The Dry director Robert Connolly on his new movie Blueback
He defied the odds with his hit movie The Dry. Now Robert Connolly is focused on a sea-based epic — and saving Australian cinema.
Even if Robert Connolly were the type for vainglorious gestures, which he isn’t, and even if he weren’t currently miles from anywhere, filming at the bottom of the world, which he is, he’d be too exhausted for a victory lap. He can barely lift his mug of strong coffee.
The Balibo and Paper Planes director is in the midst of a tricky shoot in Bremer Bay, a cinematically windswept spot on the south coast of Western Australia. Blueback, based on a 1998 Tim Winton novella, has a short production schedule, which means seven-day weeks. And it’s a sea-based shoot, which means changeable weather and uncontrollable waves, underwater filming and sometimes four boats strapped together, lurching beneath a large-format camera that has only a passing acquaintance with stability. It also stars a giant animatronic fish.
So, lots to deal with. There’s little energy and certainly no time to properly celebrate a milestone achievement that would have any Australian filmmaker popping corks and punching the air. The Dry, Connolly’s handsome and gripping crime thriller, passed $20m at the box office five weeks into the Blueback shoot, making it one of the most successful Australian films of all time. Successful like Crocodile Dundee, Babe and Strictly Ballroom. Surpassing classics such as Muriel’s Wedding and even Gallipoli, his idol Peter Weir’s masterpiece.
“I couldn’t be more excited for anyone than I am for Robert at the moment,” says close friend Eric Bana, who shares a Port Melbourne warehouse space with Connolly’s production company Arenamedia. The star of Hulk, Troy and Munich made his first Australian film in 13 years with The Dry and is reteaming with Connolly for Blueback. “He’s made great films before but to have something play so widely is fantastic.”
For two decades Connolly, 53, has turned out high-quality, defiantly Australian films, often with a sharp political focus. He’s been a champion of local cinema and a mentor to emerging talent; a resolutely individual artist who refused to bow to commercial imperatives even as he edged in from the radical fringes. Now the mild-mannered maverick has delivered a blockbuster. It’s as if Clark Kent entered a phone booth and emerged as a triumphant indie crusader. Superman in skinny jeans.
“The Dry’s success has been far beyond my wildest dreams, really,” he says quietly. “I’m really proud of its performance because I think it shows Australians love seeing Australian films and they love sharing them with their friends and family and they love going out.”
Even if Connolly were impolite enough to do so, which he isn’t, he’d probably be too exhausted to extend the middle digit of his right hand and aim it at the naysayers who said it was madness to release a local film, on New Year’s Day, in the midst of a pandemic. And he’d never say “I told you so” to a federal government he sees as encouraging Netflix, Amazon and other streaming services at the expense of cinema, boosting Hollywood output over home-grown fare. But you can bet your $20 movie ticket he’d like to.
Bremer Bay is beautiful. Untouched and untamed: the ideal setting for a family-friendly eco-fable about a young girl who befriends a giant blue groper and fights to defend its ocean home. Winton himself suggested the tiny hamlet as a stand-in for the fictional town of Longboat, and further scenes were filmed off the state’s north-west coast, at Ningaloo Reef, which the author has long campaigned to protect.
But let’s take a look through a filmmaker’s eye, one that sees potential where others don’t, one that views the Australian film industry through a prism of ineffable pride and enchantment. The filmmaker’s eye that looked at Jane Harper’s best-selling novel The Dry and saw an epic story of home, that sees in Blueback another way to celebrate the grandeur of a country he’s never been tempted to leave.
“It’s kind of pretty and picturesque with sweet little secluded bays, but it is the Antarctic below so it’s also tough and muscular with high winds and big waves,” Connolly says, surveying the bay from his temporary perch above Dillon Beach. The nearest cinema is a three-hour drive away. “It’s an epic landscape, magnificent on camera, so I’m really enjoying filming here.”
No one has filmed in Bremer Bay before, which fits with Connolly’s mantra: you never want to be the first person to do it second. He’s swollen the town’s permanent population of 350, bringing a 60-person crew and Hollywood actors Bana, Mia Wasikowska and Radha Mitchell to live among the locals (after the requisite quarantine period). It’s a buoyant and collegial set because that’s how he always works. “He’s great at harnessing people’s energy and enthusiasm and to be in that orbit is fantastic,” Bana says.
