Oh, For a Few Dollars More

By Guy Dixon From Saturday's Globe and Mail

On set, under the warm sun of Osoyoos, B.C., Paul Gross took director William Phillips aside. The big shootout was coming. The townspeople were worried. So was the director.

In the Western comedy Gunless, which opened Friday, Gross plays the flipside of his old role as a Mountie in TV's Due South. This time, he's "The Montana Kid," the quintessential American gunslinger, a wanted man with a strict moral code, who inadvertently finds himself in a tiny Canadian settlers' town circa 1890. A picture of Queen Victoria hangs in the general store. The Wild West is an American phenomenon that the town's Canadian settlers only read about in awe.

But bounty hunters are on the way. The clock's a-tickin' for the Kid. As it was for the film crew.

The chance simply to act, rather than also direct and produce, may have seemed like a vacation for Gross. "It felt like summer camp, only warmer!" he says. But the film's 25-day shooting schedule created an almost frantic pace for the crew.

Then came the shootout. "Bill [the director] looked sort of befuddled. So we sat together, and we kind of moved through it," blocking the scene around different camera angles, Gross says. "Otherwise, you'd never get out of there. It would take a week to shoot."

But for all the jokes in Gunless about the differences between Canadians and Americans, the production itself seemed to emphasize the distinctions between the U.S. and Canadian film industries.

Gross had had to learn a few tricks the hard way about multiple-angle shoot-'em-ups from directing his 2008 First World War film Passchendaele. This is the kind of experience that's more common in Hollywood, not among independent Canadian filmmakers. "It got us through it and I'm really grateful to Paul for that," Phillips says with a laugh.

The Toronto-raised director currently lives in Los Angeles, but moved there because of his wife's work. She's a surgeon, and his visa doesn't allow him to work in the States yet. So he's probably the only filmmaker in L.A. who doesn't even try to work there, he jokes.

Playing up that double identity, he unearthed a script he'd written years ago. "I just didn't want to ape on the Western," Phillips says. "As a genre, there are so many iconic images and plot element. I wanted to bring them together. But what I thought would be fun would be to create a story and tell it in a way that was very familiar to people - and yet twist them a little bit, because we've pushed it north of the 49th parallel."

The Canadian townsfolk in the film wind up subverting the whole Western idiom by questioning it or, more often than not, basically not getting it.

"We were trying to surprise the audience when these affable Canadians didn't do what they were supposed to do; they didn't play by the rules of the Western sometimes. And I wanted the audience to travel along with somebody who was having that same surprise experience," Phillips says. "And that is The Montana Kid, who lives in the classic Western, who knows how people should behave in the classic Western and is also baffled and flummoxed with these nutty Canadians who don't play by the rules."

Gunless was made for about $10-million, a king's ransom compared with most Canadian films. Telefilm Canada, which backed the film, obviously saw large commercial potential in the story, as did distributor Alliance Films, which is giving it an unusually strong promotional push for a Canadian film. Yet the shoot could still have used another $1-million to make the filming less frantic, Gross says.

"With the films we make [in Canada], at the level we make them at, it's about trying to figure out how to do all the [filming] in not quite enough time," Gross says.

In Hollywood today, by comparison, where so much emphasis is now placed on blockbusters, that kind of tight production turnaround is less of an issue. As an extreme case, Gross notes the writing work he has done for the planned Hollywood action film Battleship, to be directed by a friend of his, Peter Berg. That film has a budget of around $225-million. There's no worrying about budgeting the action scenes on a blockbuster like that. Hollywood plays by a different set of rules.