Quotes

[His grandfather's confession that he cold-bloodedly killed a young German soldier led to Gross's fascination with the horror of Passchendaele] It was sort of like a hinge, and a door swung open at that moment onto a life of consequence or adulthood. I can't really put my finger on what it did, but it did change me. And I became very interested in conflict.

[Of the 12 years he worked on the 'Passchendaele" screenplay] It was always sort of special. I remember Clint Eastwood talking about 'Unforgiven'. He really wanted to make it, and he'd take it out like an old treasured watch and he'd look at it - "Not this year" - and he'd put it back in his pocket. But it was always there. I always felt my script was like that.

It's intriguing to me why the First World War started. It's intriguing that the war continued even after both sides recognized it was hopeless. And it's also intriguing that it ended so ambivalently, leaving the door open for the second one.

[on how his nomadic childhood affected his career:] I think it has something to do with reinventing yourself. Every place you move into has a whole new set of rules and behaviours and strictures. So you kind of reinvent yourself to fit into that new environment. That possibly leads you to imagine that acting makes sense because you've developed a flair for becoming somebody else.

[Commenting on English Canada's cinema being heavily focused on an auteur model] It's been stuck in that mode for a while. Festivals are composed of audiences that you never see replicated in a normal theatre. We've hidden behind this intellectual rampart. And we end up in this perverse situation where we assign to any failed film a great deal of intellectual integrity.

[Talking about the Canadian film industry] We are not making movies that people want to see. If we made roads that nobody wanted to drive on, that would be hard to defend as a public service.

[Discussing Canadian cinema] Why are the giants of cinematic comedy - Jim Carrey , Mike Myers - not making movies here? Because there's absolutely no room for someone like that in our system.