In 1997, writer/director David Caesar was at the Toronto Film Festival with his second feature, Idiot Box (he’d made his debut six years earlier with Greenkeeping). Fellow Aussie Bryan Brown - whose career enters its third decade this year - was at the festival, too, with his latest film, Dead Heart.

The young director and the world-famous star got to chatting, like two blokes from a land downunder meeting up anywhere in the world. Well, not quite: Caesar had an idea for a movie and he thought Brown might be the man to get it made. He’d come across the story by chance: a newspaper account of a group of gangsters who had invited a Chicago Mafioso to Sydney and then taken him pig-shooting in the outback.

It had happened in the late sixties when vice was one of Sydney’s most thriving industries, thanks to the plane-loads of American servicemen who came south from Vietnam for a little R&R. And it turned out to be a period that Brown knew a lot about. “I grew up in Sydney in the sixties,” he says, “and I used to go to those illegal gambling clubs as an 18-year-old. It was a very exciting time in Sydney and a great period of change in Australia, so I was keen to be involved with the film.”

It took four years to happen, but production finally started last August on Dirty Deeds, with Brown producing the movie through his own New Town Films (in association with Haystack Productions, run by ex-pat Aussie and former PolyGram executive Debbie Balderstone) and also playing the leading role of charismatic Sydney crime boss Barry Ryan. An added international dimension is provided by the fact that foreign distribution is being handled by Toronto-based Alliance Atlantis. And the rest of the cast had picked up quite a bit of international weight along the way, too, with Toni Collette returning to her native Australia after a series of high-profile Hollywood films (including Changing Lanes, featured on page 12 of this issue) as Ryan’s wife, Sharon. “It’s the Baz and Shaz show,” she jokes.

“When I first wrote Sharon, she was very much a supporting role in the film,” admits Caesar, “but Toni grabbed the character and made so much of her that she becomes a main player. It was amazing to me how a character who doesn’t appear that frequently on screen can become such a dominant force in the movie. That’s Toni for you – she took the character with both hands and really made her live. She’s a wonderful actress.”

Also on board was Sam Neill as a corrupt cop called Ray. “I woke up one night to find Bryan standing over my bed with a crow-bar – how could I say no!” jokes Neill. “I really wanted Sam to be in the film as Ray, the bent copper, who is a very important character,” says Brown. “We only needed him for a couple of weeks: it wasn’t going to require a huge amount of his time.”

“It’s a very big story that required a relatively big budget for an Australian film,” adds his fellow producer, Debbie Balderstone, “so it was imperative that we take it to an international level with an international cast. It’s getting even tougher to get films into cinemas and we were very aware of that from the outset.”