Wrestling with an oncoming tidal wave of foreign emotions, Carr nevertheless had to figure out how to reinvent himself, how to go from a shell-shocked widower to a hands-on dad with the wherewithal to bring his family back from the brink. It wasn’t easy, and there was no map. He dodged all the do-gooder advice, and started his own experiment in what he called “free range” parenting. He proudly made every mistake in the book. And yet, somehow, day after day, struggle after struggle, Carr and his two sons found a way to grab onto momentary pleasures – and each other – as they began to reemerge as a stronger, different kind of family unit than they might have imagined. Though they called themselves “The Lost Boys,” father and sons found something vitally sustaining in each other – and in the human spirit’s capability to survive a world where nothing, ever, can be taken for granted.
In 2001, Carr published his memoir, The Boys Are Back to stellar reviews and a passionate readership. The Daily Mail called it “achingly funny and almost unbearably moving” and the Sunday Times said “Carr’s brilliantly written account of life as a single parent should be a required manual on parenting.” For Carr, the book was a chance to not only come to grips with what had happened to him, but to write about family from a perspective that has long been a mysterious blank spot in literature and film: the “dad” POV, and especially how dads interact with their kids. “I wrote the book as an explication of what it was like for a single father to bring up two boys in an all-male household,” he says. “Our role as fathers hasn’t been all that well-explored over the last 25 years and I wanted to make up a bit for that, because we do it completely differently from the way that women do.”
Carr generated controversy by writing candidly about his exuberant “Just Say Yes” policy that resulted in all kinds of unforeseen mischief, including the transformative day his younger son decided to leap off a window sill into their large bath tub. “Of course my first instinct was to say ‘you can’t, do that, you might hurt yourself,’” Carr recalls, “but the truth is I will remember that evening the rest of my life. On my dying day, I will lie in my bed and look into the increasing darkness and remember the exhilarating joy on my son’s face.” It was that exhilarating joy — a welcoming back of life in all its messiness and unpredictability — that Carr hoped to share by telling his story with gritty honesty.
Of course, he could not have foreseen that his intimate confessions of how he simultaneously faced incomprehensible loss and fledgling fatherhood would one day result in a screen character brought to life with raw emotions by one of today’s most sought-after leading men – Academy Award® nominee and Golden Globe® winner Clive Owen — in an exposed dramatic turn. Carr’s name would be shifted to Joe Warr, and details of his family’s story would be changed, but when all was said and done, Carr was stunned to see the movie reflect back to him both some of the most devastating and most wonderful moments of his life.
He admits that this process – of taking his still-raw, emotional experience, turning it into a book and then watching an extraordinary creative team transform it into a stirring screen drama — hasn’t been without difficulty, but he says it’s worth it for a story he still believes is worth sharing. Carr summarizes: “Making the film has been moving and it’s brought back a lot of memories. We were all excited about seeing the actors recreate our lives, but we also had to be brave.”
The Screenplay
Shortly after the publication of The Boys are Back, Simon Carr found himself in a surreal conversation with Peter Bennett-Jones, chairman of Tiger Aspect Pictures, whose films include the critical smash, coming-of-age tale Billy Elliot. Having fallen head over heals for Carr’s memoir, Bennett-Jones told him outright that he thought it would make a terrific film. “My pessimism was utterly confounded by Peter’s determination to get this project out,” admits Carr.
The team at Tiger Aspect was driven to make the film in part because they saw something fresh in Carr’s story that hadn’t been brought to the screen. Explains Tiger Aspect Pictures’ co-chair man and producer Greg Brenman, “We felt the story had real appeal because it uniquely captures the wildness of spirit and the sort of semi-feral way that men bring up kids,” he says. “At the same time, it’s about the memorable experiences that we all have in childhood.”
And at the heart of it all was the character of Carr himself. “He’s such a larger than life, outrageous, intentionally contentious and provocative, charming, seductive guy that we felt that his spirit and essence would make for an unforgettable lead character,” says Brenman.
Undeterred by Carr’s momentary skepticism, Tiger Aspect undertook a search for a screenwriter who could match Carr’s seriocomic sensibilities and found exactly that in Allan Cubitt. Although best known for his work on the multi award-winning British mystery series Prime Suspect 2, Cubitt’s work is diverse, ranging from adaptations of Anna Karenina and The Hound of the Baskervilles to the BBC mini-series, The Hanging Gale, about a family in the midst of the Irish Potato famine. It was his passion for Carr’s book that made him the winning candidate.
