DOG DAYS OF WINTER
Crew battled snow, and lack of snow, to shoot the story of a man and his dog on a mission
Togo
Streaming, Disney+
In January of 1925, stoic Norwegian Leonhard Seppala braced for the storm of the century as he set out on a dogsled led by his loyal husky Togo from Nome, Alaska. It was a desperate, life-risking trek to pick up a serum to battle a diphtheria outbreak in his adopted hometown.
In early October of 2018, stoic director Ericson Core and the cast and crew of the adventure film Togo set out to shoot in Kananaskis when Alberta was struck by, you guessed it, a massive storm. Was it welcomed as a happy coincidence by a filmmaker striving for ultimate authenticity? No, it was actually ironically ill-timed. At that point in the shoot, the plan was to capture some relatively tranquil fall flashback sequences involving Seppala, his wife and an adorably mischievous puppy-aged Togo at their rustic homestead.
“It was the biggest storm in 105 years,” Core says from Cochrane, Alta., before a private screening of Togo for local crew and vendors. “It obliterated our beautiful autumn and fall colours and put snow at the beginning. So our schedule was flipped upside down.”
It was a bit of a recurring theme, or nightmare, during the shoot. In Alberta, Mother Nature is more than capable of providing filmmakers with whatever blizzardy extremes are required, but only on her own terms.
As Core notes in promotional material for the film: “When we were meant to shoot summer scenes, it became winter. When we were trying to shoot winter, it became summer.”
“It was very, very hard work,” he says. “We had over 25 schedules over the course of the film because of crazy weather changes.
“Miraculously, by the time we were done in February of 2019, we left heading back to Los Angeles with all the material,” he adds. “We did not do an insert, reshoot or a pickup for the entire film. We had it all. It’s 100 per cent an Alberta-made film.”
It was a suitably adventurous shoot for the ultimate adventure film — an action-packed but heartwarming old-school man-andhis-dog tale that is streaming on Disney+.
Core was determined to shoot the action with as little CGI as possible. So the sequence where Seppala (played by Willem Dafoe) and his team precariously slide down the side of the mountain was shot on the side of a mountain.
Beautiful aerial shots of the dog sled threading its way through a burned forest were shot on location. Even the jaw-dropping sequence of Seppala taking an ill-advised shortcut over the cracking and exploding ice of the Norton Sound, while certainly enhanced by CGI, was shot on a frozen Abraham Lake in Alberta.
Diesel, the Siberian husky that plays Togo in the film, is a distant descendant of the titular dog.
“My intention was always to shoot it as grounded to the reality as I could,” Core says.
“It’s the new style where there is so much CG work and green screen and visual effects that anything can happen. But the peril of really being there and understanding it is different. This film, I think, is quite powerful and epic and I love capturing the epic. But, more importantly, I loved capturing the intimate. And to capture the intimate, I needed to be in the real circumstances.”
Togo is certainly epic. Some of the action sequences captured by Core, who also served as the film’s cinematographer, have an almost documentary-style realism to them that puts the viewer in the middle of the snowy drama. Core’s background and past work also made him unusually well-suited for the job.
He’s a former mountain guide in the Colorado Rockies.
His debut feature as a director, the 2006 fact-based Disney football story Invincible, covered similar heartwarming, againstthe-odds terrain.
His followup, the 2015 remake of Point Break, is probably best known for its epic action sequences shot in far-flung places, from the top of mountains in Switzerland to the jungles of Venezuela and the massive waves of Hawaii and Tahiti.
But Core could also relate to the unbreakable bond Seppala had for his dog, which is the real heart of Togo. For years, Core had a 185-pound part timber wolf named Shalako as a pet and their relationship mirrored the one presented in the film between Seppala and Togo.
Like Seppala, Core attempted to give the troublesome Shalako away because he was “a nuclear explosion in a fur coat” that seemed more trouble than he was worth. Like Seppala, Core had to be convinced by his wife to show patience with the animal.
Ultimately, just as Seppala did with Togo, Core would go on to form a close relationship with Shalako.
While the serum run from Nome has been well-documented, Togo’s central role in it has largely been overlooked.
According to the film, this was due to a reporter and early purveyor of fake news from the Nome Nugget, who singled out Gunnar Kaasen and Balto as the human and canine heroes of the story. While Kaasen’s team finished the final run in the relay to get the serum to Nome, it amounted to just over 80 kilometres. Seppala’s Togo-led team travelled nearly 420 km. Much of Togo’s accomplishments, during the serum run and other adventures, were chronicled in letters Seppala wrote.
“Later in his life, there is only one thing he talked about for the most part,” Core says.
“It was that he was very upset that Togo was not receiving credit for what he had done.
“Through those letters I realized how deeply Seppala loved that animal and that’s why it was all he cared about.
“He wanted to get the story right. So I do think we’re getting a story out that Leonhard Seppala wanted to get out and I feel really glad and humbled that we were able to get that message out finally.”