5555One by one, his comrades are killed by fire from a machine-gun nest in a shattered church. When the firing stops, Dunne approaches the remnants of the nest. There is only one survivor, a German boy, who weakly says, "Kamerad" ... before Dunne plunges his bayonet in the boy's forehead.
The events are true. In fact, the story was presented as described to a 15-year-old Gross by his grandfather, who was named Michael Dunne.
Dunne was the father of five daughters, and was disinclined to share his experiences with his children, but he did share with his grandson while the two were fishing.
Now, 34 years after that fishing trip, Gross took that real-life episode as the jumping-off point to Passchendaele, his long-nurtured film designed, in part, to pay homage to the 67,000 Canadians who died in the First World War.
"Something I took away from my grandfather was really curiosity about those intimate details of the time," says Gross, 49, on a recent stopover in Winnipeg prior to premiering the film here.
Gross says he was disinclined to tell a story "about the movement of great power."
"My real curiosity was about what happened to the families, and the innocence on the homefront," he says.
"A lot of things seem so nuts from a distance. For example, German breeds of dogs were banned from dog shows," Gross says, drawing an obvious comparison to the adoption of the term "freedom fries" in the U.S. Senate cafeteria after France declined to get involved in the U.S. war in Iraq.
Hence the war movie evolved "largely into a love story" when Dunne is sent home to Canada where he falls in love with Sarah Mann (Caroline Dhavernas), a woman of German parentage serving as a nurse in an army hospital.
"It's a very beautiful love story, seen through the context of this enormous cataclysm ... this slaughter yard."
That said, Gross was determined to bring the gruesome reality of the war to the screen, especially the gruelling Battle of Passchendaele, which suffered a shocking 15,000 Canadian casualties in a few months in 1917. The sheer horror of the battle was deliberately kept from Canadians of the era for fear it would hinder government's efforts to conscript more soldiers. That silence carried forward into Canadian history, and Passchendaele was conceived as a film that would finally shine a light on the sacrifice of so many Canadians.
"At that time, our population was seven (million) and change, and we sent over 620,000 men and lost 10 percent of them," Gross says. "Of those guys who went, one in 10 were killed."
"I don't mean to diminish at all the tragedy of the deaths of our CF soldiers in Afghanistan," he says. "It's about 100 out of a population of 30 million, as opposed to almost 70,000 out of a population of seven-and-a-half million," Gross says. "That's kind of an awesome statistic."
In fact, contemporary Canadian Forces soldiers were enlisted to participate in Passchendaele's battle scenes, which were staged on approximately 50 acres of wet, muddy land on the T'suu Tina reserve near Calgary.
If the footage is gory, the behind-the-scenes action could be playful, Gross admits.
"They had a lot of fun, because we could switch them around and make them play Germans and they'd have to kill Canadians," Gross says.
"Unlike extras, they come with their own command structure and they know which end of the rifle the bullet comes out of. And they're very skilled at staging fights. They would just beat the hell out of each other.
"They were all so brilliant," Gross adds. "We probably couldn't have made the film without them.
"They were very difficult conditions to shoot in, but it really helped everybody involved in it because it was so close to an approximation as to what those conditions might have been like that there wasn't a whole lot of imaginative work required when we were acting," he says.
"Bombs are going off near you, it's raining and it's freezing cold. We called them NAR scenes: No acting required."
Passchendaele opens in Winnipeg next Friday, Oct. 17.
randall.king@freepress.mb.ca
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