“I loved the book,” Cubitt says. “There were so many things that struck me as true and interesting and funny. The challenge of it, though, was that it’s a very much structured as a memoir, as a series of reflections on life and death and parenting and everything else that comes into Simon’s orbit. We had to take that essence and find a way to make it work in a film narrative.”
During early drafts, Cubitt began to mold the character of Joe Warr, relocating the story from New Zealand (where Carr moved as a British expat) to Australia and changing his occupation from political journalism to a more action-oriented sportswriter. As he wrote about him, Cubitt began to form a great deal of love and compassion for the emerging character. “I felt great sympathy and empathy with Joe, and I hope he has achieved an independent life of his own,” says Cubitt. “His joy and pain were both so real to me that I was frequently in tears while writing.”
To garner further insight, Cubitt met with UK sports journalist Richard Williams to learn more about a sportswriter’s lifestyle. “Sports is a really exciting thing to write about and I wanted Joe to write the sort of colorful, personal column that people enjoy reading so much. I had in mind someone like Martin Amis writing about tennis,” says the screenwriter. “And when Richard said that he was often away for 265 days of the year, that seemed to me to fit well with who Joe is when his wife dies.”
But the heart of the story for Cubitt lay in excavating all the nooks and crannies of father-son relationships at their most vulnerable and vital. “One of the big questions in the book is how do you bring up boys? How do you see them through trauma? And how does a man find a way to relate to his sons? I wanted to expose on screen those things that men don’t necessarily do when women are around, to explore the intimacy of their relationships, which are physical and sporty but I think also very touching and true,” sums up Cubitt.
The Boys Come Together
With a screenplay that was equal parts exuberant and emotionally stripped-bare, as well as set in Australia, Brenman had focused in on one particular director who seemed born for the material. This was Scott Hicks, who directed the critically acclaimed, multi Oscar®-nominated film Shine, a worldwide box office hit, which recounted the intensely moving, often funny story of an Australian pianist’s breakdown and recovery, and garnered Geoffrey Rush the Academy Award® for Best Actor for his richly human performance. “With Shine, Scott conveyed to the world that he is a master at working with actors and a master at working with complicated chamber pieces – which is the nature of family life,” says Greg Brenman.
Since Shine, Hicks has directed a number of Hollywood features, ranging from Snow Falling on Cedars and Hearts in Atlantis to the recent No Reservations, but THE BOYS ARE BACK would bring Hicks himself back — not only home to his beloved South Australia, but to the theme of family upheaval and the inner territory of personal transformations in the midst of an absurdly impossible situation.
Hicks remembers being knocked out by the screenplay’s distinctive tone. “I loved the combination of emotion and humor,” he says. “Often in our darkest moments it is humor that gets us through. I think it a national characteristic of Australians and it is something of a feature of my work in the sense that Shine was a film that, in addition to being very emotional, was also quite funny.”
When he read the book, Allan Cubitt’s adaptation impressed him even more. “Carr’s book is extremely entertaining, and very moving but it’s not a conventional narrative. Al had the challenge of creating a story that could thread together all these family incidents and he did a remarkable job of that,” he says. “My challenge was to then kind of unravel that and work out the choreography – the physical expression of the scenes — in a way that is alive and real.”
As Hicks began working closely with Cubitt, he found himself more and more swept up in the Carr family’s unusual trek towards reconciliation. “It’s a very personal story about people trying to reconnect with each another and about all these ingredients– love, loss, humor –which make up our everyday existence,” says Hicks. “As a father, I couldn’t help but identify with the situations and emotional conflicts, which made it very close to home.”
He continues: “I found Joe’s story so very touching – the way the trauma of his wife’s sudden death forces him to wake up emotionally and realize that he has to pay attention or he will lose his sons. It’s something I think a lot of people will relate to. People’s lives are so frenetic now and raising children is so hugely attention consuming. It’s a dilemma that so many people face: how do I balance everything else in my life with my family? I think that’s really the center of this story. And it’s the stuff of great drama, because it deals with people’s vulnerabilities.”
Hicks also viewed the story as a romance – not your typical love story but, rather, about the romantic ideals of creating a sustaining family, no matter how unconventional. “The real love story of this film is about a father and two sons,” comments Hicks. “The family undertakes a kind of human experiment — a household of boys in the absence of women — and yet somehow it works. The thing I wanted to get across in the end is that, with all the mistakes and the mess and the blunders, Joe brings his family back together. Is it all going to be easy and straightforward? I don’t think so, but that’s what life is like, and that’s the feeling I wanted in the film.”
