Three Weeks In The Mud: Actor Joe Dinicol Shares His Experience Making Passchendaele

For Stratford, Ont.-born actor Joe Dinicol, spending the better part of a month filming in the cold and damp, knee deep in mud, was a small price to pay for the honour of starring in a film capturing one of this country’s defining moments.

The 24-year-old plays a young World War I soldier in Passchendaele, the opening night gala at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival.

“It was actually more enjoyable than you’d think,” Dinicol says of filming the gruelling battle sequences outside of Calgary, Alberta last fall. “Once you got past giving up all your creature comforts, your warmth and your dryness, it actually became pretty thrilling to be a part of it.”

Recounting one of the war’s bloodiest battles, which cost the lives of 16,000 Canadian troops (roughly 310,000 Allied casualties in total), Passchendaele was directed by Paul Gross and inspired by the experiences of his grandfather, Michael Dunne, who served in the 10th Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force.

The title refers to the village near Ypres, Belgium where much of the fighting occurred, and where the Canadian troops began a series of attacks against the Germans on October 26, 1917. Where other Allied troops, among them British, Australian and New Zealand soldiers, had failed, the Canadians succeeded – taking the town by November 6.

Passchendaele cost about $20 million Cdn. to make, a hefty budget for a homegrown film. The battlefield took 14 weeks to prepare and employed 22, 3000-barrel tanks of water to supply the “rain” and swampy conditions soldiers would have faced.

Dinicol admits it was an intense shoot. The actors wore special suits under their uniforms to stay warm, and some had to be dug out of the mud with shovels at the end of a scene. But the young performer says he kept thinking about how lucky he was that it was all “pretend.”

“They weren’t real bombs and they weren’t real bullets,” he muses. “When you think of what you’re trying to recreate and the conditions they would’ve actually been in, it’s very humbling. We were constantly reminding ourselves that it was a great honour and (we were) very lucky to not be going through this for real.”

Dinicol, who spent five years acting at the Stratford Festival before moving on to films including Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides and last year’s George Romero zombie flick Diary of the Dead (which played at the festival’s Midnight Madness).

As David Mann, the asthmatic soldier fighting to overcome a sense of shame and self-doubt, Dinicol is third-billed in the film, after Gross and Caroline Dhavernas. He admits he doesn’t remember learning much about the Battle of Passchendaele in school, and so considers making the film “a great experience both as an actor and as a Canadian.”

“The story itself would translate to anything, whether it be a war film or a contemporary piece,” he opines, when asked whether this is the kind of Canadian war film that might appeal to a broader audience. “The story is strong enough to hold up regardless of what setting it’s in. That’s I think the biggest hurdle to overcome. If you’re going to tell a historical story it’s got to be a personal story worth telling, and this one really is.”

Passchendaele screens at TIFF08 and is scheduled to hit theatres October 17.

Passchendaele at TIFF08:

Thurs. Sept. 4 – 6:30pm (Visa Screening Room – Elgin)

Thurs. Sept. 4 – 8pm (Roy Thomson Hall)

Fri. Sept. 5 – 8:45am (Ryerson Theatre)

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Images of Passchendaele courtesy Alliance.