It’s been no secret that over the last few years Australian filmmakers and actors have felt that they are fighting a losing battle. The quality of Australian films have got better but the box office receipts have been going down. They might be losing the battle but now a new warrior stands at the front of this army, sword raised ready to take on all those all attack.
While award-winning director Kriv Stenders and actor, Aden Young talk to me about the release of their new feature ‘Lucky Country’, Young can’t help but go into bat for the Australian film industry. ‘When I’m a video shop and I hear some c—khead say, ‘No don’t get that, it’s Australian’, my blood boils. I want to go up to them and say ‘then what do you think you are? You’re Australian, you idiot.’ The passion in Young’s voice is clear. ‘I can’t believe Australians don’t want to see their own stories. I was born in Canada and the Canadian Film Industry is now non-existent. They have no way to show their stories anymore. We can’t let that happen in Australia… we can’t lose our cultures… out stories.’
‘Lucky Country’ is certainly an Australian story. Young plays Nat a frustrated land-owner who arrived in Australia shortly before Federation with his young family. But when his wife dies everything starts to go bad and Nat finally feels like a failure. The arrival of three strangers stresses Nat out even more. Young admits that filming for ‘Lucky Country’ has been one of the toughest tasks he has ever faced. ‘This really was a tough film to do… physically it is tiring. It was so tough to do, it exhausted me. You don’t realise it but it is rough to be tied up for hours at a time. I was amazed how tense it was and how constricted I felt. Then there was the whole lockjaw thing and having to watch the actors playing my children getting put through what they went through, that was rough,’ he explains. ‘Sometimes it was almost too much to bear. By the end of the shoot I was drained… I was sick for a week afterwards. I just had to get away.’
But it’s obvious that filming ‘Lucky Country’ wasn’t a negative experience for Young who admits he was attracted to the film because he wanted to work with Kriv Stenders, a director who has shown his class by directing films such as ‘The Illustrated Family Doctor’, ‘Blacktown’ and ‘Boxing Day’. ‘I have been a fan of Kriv’s for a long time… since ‘Motherland’ (a docco Stenders directed early on in his career). I wanted to work with him then. But then he went off and made three features… and he didn’t cast me, which left me really depressed,’ says Young only half-joking. ‘But when I was sent the script for ‘Lucky Country’ I loved it, it was a genre I like (a thriller), and I was so impressed and how the story kept moving. This boy (the character of Tom) goes through hell… and that was my only concern that they wouldn’t be able to find a kid good enough for the role.’
Young wasn’t the only one impressed when he first read Andy Cox’s script. ‘It absolutely blew me away,’ admits Stenders. ‘It was this great script full of these rich dynamic characters. And I’d been wanting to work on a broader canvas and have always wanted to do a genre film so it was a perfect fit. It is dark, but it’s entertaining… even though it centres around tragedy.’
Of course doing a film sent around Federation meant there was some extra preparation for both Young and Stenders. ‘I used a lot of photos to get a feel for the period,’ admits Stenders. ‘I also used the Internet to search as well. I was just so determined that I didn’t want it to look look a cheap ABC ‘costume drama’… I just had to get the right look.’ Young went about getting into the role of Nat in a completely different way. ‘I went on a search for things back in that period. I found some old sermons which gave me a wonderful insight, but what helped me the most was listening to music from that time. I actually forked out a lot of cash for a record called ‘Songs Of Federation’… I found reading and listening to things like that give you some great clues about people of that time.
So what about the complex character of Nat appealed to Young so much? ‘I thought he was struggling and with the pioneer side it was period of history that I really wanted to explore. He simply didn’t have the mental to get through what he wanted to do… and he failed. I found that interesting.’
It is easy to see that both Stenders and Young are passionate about ‘Lucky Country’ so I end the interview by asking Stenders what he thinks the public should know about it before they go to see it. ‘People shouldn’t be expecting ‘Australia 2’’, he says. ‘But they should expect a thrill ride that will entertain them.’