The Last Anniversary: What brought John Polson back to Australia after 30 years
Actor-director and Tropfest founder John Polson – who’s lived in the US for 30 years after his ‘trainwreck’ Sydney childhood – is back for the premiere of TV series The Last Anniversary. And a lot has changed.
News
Don't miss out on the headlines from News. Followed categories will be added to My News.
John Polson owes a lot to Tom Cruise.
The award-winning director, actor and Tropfest founder is living the high life in New York, flying his daughters across the country in his own plane – just a four-seater though – it’s like having a good car in the US, he explains – and calls people like Tom Cruise and his Aussie posse Nicole Kidman, Naomi Watts and Bruna Papandrea from Made Up Stories – among his closest friends.
It’s a world most can’t fathom – and a world away from the Sydney kid who got kicked out of school after school, leaving at 15 and, by his own admission, having a childhood that was a “trainwreck” with a mother who struggled with substance abuse. Now he’s home for Monday’s premiere of The Last Anniversary, a six-part TV series based on Liane Moriarty’s book of the same name. It’s the first work that’s brought the The Mentalist, Good Wife and The Walking Dead director home in almost 30 years.
“It was really amazing,” he says of directing and executive producing The Last Anniversary in his hometown.
Starring Teresa Palmer, Miranda Richardson and Danielle Macdonald, the series – Moriarty’s first adaptation shot in her hometown of Sydney too – was executive produced by Polson’s longtime mate Kidman.
“I haven’t worked in Australia, really at all – I haven’t directed in Australia since the late ’90s. I did a movie called Siam Sunset many, many, moons ago – my first movie,” he says. “I think that was 1999 – and shortly after that, from about 2000 onwards, I was really living in America. There’s been a few opportunities here and there to come back and work and I haven’t really found the right project.
“And this came up … and I fell in love with it.
“I read the first draft of this first script that Samantha Strauss wrote and thought ‘Wow, this is so different to anything I’ve ever done before.’ It’s so beautiful – and I thought … maybe this is the thing that I come home for.”
Polson, who turns 60 in September, thought of his upbringing a lot during his recent return. It’s been four decades, a wife and two teenage children since he’s lived here, and almost three decades since he’s worked here.
He’s worked on the biggest films and TV shows in the world – and it’s a life he says wouldn’t be what it is without none other than Tom Cruise.
“The way it evolved was I made that film which did not do very well in Australia, but Siam Sunset did pretty well on the festival circuit … it actually won an award at the Cannes Film Festival,” he says.
“I’m a big believer – and I don’t want to sound too spiritual or arty farty – but things tend to work out the way they’re supposed to work out. So at the time I was in a long relationship and that was just finishing around the same time as I was finishing that movie. Talking about a perfect storm, I got cast in Mission Impossible II as a small part and a few months into the production, which was originally shooting around Sydney and Fox, one day they just called me and said ‘Hey, we are moving the whole production to LA and you’re coming.’ They basically were like, ‘Do you have a passport?’”
So he went. But before he did, Cruise watched Siam Sunset – which was not released in the US – and loved it.
“Tom Cruise actually, to his credit, watched the movie, fell in love with it and really, I’m not just saying it – I mean, God bless that guy – he literally putthe print in the front of his jet and flew it to LA,” he says. “In those days, it was prints – it wasn’t that you send a link – and he flew the film to LA and set up screenings with agents and distributors. That’s what he did for me. Tom is an amazing guy. And he loved it and I was flattered, but what really struck me was the next night, he called me and we had maybe a two-hour conversation and he went through almost shot-by-shot. He almost had a strange, photographic memory of them.
“It was very encouraging, and that’s when he took it under his wing and helped me get an agent and did all that sort of stuff. I’m in touch with him to this day and I was able to say to him just a few weeks ago, ‘I don’t know if you really understood how much that meant to me.’ I said to him, ‘The reason I’m here in this country, with my wife and my kids and living in Brooklyn, is really because of that encouragement you gave me.’”
Looking back, he does go ‘wow – that happened’– and going home to Sydney for The Last Anniversary – which ironically hinges on family trauma and dynamics – makes him remember where he came from, and what it took to break a cycle.
“I had a rough start,” he admits candidly.
“My parents split up when I was young, like a lot of people, but my mum had a lot of problems with substance abuse. She was quite a brilliant piano player and quite a wonderful person, and I will say in many ways, I think a good mother, but she just had a lot of demons. So her and my dad split up when I was about one or two, and there were four of us and my mum was left with four kids all under the age of about five – as a single mother with all those problems. So I got kicked out of a lot of schools.
“Really, all I wanted to do was be a motor mechanic, that was my grand ambition because I loved cars and I loved engines and I loved making stuff work, and so that’s where I started to head, but I’d been kicked out too early to even get an apprenticeship.
“So I went and started working at the local gas – sorry, petrol – station,” he says in his Aussie-turned American drawl. “Hoping that between pumping petrol, I would get to work on the cars. And at the age of 17, a friend of the family’s became an agent – Robyn Gardiner – and asked me to go to audition for something. She said, ‘Look, you’re not gonna get the part, but just go’ – she had seen me kind of performing around the house and just had an instinct. I was this centre of attention guy really, even though I was shy in some ways, but in other ways I just wanted to make people laugh. And I got the part – and that was the beginning of it all.”
