If it looks like the cast members of The Grey are in pain, it’s because they are. Joe Carnahan’s superior Hollywood thriller about a bunch of oil riggers pursued by wolves after their plane crashes in the Alaskan wilderness succeeds, in part, because Carnahan chose to plonk his production not “in some studio in Burbank” but on the side of a frozen mountain outside Smithers, B.C.

“It transcended the idea of acting, and it became reacting,” Carnahan tells the Straight from his hotel room in Toronto. Jumping on the line, actor Frank Grillo mirrors Carnahan’s thoughts. “I’m limited in my talent, honestly,” he says, “and you get out there the first day and it’s 20 degrees below zero and you’re like, ‘Oh, it’s gonna be easy to do this; I don’t have to manufacture any emotions or feelings. All I have to do is know my lines.’ Basically, it’s kind of actor-proof.”

“There was never anything about this particular film where I ever thought, ‘Hey, let’s take the easy way,’ ” Carnahan continues. “That would have been a bullshit approach, and it would have failed miserably.” Similarly, the director also keeps the CGI effects in The Grey to an essentially unnoticeable minimum (the fleetingly depicted wolves, which have an oversized, supernatural aspect, were both real and animatronic). The director is admirably honest about his motivation in this case.

“Part of this was my response to looking around and going, ‘Wait a minute, do people perceive me as this jagoff hack?’ ” he laughingly barks. “That’s not how I feel about myself, you know?” Fair enough, but others evidently did in 2010 when they saw Carnahan’s cartoonishly OTT and digital-heavy The A-Team. “I never sought to have Roger Ebert cite Newtonian Law when taking me to task in a review for that film,” Carnahan sighs. “I think we were as tactical and strategic about the use of CGI in The Grey as we could be, ’cause, listen: you wind up wearing your ass for a hat if you’re not careful, and I didn’t want to do that. We really avoided that at all costs.”

Happily, The Grey eludes ass-hattery in a number of other ways, particularly in its performances. Grillo does an excellent job of drumming up sympathy for his character, the weaselly asshole Diaz (“Lookit, I’m a little, angry man, by nature, so being angry on-screen for me is probably the easiest thing to do,” he offers), while Liam Neeson’s spiritually wounded John Ottway has a heaviness that doesn’t usually make it into this kind of movie. Carnahan, who screened Deliverance and Raging Bull for his cast, knew exactly what he was looking for in the 58-year-old actor.

“Think about a guy like Bob Mitchum,” Carnahan says, “with his kind of chest gut not defining itself one way or the other. Was there anybody tougher? Lee Marvin was a marine sniper during the Second World War. They had this sense of themselves, and they had this product of being a man in a masculine way, and I think that’s why Liam Neeson is experiencing this renaissance at 60 years old, because we’ve run out of that ilk, man. We don’t have ’em anymore. I can count ’em on one hand.”

Georgia Straight, January 2012