TORONTO -- Question: How do you open and close "the Great Canadian Film?" Answer: With a beaver shot.
At least, that's how Paul Gross did it. Best known to TV viewers as Constable Benton Fraser from Due South, Gross is the star of Men With Brooms, a Canadian romantic comedy about a group of misfit curlers from smalltown Ontario. It opens across Canada a week from Friday.
Gross was in Toronto for the premiere Monday night, followed by a gala cast party at the Granite Club. He and co-stars Leslie Nielsen and Polly Shannon did one-on-one interviews in Toronto yesterday before heading to Ottawa and another round of press scrums before a screening for the prime minister and other officials.
After that it's off to Calgary and then Vancouver for more press and promotion. There's already a buzz that Men With Brooms could be the "Canadian Full Monty." With the country already waving flags in the street following the Olympic ice triumphs, Alliance Atlantis and Robert Lantos' Serendipity Point Films are pulling out all the stops.
Dressed in a wrinkled Roots sweatshirt yesterday, the overworked Gross looked as if he'd been dragged through a key hole. Besides playing the lead skip of these broom boys (Peter Outerbridge, James Allodi and Jed Rees round out the team), he did everything but cater this film, acting as co-writer and director and even tossing in a few songs.
Although he's played everything from Romeo to Hamlet, Men With Brooms is the first film Gross has ever directed. "It's the first anything I've directed," he says. "I've never even directed a two-car funeral."
He was still fussing over details yesterday, calling the lab to lighten certain scenes as the prints were being made.
And, yes, the movie opens and closes with a pack of wandering beavers. "They were originally going to be frogs," says Gross. Then Magnolia came out with that raining frog scene and Gross resourcefully switched to the nickel rodent.
Some beavers were real but most were digital. "Beavers are really hard to control and they don't actually travel in herds," he says, wincing at his own double entendres.
You'd think it would be Leslie Nielsen making with all the beaver jokes. But the star of The Naked Gun plays it fairly straight in Men With Brooms as Gross' estranged dad Gordon Cutter, a former curling champion.
Nielsen even had to be prompted during the interview yesterday to use his fabled whoopee cushion. At least I think it was his whoopee cushion.
Shannon, who plays Margaret Trudeau in the upcoming CBC miniseries Trudeau, plays Outerbridge's light-headed girlfriend in Men With Brooms. She says Nielsen kept breaking up the extras with his breaking-wind machine. "He and Paul really got all of us through those 12-hour days," she says.
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