Halifax: It’s a quiet September day on the campus of Halifax’s Dalhousie University, but its popular female dormitory, Shirreff Hall, is bustling with equipment trucks blocking the drive, crew members frantically running in and out of the building’s front door and confused students trying to figure out why it is so difficult to get to the cafeteria for dinner.

While most students are genuinely oblivious to what is going on, one man is looking very much at ease in a brown leather jacket, two cameras slung over his shoulder. He wanders around, chats on his cell phone from time to time, and takes pictures. He is actor Colm Feore, and he is looking eerily similar to the man he is portraying on this day and the many days to follow. He has the daunting task of playing Pierre Elliot Trudeau in the first biographical miniseries ever produced on the late prime minister.

The CBC-commissioned Trudeau is executive produced by Wayne Grigsby and David MacLeod of Halifax’s Big Motion Pictures and directed by Jerry Ciccoritti (Boy Meets Girl, The Life Before This).

Today, well into the second week of the shoot, is the first day Ciccoritti says he has felt comfortable and that the production is gelling. The entire week prior was spent in Ottawa, and the crew was in the midst of shooting on Parliament Hill when news of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the U.S. broke. Locations were lost (including 24 Sussex Drive), but replacements were found in other Ottawa landmarks and Grigsby says the decision was made to continue shooting.

‘This is exactly what Trudeau was talking about in 1970,’ says Grigsby. ‘If you say we can’t deal with this, they [the terrorists] have won a victory. On a certain level all the stuff about the ‘October Crisis’ [an event that saw British trade commissioner James Cross and reporter Pierre Laporte kidnapped, and the latter killed, by the Front de liberation du Quebec terrorist group] started to resonate. Trudeau was the guy who asked if power came from the barrel of a gun or from the ballot box, so we decided to keep going because it felt like the right thing to do for the project.’

Grigsby, also the writer of the miniseries, knows his history. During much of Trudeau’s reign as PM, the writer/producer was a journalist in Montreal and says he drew on his experiences during the period as background for the film.

‘I was as well-placed as anyone else to take a run at this,’ says Grigsby. ‘I lived a lot of it and read the rest. There are a lot of books out there about various aspects of Mr. Trudeau’s life, Margaret Trudeau’s life, and the politics of it all. It’s not like there is a dearth of information. So I just sank into it; the research part of it was a lot of fun.’

With a budget of $7.65 million, Grigsby has surrounded himself with a cast of Canadian film and television all-stars that includes Feore, Polly Shannon (who portrays Margaret Trudeau), Patrick McKenna, R.H. Thomson, Don McKellar, Eric Peterson and a host of others. He is also pleased with his choice of director in Ciccoritti, who is dressed today more like an agent, in a dark suit and tie, than a director. He says this project is something to be taken seriously and treated with respect, and his outfit reflects that.

‘Trudeau was a man who made the country go ‘wow,’ so I want to make a movie that makes the country go ‘wow,’ where form and content are married,’ says Ciccoritti. ‘What I’ve done stylistically is broken the four hours up into four different visual styles, each of which is based on [the style of] a director appropriate to the period in the movie that mixes in a visual style with a political angle.’

He adapted the styles of Richard Lester, Constantin Costa-Gavras, Bernardo Bertolucci and Alan Pakula to model the four hours.

He also created a 30-page document before shooting began, detailing every visual aspect of the film, and passed it out to the cast and crew to ensure everyone involved was aware of what he was after visually.

The shot currently being set up this day is a scene between Pierre, Maggie and a mediator, where the Trudeaus are officially filing for separation in 1977, leading to their 1984 divorce. The scene depicting their emotional goodbye was shot earlier in the day.

The cast of Trudeau is truly a who’s who of Canadian talent. Grigsby and Ciccoritti say that Peterson’s portrayal of Tommy Douglas left the filmmakers ‘breathless.’ They are also extremely confident in their lead’s abilities and are pleased with his metamorphosis into Trudeau.

‘He has buried himself in this guy for two months and researched the hell out of him,’ says Ciccoritti of Feore. ‘He is totally in line with my vision of the movie and great to work with. He is always on, keeping up his energy and the energy of everyone around him.’

The miniseries is being funded by Telefilm Canada, the Nova Scotia Film Development Corporation, the Canadian Television Fund, tax credits and the CBC, which is expected to broadcast the miniseries in late March 2002. Delivery is set for February. Andrew Cochran of Nova Scotia production house Cochran Entertainment is handling international distribution.

‘[Cochran] had really interesting ideas that went outside the box of just selling it to foreign countries,’ says Grigsby. ‘He has the new media side of things figured out with websites and DVDs and stuff. With such a Canadian story, it is going to be difficult for some countries to buy into it as a notion. We’ve had conversations with British broadcasters, American broadcasters, and what they were interested in was Pierre the playboy or Pierre and Maggie, but for a Canadian audience that is only one part of the picture. You have to deal with the October Crisis and the constitutional issues for the Canadian audience. We are hoping we will do this well enough that people will get into it no matter where they are.’

Grigsby admits that they are currently entrenched in a ‘frightening’ project with higher than normal expectations for its quality and content. Trudeau’s is an important story that must be well told. This is both a challenge and a basis of motivation for Ciccoritti in particular, who says he will refuse to ‘take it easy’ until shooting wraps in Halifax on Nov. 4.

‘I think because of the nature of the project, this film is going to get huge numbers,’ says Ciccoritti. ‘Colm [Feore] and I have decided that knowing we are going to get those numbers, we want to earn those numbers. If that many people are going to watch it, then this has to be something extraordinary. That is the reason you have to work harder, because everyone is going to want to watch this.’

-www.cbc.ca