As the team continued to work, Brenman also brought on board Australian-based producer Tim White, who was enamored with the finished script, noting that, unlike many films today, it works its spell on you slowly. “It insidiously took me in its grip,” says White. “It’s a restrained story yet told with great insight. It was the central character that really got under my skin. Having had a busy career and having been an absent father, I had a real connection with Joe Warr and I think lots of people will. I love the fact that he’s by no means flawless. He has a wry sense of humor and can be his own worst enemy. I also like that it’s a story not so much about an event as about a state of mind and the desire we all have to create our own private family haven.”
The Boy Who Became A Single Dad
Scott Hicks was acutely aware that, much like Shine had, this film’s entire essence would hinge on a singular performance – that of the actor playing Joe Warr, who had to all at once be falling apart, raging against the darkness, indulging in black humor, covering the finals showdown at the Australian Open, and re-connecting with his sons on the most primitively playful level. It would take an intense performance from a highly skilled actor and Hicks thought early on of Clive Owen, who had never taken on a role quite like this one, but clearly had the depth to do so.
Owen first grabbed international attention in Mike Hodges’ tough, smart, modern noir, Croupier, playing an aspiring novelist who gets caught up in a heist scheme at a London casino – and deftly revealing his struggle to remain coolly detached even as he is seduced deeper and deeper into trouble. Soon after, Owen was awarded the Golden Globe® for Best Actor and an Academy Award nomination for Mike Nichols’ adaptation of the Broadway play Closer. As Larry the doctor, Owen played a man driven by desire yet yearning for intimacy and the The New York Times cited his “emotional self-exposure” as one of the film’s most powerful elements. More recently, Owen led the savvy bank robbers in Spike Lee’s departure thriller Inside Man and drew widespread critical praise as the world-weary, accidental hero of Alfonso Cuarón’s shattering dystopian fantasy, Children of Men. More recently, Owen’s seductive intensity lit up Tom Tykwer’s thriller, The International, and Tony Gilroy’s spy-versus-spy romance, Duplicity, reuniting him with Julia Roberts.
Even though he had never played someone like Joe Warr – a family man whose journey in THE BOYS ARE BACK takes place almost entirely under the skin – Hicks intuited that Owen would get to the bare core of the role. “Clive has a tremendous strength on screen, a great stillness about him that speaks of under-the-surface emotions. He is enormously subtle in his expressiveness so much of his performances comes from his eyes and the thoughts that radiate out of them, which make him very compelling to watch,” says the director. “He is also someone who clearly enjoys life and has a great sense of himself and, again, that radiates out of him. And like anyone who is at the top of his game at that level, he makes it all look easy.”
Owen was drawn to how the story seemed to weave the fabric of our everyday family lives into something illuminating. “It’s a very beautifully written script and every time I read it, I was practically in tears,” he comments. “The idea of losing a partner and being left with the children is devastating, and leaves Joe trying to navigate the ups and downs of being a single parent, as well as trying to recalibrate what their family life is. It’s all very complicated. Grief is complicated. Parenting is complicated. And I thought this script explored that as well as any I’ve read and that’s why I wanted to do this movie. It’s a really compelling mining of what parents feel.”
Equally intriguing to Owen was Joe’s personality, which makes his struggles with trying to set his family back on course even more evocative. “Joe is a very fallible character,” observes Owen. “He’s not naturally very good at family life and this is a crazy, upside-down, volatile time for him. There are moments when things get really out of hand and he does make some big mistakes, but ultimately, you see that he’s trying to do the right thing in his own way.”
From the start, Owen was 100% committed creatively, joining Hicks and Cubitt in probing conversations about the screenplay. “I spent longer with Clive going through this script than any other actor I’ve ever worked with. His attention to detail is painstaking,” says Hicks. Recalls producer Tim White: “I remember Clive sitting down in a windowless hotel room with Scott, Allan, Greg Brenman and myself and spending 8 hours just talking about the nuances of his character. We all walked away feeling very privileged to have an actor who was that devoted and who brought such a considered, insightful approach to taking this character from the page to the screen.”
