CBC RETURNS TO THE DARK SIDE
Women lead Wild West cast in Strange Empire
Forget Girls Gone Wild — Laurie Finstad-Knizhnik is a girl who has gone Wild West. The writer known for the disturbing yet insightful drama Durham County returns to the television screen with Strange Empire, a dark tale set at the Alberta-Montana border in 1869.
As a western, it’s rare in that it focuses on the women in that era. As a new CBC show, it marks a step away from lighter dramas such as Heartland and Murdoch Mysteries, and a return to edgier scripted fare.
Strange Empire begins as Captain John Slotter (Aaron Poole) launches a ruthless attack on a frontier town, butchering most of the men and forcing the women to replace prostitutes he lost during a cholera epidemic.
From there, it focuses on three strong women: passionate Metis widow Kat Loving (Cara Gee), mildly autistic savant Dr. Rebecca Blithely (Melissa Farman), and Slotter’s wife Isabelle (Tattiawna Jones), the spiritualist daughter of freed slaves.
Finstad-Knizhnik spoke about the series and why she was drawn to these lesser-known stories in Canadian history.
Q: Where did you film?
A: We shot it in B.C. and we found locations that match the foothill locations in the Cypress and Kootenay locations in what was called Kootenay by the native tribes in the Waterton area of Alberta. We built a camp essentially with some cribs and a Chinatown, and we have a Montana set. It’s all self-contained.
Q: Why this premise?
A: It’s not Sir John A. (Macdonald)’s history — it’s the history of the people who were actually in that part of the west — the Métis and natives and Chinese and black people and women, of course. If it goes beyond the first season, it takes place over the 15 years between Louis Riel leaving Red River and going to Montana and going back.
Q: What were you most excited to focus on within those parameters?
A: It was being able to look at the women’s experience in the west, beyond being the whore or the mother or the missionary or whatever. Just seeing very different women and trying to understand their experience in a deeper way. Our three central characters are all women. And around them are various Chinese, black, native and Métis. That’s the experience that we’re trying to capture.
Q: Why do you think we tend to romanticize the western genre in film and TV?
A: It’s a great fantasy of freedom, of self-fulfillment. We’re all adventurers, right? I read a really wonderful book written by John Ralston Saul called A Fair Country, and he talks about Canada as a place where adventurers went — the criminals and people who wanted to hide, the people who made their own kingdoms, the crazies and the perseveres, all of the utopians. They all went west.
Q: What’s one of the biggest misconceptions about Canadian history?
A: The attempt for 100 years of history to pretend that we’re heirs of a European nation-state is misguided. We’re more like wild Australians. We’re very multicultural at root. Because the first people who came here, the Scots and French, they married into the native tribes. If you look at Métis records, the birth records, they go back 300 years. They’re very detailed. More detailed than anyone else’s records — it’s quite interesting.
Q: Did CBC put down any guidelines about how much darkness and violence you could show?
A: I don’t think they would’ve hired me if they didn’t want anything different than the kind of thing I brought to cable. It is violent, this one. It’s not on the level of the kind of violence that I was commenting on in Durham — it’s more the violence that was there at that time, given those circumstances … I wouldn’t have done it, I don’t think, if I didn’t feel assured that I could tell the story that I wanted to tell.