July 1998 -- Issue #47 *
This interview originally appeared in DreamWatch magazine (a science fiction magazine published in the United Kingdom) in 1998. At the time of the interview, due South's third season had recently (or finally depending on how you look at it) began airing on the BBC network. After a few shows, the BBC pulled the show in favor of sporting events and began moving it around to various timeslots before taking it off the air completely. The show eventually resurfaced on BBC 2 in 1999.
by Simon Gerard
Canada; Home of the giant Redwood tree, Maple syrup, and the Rockies. Chicago; The Windy City. Home of lot's of other stuff. Between the two is a huge cultural chasm that only a brave man would stride. How about a brave show, then? Step forward DUE SOUTH. With one mighty bound, that show has bridged the gap between the two, although not without a slight stumble on the way. It now stands with a foot in each location, pointing at a signpost that reads, 'SEASON THREE THIS WAY'.
Sadly, the star of the show is not striding around his London hotel suite, with steely eyes set to the future. Paul Gross is rather tired at the moment. If he had the time, he would go to bed and dream of sleep, but there is no time. As Constable Benton Fraser, he has had a busy filming schedule, coupled with his extra duties behind the camera as the show's Executive Producer. He is in England to talk about the new season of the show, and is eager to get started.
Anybody watching the first episode of this season will notice a major change in the show's line-up, with Detective Ray Vecchio being 'replaced'. If you haven't found the time to sit down and watch any of the new season yet, we won't spoil the fun by giving the plot away, but Paul might leak a couple of details. In a bid to stop the spoilers, we get on to the subject of behind the scenes alterations; what is going on?
"Behind the camera there's been some minor adjustments in some of the key positions, and the bigger one is that I sort of ended up taking over the show. I ended up getting forced to take it over actually! So I'm Exec Producing this time, which sounded fine but is really like putting your foot into a Bear trap! Particularly as I'd had no background of all that, and I'd never even seen a budget before - I was picking through these thing's and looking at 'line items', and saying 'We're paying how much for dry-cleaning?!'".
With all respect to Paul, considering that the show has not been without it's problems, it seems a bit of a risk to stretch your leading man to an administrative role. Paul does not see it in those terms. "Well, it was a sort of logical progression. In the first season it was Paul Haggis who started it, then it was cancelled so he left and his sister took over with Jeff King and they ran it for the second year, then she left and the show was cancelled again, so we all thought it was finished to the extent where we were throwing out sets and stuff. When it then came around to the idea that we could maybe do it again, in the absence of CBS but with the enormous contribution of the BBC and some other broadcasters in the world, the question was who would do it, and there was really only me that was left as someone who had been through it all, having written for it, whatever, it was logical. I wish someone had explained in a bit more detail what was involved though! I feel I could do a feature in my sleep! My average day was about 17 or 18 hours which was a bit wearying...".
The new season looks as slick as ever, with the dialogue coming across as being very tightly, and sharply, written, and you certainly don't get the impression that the long days were having an adverse effect on the product. "Occasionally I'd be a bit distracted by a crisis with a location, a casting, anything like that, but most of the time I was kept in line by the other significant change in the show in that Callum Keith Rennie has come in to play my partner, and he's just fantastic!", Paul grins. "He's dark, weird, spiky, insane...he should be attended to by a battery of psychologists! He's a complete nut bar but very, very committed and a hard worker. He's a great actor, and he would keep me in line by telling me when to take off my Producers hat or whatever, and get me to concentrate on the scene, and along with that it gave us a new relationship for the show which opened up different story ideas.".
So will this mean a whole new direction for the show? Paul stretches, then thinks for a minute or two before answering. "I don't know to be honest. I don't tend to look at it in overview actually, because I know the interior of the show so well. What I watch probably isn't what the average audience member would watch. Yeah, I think it must be different, it's going to be different anyway with a new cast member because no two actor's are going play thing's in the same way, and I've been asked from time to time which do I prefer, or this and that, it's just sort of hard to compare. It'd be like comparing high-performance cars; Ferrari or Lamborghini, I don't know. It's a toss up, they're certainly different, but I guess that's going to have to be the audiences decision. I think the show has essentially remained the same, with the central dynamic being that I'm still naive and oriented toward the wilderness, and he's kind of cynical and street smart. We'll have to see."