The Dry set was similarly tight-knit, with the entire production based in Victoria’s sunbaked Wimmera region for three months. “There’s magic in actually going somewhere and then taking an audience there,” Connolly says. He calls The Dry a “hyper-Australian film”: an all-local cast, with local locations, based on a local book. “It hasn’t compromised its Australian-ness in any way,” he says. “And it tells an authentic story about regional Australia, which is a really important part of our national identity.” The film, which will open in North America next month, has had a particularly strong showing in the bush. “Exhibitors have been calling me from places I’ve never heard of,” he says. “I had to look up where they were. In some country towns it’s like the whole town saw the film three times.”
Connolly has directed high-end television: episodes of The Slap, Underground: the Julian Assange Story and the big-budget international spy thriller series Deep State. “So I don’t judge television at all,” he says. “But I’ve devoted my life to this passionate love of cinema; I have a deep, philosophical love for the collective experience of watching a film in the dark on a big screen.”
The global pandemic has threatened the already shaky viability of theatres as movie fans become used to watching blockbusters delivered direct to their increasingly grand home-entertainment systems. In its Global Entertainment and Media Outlook Report 2020-24, PricewaterhouseCoopers projected a 65 per cent drop in global cinema revenue, with little hope for recovery within the next five years. Australia’s forecast is equally grim: box office revenue, which totalled $1.23bn in 2019, is set to fall to $990m by 2024.
Connolly is characteristically contrarian, adamant that cinema’s demise is greatly exaggerated. He believes that if you make it big enough, they will come. They may even bring their family. “I’ve been trying to crack this nut for a while,” he says, pointing to his 2013 film The Turning, an audacious three-hour “cinema event” in which 17 different directors each adapted a chapter of Tim Winton’s short story collection.
Connolly’s shooting now with large-format cameras, which create more room in the frame to tell a story. To ensnare more magic. “You know, big music, big-name actors, big scale and a different narrative structure,” he says. “TV’s all about plot, plot, plot; a quick succession of turning points. No matter how big your home screen is, it’s a bite-sized experience, made to binge. But cinema allows people to sit there and say, ‘Oh my lord, this is so beautiful and epic’. You can take your time with things.”
His faith in cinema’s future is where Connolly appears to part ways with the Federal Government. Proposed media reforms set to come into effect from July 1 include a reduction in the producer tax offset from 40 per cent of a film’s production costs to 30 per cent. At the same time, the offset for TV projects would rise from 20 per cent to 30 per cent. To Connolly, this looks an awful lot like throwing local cinema under the bus in favour of streaming services.
Bryan Brown backs him up. The actor, with Simon Baker, Marta Dusseldorp and Justine Clarke, visited Parliament House last month to argue the case for Australian screen culture. Rattling off the names of classic films from Breaker Morant and Picnic at Hanging Rock through Mad Max, Animal Kingdom and The Sapphires, Brown also warned against reducing the offset for local films while providing incentives for offshore productions. The current influx of Hollywood productions might provide welcome local jobs and a boost to the economy, he said, but the films “will have bugger-all to do with the Australian story”.
Bana says that without funding support, The Dry would never have been made. “There’s absolutely no doubt we’re at a precarious time,” he says. “If the rebate gets reduced from 40 per cent, we’re going to be in a pretty dire position. I think every country wants to see their own stories told. You deny a country a sense of themselves by not allowing that to happen.”
Communications and the Arts Minister Paul Fletcher has maintained the new approach will support Australian producers to follow “emerging opportunities”, including the rapidly growing global streaming market. The government’s stance was proved wrong over the summer, Connolly says, when Aussie films Penguin Bloom, Rams and High Ground joined The Dry at the top of the box office. “I think they made a mistake last year when Covid-19 was impacting and no one thought cinema would ever recover and they saw the future as streaming,” he says. “It’s a pity they are often too proud to reorient their decision-making when something comes along that should change the narrative. I think they’ve made an error that will carry years into the future when the damage to Australian cinema is fully seen.”
Connolly saw a glimpse of that future when he made the 2014 film Paper Planes, largely so his own young daughters – he has two with casting director wife Jane Norris – would have an Australian film to watch. “The kids who auditioned for that film, a huge number of them put on American accents!” he says.
Glenbrook Cinema, in the lower Blue Mountains, looks more like a Rotary hall for hire than a repository of movie magic. Blond brick, tin roof: “The little cinema with the big smile.” Young Robert, living a free-range bush childhood in nearby Blaxland, saw Storm Boy and Gallipoli there with his school. He visited Richmond’s art deco Regent Theatre, owned at the time by television personality Mike Walsh. Later, there were Alien and 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Penrith Plaza multiplex and an illicit tiptoe into the city to watch the R-rated Rambo. “There’s a whole rich experience I had at the cinema long before I ever thought I’d make a creative life,” he says.
