Another stage in dramatic life of Ruben Guthrie’s tortured adman

Brendan Cowell talks about his new film about a hedonistic adman whose supermodel girlfriend leaves him.

A scene from the film Ruben Guthrie Robyn Nevin, Alex Dimitriades, Jack Thompson and Patrick Brammall, pictured.

Brendan Cowell has seen many iterations of his comic play Ruben Guthrie. Ten productions at least, including the two sellout seasons in Sydney, but not including num­erous amateur productions.

So he knows that his piece about a hedonistic advertising creative who suffers through a year of sobriety actually works.

“I’ve seen some pretty average productions of Ruben Guthrie across the world still work,” he says of his most successful play.

“It’s funny because I got criticised by a lot of people who liked my plays when they were weirder and more brutal (and) I went and wrote a pretty naturalistic comedy that made a fair bit of money, so people say: ‘He’s lost his sense of danger and style.’ You can’t win, can ya!

“(But) it just works for some reason, so I knew we had that and I knew we had to present that. The story of that struggle.”

Cowell’s next iteration of the story is in a very different medium though.

Ruben Guthrie the film stars Patrick Brammall as the high-flying adman who comes crashing to earth when his supermodel girlfriend leaves him.

A film, by necessity, is a very different beast to a play. The best become separate entities; the worst — and Roman Polanski has been guilty a couple of times — are essentially filmed versions of the stage show.

“When you create the play, the play is like a dream that happens in the dark,” Cowell says. In his staged productions, he invented brands that Ruben sold while scenes, such as the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, could be more heightened and ridiculous.

“You can do that in the theatre because the world doesn’t exist in the theatre, it refers to the world,” Cowell says. “But in film things have to be a little more literal. The supermodel has to look like a supermodel.”

Which means the Sydney advertising world in which Ruben revels is comprised of real-life brands and products. State tourism agency Destination NSW is a major partner of the film, as are the Australian Turf Club, advertising agency George Patterson Y&R, Lexus and Qantas. All are referred to and viewed lavishly throughout the film.

Cowell admits he spruiked the film to raise financing but he has no idea about how the financing came together. It doesn’t matter “because I concentrated on the storytelling, the shots, the actors, and the post-production” and, creatively, he was pushing the need for “authenticity”.

“And I looked at what Mad Men had done with Betty Draper hosting the Heineken nights and the way they used Lucky Strike as a client,” he adds. “It added authenticity.”

Indeed, the entire film has a patina, arguably overload, of authenticity. The advertising industry is musing happily about a particularly notorious adman of the 1990s and 2000s who lived such a life before burning out, although Cowell is quick to disavow them despite his research into the sector.

“It’s pretty well documented that I had a year off alcohol in 2007 that inspired the stage play,” Cowell says. “To quash all those rumours, I can show you the first three drafts where Ruben was a TV writer who dated an actress and I thought, I just couldn’t write the truth.”

Cowell was in a long-term relationship with Rose Byrne at the time. The real-life writing scenario bored him though.

“I didn’t want to write a thing about a TV writer and I heard a couple of writers saying that if you want to write about yourself, write about someone else and then tell the truth. Take a step away.” So he took a step away into the advertising industry, which happened to help the production of the film financially and thematically.

Cowell had his own experi­ences of the sector as an actor, writer and voiceover man.

He says with a laugh that he has been in “those rooms having seven people arguing about whether I should say ‘ULTRA whitening toothpaste’ or ‘ultra WHITENING toothpaste’, and they’ll bring me back the next day and tell me ‘we’ve decided we want ‘ultra’ and ‘whitening’ and ‘toothpaste’ all to be hit.”

“The thing is they are really good at it because it can be the difference between something selling or not.”

And the sector has a culture of drinking, which intersected with Cowell’s focus.

“Advertising, like drinking, is about instant satisfaction,” he says.

“Also, it allowed me to talk about what we’re told to do. And how much we do is because we are instructed by society or each other or by family and friends. Do we go out and drink like this because we’re expected to?

“And for a guy actually railing about that in his personal life but condoning that in his professional life, it’s a wonderful kind of man in crisis moment.”

Cowell recalls the play itself took off once he incorporated jingles and ads, which added a “sickly feeling” that worked against its black comedy and theme.

“Ruben Guthrie’s holding a gun in the movie and points itself at lots of possible culprits like industry, love, breakups, parents and genetics, Australia, male depression ...”

The film’s trick is not pointing at one as the culprit, although the reaction to the film suggests the drinking culture is particularly pervasive across all work environments, Cowell says. The more he discusses the film with viewers, the more he thinks “maybe it’s not just the acting, journalism or advertising fraternities (indulging). Maybe it’s everyone.”

Just different qualities of booze?

Cowell laughs. “Or different agendas.”

The booze, in some respects, is merely a crutch for Brammall’s Ruben. Cowell says his research introduced many men in the advertising culture “who have done that thing where they burn themselves out to 38, get someone pregnant, settle down and turn into sparkling water-drinking good guys.

“A lot of those guys do struggle with the middle ground, not unlike myself,” says the co-writer of The Slap and Love My Way.

“It’s an ongoing thing. A lot of guys do get to that 40 age and go, ‘Oh, I’m tired of the struggle, I’m going to stay home, hit the Netflix and give up the fight.’ ”

So where are you at, I ask the 38-year old?

“I’m doing dry July,” he says with a grin. “That’s where I’m at.”

This weekend in Review David Stratton reviews Ruben Guthrie