There's always the danger with a show like this that the writers find that they've painted themselves into a corner (if that isn't pushing mixed metaphors too far). Is there a danger that DUE SOUTH is going to get to season four, and find...but Paul is there ahead of me. "...We've got no more stories to tell! Yeah, that's always going to happen. Most shows have a certain life expectancy but if you look at something like Hamlet, you think, well it's only four and a half hours and it's had more 'viewers' than we've ever had, but it's still packing them in. The other difficulty is that our plotlines need to be so right because there's so many elements that you have to somehow fold into it, starting with a closed crime plot but the plot itself can't be too dense or else there'd be no room for the rest of it. One of the things that we wanted to do this year was to carry along the continuing characters in a slightly more substantial way than sometimes we had in the past, so to find room for them, to include more comic set pieces, to include the dog, to put all that stuff in and have action and adventure gets very tricky - some are more successful than others."
With DUE SOUTH coming back from the brink, you wonder whether the networks would have tried to stamp their designs on the show; asking for different characters that would fit in with the audience demographics, or pushing the show into an ill-fitting format - 'I know, let's give Fraser a gun and a female partner! Why not get him out of that crazy red jacket, too?'. Paul absolutely refutes my hints at interference. "No, absolutely none of that. I think that only ever really happens if you are working directly with a large network in the States, and I wasn't really party to the producers problems in the first couple of seasons although I'd hear about it, but they had an enormous amount of pressure - I didn't have any. The BBC were hugely involved in the show and we wouldn't have made it without them, but we had one long conversation in New Orleans when it became clear that Alliance and David Marciano weren't going to be able to come to terms, and could we continue with a replacement for the character. That was it. Occasionally we'd get notes about thing's that British audiences won't take - I'm thinking specifically about violent things, and one of the episodes was about Boxing which we looked at editing, but that was it. It's odd because it's very difficult to design a show that will play well in 3 or 4 different countries without being prone to some small problems of that kind."
We'll still see the fantasy elements of the show firmly in place? He gives a croaky laugh, "What, like gassing the Mounties, you mean? Well, I like those kind of romps, they really appeal to me - not as a staple diet, but just when things just...spin off somewhere! They're tough to do because they have to be pretty madcap and relentless otherwise, if they slow down, they lose their edge, but we've got a couple coming up. We've got one story called Mountie on the Bounty which is right out there!"
After claiming earlier on that I didn't want to get into any story spoilers, I decide to throw integrity to the wind. Before long, I am pleading to find out every damn line of dialogue, and every plot twist! He will not get out of this country unless he spills the beans. "Well, it's got Pirates in it for a start! Yep, Pirates, gold, and we even have the Bounty, the one they had for the Marlon Brando film. People reading this might be interested because originally we had wanted to do something that involved a ghost ship, which turns out to be a fake as it's just someone covering up an illegal gold salvage operation in the Great Lakes, so originally we wanted to have two lake freighters connected to each other, and we had a meeting with the shipping guys who said 'nope, can't do it 'cos they'll break'. We didn't know how to do it and one day we were shooting in the harbour in Toronto and I saw this mast standing up behind a building, so I ran around the corner and there is the Bounty! I got Frank the producer down to see it and said, 'This'll be great and we can put all the Mounties on it!', and he was, like, 'Wow! White sails, and twenty guys in red uniforms standing on the deck would look great! But why would we have such a boat?' and I said 'Don't worry, we'll work that out later!'. In the end we created this character whose sworn ambition was to turn the Mounties into a great Naval power!"
This all sounds like it is wandering into the realms of SCOOBY-DOO. Paul doesn't react to comparing his show to that of a cartoon dog, but I did ask for all this information and, by Jimminy, he is determined not to skimp on the details. "We've also got a crack squad of ParaMounties coming up! Nah, it's just off the wall, and you've got to remember with this show that you still have to have the roots in reality or it'll just fail. You can't get too 'out there'."
