HYENA ROAD HITS THE SCREEN
Paul Gross comes home to CIFF
Rossif Sutherland never really played a soldier before — except maybe on TV — but when he was cast as a sniper in Hyena Road, Paul Gross’s Afghan war drama, he had to shed a few preconceptions.
Sutherland was on hand, along with director, screenwriter and co- star Gross and producer Niv Fichman, for the Calgary premiere of Hyena Road, Thursday night at Theatre Junction Grand, the second red carpet gala of the 2015 Calgary International Film Festival.
The movie folks were joined on the red carpet by a contingent of Canadian Armed Forces personnel, all of whom were anxious to see Gross’s first directorial effort since Passchendaele, his 2008 First World War drama.
While Sutherland went into preparation for his role somewhat naive about the mindset of a soldier — particularly a sniper like the one he plays in Hyena Road — like all talented actors, it didn’t take long for him to realize it and make an adjustment.
“I actually had the opportunity to train and meet with soldiers,” said Sutherland, “( to) try to delve into their lives and kind of lift that naive veil I had ( carried around inside my head), that a person carrying a gun is a very intimidating presence.
“When I got to speak to all these soldiers,” he says, “it’s one of the privileges of being an actor on film — for some reason they open up to you, and share stories they wouldn’t necessarily share with their own family.
“And I think,” he said, “the reason they did that is they knew from the get- go that the intention — whether we succeeded or not — was to honour them — not so much judge them, but to honour them.”
Sutherland also got the opportunity to meet and learn from several snipers about what they do.
“I take no pleasure in shooting a gun,” said Sutherland, “but it is their tool, and I had to grow comfortable with it in order to honour what they do, and honour the training.”
Hyena Road tells the story of a trio of characters’ efforts to help in a Canadian- American initiative to build a safe highway across a dangerous part of Afghanistan, with all the moral muddle and messy agendas that entails.
As complicated and daunting as the Afghanistan mission was, Gross says soldiers don’t change so much as the nature of the conflicts they’re asked to enter into.
“When we were doing Passchendaele,” he says, “we had a lot of guys from the CAF ( Canadian Armed Forces) who were involved in it as extras, playing soldiers — and I could always see an absolutely unbroken line from the guys who were in the Canadian expeditionary force ( in the First World War all the way) to the guys who were in Afghanistan.
“So while I think yes, lots of circumstance and things change,” he said, “soldiers I think — our soldiers — they are very aware of their historical lineage and there is a line that attaches them to the formation of the country.”
That said, trying to wrap his head around Afghanistan, which he visited with a camera crew in 2010, was complex.
“It’s unfathomably more complicated,” he said, “which I had no idea about.”
The question is whether those wartime complexities and ambiguities of an ancient culture make for better or muddier storytelling, in Hyena Road, which cost $ 13 million to shoot — large by Canadian film industry budget standards, but as producer Fichman pointed out, “half of what it cost to make Passchendaele.”
“If I had sat down and said, ‘ I’m going to tell this story’, I don’t think I would have done it terribly well,” said Gross, “but this was written really almost backwards. I had all of these stories from soldiers I collected while I was over there ... and when I got home to Canada, I was looking at them and thought, there’s a through line in here.
“I don’t feel I wrote it,” he said, “so much as orchestrated in what order things would happen if you know what I mean.
“As it turned out,” he said, “it did somehow seem to turn to encompass the complexity of what that world was.”
And while the cast includes familiar Canadian names such as Sutherland and Allan Hawco, it also tries to dig inside some of the elusive nature of Afghan culture, in the form of a character called The Ghost ( Niamatullah Arghandabi), a mujahidin enlisted to help the build the road.
“He’s a real guy. Almost all of the characters in the film are based on people I met or composites of people I met — but the Ghost is a real guy. And the guy who played him- he’s not an actor at all, I met him while we were in Afghanistan — he had served under The Ghost in the war against the Soviets.
“I don’t understand anything about Afghan culture,” said Gross, “and I spent about two- and- a- half hours there talking to The Ghost and thought, I could spend the rest of my time here with him and I will never understand — it’s a really deep, ancient, opaque culture.
“Because we were looking to try to find a level of authenticity with our actors, ” he said, “we thought, let’s try it with him ( Arghandabi) — and it turns out, he’s a brilliant actor.”