fuckyeahpaulgross:With Hyena Road, Paul Gross made a very different war film about a very different

fuckyeahpaulgross:With Hyena Road, Paul Gross made a very different war film about a very different warJason Gorber, Special to National Post | September 11, 2015Despite the shoulder-length white hair, it’s easy to see the tall and well-postured Paul Gross as no-nonsense Constable Benton Fraser in Due South. After directing some episodes of the series in its later run, the Calgary native made his directorial feature debut with the 2002 curling comedy Men With Brooms, following that up with the 2008 WW1 melodrama Passchendaele. This year, Gross returns to the director’s chair with Hyena Road, a very different war film about a very different war.Gross comes by an interest in military stories honestly. “My father was in the military. His war was Korea, so in my early years, I grew up around the army and I’m sure that’s a big reason why I feel compelled by them.” Despite this he “had no intention of ever doing a war film again because they’re just awful! They’re very complicated to make and extraordinarily difficult to finance because obviously they cost a fair bit of money.”The film itself emerged organically from a visit the actor/director made to the troops in Kandahar. The second time he arrived with a crew in tow but no real story in mind, save for “a real interest in being accurate and not bend anything too far out of shape.”While the writing of the film was by Gross’ own admission “peculiar,” many of the stories came from the soldiers themselves. “I’d just go up ask ‘What is it you do?’ Two hours later they’re still telling me. Pretty much anything that’s singular in the film I didn’t make up. If I had tried to write a storyline and then gone to Afghanistan to find information to support that I don’t think it would have been as interesting.”“The overriding thing was trying to be accurate, to not deform the experience and the things that they were actually involved in, in order to make a pleasing story. It’s why it has stuff in it that you might not have decided to include.” The film’s opening scene exemplifies this ethos, as the rat-tat of military jargon provides nearly incomprehensible patois that becomes nearly poetic in its starkness.“If you’re around the army, they speak in nothing but acronyms”, Gross says, “I had no idea what they’re talking about 90 percent of the time.” The jargon spouted out by film stars Rossif Sutherland, Jennifer Pudavick and others helps “eliminate subtlety or interpretation so that everything is clear, particularly when you’re in trouble and you’re on a radio. There can’t be misunderstanding, so it does actually serve a function.”To its credit the film is not only about the Canadian experience of war, it also provides strong and well-drawn portrayals of many Afghanis. “A lot of times you see movies where it has nothing to do with the people and the land in which they’re fighting,” he says. “Those tend to be the American films where it’s more a struggle inside the American soul than it has to do with the enemy that they’re contending with or the people that they’re presumably there to help. I felt we have to put these people in because that’s actually why we’re there. It is a partnership.”This results in some of the film’s most powerful performances, including some from people without any on-screen experience. “The guy playing the ghost is not an actor at all. His name is Neamat Arghandabi, and he is an amazing guy. When he was a kid he was a mujahideen against the Soviets, living in caves, coming out and shooting down Russian helicopters. He doesn’t even know how old he is.”Hyena Road has been shown to members of the military community and “in general the response is really positive,” despite some unintended issues for some. “We’ve shown it to a number of veterans of the war and some who have suffered the particulars of PTSD and operational stress problems and we’re finding it’s so accurate it’s actually jarring them. We’re trying to figure out a way of alerting those people who suffer from that that this could be a trigger because it’s happened now a few times.”However, for a more general audience, Gross wants to ensure we don’t forget about the war in Kandahar by giving us a sense of “Oh, that’s what it was.” Gross points out that “Canadians were there in that conflict longer than WW1, WW2, and the Korean War combined,” and he offers genuine concern that what happened there has been already forgotten by those not personally affected.Gross then returns to his opening point – “If I hadn’t gone to Afghanistan, I wouldn’t be making a film about Afghanistan. It wasn’t on my list of things to do. I do feel a very personal connection to so many of the men and women that I met when I was there. They were all extraordinarily open and the stories are amazing.”The film manages to touch upon one of the more esoteric aspects of being in cobmat. “The dramatic intensity of war is really hard to describe. Everything is amped up. I’m not a particular fan of a certain brand of coffee, but did I love it over there. It’s like the greatest coffee I ever drank. It’s cliché but the proximity of death makes everything erotic. I thought it would be good if we could capture the sense of that.”Gross believes Hyena Road to be his most mature work to date. “I haven’t been at the filmmaking stuff for a long time, but I’ve started to feel more confident in what I want to do.” The power of the narrative and unique circumstances of production forced him to “just be better at what I was doing and in that way it became less considered and more raw.”The filmmaker remains conscious of the film’s potential legacy. “I still get stopped in airports by teachers who say Passchendaele has been a fantastic tool to get kids to get to something more visceral about our history. I would hope that Hyena Road can serve some purpose in a similar way.” Given the unique circumstances of filming at the actual base during Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan, that should not be a problem. “This is the only record we’re going to have cinematically of what we did there. I’m confident about its accuracy and it can be something that sort of goes on for some time in the Canadian consciousness on some level.” -- source link

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