pre-order the book Passchendaele now on amazon.

passchen_daele @ 2008-05-24T22:24:00

2008-05-24T21:33:15Z

The new site has thrown up a wealth of treasures, including some fantastic images. These images are just ripe for a new banner heading, and as I cannot pick between them, I thought a little competition may work.
NB Please remember that these competitions only tend to work if people, such as yourselves, actually vote in them.

So would you like:

Number 1
Number 2
Number 3
Number 4
Number 5

I have put Number 2 up already, so you can view before you buy. And also, I find Number 2 breathtaking. Not that I wish to swing your vote or anything.

Put your vote in comments, and then I (or some better person) will tot up the winner

Number 1:

Number 2:

Number 3:

Number 4:

Number 5:

Of course this competition will be happily moot, if some clever, kind person wanted to make a moving banner with all these images rotating around. Not that I expect much from people or anything.

Only one rule.

2008-05-22T20:22:17Z

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passchen_daele @ 2008-05-22T15:58:00

2008-05-22T20:01:53Z

Screencaps from new trailer, now with dorky narrative! Crossposted to my own LJ.

This is Michael.

He's ~~unnaturally pretty~~ a soldier with the Canadian Corps:

He may also be a bit of a dork:

This is Sarah. She's a nurse:

Michael likes her:

She likes him, too:

Eventually they fall in love:

They do lots of things together, like ride horses:

Sometimes they just sit together and watch Alberta be pretty:

But all is not bliss, because there's this war going on:

Canada is fighting in the war:

...and Michael is a loyal Canadian soldier:

Even so, Michael doesn't want to leave:

That's not accurate:

He doesn't want to leave Sarah:

She doesn't want him to leave, either:

Inevitably, Michael goes off to Belgium to fight with the Canadians:

...at Passchendaele, where there are cannons, and it rains and rains and rains and rains, and there is mud:

Michael gets quite muddy:

...not to mention drenched:

For reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, Sarah visits Michael at the front lines:

He's plenty glad to see her:

...and she seems to stay for a while:

...but alas, we won't know if their love will triumph until the fall.

Battle Field.

2008-05-22T19:49:34Z

Some of new pictures from updated Passchendaele site.

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Images from the updated site.

2008-05-22T19:23:49Z

As per sam80853's request Here are a few of the images from the film site. There are also downloadable wallpapers there that people should check out.

make over

2008-05-22T02:09:47Z

The Official Homepage got a make-over and it looks G R E A T! Check it out!

Reviews and snooze

2008-05-15T20:20:27Z

Given that Blindness and Passchendaele have been touted as the two great Canuck film hopes of 2008, it is interesting to see some of the early reviews of Blindness coming out of Cannes:

Summary from imdb.com

Several trade reporters attending the Cannes Film Festival observed that Blindness, the, er, dark film that opened the festival Wednesday night, will need to garner some favorable reviews if it is to become successful at the box office when it opens in September. It has received none so far. Daily Variety noted that the film was "applauded at its gala screening, though not wildly so." The trade paper's reviewer, Justin Chang, wrote that Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles may have turned out a "slickly crafted drama" but that the tale by Nobel laureate Jose Saramago "emerges on screen both overdressed and undermotivated, scrupulously hitting the novel's beats yet barely approximating, so to speak, its vision." Kirk Honeycutt of the Hollywood Reporter commented that while the film may be provocative cinema, "it also is predictable cinema: It startles but does not surprise." Fionnuala Halligan, writing for Britain's Screen Daily, said that "Meirelles never illuminates convincingly the wrenching fear of his source material." Derke Malcolm, writing in the London Daily Mail concluded that the film, "though palpably sincere, is often both repetitive and dull." And Peter Howell in the Toronto Star remarked that the film commands "more respect than love" and predicted that it "won't be a guaranteed multiplex rouser."

So my question is: What do you think are the potential pitfalls that Passchendaele needs to avoid? In my mind, I think Paul needs to tread very carefully between the 'war' and 'romance' aspect of the film, we don't want a Pearl Harbour type disaster where a perfectly good concept is ruined by a cloying and forced tacked-on romance, nor a film where the romance angle takes up 95% of the scenes and the fighting part about two scenes.

Epitaphs of the War.

2008-05-15T19:53:41Z

Today my friend and I were chatting about the movie and the interview with Paul, and she remembered several poems by Rudyard Kipling and sent them to me. I would like to post them here. She sent me the Russian translation of the poems, but I found the original ones.

From Epitaphs of the War.

