Justin Kurzel and his wife Essie Davis were in London in 2019 to share the thrill when their friend Richard Flanagan scooped the Booker Prize for fiction with The Narrow Road to the Deep North. The story drew on Flanagan’s father’s experiences working as a Japanese prisoner of war on the Burma Railway. “The thing that fascinated me most about it, that struck me as so original, was that so much of it was told through memory,” says Kurzel. “There was a feeling of looking back through time.”
Jacob Elordi as young doctor Dorrigo Evans in The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
That quality was to become key to bringing the book to the screen. Kurzel’s films include the landmark true-crime drama Snowtown, Macbeth, Nitram and, most recently, the excellent Amazon drama about a Southern guns-and-God cult, The Order. “Never in a million years did I imagine Richard would ask us to turn his book into a film,” he said when the five-part series, scripted by Shaun Grant, first screened at the Berlin Film Festival this year. “But he did. I was very nervous about it, but he was very kind and just said, ‘You have to promise me to make it your own.’ ”
Brisbane-born Jacob Elordi – whose intensity in roles as varied as Nate in Euphoria, the unattainable Felix in Saltburn and Elvis in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla has made him a distinctive star – returned to Australia to play the central role. Dorrigo Evans is a young medical officer taken prisoner by the Japanese. Quiet at home, he is thrust by war into leadership, shouldering the responsibility of trying to keep his men alive.
Ciaran Hinds plays him in later life, now a wealthy doctor, sophisticated arts patron and reluctant ribbon-cutting war hero. He becomes the public figure his country wants and needs. “You have this duality,” says Kurzel, “between his grace, what he represents and what he survived and the very different sort of being he is in private, living deep in the shadows of what happened to him.”
Jacob Elordi (left) and Justin Kurzel, director of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival.
Kurzel’s maternal grandfather was a Rat of Tobruk; his grandfather on the other side, a Polish immigrant, had been imprisoned in labour camps. “So I grew up with these important men in my life who lived with the fog of war.” Grant’s grandfather, like Flanagan’s father, worked on the Burma Line. He never spoke about it. Reading The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Grant says, made him feel he knew his grandfather a little better.
Woven into Evans’s war trauma is another weighty memory: an illicit summer love affair. Young Dorrigo is already engaged to elegant Ella (Olivia DeJonge), seemingly happily, when he goes to stay at the isolated seaside pub run by his uncle Keith (Simon Baker) and his much younger wife Amy (Odessa Young). Amy is messy, spontaneous and Bohemian; he falls hard for her. His imminent deployment makes their love possible, but also more urgent. In the camp, her memory sustains him; in later life, duly married and immured in a great glass modernist cube of a house, he is still haunted by that irrecoverable joy.
Dorrigo Evans (Jacob Elordi) meets Amy (Odessa Young) in The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
“I had never done a love story and it really worried me, whether I could do it,” says Kurzel. “But I just loved it.” What intrigued him in the book, he says, was that the relationship achieves its greatest significance as something remembered. “The perspective was unique; I hadn’t seen it in film before. She becomes this sanctuary and life force and hope for him. The relationship becomes even more powerful because it is no longer a real relationship.”
War stories often hinge on the longing for the woman at home: the photograph whipped out at quiet moments, the sense there is someone specific to be protected. “But usually, it’s about going back to that person,” says Kurzel. “That somehow he has endured and survived in order to be with her.” That doesn’t happen.
Adds Grant: “Love can hurt. And having lost it, he has this cross to bear, this scar, that he has to carry for the rest of his life.”
The Australian soldiers working on the Death Railway in a scene from The Narrow Road to the Deep North.
Braiding the timelines together – the summer of love before Dorrigo is posted, the work on the line in 1943, the later scenes in 1989 – was no easy matter. At the outset, Flanagan stressed the importance of the mosaic pattern in the text. “It was integral: to tell it chronologically just wouldn’t be the same,” says Grant. The problem, says Kurzel, is that flashing back and forth is usually jolting. “But I was amazed in the edit, how fluid and kind of opaque those periods were as they worked over each other. They kissed!”
One unifying factor is a subdued colour palette. The pub is tobacco brown; grey clouds hang over the beach where the lovers frolic; the jungle – actually a rainforest near Sydney – is dark, misty and murky. The murk helps obscure the joins. “With the jungle, I was quite influenced by a lot of Caravaggio’s paintings,” says Kurzel. “The idea was that it wasn’t about an expanse of green, it was actually about how the jungle closed in. What you actually saw were the bodies.”
The men’s bodies, he says, tell the story. Both the key cast and the background actors were put on severe diets so when the camp scenes were filmed, they were just bones inside their uniforms. “I wasn’t so interested in the literalness of, ‘OK, we’re going now to Burma and this is what it’s going to be.’ It was really about what’s his memory of it, what are the things that are highlighted from that memory? And to me, it was what those men became in that landscape.”
Kurzel and Grant felt this was an important Australian story to tell – Kurzel describes being entrusted with it as a privilege – not least because the people who lived it rarely spoke of it. Come 1989, Dorrigo Evans maintains his silence, surrounded by luxury and status that doesn’t seem to touch him. “I think we live in a society where we look at people and judge them for what they are very quickly,” says Grant. “You see this person with what seems to be the perfect life. Then you realise you don’t know what he’s gone through – or what’s going through his head.”
The Narrow Road to the Deep North premieres on Amazon Prime Video on April 18.
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