'It works for me': Dirt Music director on filming Tim Winton's 'abstract' book

The reviewers haven’t been especially kind to Gregor Jordan’s adaptation of Tim Winton’s novel Dirt Music since it debuted at the Toronto Film Festival last September, in that far-off time before COVID.

The film about Georgie (Scottish actress Kelly Macdonald) and Lu (American Garrett Hedlund) and their illicit, guilt-ridden affair in remote coastal Western Australia "plays like Wake in Fright meets The Notebook" wrote the reviewer for rogerebert.com, and "shamelessly marinates" in "contrivances and coincidences" that "are preposterous".

Variety dismissed it as "a fine-looking romance that never finds the right key", populated by characters "who act without much by the way of logic". Despite much early promise, the Chicago Tribune opined, the film "stalls out in a rotation of meaningful looks and tearful whispers and gazing at ocean vistas".

Ouch.

Director Gregor Jordan working behind the scenes on the film Dirt Music. 

The thing is, Jordan – who burst onto the scene with his brilliant crime caper Two Hands in 1999, and reteamed with star Heath Ledger for his take on Ned Kelly in 2003 – kind of knows all this. He knows the story demands the viewer take some big leaps. He knows it probes a mysterious and not-immediately-filmable connection between people and land. He knows it’s not for everyone. But, honestly, he tried.

"I did it as well as I could have," he says. "Whether it's good enough, I don't know. It works for me, and I know there are people who've seen the film and it works for them and they love it, and I know that there's other people it's not going to work for."

Jordan shot the film in late 2018, and finished tinkering with it after its Toronto bow and some test screenings – "an interesting process," he says, "it's sometimes hard to gauge what's the best thing to do afterwards" – late last year. But he’s been living with the story much longer than that.

He was one of a group of filmmakers to whom the book was sent in proof form before it was published in 2001; David Wenham – who plays Georgie’s partner, crayfishing kingpin Jim Buckridge – was another. "He dug out his original unpublished copy and showed it to me."

Jordan says the book, which won the Miles Franklin Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2002, blew him away. "But it also kind of overwhelmed me as well. I just really had no idea how you would turn something that expansive, with that number of abstract ideas, into a movie."

So he passed, while Phillip Noyce (Rabbit Proof Fence, Patriot Games, Dead Calm) took it on, with Russell Crowe attached as Jim and Heath Ledger in mind for the role of Lu, a musician wrecked by grief over the death of his brother, sister-in-law and young niece in a car accident, and wracked with guilt for surviving it.

Director Gregor Jordan with Kelly Macdonald.Credit: Universal

But that too came to nothing, with Noyce saying in 2014, "I could never get a script that I thought captured the poetry of the novel, and there’s the problem. A poetic novel is just difficult to translate into a movie."

It was Sam Neill who brought the story back into Jordan’s life a few years ago, when he asked if he could bring producer Finola Dwyer, a fellow New Zealander, along to a dinner the director was hosting in Cape Town.

"And we got talking, and she let me know she had optioned the book and had a script and would I be interested in reading it," Jordan recalls. "So it was sort of a weird piece of serendipity."

The script was by Jack Thorne, the hugely successful English writer for screen (Skins, Shameless, His Dark Materials) and stage (Harry Potter and the Cursed Child), and Jordan was hooked.

"There was just such beauty in his writing, what he'd taken from the book was so elegant and clever, and there was an element of invention, too. He made imperceptible changes that captured the spirit of the book so beautifully and presented it in a way that I could see could be makeable as a film. I mean, all those strange abstract ideas are still there, but I just thought 'this is doable'."

Ah, those strange abstract ideas. This is, you suspect, where Jordan and the reviewers part company.

In bare narrative terms, Dirt Music is relatively straightforward. Georgie has fallen out of love with Jim and is instantly attracted to Lu. They begin an affair. But the depressed Lu is also a poacher, nabbing crayfish that, by the terms of his monopoly licence, ought to belong to Jim. Trouble brews.

It’s the "abstract ideas" – of music as a conduit to memory and the emotions, of dirt as the site of rootedness and identity – that make Winton’s book so complex and filming it so challenging.

The movie asks us to take seriously, for example, the idea that Lu is so stricken with grief that his dead family literally haunts him. And it asks us to accept that Lu would deal with that grief by heading off to a remote chain of islands Georgie had once mentioned to him to hunt and fish and live and, in all likelihood, to die alone.

It’s picturesque as all get-out, and for Jordan, who has been known to sleep on a plank on a remote island in the Philippines just to chase the surf, it might even be plausible. But he readily admits it’s a big leap to ask of most audiences.

"The idea that he would essentially live like a caveman in order to try and exorcise the demons that are haunting him — that's a pretty out-there concept," he says.

The lead characters are deeply embedded in the landscape.Credit: Universal

Jordan had trouble enough finding actors who would follow him on this journey "literally to the end of the world".

He’s not joking about that. Base camp for the two weeks of shooting the final act, set in the fictional Coronation Gulf, was a compound of tents at the far end of the Dampier Peninsula. Getting there involved a three-and-a-half hour flight from Perth to Broome, followed by a three-and-a-half hour drive along dirt roads.

Getting to set each day meant yet more trekking – a boat trip followed by wading through waist-deep water, with gear held overhead, to uninhabited islands accessible only with the permission of local Aboriginal people.

"You've gotta be pretty gung-ho to go to that kind of place and shoot," he says. "It was really a question of finding the best actors who are really right for those roles, who are the right ages, who are available, who are happy to travel to far north-west Australia and live in tents and go through the hell we went through to shoot it."

A rather self-limiting field, in other words.

Lu (Garrett Hedlund) and Georgie enjoy a rare carefree moment in Dirt Music.Credit: Universal Pictures

He didn’t set out to cast non-Australians, he adds, though having stars with the cachet of Macdonald and Hedlund does make international sales easier. "But there were certain actresses, Australian or not, who were very interested, and then they just sort of went, 'Hang on, I've got to fly to where?' They just couldn't wrap their heads around it. Also a lot of actresses have young children, so they just can't take them to those kinds of places."

Casting is always "a strange business" anyway, he says. "You're not completely in control. It's like the universe almost provides you with the actors that you need." And the ones it provided him are "fantastic", he adds.

The real star of this film, though – indeed, of any adaptation of a Winton story – was always going to be the landscape. That’s the appeal for filmmakers, but it’s also a serious hurdle to overcome when you’re ostensibly making a great sweeping love story with a couple of humans at its centre.

"The connection Lu and Georgie have is quite primal and visceral in that they are people who are from the earth and from the sea," Jordan notes. "These big visceral elements are a part of their love story, which sounds weird, I know, but it is what Winton created brilliantly. Trying to communicate that visually and aurally via the film was an important part of the challenge.

"I don't know how well I've succeeded in that; that's up for other people to decide," he adds. "But it definitely was something that I was trying to do."

Dirt Music is in cinemas from October 8.

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