Paul has been stuck in his hotel room for most of the day, so when he requests a short break I oblige. Drink in hand, he is flicking through a copy of Dreamwatch that I have brought along. 'We don't have anything like this in Canada,' he says. 'I really like it!'. I explain the history of the magazine, and he perks his ears up at the mention of DOCTOR WHO. Paul went to school in a number of countries, one of which was England, and remembers watching the programme with enthusiasm, as well as classic Brit comedy like THE BENNY HILL SHOW, and FAWLTY TOWERS.
When he's ready to continue, I stick to the subject of comedy and enquire about working with AIRPLANE ace, Leslie Nielson. "Leslie's great! Paul (Haggis) called him to ask him to come and do this 'man-hunt' thing, and Leslie thought it was a hilarious script and came along to do it. We got along like a house on fire, we've been good friends ever since and he wanted to come and do the Bounty episode but I think he was shooting MR MAGOO at the time. We did get him to come back to this season in a big two-parter story...actually, it's the one with the ParaMounties in it! The Rescue team comes out of this Buffalo aircraft, and their 'chutes are all Canadian flag's! Leslie is a great guy and we were talking about doing something together - not DUE SOUTH. He also had a lot to do with teaching Paul and myself how the comedy works within the confines of the show."
Will Gordon Pinchon [Pinsent] be returning in the new season? "Oh, yeah! Gordon play's the ghost of my father, and how that came about is great. As you know, he got killed off in the pilot, and one day when we were sitting around talking he said, 'Wouldn't it be great to bring him back', and we were, like, 'Yeah, but how are you going to do that?', and this idea of his ghost came up, which we thought would never work because, at that time, we didn't know what the limits of the show were and it happens that the show has proved to be incredibly absorbent. Gordon was brought back as a voice-over for when I'm reading my father's journals, and then he eventually came back as a ghost. The reaction was great, people loved it. Then Gordon and I were having dinner one day before filming, and he said, 'You know, I think he should have an office', so I asked him what he would need an office for and he looked at me and said, 'Well, office work, obviously!', so we wrote that line in. We stuck the office idea in, and put it in my closet in the Consulate. To anybody else it's just a closet, but to me it's a northern outpost office complete with snow and icicles, and the sound of wolves howling outside. Scenes like that are really fun to play because they're so nutty!"
Paul suddenly remembers another fantasy section in the new season, and is about to tell me the scene, but feels it may spoil the story when people watch it. By this point, I have no shame; 'It's alright', I reassure him, 'We can put some sticky tape over this bit'. It seems that a squad of Mounties is stuck on a plane in bad weather, and they urgently need to get a help message out. With the radio damaged, Fraser has to improvise in a manner more reminiscent of Commander Data from ST: TNG [Star Trek: The Next Generation]. With the aid of a strand of wire, a piece of chewing gum and his ear, he manages to get the message through! Now you must wipe that memory from your minds...
When you look at the show, you are struck by just how good it look's, and how good it is! Will DUE SOUTH know when it is time to bow out gracefully? It seems so, according to Paul. "Well, we only finished shooting a month ago, and I finished editing the show about...(looking at his watch), ten day's ago, so I need to assess how much longer I want to do it, whether to do it at this pace again, and most importantly whether or not we have enough stories to tell; it would be awful if it just dribbled off and became a kind of retread. The will is there to keep it going, but I don't know... Shows, like boxers, have a certain life expectancy and it would be nice to think that we have reached the end before it got tired. You and I were talking about FAWLTY TOWERS earlier on, and they only did 9 - 12 shows or whatever it was. If that had gone on and on it probably would've started to fall apart, so you want to avoid that. I mean, we'll see but it's a little too early to tell. I've got to get some rest first!"
"Goodnight, Paul!"
"Goodnight, Dreamwatch!".
(c) S.J.Gerard. May 1998.
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* - We are unsure of the exact publishing date and issue number for this interview. Issue #47 is the only one that we could find around the approximate date given to us that featured a Paul Gross interview. If anyone can confirm the date for us, please contact via the links below.