On the set, Owen had an exhilarating experience, working, in a complete turnabout from his recent romantic comedies and action thrillers, almost entirely with two child actors. “I think the spirit of the movie lies in the children and how they perceive the world and how unpredictable they are,” comments Owen. “I found it really interesting as an actor because kids really test you, since they’re not exactly acting themselves. They’re not conscious of what they’re doing, while adult actors obviously are. So it’s challenging and also very exciting because every day you have the raw, real thing coming back at you.”
Observes Brenman: “Clive became the ideal Joe Warr because he made Joe his own. You see him being cantankerous, difficult, lacking sensitivity, yet also being extremely vulnerable and really learning to put his kids before his own feelings. In bringing all of that out, Clive made the journey of the film even more moving.”
Joe’s Boys
With Clive Owen cast as Joe Warr, finding a couple of young actors to take the roles of his two disparate sons was an even more daunting task. Nikki Barrett, the film’s Australian casting director, began by conducting a nation-wide search for Artie, the playful six-year old who has to try to make sense of the sudden departure of his mother from his life even as he watches his father nearly fall to pieces. Barrett looked at over 1000 boys, screen-tested another 100 and finally, short-listed about 20. Out of that group, Scott Hicks believed that a clear winner emerged: six year-old Sydney native Nicholas McAnulty, who makes his motion picture debut in THE BOYS ARE BACK.
Scott Hicks recalls: “When it came to Artie, I wanted someone who would be completely believable and the last thing I wanted was a ‘child actor.’ Nicholas really intrigued me, because he was so forthright for a six-year-old. He had no shyness and no inhibition about him. He was very direct and struck up a conversation with me like any adult might. In his audition, he clearly had the ability to put himself entirely into the moment. The next step was presenting him to Clive for his response because the connection between them was going to be so vital to the success of the film.”
Owen clicked immediately with Nicholas, something that quickly became obvious to everyone around them. “When you put them together, they became an instant family. They are spookily alike,” says Greg Brenman. Adds Owen: “With Nick we all took a gamble on a very unpredictable energy that kind of kept everyone – Scott, me, everybody — on their toes. We didn’t want to control it too much because that’s the energy at the heart of the film.”
The filmmakers’ instincts proved themselves on the set, as Nicholas gave himself over to sheer imagination. “This was an enormous task for a child to fulfill – to take on a leading role opposite an actor of the caliber of Clive Owen, and with a story as emotional as this, and yet Nicholas stood up to that challenge and everyday surprised me with something,” notes Hicks. “I was very keen to have Artie’s character, and indeed the whole film, have as much a sense of real life to it as possible, and Nick’s ability to imagine himself a part of this world led to some dazzlingly true moments.”
The search for Artie’s half brother, the teen-aged Harry, who comes from England to live with Joe and Artie quite abruptly, was equally challenging. As a young man torn between his divorced parents and full of roiling emotions and resentments, Harry’s arrival becomes a catalyst for his father’s quest to reunite his sons, no matter what it takes. “The Harry storyline with Joe is especially interesting because it’s about a boy who feels abandoned and a father who ran away, thinking he wasn’t needed, and their struggle to heal that wound,” comments Brenman. “We needed someone who could convey the awkward dynamic of an adolescent with his Dad, yet also the sense of what Harry is searching for.”
After a series of auditions in London with Nina Gold casting, Hicks again happened upon a young man whose presence took him aback. This was George MacKay, who was recently seen as the youngest Bielski brothers in Ed Zwick’s tale of Jewish rebellion against the Nazis, Defiance, starring with Daniel Craig and Liev Schrieber. “George’s reading was so touching and so subtle that it stuck in my mind,” Hicks recalls. “I felt that if somebody could, with no appearance of acting, touch me so strongly that he had to be worth exploring.”
When Hicks showed the tape of George’s audition to Clive Owen he says, “Clive just flipped out and said ‘he’s fantastic!’ and so we were both very excited about the idea of the two of them working together.”
MacKay was drawn right away to the script, which stood out among all the others he has read in his young career. “It makes you laugh and it touches you in all different ways,” he says. “I was interested in Harry because he’s quite a closed person and a he’s been a bit shaken up by everything that’s happened with his dad moving away. Shooting the film was quite emotional and I learned a lot.” The filmmakers were especially thrilled when MacKay performed the scene at the end of the film where he finally confronts Joe with all his bottled-up feelings of anger and need. “I was in tears watching George’s performance,” says Tim White. “It was really intense to see an adolescent male at his most vulnerable and to see him really make an impact on the character of Joe Warr.” The Boys’ Women: The Female Supporting Cast
Even as Joe Warr creates a kind of private realm of father-son interaction in their house, he is surrounded by a group of vivid female characters who also have a great impact on his life – chastising him, challenging him and pushing him to make his own difficult choices. Notes Greg Brenman: “On one level this film is all about boys, yet some of the ways we understand Joe is through the eyes of the women around him. He has incredibly important relationships with his wife Katy, his mother-in-law Barbara and with Laura, his newfound friend.”
