You have to expect that when two of Canada’s premier funnymen get together, the double entendres will be flowing like Niagara Falls.
Therefore, it’s no surprise that when Leslie Nielsen and Paul Gross begin discussing the beavers that populate Men With Brooms—a film first-time director Gross also co-wrote, starred in, executive produced and contributed a song to (“Kiss You Till You Weep”)—they hold nothing back.
“I don’t feel that I’m carrying any particular torch, that I have any obligation do to anything [Canadian],” Gross says. “I like seeing beavers. They just make me laugh.”
Gross, who won two Geminis for his role as Constable Benton Fraser on Due South, explains that the beavers were originally going to be frogs until he saw the frogs falling out of the sky in Magnolia.
“Do you have control of your beaver visions, or do they come up into your mind all the time now?” asks Nielsen, who plays Gross’s father in Men With Brooms.
“I’m overrun with them,” Gross replies.
“Overrun with beavers?”
Gross explains, “We said, ‘We’re going to need some smoke stacks painted in here, and we’re going to have this storm you’re going to have to put in, and now we’re going to discuss the beaver shots.’ And it just became this farce. One of the [special effects] guys says, ‘Well, [beavers are] a little bit easier to work with because they’re [furry] and they’re wet.'”
Men With Brooms is the story of Chris Cutter (Gross), a former curling star from the fictional Ontario town of Long Bay, who disappeared 10 years earlier, throwing away a chance for his team to win the “Golden Broom”—the Stanley Cup of curling. When the team’s coach dies, his will asks Cutter to reform the team so they can finally win the Golden Broom.
“I’d like to think it’s because the movie is wonderful,” says Gross, letting out a huge burst of laughter, in answer to why Men With Brooms has been receiving so much attention. “It started fairly early on, talking with Alliance Atlantis as the distributor. Then I guess as the movie got closer and closer to being finished, they felt they had something they could take out in a broader way.”
Although the film had a budget of $7.5 million—an impressive sum for a Canadian feature
—Gross says the cost of actual shooting was much less.
“As [Men With Brooms producer] Robert Lantos expressed it, ‘It’s the amount of money that a Hollywood film would normally pay for a trailer.’ So it’s astonishing,” says Nielsen.
In response to the ongoing debate between commerce and art, Gross points out that all filmmakers want their films to succeed commercially. “[Movies] are extraordinarily expensive things to make, even the cheap ones,” he says. “If they don’t pay for themselves, eventually no one will give you the money to make them.”
“The same thing happens on honeymoons,” Nielsen deadpans.
“That’s so wrong,” chips in Gross, 42, who is married to actress Martha Burns and has two children.
Neither Gross nor Nielsen knew anything about curling before they began making Men With Brooms —Gross and co-writer John Krizanc even read a “Curling for Dummies” book. And while curling might look like shuffleboard on ice to the uninitiated, Gross says it’s actually quite difficult and required training.
“It’s really hard on the muscles that connect your penis to your butt, that stretch,” says Gross.
Gross gets slightly more serious when asked if he felt obligated to put Canadian references in the movie. “I do think Canadian iconography is really fun. I mean it’s sort of humourous and melancholic all at the same time,” says Gross. “The beaver is just a weird national symbol. I think it was Margaret Atwood who said that the beaver is the perfect symbol for Canada because it is the only animal that when faced with a mortal peril will chew off its own testicles and offer them up to its assailant. We’re a funny, odd, odd, complicated country.”
