Cinema Canada (Oct-Nov 1974)

Joanna Moss interviews Don Eccelston With over fifty films to his credit, Don Eccelston is, at 39, one of the most prolific television directors in Canada. Since his late teens he has been involved with Theatre, Radio, Television and Films. He spent five years with CTV and for the past six years has been a _ producer-director with the C.B.C. in Vancouver. Of the fifty films he has made, twenty were documentaries written by himself, and these have won him several awards such as an Italia award, the Vancouver International Film Festival award and a Wilderness award (a C.B.C. internal documentary prize). He has written and directed three dramas, one for ‘‘Where The Action Is’, one for “The Manipulators” and his most recent and controversial 90 min. drama ‘‘The Overlanders’’. He is at present working ona new script tentatively titled, “Tiger, Tiger Burnirg Bright”. He has an honest and realistic view of the C.B.C. and how the Corporation relates to young film makers. The following interview was taped in Don Eccelston’s small office at the C.B.C. in Vancouver. JM: What is the history of your projected series “The Overlanders’’? DE: That’s a long story that goes back over ten years. I’ve always been fascinated by history, Western Canadian history in particular — not so much the history of politics but the history of people. I’ve always gotten the impression from Canadian television and history books that this country is uninhabited. If people are ever mentioned, they’re reduced to statistics. If I have one criticism of The National Dream, it’s what happened to the people that really built the railroad — we don’t see them. Not that the politics of CPR are not interesting or important, they are; but it’s the lopsided view of this country that is constantly being portrayed in strictly academic terms that needs to be pulled into balance. Anyway, I was always on the search for historical material that could be translated into film. As usually happens, while you’re looking for material on one subject, you accidentally discover something totally unrelated about another subject. In my case, it was a diary kept by one of the Overlanders of 1861, a part of our history that has hardly been touched. The diary revealed a story that was filled with heroics of the best kind, yet revealed by a writer who was unaware of his own heroics. He had one goal in mind, and that was to cross a country that was certainly inhospitable to the protected traveller, hardly mapped in most areas, not mapped in others — to a place called Cariboo in the interior of British Columbia. To him, it was a dream of El Dorado, of gold, of instant wealth. Because of this, he was willing to put up with anything to get there. But the real story for me was hidden between the lines of the diary — the changes he went through as he crossed the country, climbed the mountains, rode large rafts down the Fraser River, and as he witnessed the deaths of many of his comrades. By the time he got to Cariboo, to Barkerville, the 32 Cinema Canada Overlanders gold was all gone, but he had found something far more important, he had found himself. It was a journey of self-discovery. This started me on an immediate search for more diaries, and any written, published or unpublished material about this journey. I found other diaries — in the British Columbia archives, in private collections of descendants of the Overlanders, and written accounts in newspapers of the 1860’s — and ended up with a room full of research material. At that time I was thinking of The Overlanders as being a documentary, and it evolved from that to a documentary drama, to straight drama to commercial drama to commercial series drama and, as demanded by the Toronto CBC brass, to a drama that would sell outside the country ... to Europe, the Commonwealth, and perhaps the United States. And so the mind went through a lot of changes as each new demand from the East came through on the shape of The Overlanders.