In the early days after his wife’s passing, Joe comes to rely on and then resent the protective ministrations of his meticulous mother-in-law, Barbara. As played by the prolific Australian actress Julia Blake, most recently seen in X Men Origins: Wolverine, Barbara is a woman who must confront her own powerful sense of grief even as she watches her son-in-law blunder his way into single fatherhood.
When Barbara returns to her life in the vineyards, Joe retreats into his all-male world, with one exception – he finds himself accepting the kindness and friendship of his seemingly easy-going neighbor Laura. Laura plays a particularly vital role in Joe’s new life as a single dad, because she is a single mom who knows precisely what he is up against… and she both feels for him and is aghast at his state of cluelessness. Playing Laura is the Australian actress Emma Booth, who first drew attention in the 2007 feature film Introducing the Dwights. As a huge fan of Scott Hicks, Booth was excited just to audition for him. “I’ve always loved his work and admire everything he’s done and so I went in there very shaky and nervous,” she admits.
Despite all that, she knocked it out of the park and the role was hers, especially once the filmmakers saw her chemistry with Clive Owen, full of crackling tension and the suggestion of unexplored possibilities. Says Hicks of her performance: “It was a wonderful thing to experience her working with Clive. Her immediacy and spontaneity seemed to mesh perfectly with Clive’s precision and emotional subtlety. A really distinct feeling emerged between them as characters.”
The one thing that Laura’s part of the tale definitely isn’t, however, is a sentimental love story. “Laura has really met Joe at totally the wrong time in his life,” laughs Brenman. “Her character is significant because Laura is the one person who forces Joe to think about the ways he’s undertaking the role of dad. She’s also someone I think women will really relate to.”
The tension comes to a head one day when Laura discovers a frozen chicken in Joe’s bathtub. “I love that scene,” says Booth, “because it’s where Laura finally cracks and tells Joe she’s fed up. I think she’s part of turning point for Joe because she’s saying you can’t live like this. It makes him wake up and re-evaluate to a certain degree the way he’s raising his children and treating other people.”
Contrasting with the often daunting, sometimes promising, reality that Laura represents is the haunting presence of Joe Warr’s deceased wife, Katy, who remains his private confidante. For this key role, Hicks chose Laura Fraser, a native Glaswegian known for her work on British television. “In her audition, Laura gave a performance that was so immediate – it was as if the character of Katy had just walked into the room and started talking to me. There was no sense of artifice about it.” Fraser admits: “Katy is a tricky role, because she’s just sort of snapshots, these little moments of memory or fantasy for Joe. It was also quite tough as a parent myself putting myself in that mindset of the worries and doubts and fears of having to say goodbye to your children.”
And yet she was indelibly drawn to the character. “I think Katy was a really cool woman in life and now that she keeps re-appearing after death, she’s alternately amused, annoyed, disturbed and worried. She was always the responsible one but I think she also would understand that Joe is having a moment of needing to be a kid again himself.”
As for working with Clive Owen, Fraser remarks: “I simply believed that he was Joe. The way that Joe loves this character, it was really nice to be the recipient of that kind of warmth.”
Boys in Paradise: The Look Of The Film
While the THE BOYS ARE BACK treks through a whole wilderness of emotional terrain, it also explores a world in which Joe Warr hopes he can create a kind of idyllic hide-away for his family – amidst the undulating hills, fertile vineyards and secluded beaches of the Fleurieu Peninsula in South Australia. For Hicks, this stunning landscape — his home landscape and the same territory where he shot Shine – couldn’t have been a better match for the stripped-down nature of Joe’s story. “I have a very strong visual sensibility but that said, I wanted to try a completely new thing for me with this story, which was to forgo a lot of big cinematic gestures,” Hicks explains. “I had all the tools to do the flamboyant things one loves doing in movies, yet for this film, I wanted to restrain that and keep the imagery very still, the focus very much on the people in the frame. At the same time, I do believe the look of the film and its sense of place make it more enjoyable and more emotional. There’s real magic in the places we shot.”