What he’s discovered since then is that he had pretty serious undiagnosed ADHD – which, at the time, nobody talked about.
“It wasn’t a thing,” he says. “I know now, having watched a few documentaries, read some books and I’m like, ‘Oh, wow, that’s was me, and they just didn’t know what to do with me.
“It’s actually very sad. I had one English teacher, I’ll never forget, and he would walk to class, and this went on for years – and he would literally be like, ‘Good morning, everyone – John, out,” … it’s ancient history now, but that was my schooling. I wasn’t even given a chance.”
Growing up on Sydney’s North Shore, he went to North Sydney Boys High for year 7 – at the end of which, the school wrote to his father and said it was ‘okay if he didn’t return’. So he went to Glenaeon, a Rudolf Steiner School a few suburbs away at Middle Cove – chosen because it didn’t expel students.
“But I kind of changed the school policy after a couple of years and I did actually get kicked out,” he laughs. “I was not a stupid guy – I was pretty good at math – my problem was ADHD.”
In his first year in LA, shooting a small part in a massive movie, Polson, then in his 30s, was living the good life in an incredible hotel, showing up to set once or twice a week. So he thought he may as well go and meet some agents and see what happened. That’s when he met Michael Douglas, and they made hit thriller, Swimfan.
“I’m doing Mission, and I’m sitting in this amazing hotel and I’ve got a rental car and I’m getting paid and I’m not working very often, which was just fine,” he laughs. “So I called my Australian agent, Robyn Gardiner, and said ‘Listen, I’m here, should I be meeting anybody?’
“So I signed up with a very young brand new agency called Endeavor. They kept sending me this script which wasn’t Swimfan at the time – it was called What About Donna, which I thought was not a great name – but they said just read it, Michael Douglas is producing it, check it out.
“So I read it and I did not love it. I was saying no, it’s not really for me – and they kept sending it back to me. They said ‘Well Michael Douglas saw Siam Sunset and he wants to meet you,’ which was kind of amazing because he was one of my heroes. So, long story short, Michael and I sat down and I was very nervous, because it’s Michael Douglas, and I said, ‘Listen, I’m flattered that they keep sending me the script, but it’s not really for me.’
“And he was like, ‘Well, what’s wrong with it?’ So I told him – and he said, ‘Well, I feel exactly the same – so why don’t we get together and rewrite it’ – and so that’s kind of what we did.” Fox bought the little independent movie, a ‘big moment’ for Polson when it opened at number one at the box office. He also directed Hide and Seek, starring Robert De Niro, which also opened at number one at the US box office, as well as flexing his creative muscle as an executive producer and director of hit US shows Fringe, Elementary and Law & Order: Organized Crime. He’s also acted in award-winning films The Sum Of Us and The Dry.
Then there was Bruna. Nicole. Naomi.And Tropfest, which he founded in 1993. It started as a screening for 200 people packed into Darlinghurst’s Tropicana Caffe, and soon grew into the world’s biggest short film festival, attracting judges like Toni Collette, Hugh Jackman and Rose Byrne. In 2015 it was controversially cancelled due to financial difficulties, before coming back in 2016 until its last event in 2019. So – could it ever come back?
“Absolutely,” he says. “I’m quite certain I’ll relaunch it when the time is right. I get calls regularly from people keen to be involved, but I’m particular about who that partner will be.
“If Tropfest comes back, it has to be done the right way – with the right vision, the right backing, and the same heart that made it special in the first place. As much as I want to relaunch Tropfest, the essence of it has to remain intact.
“I’d rather have no Tropfest than the wrong one. (Cancelling it) was tough … but I also believe things happen for a reason. And it wasn’t just Tropfest – big outdoor events everywhere have struggled in recent years. Looking back, sure, there are things I might have done differently. But I also recognise how much was out of my control at the time.”
What is in his control is his life now. Living inBrooklyn with wife Amanda Harding – a successful, respected yoga teacher – and their daughters Marlowe and Harper. They spent Covid at their home in upstate New York – Polson’s “happy place”.
“I’m very lucky my work is very intense, but I also get breaks for weeks, months at a time,” he says. “I’m also very lucky, we bought a property north of New York … it’s kind of like the Blue Mountains here. But it gets really heavy winters, so you can get five foot of snow in the winter, it’s spectacular. I’d say that’s my happy place.”
Another part of his life he likes to control is in the air. About 11 years ago, Polson started flying – and he has not looked back.
“No,” he laughs when asked if that scares him. “It scares me sometimes being in the back of a commercial plane because I think I have sort of a control thing. I’m almost never scared when I’m the one flying. Not that I think I’m brilliant, but it’s different when you’re at the controls.”
