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“ULTIMATELY, THERE ARE THREE LEAD
CHARACTERS IN THIS FILM: TONI, GOTARO AND THE
AUSTRALIAN LANDSCAPE”
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It’s a recipe for disaster. Hiromitsu considers Sandy the typical loud, aggressive Australian woman; Sandy finds Hiromitsu the typical arrogant, uncommunicative, sexist Japanese businessman. Things go from bad to worse, especially when Hiromitsu insists they take an offroad trip to see an abandoned iron-ore mine and their four-wheel drive gets stuck. Isolated and without the means of contacting the outside world, Sandy and Hiromitsu are slowly forced to re-examine, first their relationship, then their own individual characters. The baking hot, dusty red Pilbara becomes a cauldron in more senses than one.
“To start with, Sandy’s mono-focused,” says Tilson. “She loves her work, has a great time, but she’s a little blind to the subtleties of what’s around her, so in many ways she’s a classic blind and deaf character. Some people would say that, in tragedy, you have to start with a blind character and in comedy, you start with a deaf character. There are certainly elements of both in Sandy, but she goes on such a massive emotional journey that hopefully by the end she’s become a more open person.”
Tilson, producer Sue Maslin and Brooks hesitated for months before contacting Collette, knowing that she was ideal for the part of Sandy but knowing, too, that the actress’ international career was so active (in the past year alone, she has been seen in About a Boy, Changing Lanes, Dirty Deeds and The Hours) that they had little chance of getting her. So Tilson fine-tuned the screenplay “until I thought I’d scream if I had to rewrite it one more time”, then couriered it off to Colette’s agent.
The response was almost immediate. “Literally within a few days of that script leaving our hands,” recalls Maslin, “we received a call advising us that Toni had read it and wanted to meet us, so Sue Brooks and I caught the next plane to Sydney. Generally, you’d expect to spend such a meeting pitching the story and explaining to the actor why they should be interested in the project, but Toni spent the first hour telling us scene-by-scene what she loved about the script. So we just sat and shut up! From that point on, we knew that, in Toni, we had an actor who understood both the script and the part and wanted to come on the journey with us – and that was a wonderful experience.”
The casting of Hiromitsu was a somewhat different procedure. The part had originally been written for a middle-aged man, and Brooks, Tilson and Maslin went on several casting trips to Japan. Eventually, they met up with 29-year-old Gotaro Tsunashima, who had worked with Kate Woods, a friend of Brooks’, on a TV miniseries called Changi.
“Kate said he was terrific,” says Brooks, “so I felt extremely confident in his acting ability and also certain that he understood the role. For a while, part of me was still hanging onto this notion that he should be older. But eventually I decided, ‘No, this is the right way to go’. Now I can’t even imagine that I once thought he should have been older. Gotaro is the only actor I can see playing the part and I just think, ‘Yeah, he is Hiromitsu.’”
“I had a very clear picture of Hiromitsu,” adds Tilson, “and felt I knew him deeply through a whole series of things, many of which were only hinted at on the page. When we cast Gotaro, I thought, ‘He’s not like Hiromitsu, but he’s going to be fabulous’. Then, working with him, something extraordinary happened – a sort of magic that only good actors weave. When I saw the first rushes, there was the same Hiromitsu who had been in my head for years but who had, somewhere along the way, disappeared. Gotaro had brought him to life.”
Shooting in the Pilbara was essential, if arduous: the area’s red dust got into everything (and was still being cleaned out of the camera equipment over a week after the crew had returned to Perth, where the city scenes were shot). “The Pilbara was an enormously ambitious undertaking,” admits Brooks, “and occasionally we thought we’d bitten off more than we could chew. Initially, we were advised to film in South Australia as it was considered more achievable. But by then we’d fallen in love with the Pilbara - having visited four or five times - and knew all of the water holes, all of the mines and all of the roads.”
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