To forge an atmosphere that would be starkly naturalistic yet visually intriguing, Hicks put together an entirely youthful creative team of fresh up-and-comers that includes director of photography Greig Fraser, production designer Melinda Doring, costume designer Emily Seresin and editor Scott Gray. “I had the chance to work with a group that I regard as the next generation of hugely talented film people and it was very refreshing and energizing for me,” he comments. “It was genuinely inspiring for me to feed off of their enthusiasm and ideas.”
Hicks was also inspired by something more basic: the notion of a homecoming. “It was wonderful to work in South Australia again,” he muses. “There was a real sense of being at home and it brought a much calmer element to the process of preparation and the shooting as well.” He continues, “One of the things I like so much about this story is that it takes place in two hemispheres – and there’s a distinct contrast between life in Australia and life in England where Joe Warr is originally from and where Harry lives with his mother. I have a real experience with that myself, since I came to Australia from England when I was the same age as Harry. So I was very conscious of the elements that would strike somebody when they first arrived in this country and we emphasize those. It was a chance to show things about South Australia that I love and that haven’t been seen much in films before – the Fleurieu Peninsula, the Myponga Beach area, the wine-growing regions of McLaren Vale and the Adelaide Hills.”
Indeed, for those not familiar with the area, South Australia was full of surprises. As a Briton, Greg Brenman admits he thought Australia was all either red Outback or tropical wilds and was taken aback by this summery wine country. He says: “I discovered that South Australia, with its grassy hills, rich vineyards and beautiful red gum trees, is a wonderful place like no other.”
Helping Hicks to evoke that was cinematographer Greig Fraser, who started out as a stills photographer and whose keen eye has helped him to quickly rise in the film world Down Under. Though Hicks had never worked with Fraser before, they hit it off right away. “I knew this was going to be good from the moment Greig started shooting because he completely found a way into my head visually, and I felt I could absolutely trust his judgments and rely on his input,” says the director.
Fraser says the primary visual theme of the film can be summed up in a single word – freedom – that echoes the parenting philosophy and inner hunger of Joe Warr. “The idea was to have a feeling of freedom in all the imagery, in the lighting, in the camera movements, so that everything feels natural, unforced and never overly lit or overly controlled,” he says. “The thing that then emerges most strongly is the characters’ emotions, the joy and the sadness, the loss and the humor.”
For Fraser, it was a particular joy to work with Clive Owen, whose expressiveness always rewarded his camera’s focus, “When Clive is there, you’ve instantly you’ve got a frame that’s better than the frame that you had when he wasn’t there,” he comments. “He’s got one of the great character faces.”
Throughout the film, Fraser stuck to the guiding principle of realism, even when it comes to Joe’s wholly unreal visions of Katy. “It’s not a ghost story so Scott chose not to make her otherworldly or in any way like a ghost,” he explains. “On the contrary, we were very simple in shooting her, filming her in the reality of the space with the lighting she’s in, so she is very much part of the fabric of what Joe is going through.”
Another highlight for Fraser was shooting the Warr house, which was brought to life by production designer Melinda Doring. Doring collaborated closely with Hicks to imbue the place with the feeling of an “ends of the earth,” isolated paradise, removed from a world Joe Warr is not sure he’s ready to face again.
Scott searched far and wide for just right the spot for the house, ultimately coming across a breathtaking valley, featuring rounded golden hills and a hint of beach on the horizon. “It was such a beautiful, almost wild site, with all these lyrical trees, that the challenge was to create the perfect house to go with it,” says Doring.
Working with a floor plan created by Scott in line with how he planned to stage the action, Doring then imagined the house’s structure in the vein of the comfortable, sprawling Queensland summer houses she had experienced, but with her own twists. “The house is like a character in the film – it’s where a lot of changes happen and it was fantastic to try to bring a place like that to life,” says Doring. “My hope was to create a uniquely Australian, relaxed summertime feel with a palette inspired by the local landscape.”
Hicks requested that Doring first construct a model version of the house during preproduction “so that he could get a lipstick camera in and actually work out if the house was going to give him the interesting angles that he wanted,” Doring explains.
Then, over a period of 8 weeks, she and her crew crafted the bone of the house from galvanized iron and glass, among other materials, sourced from local salvage yards. “We used as much existing materials as we could to add to the authenticity of the look,” she continues.
