Bill Phillips, director of the soon-to-be-released Canadian western Gunless, says he wanted to give moviegoers something that plays with conventional expectations for the genre.
“We wanted to surprise people in many ways. We pushed the western north of the 49th parallel and played with expectations that people have — put them on their ear,” Phillips said Tuesday in an interview with CBC News.
“It’s a very specific genre — and that seems like a good reason to make it. You have an instant audience — it seems like everybody, or everybody and their dad, loves westerns.”
People kind of know they’re going to get “big sky and horses and shootouts,” he added. The film was shot in and around Osoyoos, B.C.
Yet no one jumped at the chance of making a Canadian western, even though the Canadian West has been a convincing backdrop for many U.S. films and mini-series such as Into the West and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.
Phillips, whose previous film credits include psychodrama Treed Murray and caper film Foolproof, with Ryan Reynolds, had never shot a western but he admits being a fan.
“I thought, let’s take something iconic about the classic American western and bring it to Canada. We literally did that — we invented a character, a gunslinger and he finds himself in Canada and we built the story around that,” he said. “We had some fun with it.”
Phillips, who wrote and directed Gunless, relished the chance to play against the squeaky-clean Mountie image of his star Paul Gross, who leaped to TV stardom with Due South.
Gross plays the Montana Kid, a gunslinger who finds it difficult to scare up a fight, or even a gun, when he winds up in a friendly town on the Canadian side of the border.
“Not only did we want to play with the image of Paul Gross and turn it on its head, he wanted to attack that as well. He insisted he had this very long greasy hair and he is literally covered in mud and pig manure when he rides into town,” Phillips said.
Gunless is scheduled for release in Canada on April 30.
