Palm Beach star Bryan Brown on mate Sam Neill and why wife Rachel Ward tells him to f--- off

Things can get pretty heated between husband and wife couple Bryan Brown and Rachel Ward when making movies together, but for Palm Beach the end justified the means.

On any movie production, the relationships between director, actor, producer and writer can be complicated, sometimes even fraught.

That made for a rather tangled web for Bryan Brown and Rachel Ward on their new Australian comedy-drama, Palm Beach.

The pair have been married for 31 years since meeting on the set of The Thorn Birds and have forged a successful creative relationship in addition to the enduring personal one that has also produced their three children - Matilda, Joe and Rosie.

But with Brown wearing the producer’s hat as well as taking the lead role of Frank and Ward penning the script and taking directing duties, things inevitably got a little heated at times.

Bryan Brown and his director wife Rachel Ward have formed a successful creative partnership as well as their long marriage. Picture: AAP

While the 72-year-old Brown says that the actual shoot in and around the picturesque Sydney seaside suburb that gives the film its title was plain sailing, there were a few bumps along the way.

“The most difficult part is getting that script right,” says Brown, leaning back in his chair in a Melbourne bayside restaurant alongside Ward and his mate of some 40 years (who is one year his junior), Kiwi national treasure Sam Neill.

“If Rachel is writing it and she is presenting it to another producer, she’s more liable to listen to what that producer says. But if she’s presenting to me, I’m her husband. Whereas with that other producer she’d like to tell him to f--- off, she will tell me to f--- off. So it’s like ‘well, we’re not getting very far tonight’. She’s a spitfire.”

Ward, 61, who also directed her husband in her 2008 feature debut, Beautiful Kate and the 2013 TV movie, An Accidental Soldier, agrees that there can be some forthright exchanges of opinions at what she calls “the pointy end” of pre-production, but says it’s all in the name of getting the best possible version of the script.

Old mates Bryan Brown and Sam Neill in a scene from the movie Palm Beach.

“Then it’s war,” she says, thumping her hand on the table. “And there’s a couple of slammed doors at that point and eventually it works itself out. Everyone cares an enormous amount about it and is invested in it and you’re not going to give in without a fight.”

And she admits that even when it came to shooting Palm Beach, she was harder on her husband than anyone else in the star-studded cast that also includes Neil, Greta Scacchi, Richard E. Grant, Heather Mitchell, Jacqueline McKenzie and daughter Matilda.

“We are always time short and you don’t necessarily have the time to do the patience, the kindness that every actor deserves — and he gets short shrift,” she says.

“It’s ‘Bryan, do it again. Again’ and I wouldn’t dare to that to Sam. He definitely gets the short stick ‘we’re running out of time Bryan, get it right’.”

Jurassic Park and Hunt For the Wilderpeople star Neill met Brown when the two were first starting to attract international attention with My Brilliant Career and Breaker Morant respectively, and have gone on to co-star in projects such as Sweet Country and Old School. He claims he’s never really given a choice when his best buddy calls him up with a project, just a starting date.

Bryan Brown, Rachel Ward and daughter Matilda Brown at the Sydney premiere of Palm Beach. Picture: Jeremy Piper

“It’s not exactly prison,” he says of the sun-drenched Palm Beach shoot, surrounded with good food and good mates.

“You are working with your friends. There are lots of friends on this one. But I have always taken the view — and this goes back 30 years now — that whatever Rachel says, I do.”

Neill says he’s intrigued by the way Brown and Ward work together and resolve their differences — and often decides that discretion is the better part of valour by resolutely trying not to get involved.

“They are both very strong characters and they often differ about what’s right and what’s wrong,” he says diplomatically.

“And how they actually give ground, that’s a fascinating thing to witness. I usually withdraw and go to another room.”

Palm Beach is a rarity in spotlighting the troubles of characters who may be older but are not necessarily wiser and follows three couples who reunite to celebrate the birthday of Bryan’s character, Frank (who the actor says is loosely inspired by Mambo founder Dare Jennings). Amid the festivities, old tensions re-emerge and it becomes clear that the outwardly successful lives of the old friends and former bandmates are not as perfect as the picture-postcard setting.

The film was inspired by a couple of serendipitous events, first when Brown and Ward had a Christmas in Wales with some old friends and Brown noticed that the men in particular were all struggling with something in their lives.

Greta Scacchi, Bryan Brown, Richard E Grant and Heather Mitchell.

He was personally coming to terms with anxiety, which had been diagnosed about six months previously and he was only just starting to get on top of.

“I was struggling, so maybe I was being self-obsessed about what I was going through,” he recalls.

“It was terribly real to me so maybe I was going ‘then these things are terribly real to these other guys’. And I thought ‘there is a story for our generation in this that people might relate to’.

Not long after he and Ward were at the movies watching The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and noticed the age of audience around them.

They were struck by the dearth of movies that not only catered to that age group, but also addressed the issues they might be facing.

“So we made a movie about them, for them,” says Ward.

“And also just presenting that age group as very vibrant, very alive, very engaged and still struggling with life. And sexual beings, absolutely. We are very different from where our parents were at this age, and definitely different from where our grandparents are. They surrendered earlier.”

Brown, who so often has played the quintessential, resourceful, knockabout Aussie bloke in movies from The Shiralee to Two Hands to Australia, is also glad for how far discussions around men’s mental health have come in the six years since they started work on Palm Beach.

Bryan Brown met his wife of 31 years, Rachel Ward, on the set of the 1983 TV mini series The Thorn Birds.

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“Now I am finding as we start to talk about the movie that men’s mental health — for this generation — is actually out there and being talked about,” he says, adding that people have sometimes found it difficult to believe that someone like him could have wrestled with anxiety.

“I say ‘they are characters — I am me’ and I am a pretty emotional sort of bloke. I see that I am totally capable of those things happening to me but people assume I am a certain way because of some characters. People who don’t know us see us via our characters.”

Palm Beach opens tomorrow.