The final product came complete with a backyard “Flying Fox,” created by local artist Jerry Keyte, allowing Artie to madly speed along a cable strung between two trees like a modern-day Tarzan. By the time the cast came to the set, the place felt utterly lived in, stuffed with memories, yet also capable of supporting the chaos of three boys. “You could not exhaust all the possibilities that house had to offer,” sums up Scott Hicks.
Of course one of the possibilities was the dissolution of the house into total chaos, which also challenged the design team. “The house we built ultimately becomes what Joe calls ‘hog heaven,’ a complete boys’ mess and disaster zone, basically,” laughs Doring. “We were constantly moving things around to create more clutter, and things even got lost, as they do when a place gets that messy.”
Other locations were imbued with a similar naturally raw beauty, including those in the world-famous McLaren Vale vineyard area, and especially the scenes at the beach, where Joe Warr takes Artie for a ride – on the hood of his car. “That one shot took a lot of planning,” notes Tim White. “Scott led us to just the spot that would allow vehicles and provide a fantastic vista.”
A similar, easy-going sense of style infused with character is highlighted in the work of costume designer Emily Seresin, who took her cues directly from the characters. She especially enjoyed working with Clive Owen, who was ready with his own ideas and suggestions. “It was a lot of fun working with him because he was so into the character of Joe and figuring what was right for him,” she says. “We wanted a writerly style for him, and his clothes reflect that fact that he lives in this farmhouse yet has to get on a plane and go to major sporting events like the Australian Open.” A signature piece in Joe’s wardrobe became a copy of one of Owen’s own linen suits. “It suited him so well and we made our own so that we could crush it to the point that it looked pretty ragged,” explains Seresin.
For Artie, she was inspired by the unpredictable way that kids approach clothing. “Artie wears his track-pants inside out at one stage, and that’s something I saw on my neighbors’ child, with the pockets just sort of flapping around looking ridiculous and he was completely oblivious to it,” she muses. “Another look is his tracksuit pants and singlet. It jumped out at me because it’s really soft and interesting and simple – perfect boy’s summer attire.”
Meanwhile, Harry is the only character with any hint of trendiness to his attire. “We wanted him to look very much like a British teenager – so we really went out of our way to try and find colors that seemed somehow not Australian,” Seresin explains. “The contrast was an opportunity to further emphasize these different worlds coming together in one household.”
The finishing touch to the film’s intimate atmosphere would be the music, which prominently features songs from the Icelandic post-rock band, Sigur Rós, known for their sonically lush, emotion-laden tunes written in a made-up language they call Hopelandic. “Initially, I used their songs as a temporary score, but it was working so perfectly that I decided I wanted to approach the band directly to see if we could license the music,” recalls Hicks. “I was forewarned that they were extremely picky about what they would allow their music to be used for, but I went to Iceland to screen for them and they simply loved the film. Georg, the bass player, said ‘There is an Icelandic word which I can’t translate which perfectly describes the experience of seeing this film’. I said, ‘Well have a try’ and he said ‘The word means you feel better for being alive having seen this film’ which I found was a profoundly moving thing to say.”
Hicks also recruited Hal Lindes, formerly of Dire Straits, to compose a significant portion of the score. “The relationship with Hal came through our music supervisor Ian Neil who has worked with a lot of frontline British directors. I described what I was looking for – an acoustic, personal, guitar driven sound – and Ian suggested Hal Lindes who turned out to have the perfect tonality.” Finally, Hicks completed the music with selections from several classic Australian artists, as well as the emerging Australian grunge band, Mayfield, known for their intense, thrashing sound.
By this point, says Greg Brenman, “With Scott’s wonderful ability to work with actors, the beautiful way Clive brings out the humor and pathos of Joe Warr, Greig Fraser making it all look absolutely wonderful, and right down to the distinct music, it was a powerful mix. In the end, everything adds up to the idea that this family might be ruptured and changed for the rest of its life but they also are ready to get on, to thrive and find happiness as well.”
Production notes provided by Miramax Films.
The Boys Are Back
Starring: Clive Owen, Laura Fraser, Emma Booth, George MacKay, Nicholas McAnulty, Natasha Little, Alexandra Schepisi
Directed by: Scott Hicks
Screenplay by: Allan Cubitt
Release Date: September 25, 2009
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual language and thematic elements.
Studio: Miramax Films
Box Office Totals
Domestic: $809.752 (100.0%)
Foreign: —
Total: $809,752 (Worldwide)