Local Star Barry Pepper Calls On His Military Discipline For The Far North Drama The Snow Walker

Barry Pepper is a very committed actor. Sure, they always say that about people who research their parts by tailing undercover cops or bulking up in the weight room. But his performance in The Snow Walker, which opens next Friday (March 5) in Vancouver, is a tour de force, putting him through gruelling physical paces and taking his character from abject arrogance to the kind of almost metaphysical wisdom that a mere movie star just can't fake.

Based on a short story by Canadian icon Farley Mowat--"Walk Well, My Brother", which is taken from a collection called The Snow Walker--the film was directed by Charles Martin Smith, who more than 20 years ago learned a few things about the Canadian Arctic while playing Mowat in Carroll Ballard's Never Cry Wolf.

The new effort is a virtual two-hander, with Pepper as a 1950s bush pilot who crash-lands on the tundra with a sick Inuit woman, played wonderfully by newcomer Annabella Piugattuk, as his companion in Arctic survival.

On Thursday (February 26), Pepper and company are in Ottawa, attending a special parliamentary screening of Snow Walker. This caps a half-decade of film honours and public rituals for the tall actor, who has also attended highly charged screenings everywhere from Normandy, France, to Washington, D.C. But how did a small-town Vancouver Island boy go from skipping rocks on the Pacific Ocean to appearing with his films for presidents and prime ministers? (Although these jobs are, admittedly, looking a little less stable than show-business gigs these days.)

"Snow Walker is a journey of enlightenment," Pepper says, calling from his home on the Sunshine Coast, "and I've been very fortunate to have participated in films that have some kind of morality at their centre, that have the capacity to inspire people, or at least disturb them in some way."

Born 34 years ago in Campbell River, Pepper had a strikingly unconventional upbringing. His free-spirited parents home-schooled him and two older brothers aboard the family project--a handmade 50-foot sailboat called the Moonlighter--on a decade-long journey through the South Pacific. Instead of watching TV, the siblings improvised plays while learning languages and local customs from the people they met and, frequently, stayed with on faraway beaches.

Upon returning to so-called normal life, the future thespian knocked around our chillier islands for a while, finished high school in Courtenay, and considered graphic design as a career until he got hooked by the late-'80s vibe at the Vancouver Actors Studio. After the usual baptism by cathode-ray fire in Vancouver-shot episodic TV, notably on the talent-rich Madison, Pepper jumped straight into the machinery of American filmmaking.

In 1998, he had made a stunning breakthrough as Pte. Daniel Jackson, the Bible-quoting sniper in Saving Private Ryan. The Steven Spielberg war epic was followed quickly by roles in high-profile items like Enemy of the State, The Green Mile, Knockaround Guys, and, yes, Battlefield Earth.

In 2001, he established his credentials as a leading man of real depth, not just a solid ensemble player, embodying conflicted baseball great Roger Maris in the critically lauded cable movie 61*. Then it was another change of pace as a piggish Wall Street type in Spike Lee's 25th Hour, followed by another hitch in the army with Mel Gibson in We Were Soldiers.

The military movies left their marks on the young actor. He had more than basic training in this area, participating in both the buildup and the follow-through for Private Ryan and Soldiers, set in the Second World War and the Vietnam War, respectively. As part of those films' success, Pepper attended awards ceremonies and commemorations at military installations throughout the U.S. and even at the White House.

"I spent a lot of time on military bases for Private Ryan and We Were Soldiers, and we met a lot of high-ranking people, including Gen. Wesley Clark. I've grown to have so much respect for the American fighting man and woman. And of course they want to honour and protect their country, but they have been put in a terrible position. I don't think that many of them can really know the political agenda that is happening behind the scenes. On the other hand, you are starting to see fewer punches being pulled in the United States, by the press and people in general."

Pepper claims no particular expertise in this area other than the combination of intense research into America's wars and his distance as a well-travelled Canadian.

"Oh, I've always been a pretty opinionated fellow. I just have a broader overview than some people, and I've been taken to school on a lot of these issues. But bottom line is that I have a lot of sympathy for the soldier in the field. Too many people make the mistake of hating the warrior, not the war."

In Snow Walker, the confrontation is less apocalyptic, but there's still a life-and-death conflict between cultures, as the downed pilot--himself a war veteran--lets go of his prejudices in order to gain a greater understanding of the land, its people, and himself.

"I think this is fundamentally a story about not examining what you are doing with your life, of taking life for granted until forced to recognize what you desire most only after it's taken away."

Content aside, the project had its military aspects. First was the nature of a Far North encampment, which isolated the core cast and crew (James Cromwell and Jon Gries are among others with smaller roles) for several winter and summer months near Churchill, Manitoba.

"The movie was considered expensive by Canadian standards, but I'll tell ya, we didn't have heated trailers and all that luxury to retreat to at the onset of frostbite or black-fly attacks.

"It dissolved that whole sense of hierarchy that usually dominates film sets," Pepper recalls almost fondly, "and it forced us to become as dependent on each other as the characters in the story had to be."

Pepper hopes that audiences get at least some of the context implied by the situation involving an arrogant white man and a tubercular aboriginal woman.

"The movie's premise has to be extreme in order to reeducate people. It's already being forgotten that right up through the 1950s, Europeans were continuing to decimate Inuit populations. About 50,000 died from despoliation of animal resources, diphtheria, tuberculosis, measles, chronic starvation; they were treated like animals by the white trappers, traders, miners, and missionaries. The RCMP was thought of as a paternal influence on the unlettered and childlike savages, and we're only a generation away from that kind of thinking. And yet the Inuit people are still not alienated from the reality of a natural world."

Thus it was startling to the young veteran to be paired with a novice when 20-year-old Piugattuk was chosen from an open casting call in Iqaluit, Nunavut.

"Annabella was absolutely amazing. I don't know if she had ever even been to a movie theatre before this, but the upside was that she was totally unfazed by the trappings of show business and all that usually goes with acting. So it was quite a challenge to meet the kind of openness she projected."

A more recent challenge for Pepper is replacing Matt Damon as Tom Ripley (The Talented Mr. Ripley) in Roger Spottiswoode's new take on Patricia Highsmith's series of novels, with the project already completed and variously known as Ripley's Art or White on White. He's also launched his own film-production and -development company, intended to create projects for himself and others. And when not working, the actor-turned-filmmaker seems content to live with his wife and small daughter on their Sunshine Coast spread.

"I somehow need the sunrise and the chickens and the quiet to make it all work. But I can put on the uniform and go out there and do it again."