Hyena Road reveals true stories of Afghan war
By Dana Gee, The Province October 7, 2015
After delivering his First World War film Passchendaele, Canadian director/writer/actor Paul Gross said he would never make another war movie, period.
Well, here we are in 2015, seven years after Passchendaele’s release, and Gross’s latest cinematic offering, Hyena Road, is a war movie. This time, though, the theatre is modern-day Afghanistan and the mission is a little less clear-cut than Canada’s involvement in Belgium in 1917.
“Obviously I’m drawn to it but I really didn’t think I would do another one because they are just so complicated to get up and on their feet,” said Gross, adding that this film was shot (mostly in Jordan and Manitoba with some footage from Afghanistan) in 30 days. “I look at it now and go ‘How did we do that? It’s crazy.’”
The seed for the film, which hits theatres Oct. 9, was first planted back in 2010 when Gross travelled with to Afghanistan to visit the troops.
During his time there Gross got to know a few people and those people did some talking.
The stories were vivid, interesting and cinematic.
The opening, edge-of-your-seat scene is based on a story about an operation gone sideways told to Gross by a member of the Canadian military.
After that initial visit Gross decided to write a movie. He returned to the war-torn country in 2011 and began to learn more about the mission (which ran from 2001-2014 and cost about 12 billion and the lives of 158 Canadian soldiers).
“Something I think, well I speak for myself, but I’ve been largely ignorant about. We’ve been at conflict for a long time, longer than the First World War, the Second World War and the Korean War combined, and I felt as though I didn’t know anything about it,” said Gross recently as he waited at Vancouver airport to catch a plane.
So he learned about it from frontline people who were willing to pull back the curtain on their dust-covered lives.
“I don’t know, I guess part of it is soldiering is a strange job in that there are endless moments of mind-sucking ennui interrupted by blind panic,” said Gross. “A lot of it is repetitious and sort of dull. Just having someone new around, everyone wanted to talk. But I also found our forces are extraordinarily open. They believe quite deeply in what they do and they are good at it and go about it with a great deal of integrity. I think we can all take a great deal of pride in that regardless whether you think we should have armies and be at war or what.”
Gross said once he had talked to the troops and others connected to this international conflict the story didn’t take long to pull together.
“The script I actually wrote really fast – it was about two weeks for the first draft,” said Gross. “It was partly because I wasn’t really writing it. It was more like changing anecdotes and stories I had been told into a coherent narrative.”
In fact, he says he was told way more stories than he could use to tell this complex story about coalition forces working to secure safe travel/transport across Afghanistan. At the heart of Hyena Road are three men: two soldiers and a mysterious Afghan with a past.
Gross plays an intelligence officer who has his own rules of engagement. Caught up in this mission worthy of a chapter from the CIA handbook is a master sniper, and straight-shooting soldier played by Rossif Sutherland.
“We do a lot of things that would surprise us,” said Gross when talking about the lengths the military goes to get the job done.
Gross and Sutherland’s characters are brought together for a sensitive operation that sees them connecting with a legendary Afghanistan fighter called The Ghost, who after years (he defeated the Russians) out of the picture has returned to the action.
“The Ghost is a real guy, the Cleaner is a real guy,” said Gross about characters in the film.
The Ghost in this film is played by Neamat Arghandabi, who actually fought under the real Ghost in the Soviet-Afghan War (1979-1989).
“He’s not an actor at all,” said Gross. “He is currently a policy adviser for the prime minister of Afghanistan, which is a pretty loose definition, ‘policy adviser.’”
So after time spent in the region and access to the military, how does Gross feel about Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan and the future of the war-torn country?
“I think I was pretty ambivalent about it when I went. I didn’t have much of an opinion about what we were doing there,” said Gross. “I didn’t know what the prospects were. I felt much more optimistic about the prospects having been there.
“The insurgency has not been defeated. The question now for the Afghans is are they going to be able to absorb it. But they do have a good army courtesy of the coalition. We did train them well and there is a lot of them.”
(Reporter’s note: this interview took place a week before the Taliban pushed past the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) in the northern province of Kunduz and overran the capital of 300,000 people and before the American air strike on a Kunduz hospital run by Doctors without Borders.)
So now with his second war movie in the can and Hyena Road about to enjoy a wide release and a big marketing push, what does Gross think about doing another war movie?
“I’m hoping to do Plains of Abraham,” laughed Gross. “The battle was like 32 seconds so it will be really easy.”
For more with Paul Gross check out the DGP podcast (Oct. 9, 9 a.m.) at theprovince.com/podcasts.
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