Before the digital revolution, filmmaking was a rich person’s game. His mother was a piano teacher, his father worked in computing, so Connolly, the eldest of three, settled on a career in theatre. He formed a fringe theatre company called Missing Link Productions and it was while producing a stage play of The Boys in 1991 that he met actor David Wenham. Upon graduating from the Australian Film Television and Radio School, he went on to produce a low-budget film version of The Boys, with Rowan Wood directing and Wenham starring alongside then-unknowns Toni Collette and John Polson. The film made just $700,000 at the box office but it won a slew of AFI awards and launched his career.
Connolly doffs and dons a procession of hats: sometimes he’ll write and direct (The Bank), other times he’ll produce (Romulus, My Father). Sometimes, as with Balibo, a hard-hitting drama investigating the 1975 deaths of five journalists in East Timor, he’ll direct and co-write (in that case with David Williamson).
In 1998, Variety named Connolly one of the 10 best emerging producers in the world and, around the time of Balibo’s 2009 release, he flirted with Hollywood. But he’d just moved to Melbourne and into an office with Bana, had a thriving business and a young family and was “loving the life I was living”, he says. “A creative life lived with friends and family, I still pinch myself that I get to do it. And Australia allows you the opportunity to control your own work. I’ve had people try to buy my company but I’ve always resisted. I love waking up every morning and I’m my own person.”
In 2008, Connolly joined the board of Screen Australia and published a White Paper, Embracing Innovation, that sought to light a fire under a rigid and outdated Australian film industry caught in a budgetary “no-man’s land” between big Hollywood productions and a surplus of bolder independent films. “I wrote that to provoke a shift in the methodology,” he says. “It’s a feeling I have that the way you make a film is infused into the film itself. The more conservative the methodology was, the more conservative the films were becoming. Things have changed but I think it’s still a relevant question: we’re trying to make this highly industrial process feel like you’re splashing paint on a canvas every day.”
Risk. Art is nothing without it. Producer John Maynard, a mentor and early collaborator, drilled this into him: Unless you have the guts to walk to the precipice of complete and utter failure, you will only ever do mediocre work. Having nailed down the technical aspects of filmmaking, Connolly has begun calibrating risk with his heart. “I’m a chess player, my brain thinks almost scientifically sometimes,” he says. “But as I’ve become more confident as a filmmaker the risk is about what I’m willing to expose emotionally. Certainly my work became richer when I had children.”
Connolly admits to an “anxiety about the level of privilege” he’s experienced as a filmmaker. In the spirit of redress, his Arenamedia, with Film Victoria and SBS, has just launched an initiative called Originate to develop three low-budget feature scripts by filmmakers from diverse backgrounds. One of those will go into production with a $1.5m budget and a guaranteed cinema release, before being screened on SBS TV. “When I talk about diverse, I mean culturally diverse but also demographically diverse,” he says. “I think our cinema traditions will be richer for it.”
Liz Kearney was a Perth-based producer in her early 30s – “totally green” – when Connolly agreed to mentor her debut film These Final Hours. “He took a massive risk with me,” says Kearney, who was subsequently brought on as a partner in Arenamedia. “I’m in awe of his limitless ability to give back, his focus on giving new people a go. He’s a firm believer Australian film is not going anywhere and he’s dedicated to inspiring others to take up the mantle. I’m so happy for him that The Dry has done well because it reinforces and solidifies what he has held true to this entire time.”
The victory lap, when it comes, will be as low-key as the man. Connolly had a “quiet beer” with Bana while the actor was in Bremer Bay and they’re planning a “nice dinner” back in Melbourne later this month. “One of the great joys about the success of The Dry is that Eric and I have been able to enjoy it together as friends,” he says. Maybe they’ll go crazy and open a bottle of red.
Meanwhile, there’s this behemoth of a film and Winton’s fish that’s “as big as a horse”, with fins “like ping-pong paddles”. Connolly’s immersed in Blueback but he’s also looking out over the dunes to the wave-pounded shore and the Great Southern Ocean beyond. Past the deep sea canyon where, during a six-week period over summer, a nutrient-rich current flows up from the south, attracting an intensity of marine life: killer whales, sharks, dolphins and giant squid. Beyond to a wild, virtually uninhabited land of towering icebergs, glaciers and subzero blizzards.
Why not add the elemental forces of snow and ice to his recent films honouring the sea and thirsty earth? He chuckles softly: “I’ve always wanted to film in Antarctica.”
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