Meaty role proves a lucky break

TEEN heart-throb Zac Efron gets to play a grown-up in Scott Hicks's new drama.

Director Scott Hicks

ZAC Efron emerges from a dust cloud, dazed and shell-shocked, following an explosion in the Iraqi desert. Clad in marines-issue khaki, semi-automatic rifle in hand, he flexes a bicep, raises the weapon to his shoulder and scours the landscape for the enemy.

It's a long, long way from High School Musical, the all-singing, all-dancing, all-smiling teen franchise that made Efron the pin-up boy for young girls across the world. But the 24-year-old, who plays Sergeant Logan Thibault in Australian director Scott Hicks's new romantic drama The Lucky One, is on a mission to prove he's a serious actor. A grown-up.

It's a notion not lost on Hicks, whose film had its world premiere in Sydney on Monday night, an event, ironically enough, attended by thousands of screaming girls.

"I've never seen anything quite like that," Hicks says, laughing. "And Zac is great with all that. But this film is part of a transition he is making in his career. He is focusing on moving into more dramatic roles and he does this one well."

While Hicks, 59, feels a small debt of responsibility for helping Efron "move on", he says the young actor needed little encouragement. "I was well aware of his reputation and his history, but what really struck me when I met Zac was there was a real eagerness to take this on," he says. "He is way outside of his comfort zone in this film and I was impressed by that.

"He made a pledge to me from the outset that he was going to do whatever was required to make this movie. As a director that means a great deal."

Whatever was required involved Efron losing his trademark shopfront-fringe and rising at 3.30am every day as part of an exercise regime that saw him pile on 9kg of muscle to play the withdrawn marine sergeant.

The film, based on a Nicholas Sparks novel, follows Logan, a veteran of three tours of duty who witnesses the death of his best friend in an improvised explosive device attack and ambush. Amid the chaos, death and rubble, he happens upon a picture of a woman. In the days and weeks that follow, he tries fruitlessly to locate the picture's owner. Keeping the picture with him for good luck, he vows to track down the woman on his return to the US to "thank her for keeping me safe". Suffering the onset of post-traumatic stress syndrome (which to Hicks's credit is not overdone), Logan sets out across the US to find his good-luck charm, Beth (Taylor Schilling), a single mother beholden to the manipulations of an abusive ex-husband (played with reliable menace by Jay Ferguson). When he does find her, he finds it difficult to leave.

The film was shot entirely on location in Louisiana, which offers a generous tax rebate scheme for filmmakers. "It made the opening war scenes pretty difficult," Hicks says. "But it was a wonderful place to work."

The crew shot for the best part of 12 months in the southern US state before editing the film in a locale a little closer to Hicks's heart: the tiny South Australian coastal village of Port Elliot.

"I always edit my movies at home," says Hicks. "I have a beach house down the south coast, and Warner Bros rented a number of houses for the crew (including Australian editor Scott Gray) from LA and Sydney to live in."

Hicks says the American post-production teams were initially worried about the idea. "They were saying 'What? This place doesn't even have a gas station?' But they soon realised they were in heaven. It was a wonderful atmosphere for that contemplative part of filmmaking."

The film's visual effects were done by Adelaide outfit Kojo. Indeed, special effects -- while they may be fleeting -- open the film with a bang: night-vision cameras and super-high definition cameras depicting US forces at work.

"I wanted to capture some of the rawness and pulse-racing feel that I got from looking at videos on YouTube of actual night raids," Hicks says.

Cinematographer Alar Kivilo shot the war scenes with a Canon D5 stills camera, and "loved embracing the new media". In one memorable scene, a high-speed Weisscam -- which shoots thousands of frames a second -- films Efron's face, rippling with shock waves, following an IED explosion. "His face just kind of melts," Hicks says. "One second becomes something like 10 minutes."

Hicks says he was intrigued about the prospect of using the war as a backdrop for romance. "The war has become more and more in the consciousness of popular culture and entertainment. It's part of the social fabric, even in romance," he says.

Kivilo's sumptuous cinematography in the film's latter half is an antidote to the earlier depictions of war-ravaged Iraq, and he makes the most of the southern locale. "The afternoon sun permeates everything," Hicks says.

The love story unfolds in a bucolic country house, which acts as a healing tonic for the war-weary Logan. Hicks says Efron's role will surprise some people.

"It's a big stretch for him . . . he is playing someone withdrawn, someone grown-up." Indeed it's not until the film's latter half that we see the slightest hint of Efron's famous simper. And his steamy sex scenes with Schiller should leave one in no doubt about his filmic shift into adulthood.

Hicks, whose Shine, the 1996 Oscar-winning biopic of David Helfgott starring Geoffrey Rush, remains his piece de resistance, admits The Lucky One will be one of his biggest budget releases in the US. And he is looking forward to its national release there on April 19.

"The great thing is when you come to this end of the process, when they release a movie, they really release it," he says. "It's opening in the States on 3000 screens. To me, that's staggering."

Hicks, who was born in Uganda, grew up in Kenya and lived in England before moving to Australia in his teens, certainly likes to mix things up.

He says he loves the freedom to genre-hop: his work ranges from biopics and features (his 1999 Snow Falling on Cedars was nominated for an Academy Award and 2007's The Boys are Back did well locally) to documentary and big-budget commercials ("which I'm still doing in my spare time"). But the Adelaide local, who is working on a new screenplay, says he is hoping to focus on more Australian work.

"This is my home. This is where I live," he says. "I might be elsewhere for stretches of time, but I love home."

The Lucky One opens nationally on April 19.