The Boys  

Following its premiere in competition at Berlin this year, Axiom Films is handling international sales for The Boys, the debut feature of director Rowan Woods, who has been making short dramas for a decade. Woods's crew was also making its first feature – but had worked with him on the hundreds of shorts Woods had made. 
Produced by John Maynard (Vigil, The Navigator, Sweetie), The Boys is a drama based on the successful, award-winning, play. The producer of the play, Robert Connolly, is also a producer of the film, and sees the basic story as a response to a series of crimes involving women plucked from the street. 

On his return home after a year in jail, Brett Sprague (David Wenham), one of three brothers, discovers things have changed and his insecurities build. Brett's girlfriend, Michelle (Toni Collette) resents the way Brett has changed. His brothers, Glenn (John Polson) and Stevie (Anthony Hayes) are restless and boozing; Stevie's pregnant girlfriend (Anna Lise) is a nuisance, hanging around. Chaos reigns in the Sprague home as their mother, Sandra (Lynette Curran), makes a stand against her sons' behaviour. George (Pete Smith), Sandra's current lover, steps between Sandra and Brett during a drunken fight and is flattened by Brett. Sandra orders her sons out of the house. Rejected by their girlfriends and their mother, the Sprague boys are united in futile rage against them. Brett leads his brothers off into the night. The story is the aftermath of that night in the form of flash-forwards. 

"When Robert Connolly and I first discussed adapting the stage play," says Woods, "I remember asking myself the question: what could be in this? Where is the insight into the humanity of the boys and humanity in general, in a piece about killers?" 
Woods was taken with the play's structure and the simplicity of its landscape. "It was the perfect foundation for a gripping psychological study of a family in crisis – manipulated by the eldest son who is loved and feared." 

Other than with a handful of films like Romper Stomper, Metal Skin or Blackrock, Australian filmmakers have not been drawn to the dark side of life in Australia's communities, the areas where the crimes that hit the papers usually come from. 
To its credit, The Boys is more interested in the exploration of the mindset of its three central characters, than in showing us a bashing and a rape. Sewell's script, structured, like the play, with sparsely-used flash-forwards that jump further ahead in time, carries us through the walls of the Sprague house into the lives of this ill-fated family, with its broken marriage, disgruntled and aimless sons, the pregnant girlfriend and a young man whose personality and circumstances combine to make him anti-social and anti-sensitive. David Wenham is sensational as Brett the brat, matched by the entire cast for intensity and credibility. 

Crackers 

David Swann is one of two Melbourne comedians to make their first feature film; the other is Irish-born Jimeoin, who wrote the screenplay for The Craic, currently in post-production. With Crackers, Swann sought to inject freshness and spontaneity into his script: "The essence of good film writing," he says, "is brevity; condensing things to the essence. Whereas theatre is 90 per cent dialogue, cinema is more visual. So I redrafted a lot to write out the clichŽs, searching for how I could find the freshness in the cliches, the uniqueness of the characters, especially in the dialogue." 

Making his feature debut, 13-year-old Daniel Kellie plays great grandson to Warren Mitchell's character, trouble-making Albert, who is Scottish. 

Shot in Melbourne between April and June last year, the comedy is produced by Chris Warner and photographed by Laszlo Baranyai, with Peter Rowsthorn, Susan Lyons, Maggie King, Terry Gill, Valerie Bader and Chris Chapman in supporting roles.  
Funded by the Film Finance Corporation and Film Victoria, with distribution deals from Beyond Films for international, Sharmill Films for Australia, and a presale to pay-TV channel, The Movie Network, Family Crackers is a mid-budget film with the appearance of a family movie. 

Despite this Crackers is not aimed at family audiences, with drug references, some strong language and sex scenes, "but the truth is, kids will go," says Warner. Which is perhaps why "the hardest thing was to lock in the Australian distribution," Warner says. "It's not a kids' filmÉ there are some serious emotions dealt with. It's a comedy with heart, about Joey, this 13 year old who saw his dad die in a plane crash. His mum wants to re-marry, but Joey attempts to sabotage the new family. It's about how he ultimately comes to terms with it through friendship with his great grandfather, all during one crazy Christmas. Underneath, it's quite a serious story, with large-scale comic mayhem – that's David Swann's form of comedy. The characters are real and they go through real experiences." 

Natalie Miller of Sharmill says "people obviously want entertainment and that's what this is." In early screenings in Melbourne, test audiences howled with laughter, especially at the blackest bits. Miller has pledged the biggest national release she has ever undertaken on a film, with 58 prints, which is scheduled for 18 June 1998. 

Dead letter office 

When producer Denise Patience joined, the deal to finance and distribute Dead Letter Office had been put in place by executive producers Steve Vizard and Andrew Knight at Artist Services: PolyGram took Australasian rights, the BBC bought UK television rights, Southern Star has international sales and the Film Finance Corporation invested the balance.  

In one of the smoothest filmmaking processes, Dead Letter Office was in production in Melbourne within four months, the longest job was casting the male lead, Frank, a Chilean migrant with a troubled past. After scouring Australia, Spain and finally Los Angeles, a Uruguayan-born American actor, George delHoyo, one of 34 auditioned in Los Angeles, was signed, to play opposite Australia's Miranda Otto (Love Serenade, Doing Time For Patsy Cline). 

"Everybody just loved the script," explains Rhys Kelly of Southern Star, "and the process was very smooth." 