He’s flown across America many times and takes his kids all over the place – but won’t take them over water. “I almost feel embarrassed bringing it up because it makes you sound super wealthy, but it’s really not,” he says. “The sort of plane I have, it’s a small four-seater. It’s fast, but it’s a propeller plane – it’s like having kind of an expensive car, and you don’t have to spend millions on maintenance – but it’s beautiful and there’s really nothing like it. I take it very seriously, and I’m very conservative. I won’t take my family over water … that’s a different level of risk, if you will, but I’ll definitely have flown my kids all the way across to California and back.
“Like when my daughter wanted to go to an Olivia Rodrigo concert and the ticket prices in New York were insane … so I looked up Lexington, Kentucky, and there were front row seats that weren’t that expensive.”
He’s proud of The Last Anniversary, and he’s bursting to have done it with some of the world’s most talented people. It marks the first time a Moriarty adaptation has been set and shot in Australia with an Australian cast, filmed in Sydney and on the Hawkesbury River where the book is set. Polson also has a small role in the series too.
“Bruna and I go back, she’s my sister from another mister and I walked her down the aisle – so we’re really tight,” he explains.
“I met Bruna when she was a teenager, so I’m very close to her, and she’s sent me a few things over the years and of course we’ve always wanted to work together and just for different reasons (I couldn’t do it). I mean she is obviously a powerhouse and even with the show, she’s just been a massive cheerleader for me for many decades, and vice versa.” And she feels the same.
“John is an old friend of mine – we’ve known each other for many years, and we worked together on Tell Me Your Secrets, which was such a tremendous experience,” Papandrea says.
“Obviously, he started his career in Australia, and he had acted with Nicole Kidman when they were teenagers, so there’s so much history here among the group. We felt that this was the one that he would really respond to. It’s very Australian and has an enormous amount of humour, heart and this great mystery.”
Polson calls it his Aussie posse. And it’s a good one.
“Obviously Nicole’s one of the producers on the show, and we go back a long way – she’s been amazing over the years with similar encouragement and inviting me to participate in events that she’s doing, or showing up for me,” he continues.
“Anthony LaPaglia actually is another one. But I thought, if I’m gonna make The Last Anniversary, I wanna come back and make a very Australian story based on an Australian book with very Australian characters, but that’s a global television show and that has a universality to it. I just try to make something that I wanna watch. I’ve made the mistake in the past and my career where you second guess yourself and there’s this fictional audience somewhere that you’re trying to impress … I’ve learned really, to just make something you wanna see. I had that in the back of my mind every single day that I made this show.”
So how did he reconnect to his hometown in such an Australian story? “I kept coming back to the book and the script – but also, it is who I am, whether I like it or not,” he says.
“I mean, I know these people and we have an amazing cast. Coming from an acting background, nobody really worships actors the way I do – I live and die for actors.
“I tried very hard to cast the right people, I try to follow my gut … because my job is not to try and impose a version of the role on top of them.”
When he thinks about it, he may have lived in New York for 25 years, but says he will always be inherently Aussie.
“I mean that’s almost half of my life,” Polson marvels. “I’m an Aussie living in New York – I’m not like a New Yorker. I’m a New Yorker if you f--k with me on the streets,” he laughs.
He was back again for the AACTAs last month, where he was able to see his 90-year-old father in Port Macquarie and fatefully say goodbye – he passed away just days later.
“It was sort of bittersweet because he was 90 and he wasn’t in a good place anymore. He had some dementia and things and it was just painful to watch it. What was really interesting for me is I thought I was ready for it – and so I got to say goodbye to him. It was only a few days later that he passed away … but it’s still really hit me hard.”
At the heart of it all, his past has shaped his future. And that has a lot to do with creating family change, a generation on.
“I think subconsciously – having a pretty screwed up childhood, which I don’t think is an exaggeration – I mean, it was a trainwreck, really, from start to finish – I think subconsciously, I wanted the challenge of not passing that on,” he says.
“And I don’t know if I’ve been 100 per cent successful, but I’ve tried. I’ve really tried to minimise my damage. And it’s funny because the show’s kind of about this, right?
“That intergenerational trauma and stuff – so I’ve really tried to minimise the damage that was done to me and just tried to be the healthiest dad I can be.
“I’m sure I failed a million times, but I’d like to think I’ve succeeded more than I’ve failed.
“I’ve seen therapists and I’ve read books and I’ve tried every which way to not pass some of that on.
“I sort of took to it like a fish to water,” he says of parenthood.
“I mean, there are times where I’m working and I have to go away like for The Last Anniversary, so it sort of balances out, but when I’m around, almost to a fault – my wife jokes that (the kids) have two mums,” he says.
“I never had doubt from the moment that they were born that there’s nothing else in my life that comes even close. I love my work. I love flying. I love a lot of things, but none of them even comes close to my family and my kids.”
Originally published as The Last Anniversary: What brought John Polson back to Australia after 30 years
Join the conversation
A shout-out to undervalued, invisible, awesome carers
Husbands with cancer, mums with dementia, neurodivergent kids. An army of carers — so often overlooked — are the hidden glue that keeps our communities soldered with their quiet love.
Read more
‘Very in love’: Clarkey takes a huge step with new girlfriend
Less than a year after they started dating, Michael Clarke and his girlfriend Arabella Sherborne have taken their relationship to the next level.
Read more