Two Canadian Memorials

1
We giving all gained all.
Neither lament us nor praise.
Only in all things recall,
It is fear, not death that slays.

2
From little towns in a far land we came,
To save our honour and a world aflame.
By little towns in a far land we sleep;
And trust that world we won for you to keep.

The Beginner

On the first hour of my first day
In the front trench I fell.
(Children in boxes at a play
Stand up to watch it well.)

Just heard

2008-05-09T10:25:43Z

...that the opening of Pass. has been pushed up to Thanksgiving, October 13th.

Will write back if confirmed.

He acts as though he is laden with time...

2008-04-27T15:45:53Z

Couple of bits of news:

"Four-time Gemini Award-winning actor, writer and producer Paul Gross has signed a publishing deal that will see the official novel based on the screenplay of the upcoming epic film Passchendaele on bookstore shelves this September.

"Canada's victory at Passchendaele is an astounding story of determination, commitment and triumph," said Gross. "Sadly, with each passing year, the story of our nation's valour is fading . . . As a proud Canadian [No, really?], it has long been my ambition to bring this powerful period of our nation's history to the world."

The novel Passchendaele will be published by HarperCollins Canada in the weeks leading up to the film's release. The book will be available in trade paperback and mass market paperback formats, with a combined announced first printing of 75,000."

http://www.canada.com/calgaryherald/news/booksandthearts/story.html?id=5946ddfb-9214-45e9-b4e2-ec20df4bb01a

ETA: "According to the trade journal Quill & Quire, the book will be written by a ghostwriter but only Gross's name will appear on the cover and in the title pages." - who does Paul think he is? Shakespeare? LOL. Doesn't this seem kind of a cheat btw?

"The Calgary Chamber of Commerce is pleased to be hosting a special dinner event on Wednesday, April 30th, featuring Canadian actor, writer, producer and director Paul Gross (well known in Canada for his iconic Mounted Police Sergeant role in the acclaimed television series Due South), and Niv Fichman, who over the last 25 years has been responsible for over 200 documentaries, television series and feature films.

Both gentlemen will be joining us, along with representatives of the film and cultural industries, and representatives of Canadian military veterans and regiments, to celebrate and talk about the success of their most recent project, the feature film, Battle of Passchendaele, filmed in Calgary and area. Mr. Gross will discuss the film itself, while Mr. Fichman will speak about opportunities for investing in the film industry."

http://www.calgarychamber.com/abcalcoc/events3.nsf/Events/Featured/F6F6311247C529448725742B00667BBA

New Trailer

2008-04-15T08:32:08Z

Apparently there will be a new Passchendaele trailer shown in Canadian cinemas before Indiana Jones. Hopefully it will be made available to the masses through the usual Whizbangy means.

According to a post by one of the actors on the Passchendaele facebook group, it seems as though they are still in the middle of post-production. The guy was just called back by Paul to reloop some of his lines and he was shown a rough-cut of some of the battle footage.

I wonder how, as an (independent) producer, you negotiate to get your film's trailer shown with all the blockbuster releases. "Trailer Showing Bribery Office" not something you can find in the Yellow pages...is it?

New weekly newsletter for C6D fans - c6d_weekly

2008-04-05T06:03:13Z

What is C6D, you ask?

C6D stands for Canadian 6 Degrees. Loosely defined, this is a large group of smaller related fandoms that have some connection to the Canadian television show due South.

Please check out c6d_weekly's profile for more information.

If this is too OT, please let me know and I will delete. Thank you.

passchen_daele @ 2008-02-01T19:40:00

2008-02-02T00:52:10Z

Pic from the Passchendaele Movie Photo Gallery:

movie poster

2008-01-24T17:33:24Z

Thanks to meresy for pointing it out.

passchen_daele @ 2008-01-18T11:22:00

2008-01-18T16:46:46Z

From the Halifax Chronicle-Herald:

Critics say Alberta grant is unfair.

They're saying this now? Where have they been for the more than two years since the grant was announced? How come the protests are only happening now that the film's a definite go?

I have only the tiniest microscopic bit of knowledge about how the Canadian film industry works, and from what I see it's really, really hard to get a film funded; however, it seems to me that a major film like this will pave the way for others to get their films made (not to mention build Canada's reputation as a producer of quality films). Besides, it's not like this one was a fundraising cakewalk. Also, I can't imagine that anyone else in the same position wouldn't jump at the opportunity to get the ear of a Premier ~~even someone like Ralph Klein~~.