The Big Chill(er)

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This article was published 25/11/2016 (3425 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

ANOLA — If there is a chill in the air, it goes deeper than the mild sub-zero temperatures experienced this week for a horror-film crew assembled in a remote forested area approximately 45 kilometres east of Winnipeg off Highway 15.

The fresh snowfall provides a sombre, elemental beauty as the crew captures shots of a ragged assembly of soldiers marching through a French forest in 1918 towards a mission that will transcend the usual terrors of war in mind-bending ways.

 

The movie is Trench 11, an acknowledged genre mash-up of a movie, according to writer-director Leo Scherman, who scripted the film with Matt Booi. In a brief break between camera setups, Scherman ticks off the genres the $2-million film encompasses.

“It has elements of men on a mission, it has elements of a classic thriller, a horror film, and there’s a science-fiction element to it,” he says. “I nerd out on these things, but I think the story structure is a horror-thriller.”

That description plays into the production companies behind the film. Trench 11 is a product of Toronto’s Carousel Pictures in collaboration with Insidious Pictures, a horror-specializing offshoot of Winnipeg’s Buffalo Gal Pictures.

 

Carousel producer Tyler Levine says that while the film incorporates elements of horror fantasy, its premise comes under the classification of strange-but-true.

“Everybody knows that World War One was fought in the trenches, but what very few people realize is what they used to do is dig tunnels underneath each other’s trenches and try and blow each other up from below,” says the Toronto-based Levine.

“They used these tunnellers, these engineers, to dig these tunnels. Rossif Sutherland plays Abraham Berton and his character is one of those guys who spent WWI in the tunnels underneath the trenches.”

Booi came to the film as an expert in the First World War as a writer and researcher on several war documentaries.

“Matt has this tremendous insight into World War One, and he also is a great writer, so the whole thing came from connecting those elements,” says the Toronto-based Scherman.

 

This is Sutherland’s third trip to Manitoba for a film. He previously played a charismatic junkie in Gary Yates’s 2009 heist movie High Life and a Canadian soldier in over his head in Afghanistan in Paul Gross’s 2015 war drama Hyena Road.

The son of actor Donald Sutherland and French-Canadian-actress Francine Racette, Sutherland bears the snowy conditions without complaint. He’s had practice after all.

“I always seem to come here at this time of year,” he says, adding he was hooked not so much by the film’s more fantastic elements, but its factual ones.

“I learned about history in school, same as most kids, but I had no idea that in a war where two armies were very much face to face, the way to get an advantage over your enemy was to dig 70 feet underground and plant explosives,” he says.

“My character comes from a family of miners, so this world of being underground is very familiar to (him). He very much prefers being underground to being up above where people are falling right and left.”

The first few days of the shoot are exteriors before the production will retreat to a studio space in Winnipeg, where Winnipeg crew member Chad Giesbrecht “has designed a series of tunnels that would make you think you’re 100 feet under the earth, but you’re actually in a warehouse on Erin Street,” Levine says.

“It’s unbelievable. It’s a labyrinth.”

 

It’s on that set where these soldiers will face an unexpected biological weapon to be employed by the Germans in the last desperate days of the war.

“It was an amazing time in terms of the technology,” Levine says of the period. “They invented the machine gun, mustard gas, so what this movie presupposes is what the Germans were trying to make an even more lethal biological weapon.

“So it’s meant to be very believable, and not as far-fetched as some of these sci-fi movies. You feel when this is something that could have happened.”

The film co-stars Austrian actor Robert Stadlober, Quebec actress Karine Vanasse and Canadian actor Ted Atherton, who has also shot a couple of movies in Manitoba (The Stone Angel, A Bear Called Winnie).

The film may actually be marketed more toward a European release, Levine says.

“We aspire to be a film that people know about. Realistically, though, I want to find an audience in Europe,” he says. “Most Canadian movies try to compete with Hollywood and I think that’s a mistake. I want to find a 17-year-old kid in Poland or Germany or the U.K. or France that is really familiar with World War One, but hasn’t seen a World War One dramatic movie made for their tastes.

“Remember the movie Cube years ago?” he says, referring to the ground-breaking 1997 sci-fi/horror film by director Vincenzo Natali. “That movie did really well in France, and for a low-budget Canadian movie, that made it a success. So that’s our aspiration.”

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @FreepKing