Written by Deb Cox, Dead Letter Office is a romantic comedy about Alice, a young woman whose letters to her absent father are never answered. She applies for a job at the dead letter office and begins a search for him through the oddball postal 'detectives' there. The manager is a quiet man with a troubled past, and the two lonely people move towards a relationship. 

"Not a lot happens but you get a laugh out of it," says Patience, who was looking for work "with no worries" after completing To Have and To Hold with director John Hillcoat.  

Patience and Cox had worked together on Cox's mini-series Simone de Beauvoir's Babies and with director John Ruane on his feature film, Feathers. "So there was the attraction of working with these people and the script deals with a very human story which I like, and I also like the element of the stranger, Frank." she says. 
Cox, was keen to increase her knowledge of the tasks of producing; "it's handy to have the writer around, but she knows when to hand over to the director," says Patience. 

One hand clapping... 

Following its well-received debut in Berlin a couple of months ago, accomplished young Australian novelist-turned filmmaker Richard Flanagan has his debut film, The Sound of One Hand Clapping, in the market at Cannes, through Southern Star, screening today. 

David Stratton in Variety said, "Suffused with melancholy, this pic is a gentle, at times poetic, essentially European film that's likely to be of particular emotional appeal to audiences that relate to its dislocated characters." 

Writing in Australia's on-line movie magazine, Urban Cinefile, film critic Louise Keller says, "Cinematic, haunting and emotionally engaging... Performances are tops, with Kerry Fox moving as Sonja, much of whose pain lies in the unclarified nature of her past and the tragedies therein. While outwardly in control, she shows her vulnerability with a screen openness.  Kristof Kaczmarek makes an indelible mark in his screen debut, as the tortured father." 

Flanagan concentrates on his central characters, an insight that graces the minds of great writers. He uses words economically, but images expansively, painting his story as if on a canvas of light and shadow. Suggestion and implication are some of his best tools, aided by the exceptional work of his cast, from the incredible and beautiful three-year-old Arabella Wain, to the shattered father, played perfectly by Kaczmarek and the unfortunate grown up Sonja, in whom Kerry Fox finds her most challenging role. 

But all the cast deserves notice, as does Martin McGrath's riveting photography and Cezary Skubiszewski evocative and varied score. The latter plays a huge role in setting the intense moods of the film, and while it offers a distinctly European-influenced soundscape, it also insinuates itself into our understanding of the film's themes – great love, terrible pain, shocking suffering, sense of loss, total bewilderment; and finally, the rediscovery of love and humanity. This is a great journey for any audience, but Flanagan and his team are up to it. 

The Interview 

The Interview, starring Hugo Weaving and Tony Martin, is a gripping psycho-drama, written and directed by Craig Monahan, unlike any other Australian film. Weaving, in the performance of his life, plays the interviewee (Eddie Fleming) – dragged out of his slumber one bleak dawn by two policemen, who take him to the station to be interviewed – primarily by Det. Sgt. John Steele (Martin), in an equally brilliant performance – about a crime. He is not sure what crime. We don't know anything. There are no signs, clues or predictable set ups. Nothing turns out the way you expect.  

Steele is aided by Det. Snr. Constable Wayne Prior, (Aaron Jeffery), and Det. Insp. Jackson (Paul Sonkkila), who has to handle the internal police politics.  
The hapless Eddie flounders his way through a Kafka-like world, until subtle shifts begin to change the roles of hunter and hunted, and a series of revelations, outside elements and inner police dramas carry the film to a gloriously ambiguous conclusion.  
"I am not telling you what I believe," says Monahan; "it's a completely different experience for an audience if they have any inkling of the ending." 
Essentially it is a battle between two men, "but people can and do draw larger issues from it," says Monahan. 

Speaking of Hugo Weaving's character, Monahan says "it was important for Hugo to keep the premise that Eddie is innocent, right through everything. Secondly, Hugo's own personality provided a natural sensitivity and even fragility, which I felt could be good to tap into. Then there was time: time to rehearse early, when all we did was read the script and visit police squads. Then more rehearsals and by which time the cast had already spent a month thinking about their characters. The scenes in the interview room were kept till the very last week." 

Monahan was advised on the script by Gordon Davie, a veteran cop with 20-years service, but the way Monahan makes use of the veracity this brings to the script is dynamic cinema, aided by production designer Richard Bell's somewhat Gothic look. "Yes, but that's very Melbourne," he says. "It's potentially naturalistic, but we shot it monochromatically which gave it an edge. I was keen to have skin tones as the only real colour, and high contrast lighting. The Gothic look came in a few months before we started shooting; originally it had a rather plain look, inside the police building."  
Monahan began playing with the basic premise some years ago, "bored with the conventional narrative structure of most cinema. You go to the movies and you watch narrative drama unfold," he says.  

"Much of it contains signposts or beats where you have access to knowledge or information before the main protagonists, and you watch their journey to acquire the knowledge that you already have." 

The filmmaker clearly jettisoned this approach; he set about creating a film that is a continuous reveal. 

Monahan first approached producer Bill Hughes in 1991 with the essence of the script in place. At the time, Hughes was working on the ABC drama series, Phoenix, become the definitive Australian police drama with its authentic portrayal of police procedure and politics. 

The film was shot in Melbourne in at midsummer 1997 using studios for the interiors and some exteriors around Melbourne's business district, including the Old Melbourne Gaol. 

The Globe Film Co will release The Interview in Australia and New Zealand, and Southern Star has international rights. Tonight's premiere screening at the Ambassades will be followed by cocktails for invited guests. 

The Interview screens Friday, 15 May for the first time – by invitation only.